264 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
Buber, Agamben rejects apocalyptic eschatology; however, he distinguishes the
messianic vocation of apostleship from the prophetic alternative, because he sees
the prophetic as unmistakably oriented toward the future. Agamben sees the
“weak messianic force” as capable of rendering contemporary nomos inopera-
tive; it is “the one thing needful,” to use Jesus’ words.^82
Yet Buber’s vision of the prophetic was also directed toward the present, the
moment in which the people decide whether to return to God. True, the prophets
failed; they are “ineffective” in the same sense that Buber himself was ineffective.
But they are no more ineffective than Agamben’s Paul himself, whose revolution-
ary doctrine apparently stands in need of rescue from the traditional view that
he taught obedience to worldly authority, or at most “a sort of mental reserve, or,
in the best of cases... a kind of Marranism ante litteram.”^83 We may not be able
to evaluate the prophets and Paul by the standard employed by politics, such as
the “successful” enactment of a plan. Agamben writes elsewhere, “One day hu-
manity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order
to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good.”^84 Ye t
Agamben’s Benjaminian-Pauline Gnosticism faces the challenge of articulating
its own power of action, which has been muted in an effort to distinguish it from
the apocalyptic type of Gnosticism. In meeting this challenge, it must avoid the
opposite extreme, the valorization of action and decision for their own sake.
The Blizzard of the World
The chorus in Leonard Cohen’s “The Future” (1992) warns of imminent chaos:
“Things are going to slide, slide in all directions / Won’t be nothing / Nothing
you can measure any more / The blizzard, the blizzard of the world has crossed
the threshold / and it’s overturned the order of the soul.”^85 The protagonist of
this song seeks escape from relativist hell, yearning for a place to stand—leading
to an interesting juxtaposition: “Give me back the Berlin Wall / Give me Stalin
and Saint Paul / I’ve seen the future, brother / it is murder.” By comparing Stalin
and Paul, Cohen’s protagonist here anticipates the career of Alain Badiou, who
in 1992 had already written his major philosophical work, L’être et l’événement
(Being and Event), but who was still five years away from publishing Saint Paul:
La fondation de l’universalisme (Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism). A
member of the 1968 generation in France, but a longtime opponent of “postmod-
ern” thought, Badiou has sought to enact what the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj
Žižek has called a repetition of the Platonic gesture, shattering the poststructur-
alist hall of mirrors by founding a new universalism. Explaining his attraction to
Paul, Badiou writes:
For me, Paul is a poet-thinker of the event, as well as one who practices and
states the invariant traits of what can be called the militant figure.... [T]here
is currently a widespread search for a new militant figure... called upon to