266 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
infidelity. The possibility of such an infidelity, even after the “subjectivation” Ba-
diou refers to in this text as “resurrection,” raises once again the problem of sin,
which was supposedly overcome through the grace of the event. This brings us
back to prophetic teshuva, and to Leonard Cohen’s protagonist in “The Future,”
who hears voices telling him to repent, and wonders what they mean.
I do not mean to suggest that Buber’s theopolitical vision of the prophetic
is the one, true way, and that apocalyptic, gnostic, or materialist deviations are
false. Agamben denies Paul’s apocalypticism only to declare him a revolution-
ary without arms; Badiou denies Paul’s relationship to dialectics, only to affirm
that “Grace... is affirmation without preliminary negation; it is what comes
upon us in caesura of the law. It is pure encounter.”^92 Each thinker describes his
“new” Paul as having some qualities that Buber prized but simply didn’t see in
Paul. Nor was Buber himself always consistent in his own theopolitical under-
standing, which harbored a tension between the element of free choice essential
to the prophetic alternative and the confidence of redemption. Occasionally, in
denigrating historical success, Buber makes it seem as though one can discern
the signs of the eventual victory of the prophetic in the details of previous fail-
ures. In doing so, he inappropriately conflates the political and religious realms,
betraying theopolitics for political theology. He is truer to his own theopolitics
when he insists, like Badiou’s militant Paul, both that the prophetic is in league
with reality and that obedience to the prophetic call carries no guarantee of suc-
cess.^93 Only then does he elaborate those theopolitical alternatives to Gnosticism,
nihilism, and statist forms of communism and Zionism that were so attractive
even to Scholem, who wrote, “To engage Buber intellectually meant to be tossed
hither and yon between admiration and rejection, between readiness to listen to
his message and disappointment with that message and the impossibility of real-
izing it.”^94 This “impossibility” is questionable. Impossibility is one of the oldest
categories problematized by anarchism.
Anarchism
Can serious questions regarding power be asked?
—Pierre Clastres, “Copernicus and the Savages”^95Anarchy and Order
Scholem and Buber’s disagreement on anarchism is about order and chaos.
Scholem associates anarchism with the chaos of apocalyptic messianism while
neglecting the centrality of order and worldliness in the anarchic vision. How-
ever, now a step back must be taken. In Žižekian fashion, we might note that
if every discussion of anarchism begins with the disclaimer that anarchism is
not really about chaos and violence, but rather a sophisticated political tradition