This Pathless Hour | 273space of juridical reason within which the rule of law obtains is established
and sustained by a dimension of force and violence that, as it were, holds
the place of those missing foundations. At its foundation, the rule of law is
sustained not by reason alone but also by the force/violence of a tautological
enunciation—“The law is the law!”^135Santner also suggests that Freud failed to see “that if indeed the Jewish God is a
kind of Master, he is one that, paradoxically, suspends the sovereign relation.”^136
Much of Santner’s work on Star of Redemption is concerned with showing how
Rosenzweig presented Judaism and Christianity as alternative ways of “detach-
ing” or “unplugging” from the “hegemonic succession of empires, rulers, re-
gimes, and ideologies.”^137
More recently, questions of the location and nature of power and authority
have been reconnected to larger narratives of secularization and historical trans-
formation. The work of Ernst Kantorowicz on the medieval idea of the king’s two
bodies, the mortal individual body and the “body politic” or “pompous body,”
which exceeds him and outlasts him, has provided a fertile ground for theorists
like Santner:
The crucial thought at the heart of the doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies is that
within the framework of the political theology of sovereignty, the signifiers
that represent the subject for other signifiers are, so to speak, “backed” or “un-
derwritten” by the sublime flesh, the sacral soma, of the monarch. With the
demise of the political theology of kingship, this “personal” source of libidinal
credit disappears. Postmonarchical societies are then faced with the problem
of securing the flesh of the new bearer of the principle of sovereignty, the Peo-
ple. Biopolitics—and its near relative disciplinary power—can be grasped as
the strategies deployed by modern societies to secure this new underwriting
arrangement.^138Santner’s account can be read as a secularization narrative that focuses on con-
tinuities between the Middle Ages and modernity. It stresses the paradigmatic
moment of the end of monarchy following both the progressive Renaissance and
Enlightenment narrative (emergence from medieval darkness to the dawn of a
better day) and the Marxist story (the transition from feudalism to capitalism
as a movement from one form of economic exploitation to another, but no less
revolutionary for all that). Here we transition from one form of investment in
a system of signifiers to another, with emphasis on what persists through the
transition: not exploitation, but a need for security in one’s identity and place in
the world.
The political anthropologist Pierre Clastres asked this question: “What
explains the transition from non-coercive political power to coercive political
power, and how does the transition come about?”^139 For Clastres, the contortions
of Western political theory around power, utopia, and human nature seem ri-
diculous in the light of anthropological fieldwork: “One is confronted... by a vast