252 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
turn and contemporary social activism seems unclear; anarchism today remains
largely loyal to its Enlightenment origins. However, academic theory is often
quasi-anarchistic in interests, if not goals, analyzing what Eric Santner has called
“the political theological (or perhaps better, the biocratic constitution of modern
life)” in terms of both “the foundation and constitution of political authority”
and “the patterns and procedures whereby human beings come to be vested with
the authority of the various ‘offices’ they occupy and the ways in which such pro-
cedures of investiture, such transferences of symbolic authority, are ultimately
legitimated.”^9 Resemblances between classical anarchism and contemporary
academic theory can likely be accounted for by attention to successive waves of
Nietzsche interpretation. The question of whether there can be a liberatory Nietz-
sche, or any political Nietzsche at all, is linked to the question of whether politics
as the subject matter of political science departments has more than a heuristic
existence—this is a question anarchism has brought to the fore from its incep-
tion, and for which it has been declared “unpolitical.”
Finally, we turn again to Zionism. The romance between Zionism and the in-
ternational left ended long ago, and in Israel the hegemony of Labor has steadily
eroded since the 1977 victory of Menachem Begin and the Likud party, descen-
dants of Jabotinsky’s Revisionists. Furthermore, from a perspective attuned to
settler colonialism, the problems with the Israeli state go deeper than whether
the “left” or the “right” runs the government; the tragedy is not that a dream was
betrayed but that anyone ever dreamed it at all. Here we assess what is living and
what is dead in the applied theopolitics to which Buber gave the name “Zionism.”
It may be, in the end, that theopolitical Zionism and secular radicalism still con-
verge in the coming community. Or, as Buber once said: “Today appearance is
currently opposed to appearance. But within the hidden sphere of the future the
meeting has begun to take place.”^10
Messianism
The Lord shall reign for Ever and Ever (Ex. 15:18). R. Jose the Galilean says: Had the
Israelites at the Sea said: “The Lord is king forever and ever,” no nation or kingdom
would ever have ruled over them. But they said, “The Lord shall reign.”
—Mekhilta ShirataGnosticism and the Thorn of Apocalypse: The Buber/Scholem
Debate Revisited
Both Buber and Scholem were radicals, Zionists, and Brit Shalom members; both
were instrumental in the revival of interest in Jewish mysticism and myth. None-
theless, as Martina Urban puts it, “starting in the 1960s, the Scholem-Buber con-
troversy, which was a debate both on scholarly method and on Jewish identity,
became one of the fundamental controversies in Jewish studies.”^11 In 1961, the