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Negri Eschatology
Negri Eschatology
Antonio Negri*
Independent writer and researcher
Rome
Abstract
In this article Jacob Taubes’s idea of eschatology is examined. Taubes’s own
understanding of eschatology has profound implications on the very expres-
sion of political theology and political practice. If politics—as a practice—
assumes that time has a terminal point, than it will invariably change this
practice and encumber and even neutralize political action of a common-
body that gives voice to the oppressed. This article agrees with Taubes in
that eschatology must announce an end to itself, which is at once a birth of a
postmodern possibility of the principle of immanence in which a common-
body announces its infinite possibility. The end of eschatology is the end of
transcendence and the beginning of a struggle for liberating the infinite pos-
sibility of a common-body of labor.
Jacob Taubes has written only one book in his life. Or, rather, he has written
many, published between 1942 and 1996, but it is always the same book,
or chapters or notes from the same book, or even plagiarisms of itself. The
title of this one book? I would propose “The End of the Modern.” But no,
someone could object, Taubes’s book is a history of eschatology. Certainly:
because the book on the end of the modern is a book about the survival
and metamorphoses, and even the soul and continuity of eschatology as
the essence of the modern. So, then, to speak of the end of the modern
means also to speak of the end of eschatology. If, in the postmodern era in
which we are living, I were able to make any recommendations to students
who seek to enter a department of philosophy that actually might concern
itself with the postmodern, in terms of books in which the philosophical
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36 Political Theology
itself and its destructive capacity are absolute potentiality, end in itself,
revelation of a common that preconstitutes its form and its figure. Paul’s
negative nomos is not governed by expectant waiting but by the common;
the common body of believers is not mystical but productive.
Why continue then with the anachronistic reading of Taubes? In part,
we already gave a hint of an answer above: because his work is an excellent
introduction to the self-destructive definition of the modern. A didac-
tic self-destruction. Perhaps Franz Rosenzweig did better for theology,
Walter Benjamin for the theory of history, and Carl Schmitt for political
theology: but Taubes offers us the sum. And in his didacticism, apart from
those great figures, he includes the general accomplishments of philo-
sophical culture from between the two wars, seizing on the two names
of Marx-Kierkegaard as the apex of the crisis. True, the one excluded
from Taubes’s synthesis is Heidegger, who always appears marginally and
somewhat caricatured, whereas his historical place is actually that of the
final destroyer of the modern-eschatological which Taubes exhumes as
the form of thinking to come. The exclusion is therefore appropriate. In
fact, from this point of view, we can see the complete insanity of nega-
tive thinking from Heidegger on, which finally goes back to the mystical.
No, Taubes suggests, this road is foreclosed, Heidegger is a tombstone on
the modern, and therefore, he adds, he wants to know nothing of him.
Precisely, because from Heidegger no dialectical somersaults are possible
from crisis to mysticism; the nakedness of being in Heidegger is a deadly
rigidity. (It is useless to add that this deadly rigidity is certainly more alive
in modern phenomenology than in the form of eschatology that persists
in Taubes.)
Implicit in the one already mentioned, there is another good reason for
reading Taubes, which we can find by developing and bringing to their
conclusion two cues that he offers in his work for the definition of teleol-
ogy. Now Taubes precisely recalls for us that teleology and axiology, the
theory of the end and the theory of value, always go together. But, put
differently, this connection which in eschatology is underlined in a special
way carries with it another connection: that which presses (and/or subor-
dinates) the rhythm of time to a principle of value, which defines the limit
prior to the development, and consequently puts the command (as science
of the limit) before the action (as freedom in time). This description cor-
responds to modern philosophy which from Platonic transcendentalism
draws—by transforming it into a transcendental principle—the science of
command, with the archè being the principle and the command and, thus,
the end-goal. Paradoxically, by emptying the relation between teleology
and axiology of all content and making it into a formal structure of con-
sciousness, Taubes contributes to offering us, by way of a diagnostic, the