The Martyr and the Sovereign: Scenes from a Contemporary Tragic Drama, Read

through Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt

Author(s): Sigrid Weigel and Georgina Paul
Source: CR: The New Centennial Review , winter 2004, Vol. 4, No. 3, theory of the
partisan (winter 2004), pp. 109-123
Published by: Michigan State University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41949453

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 The Martyr and the Sovereign
Scenes from a Contemporary Tragic Drama, Read
through Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt

Sigrid Weigel

Zentrum für Literaturforschung, Berlin, Germany

Translated by Georgina Paul, University of Warwick, U

In the site of a theater auditorium chosen by Chechen

terrorists as the location for their hostage-taking

significance of spectacular dramatization for the current po
attacks was symbolically condensed: the politics of violence
ater. Unlike partisans and resistance fighters, who oper
without recognition, in order, in targeted action, to stri
superior enemy at a sensitive spot, the underground fighters
their actions to be played out in the full glare of the spotlig
ture of theatricality and violence, the television images of th
in Israel and Chechnya and those of the wars in the former
Afghanistan, and in Iraq have long since outstripped the Th
However, what radically separates terrorist politics from th
actions of the former do not just take place in front of a large
the audience itself becomes a target. This is the reason for
which flared up concerning the possible proximity betw
and terrorism after September 11, sparked by Jean Clair's

• 109

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no # The Martyr and the Sovereign

Surrealism (for example, André Breton s fantasy of shooting into the crowd
of passersby) was to be seen as a precursor of terrorism.1
For me, viewing the images of the attacks, other associations come to
mind. The bloody acts of public violence, staged by preference in densely
populated areas, the presentation of the victims and their dismembered
bodies, the dramatization of the suicide attackers as martyrs, and the ritual
display of the wounded and dead of military revenge attacks, borne through
the streets by the combatants, all contribute to the impression that on the
present political stage, the theater of the baroque has taken over the direc-
tion. In a reversal of Walter Benjamins observation of the "radical adapta-
tion of the theatrical to the historical scene" in the seventeenth century
(Benjamin 1977, 64; translation modified), at a time when the name "tragic
drama" ( Trauerspiel ) came to apply equally to both the historical events and
the dramatic form (Benjamin 1977, 63), it seems that today politics is adapt-
ing to the media-fed craving for theatrical images.
Yet the contemporaneity of Benjamins 1927 book on tragic drama goes
further than this. Benjamin defines baroque theater as the drama of tyrant
and martyr. It is not only because of its central figures (the sovereign, the
tyrant, and the martyr) and their places (frequently in locations in the
Orient, as the dramas of eastern rulers) that this book provides quite inter-
esting frameworks for the present situation. More significant still, though,
is Benjamin s discussion of the tragic drama in terms of a dialectic of secu-
larization. In view of the political power of religion which has in recent
times so forcefully reasserted itself, it is not very helpful to distinguish, as
Jürgen Habermas did in his Paulskirche speech, between a "secularization
which is elsewhere running off the rails" and a supposedly "post-secular"
Western common-sense culture - to differentiate, in other words, between

a bad and a good form of secularization. Far more useful for an under-
standing of the influential force of religion is to look at the long neglected
traces left by the history of religion in our own culture. Many of Benjamin's
writings have as yet not been explored for the light they have to shed on
such a project. Notable amongst them is his reading of the baroque tragic
drama as the search for worldly answers to religious concerns in a period
for which, despite the unabated influence of Christianity, religion no longer

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 Sigrid Weigel # 111

held out any solutions nor offered the promise of redemption (Benjamin
1977, 79)' It is, moreover, this dialectic of history, religion, and theater that
distinguishes Benjamin's conceptualization of sovereignty from Carl
Schmitťs sovereignty theory. For Carl Schmitťs idea of the political is
founded in an analogy, rather than a dialectic, between theological and
national-legal concepts. These differences can be seen more clearly if we
compare Benjamins and Schmitťs concept of political theology not only in
terms of their conceptualization of sovereignty, as has been done very often
before, but by allowing new light to be cast on the issue of sovereignty by its
respective counterpart in the two theories: in Schmitt, the partisan, and in
Benjamin, the martyr.

THE SOVEREIGN AND THE PARTISAN:

THE SCOPE OF CARL SCHMITT'S NOTION

OF THE POLITICAL

Carl Schmitťs Political Theology (1922) function

point in the aftermath of September 11. Giorgi
drew on Carl Schmitťs definition of sovereignty in
politics of George W. Bush following the attack
Manhattan.2 And indeed, Bush's interpretation of
tial threat to the American state, as creating a nat
[Ausnahmezustand] , and his immediate declaration
may, like all the subsequent proclamations and
under Schmitťs motto: "Sovereign is he who d
[Ausnahmezustand.]" (Schmitt 1985, 5). This de
marked, according to Carl Schmitt, the borderline
case of the theory of the state, since emergency l
sion of fundamental rights within the state's legal
recently pursued by the United States represent
extent that the measures taken to counter terrori
forms of waging war which, in the course of the
integrated into the conceptual norm of internatio
national treaties (such as the Geneva Conventi

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112 # The Martyr and the Sovereign

status of normalcy. It was primarily the attempt to transfer the exercise of

sovereignty under conditions of the state of emergency from the national,
state level onto the international plane which triggered the controversial
conflicts between the United Nations and the United States.

Forty years on from his Political Theology, in his Theory of the Partisan
(1963), Carl Schmitt diagnosed a trend towards the general overstepping of
the boundary of normality within the wars and struggles of the twentieth
century. In the future, according to Schmitt s prognosis, this trend would
only become more pronounced. It is signaled above all by the transforma-
tion of the actual enemy into an absolute enemy, whereby war becomes
absolute war. This is the situation with which we are in fact confronted on

both sides of the conflict today. On the side of the United States, this is man-
ifest in the image of the "axis of evil" and the declaration that "whoever is
not for us is against us. " On the other side, too, a war is being fought against
an absolute enemy, whether under the name of the West, the Jews, or glob-
alization. Under these circumstances, two complementary political con-
cepts become completely invalidated, i.e., regulated war and partisanship.
One is a concept, developed over the course of European history, of war
based on the law of the nation-state - the emergence of which was inter-
preted by Schmitt as "overcoming" older, premodern modes of struggle
occupied with religious commitments (Schmitt 1997, luff.). Carl Schmitt
saw this development as offering the possibility of "maintaining a preserve
of warfare" in that it limits the enemy to a concrete, "actual" enemy, and
assumes the adherence to certain rules, for example for the declaration of
war: "A declaration of war is always the declaration of an enemy."3 The
other is the concept of the partisan who fights an illegal battle against a mil-
itarily superior power, usually an army of occupation. For Schmitt, four cri-
teria define the partisan: irregularity, heightened mobility, intensity of
political commitment, and telluric character (Schmitt 2002, 28).
Admittedly, the concept already begins to fracture where the interests
of a third party come into play, where partisans are supported, for example,
by the supply of arms from outside - which is the case for almost all "free-
dom fighters" in the Middle and Far East. The concept of the partisan
comes up against its limit, according to Schmitt, in ideologically motivated

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 Sigrid Weigel • 113

struggle, and even more so in the "professional revolutionary of the world-

wide civil war" (2002, 94), embodied for him in the person of Lenin. "The
partisan, then, has an actual, but not an absolute enemy. A further bound-
ary of enmity follows from the telluric character of the partisan. He defends
a patch of earth to which he has an autochthonic relation. His basic posi-
tion remains defensive, despite the heightened mobility of his tactics" (93).
Schmitt finally saw a further infringement of the concept of the partisan in
the latter 's potential adaptation to technology, in the emergence of a new
type, "let us call him the industry-partisan" (81).
With the aircraft attacks of September 11, this has also become a reality,
so that the present battles are indeed taking place beyond the conventional
conceptual limits of war and partisanship. But it is also the case that with
the suicide attackers who dramatize themselves as martyrs and refer to
themselves as Gods warriors, a figure has emerged to take the place of the
partisan which did not and could not appear within the horizon of
Schmitťs argumentation. For the scenes of today's warfare are not just
dominated by the technologically better-equipped successors of armies
and partisans, but by the sovereign and the martyr.
The fact that Schmitt could not envisage such a development can be
explained by the fact that all references to religious connections have dis-
appeared from the The Theory of the Partisan - and together with them, the
possibility of analyzing a modern topos of "Holy War." This is all the more
remarkable for the fact that his Political Theology is above all associated with
the much-quoted dictum: "All significant concepts of the modern theory of
the state are secularized theological concepts" (Schmitt 1985, 36). He con-
cretized this statement in relation to the concept of sovereignty, which,
according to Schmitt, had not fundamentally changed since the seven-
teenth century. But if Schmitt takes as his basis that " [i]n the theory of the
state of the seventeenth century, the monarch is identified with God and
has in the state a position exactly analogous to that attributed to God in the
Cartesian system of the world" (1985, 46), there follows a double limitation
on the epistemic possibilities of his theory of sovereignty. Methodologi-
cally, his thinking becomes tied to the figures of analogy and transfer
between theology and the law, and thematically to the field of state theory.

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114 • The Martyr and the Sovereign

If the thesis of a conceptual transfer adheres to a relatively mechanistic

notion of secularization, the consequence is that after a transfer of theolog-
ical concepts into other registers has taken place, religious aspects within
the latter can no longer enter into consideration. If the legitimacy of sover-
eignty has in the modern age been entirely subsumed into the law of the
state, then paradoxically religion is excluded from this kind of "political
theology." This also shuts out the possibility of thinking relationships of a
different kind between politics and theology - beyond a concept of secular-
ization analyzed through figures of transference and overcoming in which
limits are based in an exclusive Christian focus of his thoughts.
It is not coincidental, then, that in the present situation, only the United
States can be apprehended within the horizon of Schmitťs concepts of the
"exception" or the "state of emergency" and "sovereignty," but not the
opposing side.

THE RETURN OF THE MARTYR

In the figure of the suicide attacker who is venerated as

culture encounters an antagonist from its own Christ
figure of the martyr belongs to the legacy which Isl
Christianity at its foundation in the seventh century. Th
markedly different from his Christian predecessor,
appears from the outset as a warrior for the true faith,
the falsification of the idea of the one God of which Mo

the Christians and the Jews. The Christian martyr, by

least in his origins, as a figure of suffering. Derived from
meaning "witness," the Christian martyr traces his root
a witness of Christ's passion and sacrifice. The marty
Christ who holds to his faith even at the cost of persecu
death. In his text The Saving of Cardanus, Lessing cal
martyrs, as that which bears witness to the confessio
highly ambivalent thing" (Lessing 1976, 20). And so it is
iconography of martyrdom appears as a gruesome ta
forms of torture. In the representative paintings from

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 Sigrid We i gel # 115

seventeenth centuries, from Cranach and Dürer via Altdorfer to Tiepolo,

steadfast martyrs dominate the scene. Venerated in these images as saints,
they have previously had to undergo every imaginable form of physical tor-
ment - and the repertoire of atrocities is not worlds apart from the reports
of the massacres which took place during the Balkan war. The metamor-
phosis from suffering to fighting, i.e., the arming of the Christian martyr to
make of him a "warrior of God," took place above all within the context of
the Crusades.

The Islamic tradition is different. Here, there is a hierarchy among the

martyrs which has always placed those who have lost their lives in battle
(shuhada al-ma'raka) above those who have not died a bloody death
(. shuhada al'akhira ) by giving to the former the entitlement to a particular
burial ritual. In order that their blood can bear witness to their heroic

deaths at the Last Judgement, their corpses are not subject to the usual rit-
ual washing.4 At the same time, their deaths are interpreted as a rite de pas-
sage which is performed in poetic images as a wedding (' urs al shahid).
Following in this tradition, the bomb attacks by Palestinian agents today
are metaphorically represented, as Angelika Neuwirth (2004) has noted, as
a marriage with their native soil.5 Unlike the retrospective transformation
of victims (those fallen in war, in the resistance, or through persecution for
their faith) into martyrs, i.e., unlike an interpretation through which an
unbearable death is given meaning after the event, the current reference to
the concept of martyrdom in the suicide attacks transforms a religious con-
cept into a programmatic political instrument. The martyr becomes a
deadly weapon. This performance, which simultaneously dramatizes and
instrumentalizes the figure, results in a knot of political and religious
aspects which is far from easy to untie.
Read through Benjamin's book on tragic drama, these phenomena may
be described as the radical adaptation of political to theological scenarios,
as the recourse to religious solutions to political problems in a situation in
which politics does not appear to offer any answers - as a modern tragic
drama. The seventeenth century's transition between Christian eschatol-
ogy and the secularization of the historical, which in view of a general
hopelessness and despair redirected the baroque's flight from the world

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ii6 # The Martyr and the Sovereign

into an absolute immanence, is countered today by a reversed constellation

of transition. Here, the unkept promises of modernity are answered by the
flight into religious fundamentalism, which holds out the promise of tran-
scending battles to which there is no satisfactory outcome.

THE SOVEREIGN AS TYRANT:

THE TYRANT AS MARTYR

When Benjamin describes the tragic drama as a drama of

tyr, he emphasizes in particular the way in which the tw
cide in the same figure. For in the baroque Trauerspiel, t
stands for history, also embodies the switch from the so
tyrant who brings destruction upon himself and his cou

In the baroque the tyrant and the martyr are but the tw
monarch. They are the necessarily extreme incarnations
essence. As far as the tyrant is concerned, this is clear enough

sovereignty which takes as its example the special case in w

powers are unfolded, positively demands the completion

the sovereign, as tyrant." (Benjamin 1977, 69)

In the "completion" of the sovereign as tyrant, Benjamin

ble positioning of the baroque sovereign between theolog
of the state in its fatal consequences. For it is in the tyr
the exceptional status [Ausnahmezustand] is made m
latently inscribed into the sovereign's godlike positio
worldly power.
If all the concepts of the modern theory of the state ar
ological concepts, then it is only through examining the
history that the legacy can be recognized which continu
them. At the beginning, it was precisely not the case th
who decides on the exception," but rather vice versa: "he
eign has the power to decide on the exception." This
between the historical and the modern concept of sovere

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 Sigrid Weigel # 117

in Benjamin 's text in a barely noticeable turn in the argument: "Whereas

the modern concept of sovereignty amounts to a supreme executive power
on the part of the prince, the baroque concept emerges from a discussion of
the state of emergency, and makes it the most important function of the
prince to avert this." At this point there follows the much-debated footnote
reference to Schmitt, after which Benjamin, reversing Schmitťs dictum,
continues : "The ruler is designated from the outset as the holder of dicta-
torial power if war, revolt, or other catastrophes should lead to a state of
emergency" (1977, 65). In Benjamin's analysis, the baroque and the modern
concepts of sovereignty thus differ fundamentally.
The theological foundation of absolute authority in the person of the
baroque sovereign forms the condition of possibility for his tyrannical
transformation, and more than this, for his fulfillment [ Vollendung] as
tyrant: "the seventeenth century ruler, the summit of creatures, erupting
into madness like a volcano and destroying himself and his entire court"
(Benjamin 1977, 70). The Trauerspiel is thus interpreted by Benjamin as the
scene in which this consummation is dramatized. Its dynamic is founded in
that contradiction which necessarily follows upon the idea of a "mortal
God," to the extent that the latter is caught between omnipotence and a life
under creaturely conditions - between "the prince of the world" and
"heavenly animal." And it is precisely in this doubled form that he becomes
a martyr, as "he falls victim to the disproportion between the unlimited
hierarchical dignity, with which he is divinely invested and the humble
estate of his humanity" (i977, 70). The tyrant as martyr is, then, not the vic-
tim of his faith, but the victim of a theologically founded politics, which
allows of no distinction between the person and his authority and therefore
knows no limit. His tyranny is displayed not least in the form of the "affect's
state of emergency. "
It is suggestive to think of Saddam Hussein in connection with such
descriptions, and to consider the tyranny and the fall of Saddam Hussein in
terms of tragic drama. But then the question poses itself what role religion
played in his case in legitimizing his sovereignty - the case of the dictator
in the midst of a religiously defined culture. Unlike in the traditional con-
ceptualization of the "Islamic state," Saddam Hussein's dictatorship was

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ii8 # The Martyr and the Sovereign

not founded in a demanded unity of religion and politics. (Incidentally, the

absence of such a unity was evaluated by some Muslim scholars as a danger
which could lead the state to transform itself into a tyrannical organiza-
tion.) And yet Saddam Hussein could, despite the different interpretations
applied to the question of political rule and its legitimacy within Islam, at
least rely on one of the central ideas of Islam, namely, that whoever rules,
rules by God's will. And when the Iraq War tended to turn into an attack
upon the person of the ruler, and perhaps even more so upon his image, and
when American soldiers in front of open cameras started destroying his
monumental statues, his larger-than-life pictures, and other representative
signs of his power, the tyrant in the eyes of his supporters achieved the sta-
tus of martyr. This image of a single person hunted by one of the strongest
armies of the world, who through this had been transformed into a hero for
his followers, imploded however when the miserable appearance of
Saddam after his discovery in an earth cave was to be seen on TV. The media
picture of that weak prisoner was good for nothing, neither as a figure of a
hero for his people nor as a figure of a dangerous enemy for the occupation
force. This implosion of the tyrant in his dual role of martyr and enemy has
supplied a new act to the modern tragic drama.
The transformation of sovereign into tyrant and the discussion about
tyrannicide already formed in the early modern age, as Benjamin shows, a
difficult complex to which there could be no simple solutions. Today it is no
different. Every argument in support of tyrannicide requires legitimization
by another order, which runs the risk of weakening the concept of sover-
eignty. It is for this reason that the U.S. government could not define the
toppling of Saddam Hussein as the goal of the war - for that would possibly
have meant weakening or calling into question the political concept of sov-
ereignty altogether. For in George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein, there
stood opposed - from the U.S. perspective, as it were - an imperial and a
tyrannical sovereign. For this reason, the United States had to take refuge
in the argument that Iraq had failed to meet the terms of the international
accord on the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons. With this argument,
however, the United States fell back on the significance of international
agreements which bind the decision on the state of emergency to specific

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 Sigrid Weigel # 119

rules, and so set a limit upon the American president's claim to sovereignty
in the international arena.

ON THE CRITIQUE OF VIOLENCE

Benjamins reading of the Trauerspiel on the threshold between th

politics integrates aspects of the thinking from his earlier Kritik
(1922) - the standard English translation of which is Critique of V
whereby Gewalt can also mean "force," "power," or "authority
had discussed the incompatibility of the law and of justice, belongi
do to entirely different orders. In this context, he distinguishes t
serving force of human legal systems from its precursors and pr
in the history of religion, setting it apart on the one hand from m
making violence, the archetypal form of which he sees in the mer
tation of the gods of antiquity, and on the other hand,
law- destroying divine power of monotheism, which is located be
sphere of bloody violence and beyond mere naked or natural life:
the principle of all divine end-making [Zwecksetzung], power is th
of all mythical law-making [Rechtsetzung]" (Benjamin 1997, 149).
Benjamin s critique is directed here not least at a form of politi
when confronted with an opponent, calls upon a higher legiti
posing its war or battle to be just and thus claiming for itself, as
divine mandate. In doing so, it does not realise that it, too, particip
historical cycle of law-making and law-preservation. "The law
their oscillation rests on the circumstance that all law-preserving
in its duration, indirectly weakens the law-making violence repre
it, through the suppression of hostile counter- violence" (Benj
153). Perhaps this law of oscillation must also be described as
modern tragic drama.
Above all, though, Benjamin's critique of violence has as its tar
carious intermingling of concepts of divine force with the conce
political. As such, it is directed against the requisitioning of theo
means of achieving political or legal ends, as also against a pure tr
of sacred concepts into profane ones. Instead, the radical incompa

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120 # The Martyr and the Sovereign

human and divine order forms the basis for Benjamin's interest in the
specific forms and figurations through which traces of an earlier religious
history live on - in transformed and displaced fashion - in secular con-
cepts. From his early project of a theory of language right up to the thesis
On the Concept of History , a continuous work of critique can be observed,
thought through, and elaborated - in each case in its own specific context -
in the fields of language theory, aesthetics, political theology, and the the-
ory of history. The constant object of this critique are those theorems which
are founded upon an appropriation of theological connotations in moder-
nity, i.e., after the "death of God." It targets quasi-religious movements, in
which, for example, art or poetry are treated as a religious cult, just as much
as the adoption into the sphere of political philosophy or historiography of
concepts which have their origin in a divine order (such as justice or
redemption). But it also targets the entire field of rhetoric and metaphor
which profits from the continued use of biblical or sacred terminology,
together with all practices in which theology is made into that small, ugly
dwarf who, as described in the first thesis, On the Concept of History , is
"taken into the service" of other things. Benjamins concerted theoretical
work on a historical dialectic is formulated in condensed form, as an epis-
temologica! configuration, in his Theologico-Political Fragment - in a
thought-image ( Denkbild ) which characterizes the relation of the order of
the profane to the messianic as a "lesson on the philosophy of history"
(1972, 2:203f.). In this "lesson," Benjamin condemns the appropriation of
"theocracy" to a political philosophy. Instead, he stresses the fundamental
asynchronicity between, on the one hand, what happens in history and the
orientation of the profane order towards a notion of happiness, and, on the
other, the messianic, which coincides with the end of history. The specific
way in which the search for happiness within the dynamic of the profane
relates to the messianic, namely, in the rhythm of that messianic intensity
which bears the name of happiness, can only be discussed once the funda-
mental and structural difference between the two orders is grasped.
Benjamin's essay on Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften (1924-25) forms a
complementary text to the Critique of Violence - for example, when
Benjamin identifies a "Nazarene misconception" in the way that Eduard

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 Sigrid W eigei # 121

praises Ottilie's death as a martyrdom, referring to the dead woman as a

"saint" and placing her, as it were, in Christ's succession (1972, i:200f.).
However, in this essay, Benjamin's critique is aimed also at the contempo-
rary cult of poetry, of the kind cultivated by the critic Friedrich Gundolf
and by Stefan George's circle, where poetry was endowed with sacred
attributes. Through the construction of poetry as quasi-religion, a
remythologization was taking place which, as Benjamin points out, went
back beyond the separation of religion and philosophy in Greek antiquity.
He opposes this remythologization of art as cryptoreligion by proposing a
strict demarcation line between the discourse of art and a "speech vis-à-vis
God." In reading Goethe's novel, he sets out a strict division between the
concepts of human and divine order by differentiating, for example,
between Aufgabe and Forderung, i.e., between an appointed human task and
a requirement which only may come from a divine authority; between
Gebilde and Geschöpf (formation or product vs. creature); between
Aussöhnung , Versöhnung , and Entsühnung, i.e., between the kind of reconcil-
iation which takes place between human beings, a superworldly atone-
ment, and the idea of the expiation of guilt by a divine authority. In respect
of its dialectic of "natural" and "supernatural" life, the Goethe essay con-
tains direct links to the Critique of Violence, the text in which Benjamin's
work on this difference is focused on issues to do with the law and justice.6
On account of its divine origin, justice is fundamentally separate from
the sphere of political violence, so that the latter can, in Benjamin's view,
never be "the means of sacred execution" (Benjamin 1972, 1:154). This back-
ground helps us to understand his critical discussion of the "dogma of the
sanctity of human life," which he sees as a political pathos formula and
qualifies as the "last aberration of the enfeebled occidental tradition." For
this formula responds to the loss of the sacrosanct by reverting to myth,
notably to the notion of an incurring of guilt [Verschuldung] through the
operation of fate. In the pathos of the "sanctity of life," the latter is in the
first instance reduced to sheer naked existence and robbed of the aspects
which go beyond this - like happiness and justice - in order in a second
step to be declared sacred as bare life. Benjamin, by contrast, proceeds from
a concept of the human being which can "at no price" be equated with bare

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122 # The Martyr and the Sovereign

life. Since the concept of justice is derived from a divine order, human life,
in its striving after happiness and justice, is always aiming to take part in a
life to which Benjamin, in the Goethe essay, gives the title of a "higher life."
Blood, by contrast, is assigned to the sphere of naked or bare life: "For
blood is the symbol of mere life" (1972, 1:151). As the symbol of mere life,
however, blood cannot be the symbol of the martyr. This means that
Benjamin, in the very act of reflecting upon the religious origins of political
concepts, comes out all the more strongly against the use of religious con-
cepts as the means of politics.
In this sense, the contemporary dramatization of suicide bombers as
martyrs may also be examined within the framework of Benjamin's Critique
of Violence. The veneration of this kind of martyr has as its precondition the
reduction of their lives to a - religiously occupied - bare, naked life. Only
this can be transformed into a deadly weapon. When this form of terrorism
is legitimated by the fact that the agents have before been deprived of their
human dignity and human rights, then these political arguments come into
conflict with the use of religious metaphors and the veneration and super-
elevation of the suicide attackers as martyrs. The modern myth of "sacred
human rights" - whose unguaranteed promise was analyzed by Hannah
Arendt already in her book on totalitarianism in respect of the stateless
refugee as the person without citizenship rights (Arendt 1951, 268-87) - is
answered in the rhetoric of the suicide bombings with the sanctification of
a politics in which human life itself becomes a weapon.
Like the concept of sovereignty, Benjamin's concept of bare life has
hitherto been used primarily to support the analysis of totalitarian politics
and biopolitical developments - for example, in Giorgio Agamben's Homo
Sacer (1998), which calls on Benjamin's work to support his thesis that the
concentration camp has become the model for modernity. A reading of
Benjamin to support the critique of religiously motivated terrorism has, by
contrast, not yet been undertaken. It should have become clear through the
distinctions drawn between him and Carl Schmitt that such a critique has
common cause with a reflection on the boundaries of political theology.

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 Sigrid Weigel # 123

NOTES

1. See Clair (2001); also, compare di Basi (2003).

2. See Agamben (2003).
3. See Schmitt (2002, 87). All translations from Schmitts Theory of
Georgina Paul; page references are to the German original.
4. See Kohlberg (1999).
5. See Neuwirth (2004).
6. See Weigel (2002, 197-207).

REFERENCES

Agamben, Giorgio. 2003. Der Gewahrsam: Ausnahmezustand d

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Heller-Roazen. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Arendt, Hannah. 1951. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York:
Benjamin, Walter. 1972. Gesammelte Schriften. 7 vols. Frankfurt

Kingsley Shorter. London and New York: Verso.

Clair, Jean. 2001. Le Surréalisme et la démoralisation de l'Occide
Di Basi, Luca. 2003. Die besten Videos drehte al-Qaida [The Be
Qaeda]. Die Zeit, 14 August.
Kohlberg, E. 1999. Shahid. Encyclopaedia of Islam.
Lessing, G. E. 1976. Rettung des Cardanus: Werke. 7 vols. Edited
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Neuwirth, Angelika. 2004. From Sacrilege to Sacrifice. Obser

Classical and Modern Arabic Poetry. In Martyrdom in Litera
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Francis Pannewick. Wiesbaden: Reichert.

Schmitt, Carl. [1950] 1997. Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum.
Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.

Schwab. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Duncker & Humblot.

Weigel, Sigrid. 2002. The Artwork as Breach of a Beyond: On the Dialectic of Divine and
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