A NEW CULTURAL STUDIES, OR, FRATRICIDE

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Notes

1. I have had occasion to discuss this “religious myth of reading” elsewhere, most recently in my Wild Materialism: The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic (110–20).

2. “Abel is the first man to offer God a blood sacrifice… and this sacrifice, inasmuch as it was indeed bloody, was acceptable to God's eyes, whereas God angrily rejected Cain's, which consisted of the fruit of the earth. What is singular and mysterious in this is that the one who spills blood in a cleansing sacrifice comes to hate blood, and dies so as not to spill that of the one who kills him, whereas the one who refuses to spill blood as a sign of cleansing sacrifice gets a taste for it, to the point of spilling his own brother's blood. Just what is this blood, then, which, spilt one way, cleanses stains, and, spilt another, itself stains? What quality does it possess, such that everyone spills it, though in different ways? Blood has not ceased to run since then, and it never ran without condemning some and purifying others, always retaining intact its power to condemn and its power to purify. All men who came after Abel the Just and Cain the Fratricide have come more or less close to one of these two types of two cities governed by opposite laws and different governors [que se gobiernan por leyes contrarias y por gobernadores diferentes], the city of God and the city of the world, cities opposed to each other not because in one of them blood is spilt and in the other not, but because in one it is love that spills it and in the other it is spilt by vengeance; in one, blood is offered up to man and in the other to God in cleansing sacrifice and acceptable holocaust”. From Juan Donoso Cortés (“Ensayo sobre el catolicismo”—Obras 253). See also the more recent edition in Juan Donoso Cortés (“Ensayo sobre el catolicismo”—Otros escritos. The translation is mine.

3. Schmitt “The Unknown Donoso Cortés” (85). Schmitt “Donoso Cortés,” in Donoso Cortés in gesamteuropäischer Interpretation.

4. See an account for instance in Paul Edward Gottfried, Carl Schmitt: Politics and Theory, and more recently, Gary Ulmen's “Carl Schmitt and Donoso Cortés” (69–79).

5. Augustine, City of God 15:5: “‘Of the first founder of the earthly city: the fratricide whose impiety was mirrored in the founder of Rome, who slew his own brother’. The first founder of the earthly city, then, was a fratricide; for, overcome by envy, he slew his brother, who was a citizen of the Eternal City and a pilgrim on this earth. It is not to be wondered at, then, that, long afterwards, at the foundation of that city which was to be the capital of the earthly city of which we are speaking, and which was to rule over so many nations, this first example—or, as the Greeks call it, archetype—of crime was mirrored by a kind of image of itself. For there also, as one of the Roman poets says in telling of the crime, ‘The first walls were wet with a brother's blood’. For this is how Rome was founded, when, as the history of Rome attests, Remus was slain by his brother Romulus”. [“Etiam Romana civitas fratricidio incepit. Primus itaque fuit terrenae civitatis conditor fratricida; nam suum fratrem, civem civitatis aeternae in hac terra peregrinantem, invidentia victus occidit. Unde mirandum non est quod tanto post in ea civitate condenda quae fuerat huius terrenae civitatis, de qua loquimur, caput futura et tam multis gentibus regnatura huic primo exemplo et, ut Graecia appellant, archetypos, quaedam sui generis imago respondit. Nam et illic, sicut ipsum facinus quidam poeta commemoravit illorum, Fraterno primi maduerunt sanguine muri. Sic enim condita est Roma quando occisum Remum a fratre Romulo Romana testatur historia; nisi quod isti terrenae civitatis ambo cives errant”].