The Two Bodies of the King of the Jews

Abstract

Starting from Santner’s essay “Freud’s ‘Moses’ and the Ethics of Nomotropic Desire,” the article explores a remarkably intriguing and simultaneously debatable statement made by Sigmund Freud regarding the accusation of the murder of God as a central Christian source of anti-Semitism. This investigation leads into the differentiation between two bodies of the King of the Jews: Jesus Christ and Jesus Barabbas, through which early Christians not only distanced themselves from political messianism (“Barabbas”), but also assumed a political culpability, acknowledging their own responsibility for Jesus’ crucifixion. In doing so, they distanced themselves from those who neither acknowledged nor confessed a shared culpability, thereby designating them as the “Jews.” This demarcation from political guilt serves as the foundation for a “politics of guilt” in the form of a demarcation from “Judaism.” This gave rise to Christian anti-Judaism, which Freud ultimately traced back to the distinction between acknowledgment and non-acknowledgment of guilt in his book Moses and Monotheism. Drawing on the dimension of preserving communal unity through the confession of guilt, this article proposes that the Christian model of collective guilt confession should not be simply understood as a desire to liberate oneself from the superego pressures, as, according to Santner, a “spiriting away of spirits and specters.” Instead, it can be comprehended as a novel means of preserving a community through the exclusion of those who do not join in the declaration of guilt.

Keywords:

• Freud
• Moses and Monotheism
• Santner
• politics of guilt
• Barabbas
• anti-Judaism
• anti-Semitism
• eschatology
• psychotheology

1 introduction

The so-called return of religion has many facets. One of the earliest manifestations was the unexpected resurgence in interest in a previously somewhat neglected work: Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism became the subject of intensive scrutiny in the 1990s for the first time.¹ In the debates, inquiries into the link between monotheism and violence, globalization and its discontents, the interplay of “universalism” and “particularism” (implicitly involving considerations of Christianity and Judaism), and, underlying all these questions, the issue of anti-Semitism, emerged. The latter notably had already played a central role in Freud’s book and contributed to its difficult reception.

In Eric Santner’s compelling essay, “Freud’s ‘Moses’ and the Ethics of Nomotropic Desire,” all these inquiries converge. This essay formed the basis for his famous book On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life. A concept that has been hinted at earlier – namely, that the absence of a transcendent dimension amplifies the predicament of transcendence within the ordinary aspects of daily life – was further developed in his work The Royal Remains: The Two Bodies of the People and the Endgames of Sovereignty. In this text, Santner examines Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies through a modern lens, delving into the question of the persistence of the king’s “divine body” in popular sovereignty post the English and French revolutions. With this book, Santner significantly contributes to the transition from political to economic theology, so to speak: a shift from Carl Schmitt to Walter Benjamin, particularly evident in the aftermath of the financial and debt crisis.

In the following text, I, too, will start with Freud’s Moses and Monotheism but take an opposing trajectory. Although my ultimate interest is also contemporary, centering around the significance of a politics of guilt in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I will explore the Christian origin of the distinction between the two bodies. This exploration leads me to two other “bodies of the king,” specifically those of the “king of the Jews.” Consequently, instead of delving into economic theology or a “debt drive” (Aaron Schuster), I will pivot towards political theology, focusing squarely on the crucifixion of Jesus and delving into the core of a “guilt drive.” This initial framing indicates the second distinction: whereas Santner, like Freud, primarily concentrated on a Jewish tradition in his analysis of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, my focus is more attuned to Freud’s understanding of Christianity. This leads me to an early, arguably the earliest moment in which Christianity delineated itself from what it perceived as “Judaism,” thus establishing the groundwork for its self-constitution as Christianity.

2 the first and the second exodus

Eric Santner’s text, “Freud’s ‘Moses’ and the Ethics of Nomotropic Desire,” is intricate and multilayered, to the extent that a comprehensive reconstruction would require an entire article. Nonetheless, we can outline some fundamental concepts briefly. The text addresses a specific anxiety that surfaced in the era of globalization, affecting even prominent intellectuals who identified with or were committed to Judaism in various ways. This anxiety pertained to the potential disappearance of a distinctive form of Judaism. Jacques Derrida, for instance, experienced this concern:

“I understand Judaism as the possibility of giving the Bible a context, of keeping this book readable,” says Levinas. Does not the globalization of demographic reality and calculation render the probability of such a “context” weaker than ever and as threatening for survival as the worst, the radical evil of the “final solution”? (91)

At the same time, the phenomenon referred to as the “return of religion” introduced an opportunity to ascribe a more distinct and recognizable recipient to this apprehension through a political-theological interpretation. Derrida identified, within the ominous globalization process, the specter of a Western (Latin) Christianity, encapsulating this correlation in the neologism “globalatinization” (50).²

With the rise of political Islam and Islamism, which constituted the foundation of the so-called return of religion, the inquiry into a potential link between monotheism and violence became paramount. This investigation had been particularly advanced by Jan Assmann. The essence of his reconstruction of Freud’s Moses lies in not confining violence solely to monotheism (or even to Islam) but in acknowledging within this violence (inclusive of the Christian-Western history of violence against others) the imprint of a traumatic inception inherent to monotheism itself. As a resolution to the unholy alliance of violence and trauma, Assmann brought to light the Egypt cosmotheism as the suppressed counter-religion of biblical monotheism, aspiring to eliminate the distinction between “Israel” (revelation) and “Egypt” (cosmotheism), a demarcation that had persisted, in Christianity and its differentiation from the “Egyptian fleshpots” up to the present day (Assmann).

Assmann had grounds to believe that he was in alignment with Freud. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud had already reconstructed a concealed history of violence, culminating in the killing of the primal father and its recurrence in the murder of Moses. Vis-à-vis National Socialism, Freud juxtaposed a straightforward folk political theology featuring the “popular god Yaweh” with the “god of Moses” (111), sublimated to the brink of dissolution, wherein the ethical-legal character stands out and is scarcely distinguishable from a non-God. Santner aptly summarized Assmann’s concerns:

The discourses on “Moses the Egyptian” – and Assmann places Freud firmly within this tradition, indeed sees him as its culmination – are thus understood to be essentially efforts at dismantling the boundaries between revealed religion and cosmotheism. The “hidden agenda” of these discourses was, Assmann writes, “to deconstruct ‘counter-religion’ and its implications of intolerance by blurring the basic distinctions as they were symbolized by the antagonistic constellation of Israel and Egypt. ‘Revelation’ had to be (re)turned into ‘translation.’” (11)

According to Santner, Assmann proposes that by recognizing Akhenaton’s revolution as the foundation of biblical monotheism, there exists the potential to move beyond the trauma of its initially violent imposition. This messianic “dream of reconciliation” diverges from Freud’s convictions (13). Freud’s conception of culture in general, and Jewish cultural development in particular, suggests that the best one can aspire to is to navigate through messianism and the fantasies linked to any vision of the “last days” (18). For Santner, universalization (within the Mosaic paradigm) is dependent

not on reference to a primordially shared nature independent of any “positive” formulation of the universal, but rather on the surplus vitality immanent in the universal, in its contingent formulation. Every effort to reformulate the universal, to remap its boundaries, borrows, at some level, from the drive energies secreted within the universal, its secret “knowledge” or Mitwissenschaft [sic!] of its own grounding in – and thus its debt to – a contingent, “parochial” locus of enunciation. (18)

Jewish history leads a kind of double life and manifests itself in an “entanglement of Law and its spectral double” (Žižek 100) between admitted and unadmitted history (“foundational myth” and “fundamental fantasy” (Santner 13)). In other words: “The foundational myth of the Exodus narrative – a story of deliverance and covenant – is, at the level of fantasy, a sustained performance of the primal crime, a sustained state of emergency and emergence” (Santner 29). The Jewish attachment to superegoic enjoyment would represent, for Freud, “an inability to confess to the murderous deed, the killing of the primal father which the Israelites (must have) repeated on the person of the great man Moses” (25).

Here, a distinction from Christianity also becomes evident:

That is, the progress in Geistigkeit, in spirituality, represented by Christianity meant, for Freud, a spiriting away of spirits and specters, those phantasmatic remainders of the paternal will or voice which endow conscience with a quasi-material density and weight. To put it simply, the messianic “second Exodus” is motivated by a desire to be free of the superego pressures generated by the first one. The resurrection associated with the last days signifies, then, not so much a reanimation of the dead as a deanimation of the undead, a putting to rest of their voices. (Santner 24)

While it is true, according to Santner, that Freud understood the Jewish resistance to this absolution – the rejection of Christ as Messiah – as a form of failure (in terms of both spiritual progress and progress in spirituality), Freud nevertheless remained profoundly attached to this Jewish resistance against absolution (24). Instead of positing a dichotomy between the (“Jewish”) denial of guilt or “resistance against absolution” and the (“Christian” or “messianic”) “second Exodus” achieved through acknowledgment of guilt, or between the preservation of Jewish identity (“[t]hose who refused to are still called Jews to-day” (Freud 136)) and its universalistic dissolution (“Saint Paul”), Santner situates Freud – and presumably himself as well – in an ambiguity between both possibilities:

As I have been suggesting, Freud’s own position on these questions in Moses and Monotheism remains fundamentally ambiguous. We might even say that this ambiguity is programmatic, that is, that the point of introducing a new conception of truth was to place this ambiguity into the foreground of our thinking, an ambiguity that blurs the boundaries between what is essential and what is contingent. Indeed, psychoanalytic thinking as such would seem to stand or fall with our capacity to acknowledge this ambiguity as a feature of human existence. (26–27)

If I comprehend it correctly, this appears to be the constellation that Santner has expounded upon: on one side, Assmann’s Egyptian (and perhaps crypto-Christian?) universalism, facilitated by a conceivable abstract and general God that overcomes the traumatizing or traumatized violence of monotheism. On the other side, there is Freud’s (and Santner’s) “ambiguity” situated between “Judaism” (involving an entanglement of singularizing revelation and the drive energies of a spectral, superego-like double of the commanding God) and the Christian “progress in spirituality” (which involves the messianic endeavor to overcome this superego and the effective drive energies within it through the confession of guilt).³

In the following, I aim to demonstrate that not only in the obscene original crime and the covert “knowledge” or Mitwissenschaft, but also behind the “second exodus,” there lies a community-building, particularistic, and in this sense, proto-political dimension. Here, we encounter two forms of the politics of guilt. Both forms of guilt, even when acknowledged, are particularizing – one because not everyone becomes equally guilty, the other because not everyone who becomes guilty confesses to that guilt. The community formed through the confession of guilt is, in a sense, even more particular, as it presupposes a community of guilt and once again divides it. If this is accurate, it should be possible to demonstrate, behind the ostensibly more universal Christian community of believers, the existence of a “remnant” as its actual bearer.

3 discovery of the primal murder

I will begin by attempting to clarify an ambiguity in a specific passage from Moses and Monotheism. This passage revolves around a pivotal moment in human history, wherein Freud identifies the initial discovery of the murder of the primal father. While Nietzsche considered the death of God a contemporary phenomenon, emphasizing the need to embrace this event by confessing the murder of God (thereby transforming guilt into an accomplishment) as equivalent to the self-creation of the superhuman, Freud shifts this occurrence back to the early stages of human history. According to Freud, this murder is tantamount to the (self-)creation of humanity. Thus, becoming aware of it is nothing short of recognizing the origin of human existence.

Interestingly, Freud links this decisive step of awareness with Christianity.⁴ In “Paul, a Roman Jew from Tarsus, seized upon this sense of guilt and traced it back correctly to its original source. He called this the ‘original sin’” (Freud 86).

However, there is no reference to the murder of God in Paul, only of “Jesus and the prophets” (1 Thess. 2.14–16). Even in the Gospels there is no explicit accusation of the murder of God. And Freud does not name a more precise source when he writes shortly afterward:

They [the Jews, note by LDB] were constantly met with the reproach “You killed our God!” And this reproach is true, if it is correctly translated. If it is brought into relation with the history of religions, it runs: “You will not admit that you murdered God (the primal picture of God, the primal father, and his later reincarnations).” There should be an addition declaring: “We did the same thing, to be sure, but we have admitted it and since then we have been absolved.” (90)

In essence, an anti-Jewish accusation bears the entire weight of the concealed, traumatic primal truth. According to Freud, it indirectly articulates both the truth of the murder of the primordial father and, doubly indirectly, the admission of one’s own guilt. This specific accusation seems to have emerged, as far as our knowledge extends, for the first time in the latter part of the second century AD when Melito of Sardis accused the Jews of the murder of God (Stewart-Sykes). However, in this accusation, there is no acknowledgment of one’s own guilt.

For the accusation of deicide against the Jews to transform into an admission of one’s own murder of the primal father, Freud had to undertake two operations. Firstly, he had to establish a connection between two distinct “murders”: the murder of Jesus and the murder of the primal father. This connection occurs as Jesus is somehow identified with God for Christians (although Freud may exaggerate when claiming that in Christianity, Jesus had replaced God), just as the primal father became, in the figure of his resurrection, God for the Jews. Secondly, a more problematic transformation involves turning an accusation into a guilty plea. Freud accomplished this only through an arbitrary addition (“There should be an addition”). The outcome is as follows: from an accusation where Christians accuse Jews of having murdered Jesus, through these two operations, it transforms into Christians confessing to be, along with Jews, murderers of the primal father. In other words, upon closer examination, Freud’s interpretation relies on false analogies and arbitrary assertions.

4 jesus and barabbas

Let us closely examine the accusation of deicide that underlies this thesis, as the rediscovery of the suppressed primal patricide hinges on it.⁵ Even though this accusation was formulated explicitly much later, it is primarily rooted in certain New Testament passages where “the Jews” are depicted as demanding the crucifixion of Jesus.

This demand, however, cannot be fully comprehended without acknowledging its complement: the demand for the release of Barabbas. This dynamic appears to intensify the situation for the Jewish crowd. The designation of Barabbas as a “murderer” persists to this day, particularly in Germany, influenced by the impactful Luther translation.⁶ Consequently, the (indirect) “murder” of the Son of God is coupled with the choice of a murderer.

However, this understanding is one-sided and misleading. The probably earliest Gospel, that of Mark, says: “among the rebels in prison, who had committed murder in the insurrection, there was a man called Barabbas” (Mark 15.7).⁷ As the Judaist Hyam Maccoby noted:

Mark’s ambiguous expression leaves it open whether he himself was a murderer, it makes it even possible to suppose that “Barabbas was arrested as a revolutionary but was in fact not one,” and this would be a “perfect description of the status of Jesus.” (59)

The Gospel of Matthew refers to Barabbas as ἐπίσημον, that is, as “known, distinguished, famous.” “That he could be negatively famous, that is, ‘notorious,’” as the New Testament scholar Ulrich Luz said, “does not correspond to the usual meaning of the word” (271; trans. mod.). From the Gospels, Pope Benedict XVI adduced evidence for the claim that Barabbas “was one of the prominent resistance fighters, in fact probably the actual leader of that particular uprising” (Jesus of Nazareth 40). According to that, Bar Abbas was a political-messianic figure, not unlike bar Kokhba a hundred years later (Jesus of Nazareth II, ch. 2).

Bar Abbas means “son of the father,”⁸ amounting to an almost empty tautology, akin to “unmarried bachelor.” It acquires specific meaning primarily in contrast to Jesus Christ, with whom it is juxtaposed. In the case of Jesus Christ, the question the father has been, and still is, complex and subject to debate. “Son of the father,” or “Bar Abbas,” can then mean two things: firstly, that he has a father, in contrast to Jesus Christ, whose father is uncertain. Secondly, it can be understood as an identification with Jesus himself, as “son of the father” recalls the significant and provocative instance when Jesus referred to God as his father (Frazer 191–95). “Bar Abbas” is therefore marked by a peculiar blend of proximity and contrast to Jesus Christ.

This distinctive state between identity and difference is underscored by another aspect. The oldest sources also mention Barabbas’ first name, which was later erased. It reads “Jesus” (Reinach).⁹ Thus, it appears that a choice was made between two messianic figures, both named Jesus, and for both, emphasis was placed on sonship: one as the son of the heavenly and the other as the son of an earthly father. The initial excessive closeness, which over time seemed offensive and was toned down, requires interpretation. There are apparently close, yet inherently opposing interpretations.

5 anti-anti-semitic identity thesis

The first interpretation can be understood as anti-anti-Semitic. Approximately 120 years ago, the lawyer Heinrich Meyer Cohn proposed the thesis of the identity of Jesus and Barabbas (“Jesus = Barabbas”), drawing on then-new philological insights regarding the New Testament. This proposal emerged in response to a rapidly growing anti-Semitism. He was followed, among others, by Freud’s student Theodor Reik (Der eigene und der fremde Gott 111–12), later by H.A. Rigg (“Barabbas”),¹⁰ Hyam Maccoby (“Jesus and Barabbas”), Stevan Davies (“Who Is Called Bar Abbas?”), and others.¹¹ This thesis is rarely discussed, but still held until today, and all interpretations that see Jesus exclusively as a political agitator (such as Hans Kelsen (39) or Sigmund Freud himself) come close to it.

According to Cohn, the later, pro-Roman editors of the Gospels put two figures in the place of the one person, Jesus (Christ) and (Jesus) Barabbas. The Jews could then demand Barabbas’ liberation, while Pilate could seek to protect Christ from execution (Cohn 66). However, as reported in the Gospels, Pilate’s attempt to save Jesus is, says Cohn (and many others), neither consistent with his character (historically known to be rather brutal), nor psychologically probable.¹² Cohn correctly argues that the explanation provided (the so-called “Paschal Pardon”) lacks any historical basis.¹³ It also leads to unplausible consequences. It would be comprehensible if the people had fronted up to the palace to demand the release of a prisoner in an act of sedition. But if instead the Jews had the right to demand the release of a prisoner, there would have been no reason for the procession before Pilate’s palace (Cohn 67–68).¹⁴ The people could not prevail, and Christ was crucified, with the inscription INRI, which was, Cohn assumed, intended to mock the Jews who had seen in Christ the Messiah and King of the Jews (66).

The anti-anti-Semitic (but also and significantly anti-antidemocratic¹⁵) consequence is clear: if Jesus and Barabbas were identical, the (Jewish) “people” had gathered to demand Jesus’ deliverance, not his crucifixion. This would eliminate the anti-Jewish accusation of deicide at its root. And it would eliminate one of the main mysteries of the story of Jesus’ crucifixion as well: that the mood could shift so quickly against him and that the Temple aristocracy – presumably doubly unpopular as collaborators of the Roman Empire and as privileged – could exert so much influence on the “people.” The crowd was always “favourably disposed towards Jesus, except in that one passion episode” (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith). According to the New Testament, the crowd had been supporting Jesus up until a few days before his crucifixion, and probably until the night before (because Jesus was secretly arrested when he was secluded from the people), and then again immediately after crucifixion (Luke 23.48).

The main problem with this interpretation lies in its failure to provide an alternative explanation for the demand to “Crucify him!” It does not address the question of how the conflicting Jewish and (Gentile) Christian interpretations emerged. Nor does it elucidate the origins of the division between Jews and Christians, which was the precondition for “the Christians’” blaming of the crucifixion on the “the Jews.” Furthermore, given that the identification of Jesus and Barabbas typically leads to understanding Jesus as a messianic-political resistance fighter, as “Barabbas” and not the other way around, the identity thesis implicitly denies a fundamental aspect of Christianity – that Jesus was more or different than a mere political (or politico-messianic) agitator. Consequently, this anti-anti-Semitic interpretation carries an underlying anti-Christian subtext.

6 anti-anti-christian alter ego thesis

The second interpretation was most distinctly articulated by Pope Benedict XVI and can be termed as anti-anti-Christian. I also refer to it as the “alter ego thesis,” as it involves an extreme approximation of Jesus and Barabbas without both becoming identical. On the contrary, their confusability is what highlights the profound contrast between them. “Again and again,” Benedict writes, “mankind will be faced with this same choice: to say yes to the God who works only through the power of truth and love, or to build on something tangible and concrete – on violence” (Jesus of Nazareth II, ch. 7, 3).¹⁶

The choice between Jesus Christ and Jesus Barabbas is presented here in terms of salvation history as a decisive moment leading to the divergence of Christianity and Judaism. From this perspective, Judaism is equated with a decision against Christ and in favor of Barabbas – endorsing a politico-national messianism that, thirty years later, culminated in the rebellion against Rome, the destruction of the Temple, the Diaspora, and ultimately the defeat of bar Kokhba's political messianism.

The decision in favor of Jesus Barabbas is hence retrospectively interpreted as synonymous with a path leading to complete failure, rooted in the choice against Christ. It can also be viewed as the disinheritance of the Jews in favor of the church, or more simplistically, as divine punishment for deicide. The historical significance of this accusation seems to lie in its potential use to justify the substitution theology that emerged after the failure of the last major Jewish revolt against Rome. Unfortunately, Benedict does not delve into the fact that rabbinic Judaism is also a response to the disappointment of bar Kokhba's failure, giving rise to new parallels between Christianity and Judaism.

For this reason, the alter ego thesis is politically problematic. In this interpretation, the choice of Barabbas (and not the establishment of rabbinic Judaism after 135) is considered equivalent to the self-constitution of Judaism as the choice of a (false) political-national messianism. Furthermore, because this choice is accompanied by an anti-Christian stance against the true Messiah Christ, against “love and truth,” this interpretation is anti-Jewish and is unable to disassociate itself from a history of violence against Jews.

The primary theological and hermeneutical problem with this interpretation lies in the fact that a clear distinction, or even opposition, between the two messianic paths only became possible ex post, retrospectively, after the crucifixion and resurrection, and particularly after the catastrophe of the Jewish war when the Gospels were written. Therefore, it seems anachronistic – and neglectful of history-in-actualization, Vollzugsgeschichte (Heidegger) – to expect the pre-Easter followers of Jesus already to possess knowledge that they could only have acquired later. This applies even more so to the rest of the Jewish people, from whom one could expect even less than from Jesus’ apostles and followers that they ought to have “correctly understood” him during his lifetime.

7 guilt-political interpretation

This problem simultaneously provides an approach to mediating the alter ego thesis (two messianic paths, a good Christian and a bad Jewish one) and the identity thesis (Barabbas = Jesus, but more fundamentally: Jesus Barabbas over and against Jesus Christ). The solution occurs as soon as one interprets the juxtaposition of two different messianic figures, two “Jesuses,” and two “sons of fathers” as a narrative production, as the retroactive illustration (or, in a more Hegelian formulation, the setting of one’s own conditions) of a post-Easter theological truth, rather than the description of a historical fact.

This perspective is in line with the possibility that when the Gospels speak of the whole people, they really mean the whole people, including the Jesus-followers. They, too, might have clung to a messianic conception until the time of the trial, a wrong one so it would turn out for them. Like the rest of the people, they would not only have celebrated his entry into Jerusalem but, following his arrest by the Romans, also demanded his release. (This does not exclude, however, the possibility that the apostles of Jesus had more reasons than others to remain hidden due to their precarious standing.)

However, precisely because this political messianic concept (“King of the Jews”) was very likely the cause of Jesus’ crucifixion, from a Christian standpoint, the entire people – including Jesus’ followers – could retroactively be held responsible for Jesus being perceived as a political Messiah. This resulted in Jesus being viewed as a rebel by the imperial rulers, subsequently leading to his arrest, trial, and crucifixion. Ultimately, the “choice of Barabbas” could be distilled into the formula: “crucify him!”¹⁷

The people as a whole were tragically guilty in this regard. Tragically, “for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23.34). Simultaneously, this marks the very origin of the initial distinction between Christians and Jews – the guilt of Jesus’ followers ran deeper. Given their familiarity with Jesus, or at least the opportunity to know him better, they might have comprehended his message and resisted being swept away by the widespread political-messianic fervor that indirectly led to his demise. Once this post-Easter Jesus is reinterpreted as “Christ,” and “Christians,” perhaps only after the destruction of the Temple,¹⁸ dashed the dream of political messianism, are they able to recognize and to acknowledge their own complicity in his crucifixion. Understanding this became a precondition for overcoming the guilt.

Consequently, it could be assumed both that the Jewish people shared a collective (tragic) guilt and that those who, after the events of Easter and the destruction of the Temple at the latest, recognized themselves as culpable, thereby no longer belonged to that guilty people in the same way. Moreover, those who remained unaware of their guilt could retrospectively have been seen as persisting in that very guilt, to the point of stubbornly denying it. In other words, the entire people [pas ho laos] contributed to his crucifixion, but among this people, those who had not acknowledged – and consequently had not seen any reason to confess – their guilt as the post-Easter Christians did – became the truly guilty ones.

The Gospels can be interpreted as testimony to this shift in guilt. The Christians, by overturning their conception of the Messiah, managed to maintain their belief in Jesus as the Messiah. Conversely, because “the Jews” clung to their political-national conception of the Messiah, they could no longer believe in Jesus as the Messiah after his crucifixion. From the Christian perspective, this contributed to the destruction of the Temple and, through messianically inspired revolts, the devastation of Palestine in subsequent uprisings until 135.¹⁹

Thus, it turns out that the peculiarities which Freud pointed out in connecting the anti-Jewish accusation (of the murder of Christ) with the murder of the primal father and a confession of guilt, hold true even without reference to the primal murder:

You will not admit that you murdered God (the primal image of God, the primal father, and his later reincarnations). There should be an addition declaring: “We did the same thing, to be sure, but we have admitted it and since then we have been absolved.” (90)

8 on psychotheology of end-of-days life

At the root of the accusation of the murder of God, in which Freud discerned the emergence of a primal crime, lies the division between Jesus Christ and Jesus Barabbas as embodiments of two conceptions of the Messiah, two bodies of the King of the Jews. This division forms the basis of the long and intricate history of distinctions, translations, and “secularizations,” including the theological doctrine of two natures: the crypto-theological medieval doctrine of the two bodies of the king, and – as we see in Santner’s longstanding inquiry and project – its spectral afterlife, after the end of sovereignty that followed the English and French revolutions.

At the very beginning of this division is a new, universal understanding of the Messiah, which was the condition of possibility of retaining Jesus as the Messiah; the condition of possibility of his afterlife, despite the total failure and collapse marked by his crucifixion. However, this new (Christian) understanding of the Messiah was inevitably accompanied by a sense of grief: the (initial) relinquishment of the pledge for an earthly liberation of Israel, and, consequently, of a messianic conception where politics and religion remain intertwined. In this way, a conception of the Messiah that was politically and nationally shaped (“King of the Jews”) had died on the cross: INRI.²⁰

A new messianic understanding necessarily brought with it an awareness of culpability, the traumatic realization that the disciples themselves had played a role in Jesus’ demise due to a misguided understanding of the Messiah. In this context, the sequence is not, in the manner of Freud, one where guilt precedes redemption; rather, redemption emerges concurrently with a renewed sense of guilt stemming from a revised comprehension of Christ.

If this proposition holds true, and if at the core of Christianity lies not only the traumatic aspect of the crucifixion of the King of the Jews but, with the resurrection, the recognition of the followers’ complicity in this crucifixion, then the nexus of politics and religion in Christianity must be characterized by an intense convergence of fascination, trauma, and guilt.

The revised concept of the Messiah as (“Christ”) mandates a distinction between earthly and heavenly kingship, emperor and God, and this demarcation is applicable to both facets of the dichotomy. Christianity has thrived thanks to this scenario. Yet, when politics and religion, the political and the messianic, draw close, a particular tension is bound to arise – that between the recollection of the fascination of Jesus prior to his political failure and the traumatic experience of the crucifixion. Consequently, conflicts emerge when religion and politics intermingle, either within Christianity or within other religions. In these instances, religious communities, guided by a new, non-political understanding, position themselves as Jesus’ original alter ego, which represents the fundamental rejection of political messianism (“Barabbas”) for self-identification as Christianity. In response, a theopolitical self-defense mechanism gets activated, but in extreme cases the violence of the secular sword (that is, the instrument of a worldly authority that is a political counterpart to the church) is also legitimized.

On the one hand, relinquishing the notion of a political Messiah, as ensued in the aftermath of the crucifixion, became a task that was not easy to accomplish without residual effects, devoid of wounds and pain. Early Christians, it seems, anticipated the imminent return of Christ within their own lifetimes. If eschatology is a term that denotes the transformation and preservation of elements that are unrealized and elicit pain into a horizon of hope (akin to what Nietzsche referred to as “the historical human being” (Die Geburt der Tragödie 255)), then subsequent millenarianism could also signify a commitment to a political Messiah. Millenarianism may serve as the eschatological-spectral counterpart to the phantom pains associated with the unfulfilled arrival of the earthly Messiah.

A parallel consideration may be extended to the transfiguration. The transfiguration could be understood as expressing the indistinguishability and inseparability of a political and Christian understanding of the Messiah, the fascination of an indeterminacy of as-yet undifferentiated concepts of the Messiah. This lack of differentiation, like that of the lost paradise that is retroactively valorized by its very loss, goes beyond the resurrection (or back before it), because the transfigured Jesus doesn’t show the stigmata that he had suffered during the crucifixion, that is, the reminders of pain and cross (Luke 24.39). And since the self-constitution of Christianity is based on the traumatic lesson of the cross and the recognition of one’s own guilt, the transfiguration, the status gloriae, is not only an eschatological transcendence or “beyond,” but primarily the beyond of Christianity itself. The fascinating indeterminacy of the pre-crucified Jesus and the time when Jesus “dwelt among us” in limbo between political Messiah and Son of God, might be for Christians the epitome of the highest fascination, of a specific Christian excessiveness, of a beyond-of-resurrection, one that is narratively preserved in the story of Jesus’ transfiguration and in its associated eschatological ideas, notably in the dazzling concept of the status of glory.²¹

In his book Theorie der Befreiung, Christoph Menke has conceptualized radical liberation as a fascinating confrontation with one’s own pre-subjective indeterminacy. Applied to Christianity, this would be the encounter with a fascinating messianism before its traumatic split, before the death of the messianic King of the Jews. As insightful as such an application to Christianity may be, what Menke’s focus on fascination misses is the frightening dimension of the dissolution of identity that would inevitably accompany such an encounter – and the corresponding resistance it must generate. In this regard, Rudolf Otto’s religion-phenomenological approach seems more comprehensive, as he famously termed fascination only one side of the numinous, contrasting it with a frightening dimension, the tremendum.

The Christian numinous is the yet undiscerned connection of Jesus and “king of the Jews,” of Jesus and Barabbas; in short, Jesus Barabbas. This is what the people as a whole had chosen and what Christians had given up to maintain faith in Jesus and become Christians. The confrontation with any new Jesus Barabbas would therefore necessarily remain in the indeterminacy of the fascinating inseparability marked by Jesus Barabbas, of this threatening, culpable, and ultimately murderous misunderstanding. “Messianism is the great temptation of Western politics” (Walzer 135).

In this sense, the association of Barabbas with the murderer holds true in a profound sense. As representative of a specific messianic understanding, the choice for Barabbas was tantamount to the murder of Jesus Christ. Consequently, this choice would not only reignite the initial fascination. It would also evoke the apprehension of self-dissolution and the traumatic recollection of an inherent Christian culpability for Jesus’ crucifixion. Hence, the more Christianity worked to solidify its identity, the more the link between Christian and political messianism needed to be kept at a secure eschatological distance, either through millenarianism or the status gloriae. Any manifestation of this connection, when it occurred, had to be interpreted as an anti-Christian temptation, mobilizing corresponding catechontical anti-anti-Christian impulses.²²

What Dostoevsky depicted through his renowned figure of the “Grand Inquisitor” is more broadly applicable to (ecclesiastically constituted) Christianity. The anticipated return of the heavenly king, as Christianity envisions (“He sits at the right hand of the Father and will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,” whereby “his reign will be without end”²³) would have to be perpetually contended with by the same Christianity. Christianity, it seems, is fated to incessantly defer the realization of the glory and kingdom of Jesus, thus obstructing its own deepest yearnings. Christianity, therefore, operates as a parousia-delaying machine (or, in German: Parusieverzögerungsmaschine): a mechanism that continually postpones the awaited coming or presence.

This represents the most significant divergence from Santner’s approach: “the most one can hope for is to work through messianism and the fantasies associated with any vision of ‘last days’” (18). Instead of advocating for a minimal messianism in form of an (infinite) “working through” (or deconstruction) of messianic fantasies, Christianity, in maximalist fashion, preserves the fulfillment of all desires and aspirations, the comprehensive rectification of all endured injustices and pain – by deferring it to the secure distance of an eschatological realm.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Only one year after the end of the Warsaw Pact, Yosef Yerushalmi published Freud’s Moses. Jacques Derrida responded three years later with his Mal d’archive. There followed, among others, books by Robert Paul (Moses and Civilization), Regina Schwartz (The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism), Jan Assmann (Moses der Ägypter), and Richard Bernstein (Freud and the Legacy of Moses).

2 A similar fear was already articulated in Derrida’s Of Grammatology, namely in the form of a (feared) worldwide literacy and an accompanying occidental logocentrism (Di Blasi, Dezentrierungen 195–218). Following September 11 and the “war on terror,” Gil Anidjar, a student of Derrida, consistently extended the politicization in this context towards a postcolonial intensification: globalization – colonialism – Western Christianity.

3 Christoph Menke has recently presented a third option, which consists in transforming that ambiguity into dialectics. What Santner leaves in ambiguity is rendered as a clear distinction between radical and mutually opposed liberation projects: one pertaining to the liberating-singularizing invocation of God at Sinai (religion), and the other in the liberating experience of the drive as the zero stage of humanization (neoliberalism). Both are finally related to each other and dialectically mediated: the fascinating experience of indeterminacy turns out to be an encounter with one’s own pre-social and pre-subjective indeterminacy, but which the subject can only experience “by being given its truth from outside” (“indem ihm seine Wahrheit von außen gegeben wird”) (Menke 553).

4

It appears as though a growing sense of guilt had taken hold of the Jewish people, or perhaps of the whole civilized world of the time as a precursor to the return of the repressed material. Till at last one of these Jewish people found, in justifying a politico-religious agitator, the occasion for detaching a new – the Christian – religion from Judaism. (Freud 86)

5 I have dealt with this question in more detail elsewhere. See Di Blasi, “Political Intertheology.”

6 John 18.40 “Barabbas aber war ein Mörder.” In more recent editions, this has been changed into “Er war ein Räuber” (“he was a robber”).

7

Mark’s ambiguous expression makes it possible to suppose that Barabbas was arrested as a revolutionary but was in fact not one. This is a perfect description of the status of Jesus himself, if we accept Paul Winter’s thesis in On the Trial of Jesus. Mark’s equivocal description of Barabbas may be a faint echo of the status of Jesus himself. (Maccoby 59)

8 Another, albeit less convincing, meaning could be “son of the teacher.” Rigg later argued that calling God his father (abba) appeared particularly provocative and could have led to Jesus being nicknamed Bar Abbas. See Rigg 438. Davies later reiterated the possibility that Jesus of Nazareth was known as Jesus bar Abba. Bar Abbas was then “a patronymic-like familiar name reflecting a prominent aspect of his teaching.” Moreover, he continues,

[t]he fact that Jesus addressed God as “abba” was such a memorable aspect of Jesus’s teaching that the term “abba” is preserved in Paul’s letters (Gal. 4.5 and Rom. 8.15) and in the Gospel of Mark (Mark 14.35) in the original Aramaic. Perrin, following Jeremias, writes that: “An intensive investigation of the Jewish traditions has shown that to address God as Father is by no means a commonplace of ancient Jewish piety, and that when it does happen, the form abba ‘Father’ or ‘My Father,’ is never used.” (Davies 261; italics in original)

9 This interpretation has been reaffirmed repeatedly, for example, by Moses, “Jesus Barabbas, a Nominal Messiah?” According to Luz, despite the very narrow attestation, most text-critical experts today accept the reading with “Jesus Barabbas” in Mt 27.16 and 17 as original. See Luz 265.

10 Rigg’s version of the identity thesis makes central use of the same argument, developing it far more extensively and philologically accurately.

11 The Jewish Annotated New Testament also takes this position and basic arguments: “Barabbas is Aramaic for ‘son of the father,’ and is likely an invented double for Jesus” (92).

12 Philo describes Pilate in Legatio ad Gaium (§§ 299–305) as unbending, headstrong, and unyielding (akamptos, authades, ameiliktoi). See also Agamben 17.

13 That “no such custom existed” seems to be the predominant scholarly opinion on this matter to this day (Winter 94).

14 Further, if the point is to release him for the festival, the timing is off: the paschal lamb was eaten the night before (Jewish Annotated New Testament 92).

15 In the Bethel Confession, for example, the election of Barabbas is cited as evidence of the people’s susceptibility to error (Bonhoeffer 374).

16 This reading is consistent with the apologetic Christian interpretation which recognized in the choice between Christ and Barabbas a

choice, decisive for all time, between the way of salvation of Jesus Christ and a political messianism and zealotry, […] a choice in the consequence of which the Jewish people committed the unfortunate and disastrous revolt against Rome, a choice that resulted in the fall of Jerusalem and sank Israel into a sea of suffering and misfortune, a choice that forced the Jewish people to an eternally unsteady, Ahasverian life of dispersion. (Schreckenberg 131; my trans.)

17 With this sharpened perspective, a proximity to Nietzsche’s understanding of active nihilism becomes evident. Political messianism emerges as driven by a nihilism, an unconscious (death) drive to challenge the political supremacy that possesses the means to annihilate its enemies. Or, in Nietzsche’s words: as “instinktive Nöthigung zu Handlungen, mit denen man die Mächtigen zu T o d f e i n d e n macht” (“Der europäische Nihilismus” 215).

18 It might have been thought that, for Christians, the trauma of the destruction of the Temple brought to mind the trauma of the crucifixion. The difference now concerns their ability to interpret this destruction as a subsequent affirmation of their path, whereas the crucifixion had initially appeared to indicate the failure of their Messiah.

19 When rabbinic Judaism was reconstituted in the aftermath, the important canonical writings and decisive course-setting had already been established.

20 Luke let the “Emmaus disciples” express the corresponding disappointment (Luke 24.21). Jacob Taubes described with regard to Paul and the opening of the Jews, of God’s holy people, to the Gentiles:

I don’t read this rhetorically, what Paul is saying here, at the beginning of (Rom) 9 – that he is burdened with great sorrow and anguish and all of what he’s leaving behind: the sonship, the covenant, the fathers, the worship, the promises, the Messiah – there is nothing, after all, that does not rest on this people. (41)

21 If it has not already been done, it would be interesting to relate the concepts of millenarianism and status gloriae to the messianic concepts of the promised land and Eden in Judaism, as discussed by Walzer 120.

22 This pertains to Jesus Christ himself. Everything that was political about him and rousing in this respect now becomes a potential problem. This points to a spectral dimension of Christianity that afflicts it again and again and against which it has, again and again, to prove itself.

23 Creed of the fourth century.