Desecularizing Santner’s Psychotheology

Abstract

In this paper, Eric Santner’s theory of political flesh is appreciated in its relation to philosophy of religion and Christian theology. In the first part of the paper, Santner’s speculative concept is brought into conversation with the debate on embodiment, incarnation, and a hermeneutics of the flesh. Santner’s conception of the flesh is shown to follow a logic of excarnation, or rather disincorporation, and thus to be at odds with contemporary harmonistic theories of embodiment that attempt to think body and spirit together without rupture. In contrast, the relevance of Santner’s theory lies precisely in its antagonistic reading of the dynamics that constitute human embodied being – a dimension overlooked by most recent theories of embodiment. The second part of the article develops a reading of Protestantism as a “religion of the flesh” in line with Santner’s argument. In doing so, it is shown that the Protestant narrative of self-modernization and progress (Hegel’s “religion of freedom”) can be subverted by the conception of the flesh brought into play by Santner, revealing a much more ambivalent history of Protestantism. In a re-reading of the theologies of Karl Barth, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and John Calvin, it is shown that the Protestant understanding of the church can be made transparent to a figure of the undead that is virulent in it, namely the undead flesh of Jesus Christ. In the end, the question is raised whether this figure of an “undead” Christ might not be interpreted as a paradoxological intervention in the sense of Eric Santner.

Keywords:

• religion
• embodiment
• Christology
• church
• flesh
• spirit

1 introduction

In my paper I will try to give an assessment of Eric Santner’s theory of political flesh in its relation to Christian theology. In my view, Santner’s theory is a new form of political theology that breaks with the ideology of secularization and does not seek to replace it with a new narrative of progress. Nevertheless, it still connects with the secularization theorem, the assumption that the theological principle of incarnation, the binding of transcendence into immanence, has emigrated from religion in the narrow sense into the forms of life of modern culture. In the first part of my paper, I will thus bring Santner’s theory into conversation with the debate about a hermeneutics of the flesh and symbolic embodiment. I will show that Santner’s conception of the flesh follows a logic of excarnation, or rather of disincorporation, and thus stands at odds with contemporary harmonistic theories of embodiment that seek to think body and mind together without rupture. In contrast, the relevance of Santner’s theory lies precisely in the antagonistic reading of the dynamics that constitute human embodied being.

In the second part of my paper, I will then develop a reading of Protestantism as a “religion of the flesh” in line with Santner’s argument. As a “religion of the flesh” it distinguishes itself from the religion of embodiment, Roman Christianity, and is at the same time a necessary counterpart to it. In order to relate both variants of the same Christianity, or rather of a Christianity that is “not-united” with itself, I start from St Paul’s ecclesiology. He conceives of the church of Christ as the embodiment of the body of its Savior and thus doubles the embodiment accomplished by God himself in Jesus Christ by spiritualizing it, that is, conceiving it as a work of the Holy Spirit. To what extent, however, this work of the Holy Spirit can be conceived as the work of the flesh or not will be discussed in dialogue with Santner.

2 flesh instead of embodiment: an antagonistic register of the political subject

Santner has unfolded his insights into the political subject of modernity starting from an analysis of the momentous replacement of the sovereign monarch by the people as the subject of political power. Santner’s thesis is that political modernity is grounded in a process of releasing the so-called “flesh” of the political subject. “Flesh” is an incomprehensibly formless, but at the same time infinitely malleable, libidinous tissue, which has to be “bound” again in the subject in a political economy. My thesis is now that Santner’s theory is a theory which, despite its rhetoric of body and flesh, is opposed to the recently emerging approaches of an appreciation of mediation, corporeality, and materiality and which should therefore be positioned as an antidote to them.

I would like to explain this in more detail. In his readings, Santner portrays the process of the recasting of the monarchical king’s body by the democratic people’s body as a process of excarnation of the central occidental figure of sovereignty, namely the king’s body (Royal Remains 55, 62, 96).¹ For Santner, excarnation,² or better disincorporation/disembodiment, is a hallmark of modern life and thought. Unlike the current philosophy of embodiment (Fingerhut et al.; Kearney and Treanor; Fuchs), however, Santner does not naively oppose the modern dynamic of excarnation with a new model of incarnation or incorporation, a demand for “re-embodiment” (Kearney; Fuchs), but rather he reveals that there is a ghostly double of the body in which it leads an afterlife, as it were, after its disappearance: the flesh.

Santner uses the term “flesh” also to address an ontological wound that no form of symbolic embodiment or imaginary transgression can ever close (“Rebranding” 46, 51). The dynamics he describes of the body’s excarnation into flesh testifies that there is a surplus over the two dialectically constituted movements of ex- and incorporation that cannot be grasped in themselves. This surplus, however, does not simply unite the dynamics of the formation and dissolution of form in a sovereign life; rather, according to Santner, from it emanates that mysterious, almost magical-mythical power that can potentially inform life, but also deform it (Royal Remains 39). The sovereign is indeed master over the flesh, but thus at the same time “subjected” to its precarious existence, which consists in being able to become “formless” in a horrible way and therein to deprive any form of life of its power. In the intersection between somatic and symbolic existence of each individual subject there remains a residue that haunts it as a “ghostly double.”

Would Santner advocate a re-embodiment of the sovereign, given the disastrous consequences of the expansion of sovereign power into the horizontality of the flesh? The dominant rhetoric in his earlier text, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, is not, I think, repeated in his later studies. In his recent study on the culmination of the neoliberal order in a political economy of branding, Santner seems to assume a renewed “binding” of the flesh by a sovereign power figure (“Rebranding” 19–112).³ But is working through, uncovering, really redemption in the sense of resolution? Santner himself does not emphasize this precisely. Rather, he argues that neither disembodiment of the sovereign nor renunciation of the neoliberal cult of branding can ever redeem us from the libidinous dynamic of the flesh. Because with it also the human existence itself would be given up, the subject, which is constituted by the surplus of the human compared to the animal life. The subject is, so to speak, the “not being able to close” the gap.

By insisting on this gap in the subject, which produces the incomprehensible-formless but infinitely malleable fabric of the flesh, Santner’s theory – as I have shown – moves far away from all late modern theories of a naive “re-embodiment” (Fingerhut et al.; Kearney and Treanor; Fuchs) which instead of a mediation or difference of body and mind want to assert the immediacy and fusion of the two. Santner’s concept of the flesh salutary cuts through this insinuation of an entirely fixed coupling of political subject and embodiment through the antagonism of the flesh inscribed in materiality. Santer’s political subject is a subject that cannot see through itself and therefore finds in itself its uncanny double.⁴ Any kind of harmonistic-peaceful approach negating conflicts, traumas, and diastases in the reality of the subject has thus been successfully rejected by Santner. But what about the other side – the demarcation of his theory towards a negativistic political ontology?

As Oliver Marchart has shown in his pioneering study, a number of recent political theories assume a political ontology that declares difference, rather than unity, to be the ground of the social. Because they do not assert a substantial foundation of human sociality, but rather refer to an abyss, an antagonism as the impetus constituting society, Marchart has summarized these political theories as post-foundational. Among these post-foundational political theories is Claude Lefort’s theory of democracy. Lefort, in particular, develops the normative notion of a negative universality (Weymans and Hetzel 26–43). He sees democracy as a political regime centered around an empty place of power. It stands for the principal absence of all ultimate grounds of a political order. Lefort shows that the dispositif of power in democracy no longer needs a substantial foundation and replaces it instead with an empty place. The empty place of power functions as a formal placeholder for the unity and indivisibility of democratic society, which in premodern times was manifested and embodied in the person of the king or the monarch (also Klein 34–92).

Like Lefort’s, Santner’s theory tends toward a dialectic of emptiness and fullness, of abstraction and embodiment of political power. When arguing against equivocation of his theory with neo-materialist ontologies, Santner speaks of an “abstract materiality” to explain and delineate his conception of the flesh (Weight of All Flesh 55). Elsewhere he speaks of the “bodily imaginary”/“Leiblich-Imaginäre” (240). But this choice of words can be misleading, since it tends, in my opinion, to level out again the difference of body/flesh so emphasized by Santner. Basically, however, Santner cleverly saves himself from the dialectic of emptiness and occupation of the place of power inscribed in Lefort’s theory of democracy. Contrary to Lefort’s view, for Santner the locus of power is not empty in the sense of vacant, so that it can be “occupied” over and over again by changing parties or individuals from among the people. Santner himself emphasizes this in his interpretation of the painting of Marat’s death, which is programmatic for him and which we also find on the cover of his book The Royal Remains. There he writes that the black void in the upper part of the painting can be read as a visual testimony to the flesh, since it eludes the “work of incarnation” (Santner, Royal Remains 92) and in this incomprehensible formless withdrawal gives space to the “sublimely somatic element in excess of our animal being” (73). The emptiness “forms not so much a vacancy as the site of an excess of pressure” (93). Santner’s emptiness is – one might say – unlike Lefort’s programmatically “empty place,” immune from being taken up merely as a springboard for ever new recastings or “re-embodiments” of power. It preserves in another way the antagonistic core of the theory of political power, namely by locating this emptiness in Santner’s theory in a pure drive, a libidinous energy, of which we cannot dispose in any way or in any shaping or binding of life. In this respect, the flesh is – to use Oliver Marchart’s phrase – the abyss that constitutes the political and makes it an unfinishable project.

Could this potency, this very sovereign energy of the flesh, which is not containable by figures or embodiments of the sovereign, be related to the doctrine of the Holy Spirit and thus to the persistence as well as the fluctuation of religion in history?

Spirit, in the view of modern Christian theology, is by no means an entity of transcendence, timeless and spaceless or even immaterially constituted, but it is the structure of a material mediation between two, which can never be or become “one” without a gap. In this sense, Santner’s “flesh” would be a good substitute for spirit in the sense of such a modern understanding of Christian theology. For example, one could say that the development of Christianity from a religion of bodily integrity (Roman Christianity) to a religion of the fluidity of the Spirit (Pentecostal Christianity) is due to this increasingly releasing power of the flesh. And it is precisely here that I would like to follow up with the remarks in the second part of this article.

3 protestantism as the religion of the flesh: the undead body of jesus christ

As Santner himself repeatedly emphasizes, the process of releasing and delivering the flesh poses a threat to every form of corporate identity and integrity, as well as to the work of incarnation (Weight of All Flesh 9, 26). A work of incarnation, in a very literal sense, is carried out to this day above all by the Catholic Church. Among the various denominations of Christianity, it is still considered the one that most consistently unfolds its doctrine of salvation, of Jesus Christ and of the Church through a practice of incarnation, the embodiment of God in the sacred body of the Church. The Catholic Church sees itself as the representative of the Son of God who disappeared into heaven after the resurrection, and thus as the heir of the embodiment of himself in a human flesh “performed” in him by God. The church as the epitome of a holy community is for Roman Christians an “institution of salvation” and a sacramental space of salvation in this world. In grounding this theology and practice of sacramental embodiment, Roman theology can refer in particular to the designation of the church of Jesus as the body of Christ in the letters of the apostle Paul. The Pauline distinction between the body (soma) led by the Spirit of Christ – or as Paul says “baptized” – and the flesh (sarx) of the congregation that has fallen into sin is also taken up by Santner (“Rebranding” 46; Weight of All Flesh 8–9). With this distinction, according to Santner, the idea of the flesh as “the thorn in the body” is born (Royal Remains 39). Paul’s organological-corporeal thinking is thus already “haunted” by the ghostly double of the flesh, which rebels against its orders from within and that is, within the body itself. In other words, the flesh disturbs the body of Christ’s church. It is not its counterpart or dialectical antithesis, but its inner antagonist, which therefore can be suspended only at the price of self-sacrifice.

Precisely such a thorn in the body of the Church became the Reformation movement in the sixteenth century. It turns against the logic of the sacred body and suspends the binding of the profane acts of eating and drinking, but also of the ministerial body and its liturgical action, provided by a hermeneutics of sacramental embodiment. What the church is subsequently becomes diverse and arguably hybrid. This development culminates to a certain extent in the nineteenth century, when in modern Protestantism, for example, the Protestant theologian Richard Rothe propagates the dissolution of the church in state and culture, or Adolf von Harnack wants to lead Christianity historically back to the pure teachings of Jesus independent of the dogmas and rituals of the church. Not least because of this, Protestantism has been celebrated as the modern religion par excellence (Hegel).

In the following, I will show to what extent this Protestant narrative of the self-modernization and progress of religion in history can be subverted by the conception of the flesh brought into play by Santner. As a consequence, a much more ambivalent history of Protestantism can be uncovered. To render this different view of Protestantism plausible, I will make the Protestant understanding of the church transparent to a figure of the undead that is virulent in it, namely the undead flesh of Jesus Christ. Despite all renunciation and detachment from the “holy body” of the church and thus also from its claim to realize a sacramental reality, modern Protestantism also continues to establish a person as the sovereign lord of the church. However, this is of course not a body of flesh and blood, not a pope or priest, but Jesus Christ himself, who, as it were, as the undead – who has died and yet must not die – holds their community together. In order to see how this undead Jesus Christ is by no means as “incorporeal” and devoid of all materiality as it appears in modern, thoroughly rationalized Protestant Christologies, we must trace the institution of the Christ as Lord of the Church back to that decisive moment when the protestant strategy of disembodiment was transformed into an incarnation of a new order. In what follows, I turn primarily to the Reformed line of Protestant tradition and unfold a genealogy of Jesus Christ as sovereign Lord of the Church, starting with Karl Barth, continuing through Friedrich Schleiermacher, and ending with John Calvin, the Swiss reformer.

In the twentieth century, it is above all the Reformed theologian Karl Barth who aggressively advocates the doctrine of Christ as Lord of the Church and positions it against the doctrine of sovereignty of Emanuel Hirsch and other German Christians who see in the leader figure of Nazi Germany a new incarnation of God, the Lord of history. Barth emphasizes that Jesus Christ is the one and only Lord of the Church. He alone is able to release and detach the body of the Church from all entanglements in the ideologies and leader cults of this world. In this, for Barth, Christ is the “Word of God”; thus he appears as a communicative event of God’s address, which materializes in the sermon and liturgy of the church without itself being of a material nature. God’s word strikes man in such a way that he must respond to it, even though he cannot. It is – in short – a word of power.

In view of Barth’s theology of the Word of God, one can now speak of a spiritualization of Christology that seeks to make the born, died, and resurrected body of Christ immortal, as it were, in the theological category of the word or speech event and absorb it there. Interesting in view of a conversation with Santner’s theory of the flesh is the way in which Barth describes the sovereign power of Christ in our lives: it is a claim that we are incapable of answering and which, precisely in this, binds us infinitely, since we are nevertheless supposed to answer. We encounter this form of fixation on Christ even before Barth.

The most important Reformed theologian of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, already takes a similar position to Barth with regard to the centrality of Christ for faith and church. In his Glaubenslehre of 1830–31, Christ is the “Urbild,” the archetype of all life forms of faith that follow him. “Urbild” means at this point that the perfect God-consciousness of Jesus in history, in Schleiermacher’s view, can neither be caught up with nor replaced by the “total life” of Christian faith that follows him. For it is characterized by an extraordinary effect. Every single movement of the present life of faith always owes itself to the work of Jesus or his perfect spiritual life, which has an effect on us “through the nasty ditch of history.”

For Schleiermacher, too, Christ has become immortal in that his consciousness, his spiritual life, unlike other forms of consciousness, has the quality of unfolding effects beyond time and space and of binding people to himself in this way. The relationship to Jesus Christ, Schleiermacher writes, is the only way to have “participation in Christian community” (§14, 102). He describes the relationship to Jesus Christ as Redeemer that the believer maintains as “pious excitement” (frommes Gefühl), a feeling instilled in the subject by the operation of Jesus Christ’s redeeming power. According to Schleiermacher, the believer who is aroused by Christ develops several feelings, in which the “feeling of dependence” – or as Rudolf Otto will later put it – the “creature-feeling” is the determining one (Schleiermacher §4, 22).

On the surface, then, Schleiermacher too has “disembodied” Christology, as it were, and accordingly the church for him is above all a space of communication, a space of the vital exchange of people that brings their orientation towards the exceptional spirit of Christ and his work. But Schleiermacher is also aware of the extraordinary and almost uncanny work of the dead Christ, who is able to bind people in their feelings, thoughts, and actions in such a way that they unite to form a special community, the church. For Schleiermacher, as for Barth, Christ is the undead, who has not died and yet, as the dead, must continue to be alive, present, and effective in order to bind people together and form them into a community.

Now, if we go back one step further to the sixteenth century and look at the moment when the doctrine of the church as a body politic was rewritten, we find something very interesting, namely an undead Christ whose reality is neither word nor consciousness, but “heavenly flesh.” There is none of the Reformers who so masterfully enthroned the body of Christ in his theory of the Church as John Calvin. In his famous Institutio christianae religionis (1559), Christ the Lord appears as “heavenly flesh” to lead his church and to accomplish the work of salvation in it. In Calvin’s view – and here he rejects more rigorously than Luther the real presence of Christ and his incarnation in the eucharist – Christ cannot be bodily present in his church after his death, since his crucified body resides “in heaven” after resurrection and ascension until his return. Christ resides there as “heavenly flesh” whose effects nevertheless reach us.

Calvin thus chooses the term “flesh” to characterize the particular mode of being of an undead person who has died but must nevertheless continue the work of redemption. He expresses with his conception of a “heavenly flesh” that he considers it a sin to attach visible form to God (Calvin, pt. I, ch. 11, §46), and he resists all attempts to assert a physical presence of some kind of the body of Christ on earth. He therefore emphasizes to his theological opponents that Christ’s body was not merely invisibilized, that is, made invisible, at the Ascension, but that it has moved to another place and is now “contained in heaven until the last day” (Calvin, pt. IV, ch. 17, §26, 495f.). Calvin goes on to write that Christ teaches us “the interposing cloud shows that he is no more to be sought on earth, we safely infer that his dwelling now is in the heavens” (Calvin, pt. IV, ch. 17, §27, 496). The omnipresent Christ taught by the Lutherans, who is invisibly present “in all places, but without form” (ibid.), goes hand in hand for Calvin with an annihilation of the corporeal nature of the body and thus of the very promise of God, which is bound to this very body. Christ as risen and ascended is therefore physically absent, but he is not invisible or spiritualized. Calvin thus establishes a kind of interim: Christ’s body is neither visible nor invisible, it is simply gone – until it returns. In this context, Calvin also refuses the idea of a transformation of the body into a spiritual reality. The resurrected body of Christ does not undergo any transformation of its form or properties “in heaven,” it is neither spiritualized nor transcended nor transubstantiated, but its immanence is simply preserved and enclosed “by heaven.”

With his Christology of a “heavenly flesh,” Calvin wants to strictly avoid the sanctification of profane processes at the place of the church. He consistently unfolds his ecclesiology from the Ascension and in this way “secures” or “binds” the body of Christ as an undead in heaven. The healing and redeeming energy of this heavenly flesh comes – he assures – down to us on earth. But to possess Christ’s body, to incorporate it, to embody it sacramentally-personally, we simply cannot. The redemptive energy of his flesh is, as it were, “bound” and “banished” in heaven, and therefore cannot be bound and administered in human liturgies. The “heavenly flesh” governs the Church through its spiritual effects and helps it to its effectiveness – without any sanctity of its corporate formations.

4 the undead flesh as a para-doxological intervention?

In conclusion, I would like to ask: can this Reformational recasting of Christ’s omnipresent holy body by his heavenly flesh perhaps even be interpreted as a para-doxological transaction of excarnation? I would like to weigh the pros and cons.

In terms of Santner’s concept of a paradoxology (“Rebranding” 73–95), a “redemption” from the mechanisms of management and binding of the sacred flesh would have to bring about in some way an inoperativity/inactivity (Agamben) of the dialectical process of charging the profane with sacredness, of enclosing transcendence in immanence.

With his vision of a heavenly flesh, which strips the political body of the church of the mechanisms of its sacramental self-sanctification by withdrawing that sanctity to a place (at that time) inaccessible, heaven, Calvin brings into play such a paradoxological moment of the elimination of the inclusion of the transcendent in immanence. The heavenly flesh has its point in the fact that it is radically and conclusively withdrawn from the church and its liturgical-sacramental embodiments, and indeed cannot be subverted again through the back door in the form of an omnipresent Christ after death, resurrection, and ascension. Jesus’ martyred flesh can thus not be integrated into the profane rhythms of the embodiment.

As Jean-Luc Nancy rightly writes (Corpus 87–93), the crucified is the body dissolved into its wound, the body that is no longer body. The one resurrected with this body of the crucified is also a wounded one. He has – noli me tangere – no touchable body and his tangible body disappears completely at the latest with the Ascension (Nancy, Noli me tangere). The sovereign Lord of the Church is thus indeed a wounded and crucified Christ, enclosed in his immanence, but it is precisely the “sublime flesh” created by his disembodiment to which redemptive quality and binding effect are attributed. And exactly this is again the crux of the “attempted solution” of Calvin’s coinage: his paradoxology takes the pressure out of all profane embodiments, but it does not release people from their extraordinary bond to the Lord of the Church, from whom alone they experience redeeming effects. As Santner rightly writes, man’s creatureliness, his inability to close the gap between somatic and symbolic existence, is the cause of his humane existence. Calvin’s theology of the heavenly flesh cannot and does not want to “solve” this existential pressure, which can also be understood theologically as the need for redemption. However, it again does not fall into the temptation to stage the excarnation as symbolic emptiness and formal omnipresence of the place of power. Rather, the place of power in Calvin’s ecclesiology is permanently occupied by the disembodied flesh of Jesus Christ, by the “heavenly” creature. And whoever has the power of imagination to visualize this hideously decayed flesh of an undead “up there” will leave it untouched as far as possible instead of bringing it down here to earth.

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See also Santner, Royal Remains 62, where he refers to “flesh” as “this strange organ without body.” See also ibid. 96, where he speaks of an “excarnation of sovereignty.”

2 I use the term “excarnation” in this article not in the sense of an exodus from the flesh, which would contradict Santner’s intention, but as a counter-term to the theology of incarnation, which means an indwelling of the word in the body and thus a “spiritualization” of it into the body of Christ.

3 Santner speaks of branding metaphorically as a “mark burned into the flesh” (“Rebranding” 30).

4 This figure of thought of a double alterity of the subject (for itself; for others) is already broadly elaborated in Santner’s On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life.