“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”1 ‘The exception’ is the state of emergency. Of course, ‘he who’ is not originally or theoretically sovereign; the people are, according to Hobbes and everyone since. And therein lies the rub. The electoral process, which is thought to elect ‘representatives’ of ‘the people’, throws up those who find the limitations of the people’s sovereignty too constricting: constitutions, assemblies, deliberations, legislation etc. Thus throughout the very short history indeed of people’s sovereignty, the necessary emergencies have always turned up. Today it is the emergency in the US – there isn’t one – requiring the POTUS to take drastic measures. He is a man who chafes at having limits put on him by ‘the people’, a completely abstract thought, but in reality by other elected ‘representatives’ of the people who themselves rarely have the slightest idea of ‘representing’, but rather are concerned for advancing their own sovereignty in whatever limited domain they can.
The European Civil War 1917-19452
In the latter stages of the event that lies at the foundation of our age, the European Civil War, four men climbed up to the point where they could leverage an emergency to lay claim to their respected sovereignties with an eye to the main goal, global sovereignty, with an emergency that they together created: Roosevelt, Hitler, Churchill and Stalin, each with a lust for total power not only in his own domain but a global ambition. Then, although Roosevelt built it, Truman dropped the atomic bomb, because of the ‘emergency’ of bringing the war to an end, although in fact the Japanese were trying to negotiate surrender.
In our more recent history, mediocre men have had the ‘war on terror’, a gift from Bin Laden and his cohorts, whom Adam Curtis showed in “The Power of Nightmares”3 were co-dependent with the US State Department on the need for a global enemy and thus on an emergency or ‘state of exception’. Thus the former by his state of exception gave himself sovereignty over the Divine and the Prophetic according to both of whom murdering civilians indiscriminately is prohibited absolutely. Significantly, of course he handed his adversaries the excuse they needed to carry out a plan they had long hatched, only needing a suitable provocation to expedite. The two parties depended on each other to lay claim to the sovereignty they desired.
When that argument wore thin, then the ‘pandemic’ turned up, for which various agents had been readying, and preparing public opinion for years. It turned up on the current incumbent’s previous watch too. Again, it was global sovereignty that was the object of desire, since the US as the hegemon is the door to that ambition.
It is Nietzsche who:
“… is the first to pose the thoughtful question – thoughtful in that it starts from metaphysics and points back to metaphysics – which we formulate as follows: Is the man of today in his metaphysical nature prepared to assume dominion over the earth as a whole? Has the man of today yet given thought in any way to what conditions will determine the nature of such worldwide government? Is the nature of this man of today such that it is fit to manage those powers, and put to use those means of power, which are released as the nature of modern technology unfolds, forcing man to unfamiliar decisions? Nietzsche’s answer to these questions is No.”4
But Heidegger makes clear that this is to do with Nietzsche’s widely misunderstood Overman who:
“The superman never appears in the noisy parades of alleged men of power, nor in the well-staged meetings of politicians. The superman’s appearance is likewise inaccessible to the teletypers and radio dispatches of the press which present – that is, represent – events to the public even before they have happened. This well made-up and well staged manner of forming ideas, of representation, with its constantly more refined mechanism, dissimulates and blocks from view what really is.”5
And:
“Let me stress it again: the superman in Nietzsche’s sense is not man as he exists until now, only superdimensional. The “superman” does not simply carry the accustomed drives and strivings of the customary type of man beyond all measure and bounds. Superman is qualitatively, not quantitatively, different from existing man. The thing that the superman discards is precisely our boundless, purely quantitative nonstop progress. The superman is poorer, simpler, tenderer, and tougher, quieter and more self-sacrificing and slower of decision, and more economical of speech.”6
Then President Putin, with his own needs and with his invasion of Ukraine, supplied his opponents with the emergency they needed, and quite suddenly the pandemic was over. It became yesterday’s news almost overnight.
Then, in their turn, Hamas handed the Israelis, and by extension the US State Department, a gift on a plate: the excuse they needed to turn Gaza and then the West Bank into a field of slaughter, perpetuating the aspiration to sovereignty of one very unsavoury criminal and contributing to the aspiration of a certain POTUS.
‘The people’, the mediocre and the bourgeoisie
Since its arrival in the French Revolution the cry of ‘the people’ has been the means by which mediocre people (mediocre being “from Latin mediocris ‘of middle height or degree’”)7 sought aspirationally to climb out of their middle class backgrounds and take sovereignty – bankers, lawyers and journalists, in other words: the bourgeoisie. One must remember that these people are a ‘middle’ class in every way: in terms of wealth, even when they reach millions, and intellectually they scavenge off the great heritage of mankind producing studies that both tell you why you must read Carl Schmitt, for example, and more importantly what you have to understand from him, which is probably not what he tried to convey. We could make the same point about anyone from Plato to Wagner and so on. And we are as grateful as others for the ‘honourable exceptions’.
The middle class is a missionary movement with global aspirations and in Napoleon found its apostle. It again appeared in identical fashion in the Russian Revolution, with global aspirations, and if Ernst Nölte is to be accepted, although not everyone does, bringing about Fascism and Nazism as reactions.
The revolutions and wars were staging posts on the arrival of banking from the underneath to the fore. The World Wars saw the institution of the major global banking institutions, in 1944 at Bretton Woods, the World Bank, the IMF and so on – the Bank of International Settlements previously founded in 1930 to oversee debt reparations by the Germans for the first stage of the War conventionally known as the First World War – with the international legal order, the UN, which would cement the nations together impotently to the banking order. What was a period of unparalleled chaos and de-struction would produce very tangible structures indeed, while simultaneously licensing the bankers’ favourite nation in the Middle East.
Our current dis-order – presided over by an apparently super-erratic reality-show host, making a series of moves widely understood to bring pan-demonium to the world economy, punishing Lesotho and other desperately poor nations with their tariffs – also reveals a surprising order, in its de-struction bringing about the strengthening of banking structures, the POTUS presiding over an all-engrossing piece of theatre, which is nevertheless vital to this project. He had dismantled the US apparatus to channel funds to a whole host of societies, USAID thus engendering in them a dependence on global capital. With the destruction of USAID, they, convinced of their desperate need, will of course go to those international banking institutions, the World Bank and the IMF, and that global agenda will be enormously advanced.
So the middle class have arrived centre stage, lacking the strengths of character of people who actually work and do things, with their capitalism exploiting the labour of the disenfranchised poor, lacking too the merits of the aristocratic order they abolished, neither knowing noblesse oblige nor the ethics of service and work.
And the Muslims arrive in this age and on this late modern stage with its usury capitalism having imbibed the usury that guarantees their destruction and the seizure of their lands and their wealth and the loss of their d?n. And yet, the Muslims alone hold the key to the matter: the abolition of usury, the vital obligation of the provision of free markets for any to enter except for usurers, leadership which empowers the people of knowledge among whose duties it is to prevent usury in trade, and the establishment of sound currency, the whole revolving around the pillar of zak?h.
Zak?h is the Robin Hood tax which takes from the rich, not out of any ressentiment towards them and thus is not a punitive tax such as that of the welfare states which arguably forced global capital off-shore8 and set up a dialectic to which there is no solution. And zak?h is not a miserable dole that keeps the poor dependent in their poverty as a terrible warning to others to submit to capitalism lest a similar fate befall them, but actually a sharing of capital – gold, silver, sheep and cattle, grains and the like – that allows the poor to lift themselves up. But this requires a figure who has been absent for too long: the leader. This is not the fantasy of the caliphate that some have, but initially just someone(s) who will take the lead and dominate the commercial sphere, in the name of the Divine not in the name of ‘the people’.9
And the last word must go to Martin Heidegger via Giorgio Agamben:
“Heidegger’s abrupt statement in the 1976 interview with “der Spiegel”: “Only a God can save us” has always aroused perplexity. To understand it, it is first necessary to return it to its context. Heidegger has just spoken of the planetary domain of technique that nothing seems to be able to govern. Philosophy and other spiritual powers – poetry, religion, the arts, politics – have lost the ability to shake or otherwise orient the lives of the peoples of the West. Hence the bitter diagnosis that they “cannot produce any immediate change in the current state of the world” and the inevitable consequence that “only a God can save us”.”10
And he concludes:
“How should we understand the philosopher’s bitter diagnosis? In what sense “only a God can save us”? For almost two centuries – since Hegel and Nietzsche declared his death, the West has lost its god. But what we have lost is only a god to whom it is possible to give a name and an identity. The death of God is, in truth, the loss of divine names (“the divine names are missing”, Hölderlin lamented). Beyond the names, the most important thing remains: the divine. As long as we are able to perceive how divine a flower, a face, a bird, a gesture or a blade of grass, we can do without a God that can be named. The divine is enough for us, the adjective matters more than the noun. Not “a God” – rather: “only the divine can save us”.”11
But here we beg to differ with Agamben in spite of his eminence and the great respect we have for him. ‘The Name’ has a chequered history. Rabbinical Judaism anathematised its mention, except for in the Temple in Jerusalem during the cacophony of horns at the Passover, when the priest invoked it but none could hear it. Subsequently there arose among the Jews figures called Baal Sham (in Arabic Ba‘l al-ism – master of the Name), who similarly monopolised the Name but in an esoteric fashion that can only be characterised as deeply magical. These figures were to give birth to a cult, wrongly thought of as ‘Orthodox’, called the Hasidim. It is not accidental that one discovers this obscure part of history when exploring the roots of Freemasonry, although there appears to be no direct connection between the two groups.
Leapfrog the intervening centuries and the ‘death of God’, and the circle comes around again to the Divine Name or rather Names. Without ‘Name’ we have only the god of the philosophers, and as Heisenberg said to Pauli in Copenhagen: “I might go on to remind you of Pascal’s famous text, the one he kept sewn in his jacket. It was headed ‘Fire’ and began with the words: ‘God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – not of the philosophers and sages.”12 It is time for His name and His names. And He is called by His name and called upon by it, for sovereign is He.
Footnotes
1 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology – Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty.
2 Ernst Nölte, Der europäische Bürgerkrieg, 1917–1945: Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus – The European Civil War 1917-1945, translated by two anonymous writers, Publius Agrippa and Russian Cosmist. https://theognisomegara.substack.com/p/ernst-noltes-european-civil-war-1917
François Furet differed with Nölte and they had a correspondence which was collected in a book Fascism and Communism.
3 https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p088s5k4/the-power-of-nightmares
https://archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares-AdamCurtis
4 Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? p.65
5 Ibid. p. 72-73
6 Ibid. p. 69
7 Oxford English Dictionary
8 Rana Dasgupta – “The Demise of the Nation State”, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/05/demise-of-the-nation-state-rana-dasgupta
9 Economist Michael Hudson sees how the liberal order removes any reins on the ambitions of capital, and that paradoxically, despots and tyrants reign it in.
10 https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-solo-un-dio-ci-pu-lvare
11 Ibid.
12 Werner Heisenberg, “Positivism, Metaphysics, and Religion”, Physics and beyond: encounters and conversations.