[D66] The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology

[Nord]

http://books.google.nl/books?id=sy9zn3FcHnwC&pg=PR7&hl=nl&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false

The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology
Simon Critchley
Verso Books,1 feb. 2012-291 pagina's


pg. 174:

PAROUSIA AND THE ANTI-CHRIST

W hat about that waiting community? W hat does it await? How
does it await? This takes us directly to the question of temporal­
ity. Heidegger has two working theses with respect to Paul: first,
that primordial Christian religiosity is bound up with an experi­
ence of the enactment of life in the way we have described above.
Second, he claims that Christian religiosity “lives time itself” (lebt
die Zeit selbst).66 Everything turns here on the interpretation o f
parousia, which can be variously translated as presence, arrival, or,
more commonly, the second coming. Heidegger tackles this issue
in his interpretation of Second Thessalonians, which some schol­
ars consider apocryphally ascribed to Paul. The sense o f parousia as
the literal return o f Christ doesn’t interest Heidegger much. His
concern is rather with the way in which parousia suggests a tempo­
rality irreducible to an objective, ordinary, or what Heidegger will
call in Being and Time “vulgar” sense o f time. That is, a temporality
“without its own order and demarcations,” the simple demarca­
tions into past, present, and future.67 Rather, parousia refers back
to the idea of life as enactment: namely, that what gets enacted
in the proclamation of faith is a certain relation to temporality.
More specifically, this is temporality as a relation with parousia as a
futurity that induces a sense o f urgency and anguish in the present.
In short, what we see in the interpretation ofPaul is a foreshadow­
ing of ecstatic temporality in Being and Time, where the primordial
phenomenon of time is the future.
But it is the key insight into the fmitude of time in Being and
Time that reflects back so suggestively onto the reading of Paul.
If, in Heideggers magnum opus, time is finite because it comes
to an end with death, then the end of time in Paul turns on the
concept o f parousia as the eschaton, understood as the uttermost,
furthermost, or ultimate. The person “in Christ” proclaims in the
present a relation to an already (the historicity of resurrection) and
a not-yet which is uttermost (the futurity of parousia). Temporality
is not a sequential line, but a finite unity of three dimensions.
In another crypto-Harnackian gesture, Heidegger claims that this
Pauline experience of the eschatological was already “covered up
in Christianity” by the end of the first century AD, “following the
penetration of Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy into Christianity.”6
8
By contrast— and here we can note a further quasi-Messianic
moment in Heidegger— the original sense of the eschatological
is “late Judaic (spätjüdisch), the Christian consciousness [being] a
peculiar transformation thereof.”6 This suggestive reading would
9
allow for a bringing together of Messianic temporality, rooted in
the ho nun kairos, the time of the now, which Agamben links to
Benjamins idea o f Jetztzeit, now-time, and Heideggers concep­
tion o f the Augenblick, the m om ent of vision— which, o f course,
was Luthers translation of kairos in Paul.
Christian life, Heidegger insists, is lived without security. It
is a “constant insecurity”70 in which the temporality of factical
life is enacted in relation to what is uttermost, the eschaton. It is
this sense o f insecurity and anguish that is at the heart of Second
Thessalonians. This is where the figure o f parousia has to be con­
nected with “the son o f perdition,” namely the Anti-Christ. Paul
writes: “Now concerning the coming (parousia) of our Lord Jesus
Christ and our assembling to meet him ... Let no one deceive you
in any way; for that day will not come unless the rebellion comes
first and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of perdition”
(2 Thess. 2:1, 3).
The figure of the Anti-Christ massively heightens the sense o f
anguish and urgency among the waiting community of believers.
He is the figure who opposes all forms of worship and pro­
claims himself God. In one passage where Paul begins to sound
like Marcion, the Anti-Christ is declared “the god of this world”
(2 Cor. 4:4). Heidegger links the Anti-Christ to what would
become, in the years to follow, the theme of falling, das Verfallen:
“The appearance o f the Anti-Christ in godly robes facilitates the
falling-tendency of life (die abfallende Lebenstendenz) .”7 W hat is
1
almost being envisaged here by Heidegger is a conflict between
two divine orders: Christ and Anti-Christ. For Heidegger, the
Anti-Christ reveals the fallen character o f the world, in relation­
ship to which “each must decide,” and “in order not to fall prey
to it, one must stand ever ready for it.”72 Heidegger adds, “The
decision itself is very difficult.”7
3
What the figures of parousia and the Anti-Christ reveal is the
falling tendency o f life in the world. In a marginal note to the
lecture course, Heidegger writes telegraphically o f the “Communal
world (Mitwelt) as ‘receiving’ world into which the gospel strikes” ;
and again, “this falling tendency of life and attitude in communal-
worldly tendencies (wisdom o f the Greeks) ”74 Our everyday life
in the world— what Heidegger will later call das Man— is revealed
to be abfallend, in the sense of both falling, dropping, or melting
away, but also becoming Abfall, waste, rubbish, or trash. This dis­
closes a peculiar double logic: in proclaiming faith and enacting
life, the world becomes trash and we become the trash of the
world. The waiting community becomes the unwanted offscour-
ing that is seen as garbage by the lights of Greek wisdom and sees,
in turn, the existing communal world as garbage.

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