Arcane geopolitics: Heidegger, Schmitt and the political theology of Gnosticism

Political Geography 80 (2020) 102159

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Arcane geopolitics: Heidegger, Schmitt and the political theology of Gnosticism Benedikt Korf a, *, Rory Rowan a, b a b

Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, CH-8057, Zurich, Switzerland School of Geography, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

A B S T R A C T

In this paper, we discuss what is at stake in appropriating the thought of reactionary figures, such as Heidegger and Schmitt, for critical geography. We will argue that Heidegger and Schmitt were beholden to an arcane geopolitics shaped by supposed gnostic insights into the deeper currents of world history. This (geo-) political theology of Heidegger and Schmitt has not yet been given sufficient attention by geographers engaging their work. However, it is only in approaching their work in a theological key that the gnostic political theology that undergirds their arcane geopolitics can be fully understood. At the core of this arcane geopolitics is the conviction that modernity and all those identified as its agents is a force for ill, setting the world towards catastrophe. In this paper, we excavate this gnostic disposition in the thought of Heidegger and Schmitt in order to raise questions about how their work ought to be mobilized in and for critical, emancipatory, progressive thought so that this appropriation does not bring unwanted residues along with it.

€nliche oder sachliche Sympathie für Martin Hei­ Ich habe nie perso degger gehabt, aber gegen seine neueren Zensoren begehre ich auf. €chte Ihnen daher auch das nackte Faktum mitteilen, dass ich Ich mo 1971 den Kontakt zu Carl Schmitt gesucht und gefunden habe. €ter mehr zu sagen sein. Darüber wird viel spa I never felt any personal or thematic sympathy for Martin Heidegger, but I do protest against those latest censors. I would therefore also like to inform you about the crude fact that I have sought and found contact with Carl Schmitt in 1971. More will have to be said about this much later. Hans Blumenberg in a letter to Jacob Taubes, 24 May 1977.1

1. Introduction Many left, progressive and critical scholars have felt attraction to deeply reactionary thinkers and their “dangerous” (Müller, 2003) or “poisonous” (Korf, 2014) thought. Two such figures are Martin Hei­ degger and Carl Schmitt. Both thinkers have likewise been influential within critical human geography. In both cases, critical geographers have had to come to terms with the fact that Heidegger and Schmitt collaborated with the Nazi regime whilst neither expressed any public regret for their complicity thereafter. Both Heidegger and Schmitt also harbored anti-Semitic sentiments. While Schmitt’s anti-Semitism has long been an accepted fact, and a key aspect in his reception, Heideg­ ger’s relationship to anti-Semitism was not well understood until the recent publication of his Schwarze Hefte (The Black Notebooks) where some passages have revealed the extent of his anti-Semitic convictions.2

* Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (B. Korf). 1 In: Kopp-Oberstebrink & Treml, 2013, p. 174. 2 A number of Schmitt’s most important published works, including The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (1938/2008), included openly anti-Semitic content and his open activism during the Nazi regime against the “Jewish spirit” within German law, ensured that his anti-Semitic credentials have rarely been in doubt. The publication in 1991 of Glossarium (Schmitt 1991/2015), Schmitt’s private diaries written between 1947 and 1951 (as yet unavailable in English translation), served to confirm the strength of his anti-Semitic conviction (Gross, 2000, 32f.). In Heidegger’s case, the publication of the Schwarze Hefte has sparked a heated debate about the role of anti-Semitism in Heidegger’s work and what it means for his reception (Di Cesare, 2014; Espinet, Figal, Keiling, & Mikovic, 2018; Farin & Malpas, 2016; Gander and Striet 2017; Heinz & Keller, 2016; Homolka & Heidegger, 2016; Mehring, 2016a; Mitchell & Trawny, 2017; Trawny, 2014; Trawny & Mitchell, 2015). Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks) are thought diaries that Heidegger wanted to be published posthumously as the last volumes of his Gesamtausgabe (Collective Works). The first three volumes with the title Überlegungen, covering the period of 1931–1941, were first published in German in 2014 (Heidegger, 2014a, 2014b, 2014c). These three volumes have meanwhile been translated into English (Heidegger, 2016, 2017a, 2017b). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102159 Received 16 May 2019; Received in revised form 6 February 2020; Accepted 6 February 2020 Available online 23 February 2020 0962-6298/© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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This complicity has raised the question whether or not their “politics” disqualifies their thought – and this question has remained highly controversial. Rather than through the narrower questions of their anti-Semitism or complicity with the Nazi regime, we propose to approach their thought through the trope of “arcane geopolitics”: At the core of this arcane geopolitics is the conviction that modernity and all those identified as its agents – liberalism, capitalism, socialism, universalism, technology, "the Jews" – is a destructive force, setting the world on a path towards ca­ tastrophe. Their arcane geopolitics was embedded in an intellectual milieu that propagated ideas of German exceptionalism and was convinced that the German Volk had a particular mission in world his­ tory (Habermas, 1995, 112ff.; Stern, 1992). Both thinkers saw the worldly machinations of profane politics as a palimpsest through which a murky world of dark theological forces could be glimpsed; at least by those initiate in reading the arcane undercurrents of world history. This paper argues that Heidegger’s and Schmitt’s arcane geopolitics is best understood as a form of Gnosticism. Gnosticism, the thought of a “heretic” Christian sect in early Christianity, has since then repeatedly (re-) emerged as a train of thought in European Geistesgeschichte, and became particularly influential in Germany in the 1920s (Taubes, 1984, 1993). Markschies (2001, 19f.) provides a useful typology of gnostic thought: Gnosticism narrates a mythological drama to explain evil in the world through a dualist ontology of God. Gnostics differentiate a lesser, potentially evil and deficient creator god (the demiurge) from an absent, supreme divine redeemer, who, in the end times, will rescue the world from its inherent evil. Until this time of redemption, history will be defined by the struggles between these forces of good and evil. Only a spirited select possess the esoteric insights into these arcane forces of the world. Heidegger and Schmitt understood themselves to be in possession of such insight and crafted their political worldviews in relation to it. The political theology of Gnosticism needs to be situated within the recent resurgence of interest in the theology of Saint Paul among critical leftist thinkers (Frick, 2013), such as Giorgio Agamben (2006), Alain � zek (2003). For Badiou (2003), Simon Critchley (2012) and Slavoj Zi� Critchley, the (re-) turn to Paul is not a conservative gesture, but “the demand for a new figure of activism” (Critchley, 2012, p. 157). But there are political risks involved in this return, and these are closely linked to the thinking of Marcian, a disciple of Paul, who radicalized the latter’s message. Although Paul himself was not a gnostic, Marcian is often considered a crucial figure in the development of Gnosticism (Marks­ chies, 2001, 86ff., Taubes, 1984, 1993). Marcian, especially in the influential reading by the Protestant theologist Adolf von Harnack (1921), radicalized the dualist ontology of God and gave it an anti-Judaistic twist: JHWH, the God of the Old Testament, is the demi­ urge, and Christ the redeemer. Interest in Marcian’s thought emerged as an influential intellectual undercurrent in the 1920s and fundamentally shaped Heidegger’s and Schmitt’s thought. 3 The gnostic character of Heidegger’s and Schmitt’s thought became the subject of an influential controversy in the 1970s involving the philosopher Hans Blumenberg and the scholar of Judaism Jacob Taubes. These debates have recently been revisited in the work of Agamben, Badiou, Critchley and others. Blumenberg (1988) identified in Heideg­ ger’s and Schmitt’s thought an anti-modernist Gnosticism that combines eschatological motives with unmediated antagonisms. Taubes (1987, 47f.) asked what it was that attracted Heidegger and Schmitt to Nazism and what value their thought might have in the wake of this fact. Situ­ ating Heidegger and Schmitt in this intellectual genealogy and returning to the controversies they had with Hans Blumenberg and Jacob Taubes

enables a more nuanced reading of their oeuvre. By approaching their work in a theological key their arcane geopolitics can be best understood and the (gnostic) political theology it rests upon excavated. In this way the contours of their thought can be grasped and the stakes of their reception clarified. In what follows, we therefore start by mapping out the controversial terrain that opens up in engaging “Heidegger” or “Schmitt”, in critical geography and beyond, before analyzing the gnostic topoi in Heidegger’s and Schmitt’s (geo) political theologies and how these have been debated by Blumenberg, Taubes and others. We conclude by raising the question of how, if at all, these two thinkers ought to be mobilized in and for “critical” – eman­ cipatory, progressive – thought, and sketch out the possibility of alter­ native political theologies that reject the reactionary inclinations embedded in the gnostic disposition of Heidegger and Schmitt. 2. “Schmitt” Carl Schmitt’s work has met with a mixed reception in Geography. On the one hand, it is clear that “the discipline of Geography … appears overall reluctant to engage with Schmitt” (Minca & Rowan, 2014, A2). Stuart Elden for example has argued that the “anointing of Schmitt as a geopolitical theorist with contemporary relevance is a serious error, intellectually and politically” (Elden, 2010, p. 24). And Michael Hef­ fernan (2011, p. 242) writes: “I am skeptical whether these [writings of Schmitt] provide anything more than an intriguing, occasionally dazzling extension of German interwar geopolitical writing into the post-war period.” This skepticism appears to be grounded on a chain of associations that embed Schmitt within a historical account that it is assumed needs no further analysis (Schmitt ¼ Nazi ¼ Lebensraum ¼ Geopolitik).4 In such a reading further engagement with Schmitt’s thought is not only seen as unnecessary but also politically risky and even epistemologically illegitimate. Yet, on the other hand, over the course of the last two decades some of Schmitt’s key concepts – notably the concept of the political and the state of exception - have been absorbed into the conceptual lexicon of political geography through Agamben’s reading of Schmitt (Agamben, 1998, 2005). This “post-Agamben” Schmitt (Legg & Vaseduvan, 2011, p. 10) has had a profound influence within political geography over the last decade, with talk of the “spaces of exception” becoming the norm (so to speak) in attempts to understand the geopolitics of the ‘post 9/11’ years (Gregory, 2004; Hagmann & Korf, 2012; Minca, 2007; Reid-Henry, 2007). More recently, Schmitt’s explicitly spatial concepts such as the nomos of the earth, Grossraum order and his geopolitical mythology of land and sea have drawn the attention of geographers (see Korf & Schetter, 2012; Legg & Vaseduvan, 2011; Mendietta, 2011; Minca & Rowan, 2015; Rowan, 2011). These readings have, however, not given much attention to the metaphysical and mythological aspects of Schmitt’s political theology (Meyer, Prinz & Schetter 2012; Minca & Rowan, 2014).5 We think this neglect is problematic insofar as grasping Schmitt’s political theology is key to understanding his spatial thought. Schmitt’s most important concepts – such as the concept of the political, sovereign

4 However, few geographers (including in Anglophone political geography) have investigated the relationship between German geography, Geopolitik and Nazism in detail, nor have they considered Schmitt’s position with regard to German Geopolitik in any detail (Barnes & Minca, 2014; Bassin & Klinke, 2018; Giaccaria & Minca, 2016; Minca & Rowan, 2015; Murphy, 1997; Sprengel, 1996; Werber, 2014). 5 For example, most of those geographers engaging with the “post-Agamben” Schmitt do so via Agamben’s early books in the latter’s Homo Sacer project, notably Homo Sacer (1998) and State of Exception (2005), whilst failing to attend to later works such as The Time that Remains (2006) and The Kingdom and the Glory (2011) where the theological dimensions of Schmitt’s work are engaged both explicitly and implicitly.

3

Adolf von Harnack’s influential study on Marcion, published in 1921, was certainly not unknown to either Heidegger or Schmitt. Linder (2008) discusses this link for the case of Schmitt. Whether Marcion was truly a gnostic has been questioned by Critchley (2012, 196ff.), however, but he acknowledges the in­ fluence of Marcion’s thought on Heidegger. 2

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decisionism, the state of exception, Grossraum order, the nomos of the earth – were shaped in relation to (his often idiosyncratic interpretation of) theological concepts, figures and debates. Indeed, his geopolitical thought was framed within a conception of world history defined by a divine struggle between forces of god and evil (Bolz, 1991; Meier, 1998; Minca & Rowan, 2015). Crucial to Schmitt’s (geo)political theology is the concept of the Katechon, which has thus far been almost wholly overlooked in Schmitt’s reception in Geography (for exceptions see Minca & Rowan, 2015 and Meyer, Prinz & Schetter 2012). Although it is an obscure theological concept that only appears fleetingly in Schmitt’s published works (first in Land and Sea: Schmitt 1942/2016, 11ff),6 it is crucial in understanding the arcane nature of his geopolitical thought (Gross, 2000, 267ff.; Linder, 2008, p. 42; Meuter, 1994; Minca & Rowan, 2015). Schmitt took the concept of Katechon from Saint Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians (Chapter 2, 6) where it plays the role of a historical “restrainer” that “holds back the end of the world” (Schmitt, 2003, p. 60). According to Saint Paul, the interregnum between the death of Christ and the Day of Judgement is defined by the struggle between the Antichrist and the Katechon. Whilst there is no escape from the Day of Judgement in Paul’s eschatology, its coming can be hastened or delayed by actions within the profane world. Those forces associated with the Antichrist act to provoke the Second Coming of Christ, and hence accelerate history towards the apocalyptic end times. By contrast the Katechon holds the apocalypse at bay by countering the work of the Antichrist. Indeed, Saint Paul had noted that the work of the Antichrist – “the lawless one” – was always hidden in the guise of other agents. The question then becomes what profane forces might be identified with the Katechon and the Antichrist in Schmitt’s eschatological history. Schmitt writes:

regarded as anomic. In Schmitt’s reading the modern state form – whether liberal or communist - had the seeds of anomie built into its very foundations (Groh, 1998, 2016; Gross, 2000). In Schmitt’s ac­ count the modern state arose out of an attempt to find a secular ground for the political in order to quell the creedal violence in Europe sparked by the political fallout of the Protestant reformation. Whilst the secular state form allowed peace and order to be restored in Europe in the short term by de-theologising politics, in the longer term embracing secular­ ization eroded the possibility of political stability as the unifying figure of a singular God was exiled from the political (Minca & Rowan, 2015b). In Schmitt’s eschatology “the Jew” becomes stylized as the Antichrist that the Katechon must seek to “restrain”. In the deeply anti-Semitic account of the modern state form’s rise and fall that Schmitt charts in books such as The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Schmitt, 1938/1982), “the Jews” are identified as the main benefi­ ciaries of liberal order, which by adopting a tolerant stance towards “the Jews” allowed particular interests to be pursued against the common good (Groh, 1998; Gross, 2000). By refusing to recognize Christ as Messiah, “the Jews” produced a fundamental fissure in the edifice of the liberal secular state form by exploiting the gap opened up by a de-theologized politics (Schmitt 1922/2003, p. 69; cf. Schmidt, 1998, p. 67, Palaver, 1996).7 Schmitt’s geopolitical thought is rooted in an arcane substratum, where profane figures of imperial order are identified with the divine order of God and those forces antithetical to geopolitical order bear the mark of the devil. Indeed, in interpreting the geopolitical convulsions of his day Schmitt lined up his intellectual and political enemies - liber­ alism, socialism, positivism, communism, the USA, and of course, "the Jews" – as worldly stand-ins for the work of the Antichrist. He regarded all of these forces as agents of geopolitical chaos that were the hand­ maidens of a global “spaceless disorder” defined by unbounded violence and destruction (Minca & Rowan, 2015). Schmitt quite literally saw in the threat of such worldly disorder the beginning of the end times, with the apparently profane work of these emissaries of the Antichrist prompting the Day of Judgment, and hence the end of historical time.

The decisive historical concept in this continuity [between the Roman Empire and Christian medieval empire] was that of the restrainer: Katechon. ‘Empire’ in this sense meant the historical power to restrain the appearance of the Antichrist and the end of the present eon; it was a power that withholds (qui tenet), as the Apostle Paul said in his Second Letter to the Thessalonians. (Schmitt, 2003, p. 59–60)

3. “Heidegger” While Schmitt’s reception in human geography has been accompa­ nied by some degree of controversy, Heidegger has long found a warmer reception in the discipline. Heidegger’s thought has served for some to underpin a humanistic geography (e.g. Buttimer, 1976; Entrikin, 1976; Relph, 1976; Seamon, 1979), and provided a philosophical vocabulary with which to conceptualize place (Casey, 1997, p. 243ff.; Creswell, 2004, p. 21f.,; Malpas, 2006) and theories of practice within human geography (e.g. Hannah, 2019; Schatzki, 2002, 2007). Further, Hei­ degger’s work on “das Ereignis”, or “the event of revealing” (Joronen, 2013, p. 627), has been interpreted as a spatial concept of crucial importance (Elden, 2005, 40f.; Strohmayer, 1998; Joronen, 2013). This said his reception has not been entirely without critical friction. While Malpas held Heidegger’s later work to offer “the most important and sustained inquiry into place to be found in the history of Western thought” (2006, p. 3), major disciplinary figures such as Harvey (1996, p. 299ff.) and Massey (2004, p. 8f.) warned against a nostalgic anti-modernist and anti-technological undercurrent in Hei­ degger’s notion of place. Against this charge, Joronen, among others, has defended Heidegger’s thought as affording a condition of spatial

Hence for Schmitt the work of geopolitical theology involved a world historical hermeneutics through which arcane agents could be sifted out of the profane machinations of current affairs. Christian Linder has argued that the search for the Katechon became Schmitt’s obsession (Linder, 2008, p. 43). With typical modesty he did at times cast himself in the role – the last figure of historical consciousness holding off the apocalyptic death drive of liberalism and the enemies of the political (Schmitt, 1950/1997, p. 29; see also Schmitt 1942/2016, 11ff; on this: Meuter, 1994/1998, Chapter IV; Gross, 1993, 410ff.). Or he associated a motley crew of historical figures with the Katechon from the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II to the Byzantine Empire in Land and Sea (Schmitt, 1997, p. 8, p. 43) and the Roman Emperor in The Nomos of the Earth (2003, 59–60). While it is hard to get any strong sense of who or what he identified as an effective “restrainer” of the Antichrist, the Katechon as a figure of empire literally, in Schmitt’s view, guaranteed the continuity of historical time by upholding an imperial geopolitics whereby the world was carved out into spatially distinct power blocks – a concept he of course famously formalized in his theory of Grossraum (Cacciari, 2018; Esposito, 2015, 76ff., Meier 1994/1998; Minca & Rowan, 2015). On the side of the Antichrist, Schmitt identified those forces that he

7 In a note dated from 16 June 1948 in his Glossarium (Schmitt, 1991, p. 165), Schmitt would call his war against the “protestant heresy of liberalism” an “eigentliche katholische Versch€ arfung” (authentic Catholic intensification) (cf. Groh, 1998, pp. 185–233, 2016; Linder, 2008, p. 42,; Rissing & Rissing, 2009, p. 70,; Wacker, 1994), although it isn’t quite clear exactly what constituted ‘authentically Catholic’ in Schmitt’s view given the idiosyncrasies of his pirate theology.

6 It is possible that the concept of the Katechon played an important role in his thought much earlier. Groh (2016, p. 25) cites a letter of Carl Schmitt to Pierre Linn, dated 11 January 1948, where he claims that his theory of the Katechon dates back to 1932.

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openness (Joronen, 2013, p. 629). In these controversies, the problematic genealogies of much of Hei­ degger’s vocabulary within a specific German intellectual tradition – his “Germanness” - and his privileging of particular traditions over others, have remained somewhat underexplored (Strohmayer, 2015; but see; Elden, 2006; Joronen, 2013; Shaw, 2012). Strohmayer (2015, p. 150) accords this oversight to the emphasis given in Geography to Heideg­ ger’s later writings of the 1940s and 1950s, where the German philos­ opher abandoned his earlier critique of metaphysics. Perhaps as a result of this partial reception Heidegger’s Black Notebooks – and the ensuing international controversy around their anti-Semitic content – have not (yet) found much resonance within the discipline (Joronen & Imre, 2015; Korf, 2014; Strohmayer, 2015), despite the fact that Heidegger himself considered these notebooks to be “intellectually significant” (Gumbrecht, 2017, p. 132). In considering Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, Jeff Malpas, whose work on Heidegger’s spatial terminology (e.g. Malpas, 2006) has been influ­ ential in human geography, objects to a terminology of “contamination”, “infection” and “taint”. Such terminology, Malpas argues, inevitably promotes “the case against any serious engagement with Heidegger’s thought” on the basis that such engagement would be seen to risk “the same contamination, the same infection, the same taint” (Malpas, 2016, p. 10). Malpas makes the point in order to defend what he calls Hei­ degger’s “topological” thinking, his writing on “place” and its position within his broader critique of modernity and enlightenment rationality. Heidegger’s late reflections of the Nazi regime revolved around this critique, and specifically the charge that the Nazi regime had not overcome modernity but rather embraced its calculative rationality (see Elden, 2006). Malpas rejects those readings which distinguish between an “early” (problematic) from a “late” (uncompromised) Heidegger, and rather regards his late work as an “intensification” of his earlier thought. In Malpas view, the experiences of National Socialism, war and the holocaust have affirmed rather than challenged Heidegger’s earlier critiques of modernity (Malpas, 2017, p. 118).8 Malpas thereby em­ braces Heidegger’s spatial terminology, and his topological thought, but remains silent on the reactionary inflections within Heidegger’s writings. However, passages in the Black Notebooks, such as those declaring that “world Jewish order … is everywhere unstoppable”,9 led Peter Trawny, editor of the Gesamtausgabe of Heidegger’s work (including the Black Notebooks), to acknowledge Heidegger’s “seinsgeschichtlichen” (being-historical) anti-Semitism (Trawny, 2014). Heidegger’s anti-Semitism was itself “topological” in so far as “the Jew” was to be politically and philosophically rejected because of their supposed “Weltlosigkeit” and “Ortlosigkeit”: the Jew’s lack of attachment to place

and absence of rootedness “… forces Judaism into the role of the great destroyer” (Coyne, 2018, p. 85).10 A clean cut between Heidegger’s anti-Semitism and his “topological” thought is therefore problematic, as Heidegger’s spatial terminology is closely interwoven with his language of history and his concept of Being (and the eclipse of it through the machination of modernity). As Wolfson notes, in Heidegger’s notebooks “Judaism is cast as the antihistorical force in modernity” (Wolfson, 2018, p. 100). Indeed as Gordon argues “the Jews become a virtual anti-type in Heidegger’s thought” precisely because “they apparently lack ‘worldhood’ and all the various skills associated with existential involvement” (Gordon, 2017, p. 140; see also: Gilman, 2017; Mendieta, 2017). Heidegger’s spatial thinking needs to be situated within the broader currents of reactionary thought that flourished among the antirepublican, anti-socialist, anti-liberal and anti-modern adversaries of the Weimar Republic of the 1920’s and 1930’s (Grosser, 2011, p. 384; Wolin, 2016), and how this milieu lived on after World War II (Haber­ mas, 1995; Müller, 2003). Heidegger shared this intellectual milieu not only with Schmitt, but also figures such as Ostwald Spengler, Ernst Jünger, Gottfried Benn and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (cf. Bohrer, 1978; Bolz, 1991; Grosser, 2011, Von Krockow, 1958/1990). This reactionary thought propagated an ideology of German particularism that held that “the German Volk possessed a distinct eschatological-historical mission … to redeem humanity from the decadence-cum-barbarism of Western civilization” (Wolin, 2016, xvii). After the “catastrophe” of defeat in World War I, the urgency of this mission became more pronounced for those attached to the idea of German Kultur taking on reactionary political form. Heidegger shared this disposition and translated this mission into the temporal semiotics of rupture, decisiveness (Entschlossenheit), struggle (Kampf) and the “v€ olkisch” undertone that suffuses much of his earlier work. This argument could still be digested by many critical geographers whose reception focused on Heidegger’s “allegedly ‘humanist”’ writings after his alleged “Kehre” (Strohmayer, 2015, p. 14) and his critique of calculative rationality, into which he subsumed a late critique of Na­ tional Socialism (albeit alongside world Jewry) (Elden, 2006). However, even after World War II, Heidegger’s politics re-affirmed his anti-modernism and anti-liberalism and his opposition to “Western culture legacy”: “[T]he victory of the Allied powers over the fascist dictatorships of Europe might in fact represent the preservation of that Western cultural legacy … This World War [World War II] has decided nothing, if here we take decision in the strong sense, as it pertains uniquely to the essential destiny of man on this earth. Only the indecisiveness of what remains comes a little more clearly into view”.11 Indeed, Heidegger found no cause for celebration in the Allied forces’ defeat of the Nazi state. Not only that but he saw the Allied victory as having not only preserved but amplified the legacy of modernity and its metaphysics. It is in understanding the persistence of his reactionary tendency in

8

Indeed, the interpretation of the significance and meaning of Heidegger’s ominous “Kehre” from “early” to “late” Heidegger lies at the heart of much of current debates around the possibility of cordoning off a pure or “real” Hei­ degger from a compromised or contaminated Heidegger (Grosser, 2017). Habermas read Heidegger’s “Kehre” as a result of his engagement with National Socialism, possibly even as an explicit response to settle his accounts on this political chapter (Habermas, 1985, 184f.). The key question however is what is gained from separating an early from a late Heidegger. This move risks repli­ cating Heidegger’s own self-justificatory rhetoric, where the “Kehre” marks his final turning away from the metaphysical tradition. But the Schwarze Hefte seem to confirm Hans Blumenberg’s suspicion that the “Kehre” should rather be seen as a “Konsequenz” (a necessary consequence) of the uncompleted part of “Sein und Zeit”, i.e. not as a contradiction or turning away from a previous position, but rather its radical completion (Blumenberg, 2000, 59f.). Malpas uses the term “intensification” (Malpas, 2017, p. 118), although Blumenberg and Malpas clearly depart into opposing directions concerning the philosophical and po­ litical implications of this reading. 9 GA 96, 262 (GA ¼ Gesamtausgabe, i.e. Collective Works of Heidegger)– we have taken the English translation from Krell, 2015, p. 135. Heidegger made this statement in his notebooks from 1939 to 1941 (Heidegger, 2014c).

10 This classic anti-Semitic trope of Jewish ‘rootlessness’ was likewise given a spatio-philosophical gloss in Schmitt’s writings, notably in his essay on the Grossraum order. There Schmitt identified “the spirit of the Jew” with an “empty concept of space’ that he argued had brought about the dissolution of spatio-political order in the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries (Schmitt, 2011, p. 122). “The Jewish people,” Schmitt claimed, had not only acted as “an important fermenting agent in the dissolution of concrete spatially determined orders” historically, but also that their “misunderstanding … with respect to everything that concerns soil, land, and territory, is grounded in [their] style of political existence’ (Schmitt, 2011, p. 121). 11 Heidegger (1954, p. 65); we have taken the English translation from Wolin (2016, p. 144).

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the face of the full horrors of Nazism that getting to grips with Hei­ degger’s arcane (geo)political theology becomes significant. Heidegger saw liberalism, the Jew, Western culture, modernity as demonic forces, as the source of the world’s morbidity (Weltverdüsterung). Heidegger’s vocabulary of Gefallenheit, Uneigentlichkeit, Er-eignis or Seyn is clearly marked by an eschatological – and, as we will be showing, a gnostic – undercurrent, even though the theological register in Heidegger’s work is perhaps more obscure than in Schmitt’s writings.

that the secular state had simply adopted theological attributes. For Blumenberg, political absolutism was not mimicking divine authority, but became simply a necessity in the increasing religious factionalism of the post-Reformation era. In the afterword to Politische Theologie II (1970/2008), Schmitt wrote a rejoinder to Blumenberg. Schmitt feared that Blumenberg’s critique would undermine the theological un­ derpinnings of his concept of the political by rendering the forces acting within the political immanent to itself, while Schmitt understood arcane forces at work in structuring world history (Groh, 1998; Gross, 2000; Meier, 1998; Palaver, 1996). In his critique of Blumenberg, Schmitt developed a gnostic concep­ tion of Christology. Schmitt countered Blumenberg’s argument by introducing enmity, and hence the concept of the political, into the very heart of God’s trinity, by crafting the image of a divided deity. Hence Schmitt locates the gnostic dualism of creator and redeemer inside the figure of Christ: Christ as both, submissive “God” and rebellious “human”; an “Epimetheus”-Christ versus a “Prometheus”-Christ. For Schmitt, these two figures of Christ form two brothers that stand in a state of constant enmity with each other (cf. Groh, 1998, 156ff.; Schmitz & Lepper, 2007), their struggle ensuring that world history as a history of struggle continues, rather than marking a cessation of struggle. The arcane gnostic dimensions of his thought are thereby rendered explicit, marking indeed a move from political theology to a fully theological politics (see Groh, 1998, 2016, Meier 1994/1998; Minca & Rowan, 2015).15 The immanent forces of the modern age are, in Schmitt’s view, simply the expression of the Promethean Christ:

4. Gnosticism and arcane geopolitics In this paper, we argue that Schmitt’s obsession with the figure of the anti-Christ and Heidegger’s notion of Being articulate, admittedly in different forms, a gnosticist (geo)political theology. To understand the significance of our argument, it needs to be situated in an intellectual struggle around gnostic thought and its relation to modernity that sha­ ped the Geisteswissenschaften of post-war Germany in the 1970s and 1980s (Taubes, 1984). Central to these debates was philosopher Hans Blumenberg’s influential work Die Legitimit€ at der Neuzeit (1988; appeared in English as The Legitimacy of the Modern Age). Blumenberg defended the modern age against Eric Voegelin’s influential thesis in The New Science of Politics (1951) that modern thinking was fundamentally gnostic. Contrary to Voegelin’s analysis, Blumenberg argued that the modern age was in fact characterised by the overcoming of Gnosti­ cism.12 For Blumenberg (1988, pp. 138–149, 333–353), gnostic topoi are marked by a pre-modern disposition that thinks in terms of redemption rather than improvement. Blumenberg located such gnostic topoi in the reactionary disposition of Heidegger and Schmitt, which identifies ostensibly dark, mythotheological forces that can be deciphered in the ills of modernity. For Jacob Taubes, a philosopher and scholar of Judaism, Heidegger’s and Schmitt’s Gnosticism distilled a “rogue” home-brew strain of Catholi­ cism (1987, 1993, 140f.) in order to find solace in a world without salvation (“Heillosigkeit der Welt”). They were thus setting themselves at some distance from mainstream institutional Catholicism (Groh, 1998). Taubes labels both as “abgestandene” (insipid) Catholics, rep­ resentatives of a quasi-ostracized Catholic minority, who had to fight their way into an intellectual culture dominated by a liberal consensus shaped by Protestant and Jewish influences (Taubes, 1987, 73f.).13 This liberal intellectual world was perhaps best personified in the figure of Ernst Cassirer, with whom Heidegger clashed in the famous Davos disputation. Cassirer, a liberal advocate of Neo-Kantian thought and the Weimar republic represented both metaphysical and political stands against which Heidegger positioned himself (Friedman, 2000; Gordon, 2010). On 7 August 1975, Blumenberg wrote a letter to Schmitt trying to express why he fundamentally disagreed with Schmitt’s gnostic dispo­ sition. Blumenberg argued that each eschatology was essentially gnostic: €t “Jede Eschatologie (ist) ihrem Wesen nach gnostisch”.14 In Legitimita der Neuzeit (1988, originally published in 1966), Blumenberg had crit­ icized Schmitt’s secularization thesis as formulated in Politische Theolo­ gie I (Schmitt, 1985). Therein, Schmitt had written that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” (Schmitt, 1985, p. 36). Blumenberg plainly rejected the idea

“The main structural problem with gnostic dualism, that is, with the problem of the God of Creation and the God of salvation, dominates not only every religion of salvation and redemption. It exists ines­ capably in every world in need of change and renewal, and it is both immanent and ineradicable” (Schmitt, 2008, p. 125).16 Schmitt is clear that he stands on the other side – that of the Epi­ methean Christ who obeys and simply endures the God given Heillo­ sigkeit der Welt – a God given world where salvation is impossible. The Promethean Christ causes stasis – uproar, insurrection – against God and as such is a figure of anomie, of lawlessness, which the Katechon must seek to “restrain”. This Promethean Christ makes an agreement with humanity against God, the creator, in order to create good things on earth himself. Hence the Christ of love, mercy, charity that wants to overcome evil and suffering on earth becomes synonymous, for Schmitt, with the hubris of modernity and utopian attempts to achieve universal peace, or render heaven immanent to earth.17 In Heidegger’s case, Blumenberg was careful not to explicitly call him a Gnostic, although he depicted a number of analogies between Heidegger’s thought style and that of the Gnostics (Blumenberg, 1979, p. 246; cf. Heidenreich, 2015, pp. 141–154 and Buch, 2014, pp. 87–100). Notably, he identified in Heidegger’s notion of

15 Reading the now available early diary (1912–1915) of Carl Schmitt, Ruth Groh (2016) shows how Schmitt reads gnostic authors, in particular Marcian, already early on and that these readings shape his antagonistic dualisms of order and chaos in his early writings on dictatorship and the Catholic Church. Marcian also features in Schmitt’s Glossarium (Linder, 2008), but, as Groh (2016) shows, Schmitt downplays his Gnosticism in subsequent writings, as he feared that openly taking gnostic positions could endanger his academic career. Only in Politische Theologie II (1970) does Schmitt, in open confrontation with Blumenberg and Peterson, make his gnostic position finally explicit. 16 The German original reads: “Das strukturelle Kernproblem des gnostischen Dualismus von Sch€ opfergott und Erl€ osergott beherrscht aber nicht nur jede Heils-und Erl€ osungsreligion. Das ist in jeder € anderungs-und erneuer­ ungsbedürftigen Welt unentrinnbar und unausrottbar immanent gegeben” (Schmitt 1970/2008, p. 93). 17 This conviction lead Schmitt to a polemical rejection of the thought of JeanBaptist Metz and the traditions of liberation theology and revolutionary the­ ology (Schmitt, 1970/2008, 26ff. See on this: Maier, 1970/2007, pp. 15–73).

12 We cannot do justice in the space available to the complicated debate on Blumenberg’s notion of the modern age as the (second) overcoming of gnosis and how this is linked to complex theological debates in the late medieval period (Hübner, 1984), nor how Blumenberg’s thesis opposed Voegelin’s (Styfhals, 2012). 13 On the Catholic anti-modernist milieu in which Heidegger grew up and which influenced him in his early theological studies to become a Catholic priest, see Arnold (2017); on Schmitt and Catholicism, see: Mehring (2016b). 14 Blumenberg in a letter to Schmitt, dated 7 August 1975 (in: Schmitz & Lepper, 2007, p. 132).

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“Sein zum Tode” an eschatological disposition (cf. Marquart, 1973, p. 25; Meier, 2003, pp. 73–82). Blumenberg was not the first to make this claim. Already in 1934, Hans Jonas, a student of Heidegger, had diag­ nosed a gnostic disposition in Heidegger’s existentialism, i.e., in Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) (Jonas, 1934/1954, 90f.; also: Jonas, 1952). More recently, Barbara Merker (1988), in a close reading of Sein und Zeit, identified the gnostic disposition in Heidegger’s tropes of Gefallenheit and Geworfenheit. Similarly, Heinz-Dietrich Kittsteiner (2004), following Jonas (and Merker), finds the gnostic disposition encapsulated in Sein und Zeit: Heidegger identifies the Demiurge in the working of “Uneigentlichkeit” und “Man”, and the “Ereignis” of “Machtergreifung” becomes the eschatological horizon of the coming of “Eigentlichkeit” in political form. Crucially, however, Blumenberg insisted that this gnostic disposition was not confined to the “early” Heidegger of Sein und Zeit, but could be traced in his late work after the Kehre, where the primacy of Being is cast as a vengeful divinity (Blumenberg, 1988, p. 220). The ultimate omnipotence of Being in the late Heidegger, inscrutable to human un­ derstanding, is nothing else than a deus absconditus or an exogenous “Er-eignis” that radically separates Being from everyday life and iden­ tifies the Demiurge in the technological advances of the modern age (Blumenberg, 1996, p. 739). This gnostic theology reads “Seyn” as an Er-eignis that is radically different from history (which is the work of the Demiurge). Kittsteiner concurs with Blumenberg’s reading, arguing that Heidegger’s second gnostic topoi identified the workings of the Demi­ urge in Americanism and Bolshevism (Kittsteiner, 2004, p. 212) - un­ derstanding the Weltverdüsterung to be forged through their demonic forces, much as Schmitt had. If we read Heidegger’s critique of calculation and technology through this gnostic lens as the workings of the Demiurge, the impli­ cations of Heidegger’s positions become more problematic. Take, for example, Heidegger’s Bremen lectures in 1949, where he claimed that modern agriculture was “a motorized food industry, in essence the same as the manufacture of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockade and starvation of countries, the same as the manufacture of atomic bombs.“18 What could be understood simply as a critique of unsustainable modernized agricultural technologies (an aspect of what Heidegger terms “Gestell”) is better grasped as a funda­ mental ingredient of his arcane geopolitics. Not only can we read this in geopolitical terms as equating the Nazi crime of the holocaust (gas chambers) with the war strategies of the Allies (e.g. the atomic bomb, the siege of German cities) or simply as a critique of calculative ratio­ nality. Rather Heidegger the gnostic sees at work here an arcane geopolitics where the handiwork of the Demiurge can be traced in the process of Weltverdüsterung. Heidegger’s disposition was also gnostic in so far as he considered himself to be one of the few (or perhaps the only one) initiate in this esoteric knowledge about the work of the Demiurge, initially identified as Man, later as Gestell, and yet, he awaits the Vorbeigang Gottes (the arrival and passing of God) as the “Ereignis.” In Heidegger’s famous interview with Der Spiegel, conducted in 1966 but published post­ humously in the days after his death in 1976 as “Only a God Can Save Us”, the gnostic character of his thought is made explicit19:

but that when we perish, we do perish in the face of the absent God.” (Heidegger, GA 16, 671)20 This is, Kittsteiner concludes (2004, 14f.), simply the culmination of a gnostic Geschichtstheologie (theology of history): “to be prepared to perish in the face of an absent God [and] the very present Demiurge” – (Kittsteiner, 2004, p. 15).21 Micha Brumlik (1992, p. 265) has likewise come to similar conclusions: “Heidegger’s life-long philosophical endeavor … mirrors in several respects the paths taken by the gnostics: their search for traces of the divine in an outrightly sinful world.” And for gnostics, writes Brumlik, sinfulness is not a question of ethics (or justice), but a sign of an erroneous appreciation of the world and its inner truth. Blumenberg reads Heidegger’s and Schmitt’s Gnosticism as a sort of anti-modern relapse, which fuses eschatological motives with abrupt antagonisms (Heidenreich, 2015, p. 151). Heidegger and Schmitt both framed the tumultuous geopolitical changes they were living through in relation to an apocalyptic horizon and depicted the profane reordering of global geopolitical power in relation to a gnostic conception of his­ torical struggle between the Antichrist and the god of redemption. In the aftermath of World War II both thinkers attempted to grasp the changing world order within the framework of their gnostic philosophy of history, which cast their interwar anti-liberal convictions in a metaphysical and mythopoetic register. Their response to the cataclysm of National So­ cialism, the Holocaust and the ravages of World War II was not to question their earlier reactionary spatial imaginaries but to wrap them in arcane ruminations in order to preserve them. 5. Coda: reading reactionaries The reactionary, writes Emile Cioran (1980, p. 37), is “a profiteer of the horrendous, whose thinking, which is congealed by pure reckoning or an excess of clear-sightedness, trivializes or maligns its own time”.22 Cioran - himself a former reactionary who retreated from fascist politics into the security of metaphysical pessimism (and like Heidegger and Schmitt failed to address his complicity in the postwar era) – encapsu­ lates the gnostic disposition of the reactionary well, with which Hei­ degger and Schmitt are firmly ensconced. As Peter Sloterdijk writes, for gnostics, “in questions of truth it counts more to be wise rather than pious” (Sloterdijk, 2017a, p. 85).23 The space opened by this triviali­ zation of one’s own time allows for both horrific violence and the refusal to be held accountable for it. In this sense, the gnostic disposition of reactionary thinkers, as much else, must be firmly rejected. As Slavoj � zek bluntly put it: “Gnosticism? No, thanks!” (Zi� � zek, 2001, p. 6).24 Zi� Should we therefore stop reading gnostic reactionaries like Heideg­ ger and Schmitt altogether? Not necessarily. Indeed, it is important to

20 This is the original wording of Heidegger, as published in GA, 16, p. 671; see Kittsteiner, 2004, 14f., footnote 9. Our translation. In German original, the passage reads as: „Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten. Die einzige M€ oglichkeit einer Rettung sehe ich darin, im Denken und Dichten eine Bereitschaft vorzu­ bereiten für die Erscheinung des Gottes im Untergang; dass wir nicht, grob gesagt ‘verrecken’, sondern wenn wir untergehen, im Angesicht des abwe­ senden Gottes untergehen.” 21 Our translation; German original: „Sich vorbereitend im Angesicht des abwesenden Gottes untergehen, oder “verrecken - getrieben von dem sehr anwesenden Demiurgen”. 22 Our translation: The German original reads: “ein Profiteur des Schreckli­ chen, dessen aus Berechnung oder Übermass an Klarsicht erstarrtes Denken die Zeit bagatellisiert oder verleumdet.” 23 Our translation. The German original reads: “Zur Gnosis disponiert ist jemand, dem es in Wahrheitsfragen darauf ankommt, eher klug als fromm zu sein.” 24 � zek’s call to refrain from the “gnostic disposition” and its We concur with Zi� � zek’s suggestion that Heidegger’s apocalyptic nostalgia but we disagree with Zi� � zek, 2017). notion of Geworfenheit is opposed to the gnostic tradition (Zi�

“Only a God can save us. I see the only possibility of salvation in that thinking and writing poetry prepares us for the appearance of God in the final demise; that we do not, to put it bluntly, ,kick the bucket’,

18 We have taken the English excerpt from Wolin, 2016, p. 168. The original quote in German reads: „Ackerbau ist jetzt motorisierte Ern€ ahrungsindustrie, im Wesen das Selbe wie die Fabrikation von Leichen in Gaskammern und Vernichtungslagern, das Selbe wie die Blockade und Aushungerung von L€ andern, das Selbe wie die Fabrikation von Wasserstoffbomben.” (GA 79, p. 27). 19 See, for a detailed and critical history of this interview, Hachmeister, 2014.

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engage with reactionary thinkers not despite the fact that they may be intellectual and political “enemies,” but precisely because they are. This is not only because the reactionary traditions of thought to which they belonged have persisted and need to be understood and challenged in the present (Balakrishnan, 2017; Sedgwick , 2019), but also because their work is bound up with wider patterns of thought that may appear less obviously repugnant (Minca & Rowan, 2014, A2). Already in 1953, Jürgen Habermas stated that it was time “to think with Heidegger against Heidegger” (Habermas, 1981, p. 72).25 The young Habermas, then still a PhD student, came to this conclusion after criticizing the publication of Heidegger’s 1935 lectures on meta­ physics (Habermas, 1981, pp. 65–72). These lectures contained a passus on the “[innere] Wahrheit und Gro€sse dieser Bewegung”26 - “the inner truth and greatness” of the (National Socialist) movement (Habermas, 1981, p. 66), which was left unchanged when it was pub­ lished in 1953. Almost fifty years after Habermas’ comment on Hei­ degger, Chantal Mouffe argued that it was not only possible but also desirable to “think both with and against Schmitt” (Mouffe, 1999, p. 6), opening up an enduring trail of engagement with Schmitt on the Anglophone left, which was itself pre-figured by the reception of his work amongst Italian and French Left thinkers (see Minca & Rowan, 2015b). Such a critical reading of Heidegger and Schmitt should not be a selective one, however, that ignores the theological register of their thought and the arcane geopolitics underpinning it. Rather, when engaging Heidegger or Schmitt, it should be possible to “resist [their] gnostic conclusions while taking up what is philosophically insightful in [their] work”, although such insights can “survive if and only if they remain available for a truly critical appropriation” (Gordon, 2017, 148f.). Indeed, in engaging the theological register of Heidegger and Schmitt a number of critical theorists, such as Giorgio Agamben, Micha Brumlik, Simon Critchley, Gianni Vattimo and Jacob Taubes, have pointed to the emancipatory potential of “alternative theologies of the political” (Amesbury, 2018) and the possibility that political theology can be a theoretical resource for progressive ends. Critchley writes: “What I am dreaming of here is Heidegger with a thorn in the flesh; a little bit Gentile, admittedly, but also a little bit Jewish, to cite Taubes [who writes on Schmitt]” (Critchley, 2012, p. 183). Alternative political theologies make space for attending to the marginal – contra Heidegger and Schmitt for whom the forceful certainty of the coming catastrophe legitimates the pursuit of order at any cost (Korf, 2018; Minca & Rowan, 2015b). The emancipatory potential of weak messianic thought finds an echo in Gianni Vattimo’s notion of kenosis, the self-abasement or “dissolution of divine transcendence” (Vattimo, 2002, p. 27). For Vattimo, kenosis makes caritas (charity) more enduring than claims to truth. Vattimo thereby reverses the gnostic equation. And Catholic theologist Johann Baptist Metz (2006) under­ stood his new political theology as a critical interlocutor in a secularizing society; a political theology that could record the negativity of suffering in the light of messianic hope rather than apocalyptic prophecy: If, as Kyle Gingerich Hiebert writes, “Schmitt represents a kind of apocalyptic preservation” of order, then “Metz represents a kind of apocalyptic disruption” of the same (Gingerich Hiebert, 2017, p. 53). The negative theology of (reactionary) Gnosticism cannot think in emancipatory terms: “Gnosticism insists upon evading time rather than fulfilling time in an apocalyptic climax, or living in time through sub­ stitution” (Bloom, 1982, p. 67). The gnostic abides by a false creation, and thereby affirms the Weltverdüsterung (Heidegger) or the Heillosigkeit der Welt (Schmitt). Heidegger’s “Only a God Can Save Us … when

we perish” expresses the obvious failure of this apocalyptic register. Groh (2016, p. 24) calls this a paradoxical eschatology – an eschatology that is fundamentally anti-eschatological: Schmitt seems to find solace in the figure of Katechon, and propagates the suspension of Parousia, the second coming of Christ. But this abiding by the evil world is understood as an elitist position: “When you have the Gnosis, when you see truly, then you are in the place of rest, you are in your own internalized pleroma” (Bloom, 1982, p. 69). Against Schmitt’s anti-eschatological eschatology, Agamben evokes the messianic thought of Walter Benjamin (Benjamin, 1977, p. 261). Messianic thinking creates a space of potential, or as Agamben writes following Benjamin, the “small door through which the Messiah enters” (Agamben, 2006, p. 71). To illuminate this point, Agamben differenti­ ates between eschatological and messianic time: “[T]he messianic”, he writes, “is not the end of time, but … the time that remains between time and its end” (Agamben, 2006, p. 62). Messianic time, in this reading, is neither chronological time, nor the apocalyptic eschaton at the end of time. For Agamben, Blumenberg, in his critique of Schmitt, falsely conflates messianism with eschatology, “the time of the end for the end of time” (2006, 63). Messianic time is thus neither eschatological nor apocalyptic, and it is here that Agamben turns against the eschatological orientation of Schmitt’s thought and his conception of the Katechon as a restrainer of the apocalypse. Agamben proposes a different conception of Gnosticism: the gnostic attitude “is resolutely revolutionary … [its] truth is in the moment of abrupt interruption, when man … takes possession of his own condition of being resurrected” (Agamben, 1993, p. 101). In his own reading of St Paul, Agamben defines messianic time as operational time, a different category of time that is transformative: the time that is left to us to bring time to an end (Agamben, 2002, p. 5). Benjamin’s famous phrase “Nur um der Hoffnungslosen willen ist uns die Hoffnung gegeben” (Benjamin, 1977, p. 135) – “only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope” (Benjamin, 1996, p. 356) – encapsulates this revolutionary messianic torsion in the philosophy of history (Brumlik, 2014, p. 89). And while Agamben’s reading of Walter Benjamin is contested, as is his conception of messianism or Gnosticism,27 his work illuminates that neither Heidegger’s nor Schmitt’s arcane geopolitics are the only possible readings of political theology. Indeed, in tarrying with the emancipatory potential of plural politi­ cal theologies – whether Christian, Judaic, or from other faith traditions – pathways are opened to think critically about the relationship between violence and politics, history and agency, power and resistance. It is perhaps a challenge for critical human geographers to explore these questions through the register of alternative political theologies rather than through the array of conceptual resources upon which its nominally secular traditions draw. Yet, the task of carefully excavating what po­ tential may be found in the intellectual ruins of Heidegger’s and Schmitt’s arcane geopolitics, whilst staying critically vigilant that this engagement does not carry unwanted episto-political residues along with it or serve to legitimize them once again as unproblematically “great” thinkers, requires consideration of this theological register as well. Funding This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

25

27

“Es scheint an der Zeit zu sein, mit Heidegger gegen Heidegger zu denken”. For a fuller discussion of Habermas’ critique of Heidegger in 1953 and there­ after, see Demmerlein (2017, in particular p. 191). 26 GA 40: 208/222. We have taken the English translation from Gordon, 2017, p. 148.

Agamben “reads Benjamin through Schmitt” (Britt, 2010, p. 272) rather than against him, but for Brian Britt, “the messianic idea in Benjamin … serves to resist Schmittian decisionism” (Britt, 2010, p. 278, our emphasis). See also Critchley’s critique of Agamben and Heidegger on the accounts of their crypto-Marcionism, i.e. their gnostic disposition (Critchley, 2012). 7

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Declaration of competing interest

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