other attributes, thereby making a dominion within a dominion:
With the Hebrew Cabalists, Malcuth or the Kingdom, the last of the Sephiroth,
signified that God controls everything irresistibly, but gently and without vio-
lence, so that man thinks he is following his own will while he carries out God’s.
They said that Adam’s sin had been truncatio Malcuth a caeteris plantis, that is to say, that Adam had cut back the last of the Sephiroth, by making a dominion
for himself within God’s dominion [ . . . ] but that his fall had taught him that
he could not subsist of himself, and that man must be redeemed by the Messiah.
(Leibniz, §372, p. 348)
According to Leibniz, Spinoza (who in the TheologicoPolitical Treatise again
takes up the image of the imperium in imperio in order to criticize the modern
idea of freedom), in his system, had done nothing but take the cabalist thesis to
its extreme point.
The oikonomia of the moderns is this truncatio Malcuth that, taking for itself a sovereignty separated from its divine origin, in truth maintains the theological
model of the government of the world. It establishes an oikonomia in the oikonomia, leaving intact the concept of government that conformed to this model.
For this reason, it does not make sense to oppose secularism and the general will
to theology and its providential paradigm; what is needed is, rather, an archaeo-
logical operation like the one that we have attempted here, one that, by moving
THE KINGDOM AND THE GLORY
631
upstream to a time before the separation that took place and that turned the two
poles into rival but inseparable brothers, undoes the entire economic-theological
apparatus and renders it inoperative.
That the two poles of this apparatus are not antagonistic, but remain secretly
in agreement until the end, is evident in the thinking of the theologian who has
brought the providential standpoint to such an extreme that it appears to resolve
itself completely and without remainder in the image of the world of modernity.
In his Traité du libre arbitre Bossuet tries at all costs to reconcile human freedom with the divine government of the world. God, he writes, wishes for all eternity
that man be free, and not only potentially but in the actual and concrete exercise
of his freedom.
What is there more absurd than to say that man is not free because God wants
him to be unfree? Should one not instead say, on the contrary, that he is free
because God wants him so; and that, just as it comes about that we are free as a
consequence of the decree that states that we are free, in the same way we freely
execute this or that action as a consequence of the same decree that extends to
the particulars? (Bossuet 1871, Chapter 8, p. 64)
The divine government of the world is so absolute and it penetrates creatures so
deeply, that the divine will is annulled in the freedom of men (and the latter in
the former):
It is not necessary that God, to make us conform with his decree, places within
us anything other than our own determination or that he places it within us
through others. Just as it would be absurd to say that our own determination
takes away our freedom, equally it would be to affirm that God takes it from us
through his decree; and just as our will, deciding to choose one thing rather than
another, does not take away the power to choose, one must conclude in the same
way that God does not take it from us either. (Ibid., p. 65)
At this point, theology can resolve itself into atheism, and providentialism into
democracy, because God has made the world just as if it were without God and
governs it as though it governed itself:
One can in fact say that God makes us just as we would be were we able to be
on our own; because he makes us in all the principles and states of our being.
Therefore, it is true to say that the state of our being is to be all that God wishes
us to be. In the same way he makes man be what man is; and body be what body
is; and thought be what thought is; and passion be what passion is; and action
be what action is; and necessary be what necessary is; and free be what free is;
and free in action and exercise what free in action and exercise is [ . . . ] (Ibid.)
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HOMO SACER II, 4
In this grand image, in which the world created by God is identified with the
world without God, and where contingency and necessity, freedom and slavery
all merge into one another, the glorious center of the governmental machine
appears clearly. Modernity, removing God from the world, has not only failed
to leave theology behind, but in some ways has done nothing other than to lead
the project of the providential oikonomia to completion.
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