There is No Law Among the Wild Fruit Trees
No Law, No Caesars
“The Messiah has abolished the law…” so it says.
In fact “abolished” is not quite the right word. Abolition sounds like doing away with something absolutely by making it, well, illegal. The Greek word used here, by those proto-anarchists, is katagesis. This doesn’t mean to do away with, or indeed to criminalise. It means something more like, to bring to a stop, or perhaps, to bring to rest. To “render inoperative” as Giorgio Agamben translates it. Perhaps like some archaic machine, shut down long ago, now resting and rusting amid growing things; a testament to the ingenuity and folly of some past time. Or perhaps like an exhausted custodian, whose unhappy work was never done and only ever grew with the doing, who then finds the task is finally lifted and they are able to sleep the sleep of the ages. Messianic katagesis transfigures law into something venerable, if indeed there was ever anything good and true to transfigure. Messianic katagesis, turns law into lore.
But this is a dim image of a strangely dreamed future. We don’t live then, we live now. Now is a listless, meandering age of law and violence. What of these afterlife wish dreams?
I don’t think they are wish dreams. I think the refusal of law and its deactivation is a thing to be practised. This is the refusal that transfigures the present.
Law can be understood this way: we need law to precisely the extent that we lack relationships good enough to trust. Every law that ever had any legitimacy existed to make up for an unfortunate deficit in good relations. Where good relations grow, the realm of law recedes. Relationship is the refusal of the violence of law.
So it was that Walter Benjamin said:
“Is any nonviolent resolution of conflict possible? Without doubt. The relationships of private persons are full of examples of this. Nonviolent agreement is possible wherever a civilized outlook allows the use of unalloyed means of agreement. Legal and illegal means of every kind that are all the same violent may be confronted with nonviolent ones as unalloyed means. Courtesy, sympathy, peaceableness, trust and whatever else might here be mentioned…”
To practice relationships good enough to trust is to exercise a messianic power which renders law inoperative. Relationality, goodfaith, love… these things swell the messianic river that runs under the world. As
put it, “friendship is my theory of change.”The New Testament term for this is pistis. This word is usually translated “faith” or “belief.” These words now carry the meaning of “religion” in general, or “Christianity” in particular. The real meaning is something more like, well, relationships good enough to trust. This is the great yes to all our relations, a messianic practice that brings law toward its forever-rest. As it says, “the Messiah is the end of the law for people of pistis,” …for all those who live amid a web of relations good enough to trust.
I'm not talking about being nice. This is political. This is about horizontal world-making. This is about cultivating messianic commons. It is the anarchist principle of mutual aid, that shrugs off the tutelage of rulers and law-makers.
Building a world of rich relationships is difficult. Obviously, it has not been achieved by Western civilisation which continues to view itself, in certain quarters, as the world's only hope. Meanwhile, gunpowder plots appeal because repeating the violence of law back to itself would seem easier than the long slow work of conducting ourselves in another pattern of being altogether.
To the extent that I live amid trusting relationships I live outside the law. The more I do so the more law recedes. When I live peaceably with my own, I hold my ground. When I form relationships across lines of difference and Otherness, the messianic river swells and rolls. When I love my enemies, judicial systems wait on the sidelines for something they can comprehend. When I belong wholly to all relations, then the law will be no more.
It says that the one who loves has filled in the law’s insatiable appetite for control. Then, it has no more claims to make. Joyous wildness resumes. The trees thrive and collaborate quite well without management. The fruits of the spirit of life, it says, are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. There is no law against these things; no law worth keeping anyway. Neither does any law produce these things. The one who is centred on these wild and lawless fruits, has no need of law and no part in its violence.
David, This is fantastic. Truly. As I've said to you before I propose that one could swap "law" with "markets" and come to the same conclusion you have. That we need civilization when we've abandoned relational maintenance. Broken egg, no chicken, so to speak. But relationships are hard work. I just wrote something similar in a piece called Guilt-Grief-Gratitude: My encounters with guilt arrive most often when I visit nonhumans in the woods. Guilt mixed with envy. All they have to do is be themselves alongside their neighbors, who also seem to know how to be themselves, and, without sitting through hours of consensus meetings or spending years studying nonviolent communication, they just make a healthy forest.
My favorite quote about law:
“Law reflects, but in no sense determines the moral worth of a society…. The better the society, the less law there will be. In Heaven, there will be no law, and the lion will lie down with the lamb…. The worse the society, the more law there will be. In Hell, there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed.”
It comes from a lecture by Prof. Grant Gilmore, published as The Ages of American Law (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 110-111.
Gilmore was away from Yale law during my time there … but his view somehow infiltrated.