Messianic sovereignty: reading Nietzsche with Benjamin

Justine McGill (La Trobe University)

Early in the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche introduces the figure of the “sovereign individual,” bearer of the “right to make promises” and the “extraordinary privilege of responsibility.” He then promises to reveal the history of human development which culminates in the emergence of a consciousness which is ripe for such responsibility. However, by the end of the essay the “sovereign individual” has disappeared. Instead, Nietzsche dramatically invokes a “redeeming man of great love and contempt” who “must come one day,” and then declares that at this point, he must fall silent.

In seeking the origins of responsibility we are thus led to discover a messianic expectation or promise. What does this mean for Nietzsche’s approach to sovereignty and responsibility? Is the sovereign individual a moral figure, or is his sovereign practice of responsibility better understood in political or religious terms? This paper will draw upon Walter Benjamin’s deployment of a similar nesting of secular and religious thought to explore these questions. To read Nietzsche with Benjamin will lead to an interpretation of the “sovereign individual” as an allegorical figure of messianic politics, rather than an image of modern moral achievement or aspiration.

Justine McGill is a lecturer in philosophy, currently teaching at La Trobe University. She is the co-editor, with sociologist Craig Brown, of an interdisciplinary collection on Violence in France and Australia: Disorder in the postcolonial welfare state (Sydney University Press, 2010). She has research interests in Nietzsche studies, continental philosophy, early modern thought, film theory, feminist philosophy and Asian philosophy, particularly Buddhist thought. She is also interested in bringing analytic, continental and Asian philosophical perspectives into dialogue (for example, in exploring philosophy of mind and consciousness). She is currently working on a book about the concept of responsibility in modernity.