The Just Without Justification: On Meister Eckhart and Political Theology

By reconstructing the conceptual logic underlying the figure of ‘the just’ found in Meister Eckhart’s sermons, this essay transforms the parameters of what counts as political theology for the medieval period. By giving voice to an uncreated freedom of those who are equal to nothing, Eckhart’s mystic discourse poses an unmarked challenge to the political theologies of sovereignty and subjection. Against the interlinked ruses of individuation, subjection, and salvation, his mystic speech of de-interpellation asserts that justice is lived only in the now, without deferral or justification. By enacting a reading practice of abandon – abandoning not only rigid distributions of textual genre, but also the primacy accorded to the subject and the proper – this essay makes visible an example of the unbearable truth for the political that may be retrieved from mystical texts – a scandal for the orders of legitimation and interpellative subjection around which the logic of the political ceaselessly revolves.