The Speculative Angel

“Let the angel come.” This is how Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet preface their heretical, perhaps misguided and certain-ly maligned, but utterly fascinating fusion of Lacan, Mao, and political theology in their L’Ange of 1976. They are more pleading later in the book, writing: “The angel must come.” But what does any of this mean? Why, when considering speculative medievalisms, have I chosen to write about angels, those beings that seem the least contemporary and perhaps most reactionary of medieval theory? And why have I chosen to do so largely via a virtually unknown or forgotten text by two Maoists whose work has largely been ruined for us by its placement as one species of the cynical, often racist and impe-rialistic, neo-liberal and anti-communist New Philosophers? What does this ostensibly political text, one that the authors declare is nothing but a Maoist philosophy (contrary to the idea that they are fellow-travellers with the Sarkozist ex-Maoists like Glucksmann or Bernard-Henri Lévy), have to say about speculation today? And in what way is it grounded in the premodern condition? The answer is, in part, because I want to understand what speculation may have to do with revolt, with struggle, and it is in the figure of the Angel that such questions come together, both historically and within wildly speculative ultra-left French theory. For the Angel is both a negative name for something that is not Worldly and the Angel is a field of battle where one either becomes a do-mesticated, pacified bureaucrat of the way things are or where one separates and divides what is from what could be.