Now that I have shown how usurpation already exists potentially in delegation, and how the fact of speaking for someone, that is, on behalf of and in the name of someone, implies the propensity to speak in that person’s place. 1 would like to discuss the universal strategies through which the delegate tends io concentrate himself. In order to identify himself with the group and say ‘I am the group, ‘I am, therefore the group is,’ the delegate must, as it were, abolish himself in the group, make a gift of his person to the group, declare and proclaim; ‘J exist only through the group.’ The usurpation of the delegate is necessarily modest and presupposes a certain modesty. This is no doubt the reason why all apparatchiks have a family resemblance. There is a sort of structural bad faith attached to the delegate who, in order to appropriate for himself the authority of the group, must identify himself with the group, reduce himself to the group which authorizes him. Bui I would like to cite Kant who, in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, notes that a church founded on unconditional faith, and not on rational faith, would not have any ‘servants’ (ministri) bul ‘commanding high officials (officiales) who give ihe orders and who. even when they do not appear in hierarchical splendour*, as in the Protestant Church, and even when they ’protest verbally against all this ... actually wish to feel themselves regarded as the only chosen interpreters of a Holy Scripture’, and thus transform ‘the service of the Church [minister-ium] into a domination of its members |t7wpenwn] although, in order to conceal this usurpation, they make use of the modest title of the former’.4 The mystery of ministry works only if the minister conceals his usurpation, and ihe imperium it confers on him, by asserting that he is just an ordinary minister. Il is possible for such a person to confiscate the properties associated with his position only in so far as he conceals himself- thal is the very definition of symbolic power. A symbolic power is a power which presupposes recognition, that is, misrecognition of the violence that is exercised through it. So the
symbolic violence of the minister can be exercised only with that sort of complicity granted to him, via the effect of misrecognition encouraged by denial, by those on whom that violence is exercised.
Nietzsche puts this very well in The Antichrist, which is less a critique of Christianity than a critique of the delegate, since the minister of the Catholic faith is the incarnation of the delegate: that is why in this book he obsessively attacks the priest and priestly hypocrisy and the strategies through which the delegate absolutizes himself and consecrates himself. The first procedure the minister may employ is the one which consists in making himself appear necessary. Kant had already referred to the way exegesis, as a form of legitimate reading, was invoked as necessary. Nietzsche spells it out in full: ‘One cannot read these Gospels too warily: there are difficulties behind every word.'5 What Nietzsche is suggesting is that in order to consecrate himself as a necessary interpreter, the intermediary must produce the need for his own product. And in order to do that, he must produce the difficulty that he alone will be able to solve. The delegate thus performs - to quote Nietzsche again - a 'transformation of himself into something holy’. To enable his necessity to be fully felt, the delegate thus resorts to the strategy of ‘impersonal duty’. 'Nothing works more profound ruin than any "impersonal” duty, any sacrifice to the Moloch of abstraction.’6 The delegate is the one who assigns sacred tasks to himself. ‘If one considers that the philosopher is, in virtually all nations, only the further development of the priestly type, one is no longer surprised to discover this heirloom of the priest, self-deceptive fraudulence. If one has sacred tasks, for example that of improving, saving, redeeming mankind ... one is already sanctified by such a task.1'
