ABSTRACT
This chapter emphasizes God's will, his election, becomes indistinguishable from curse at the cusp: since Gods will is thought to be both omnipotent and entirely inscrutable, subjection to it becomes unbearable; it becomes a curse of the kind described by Giorgio Agamben as the state of exception. It seeks to uncover links between this traumatic limit moment regarding Gods will and following early modern views concerning human Last Will. The chapter anticipates a trauma concerning the will of God may leave traces of tension concerning the idea of human Last Will and the justice of its enforceability since it is hypothesized that Gods will and Last Will may correlative religious and socio-legal forms. It begins with reading Macbeth for traces: instances at which competing Last Wills are portrayed as provoking extremes of violence. Blumenberg argues that Schmitt is attempting to justify absolutist tendencies in twentieth-century politics by invoking traditional theological terms that continue to generate, rhetorically, positive authority effects.
