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.In a way, these contrasts approach the same issue but in differentaspects and ways.Connolly might be seen as addressing ways to prevent242 Conclusionbeliefs from being practiced in ways oppressive to others; King andBaldwin, say, address what to do in relation to others already oppressingthem.We surely hear registers of receptivity and forbearance in them,just as we hear registers of judgment in Connolly, but distinctively, Bald-win announces willful innocence, enacts judgment, and seeks abolitionin the face of domination.Neither approach to domination is univer-sal, though Baldwin can sound that way; each may warrant emphasisdepending on political context and theoretical purpose.But the issueof race in the United States, it seems to me, calls us to face the issue ofpower in ways that seem to elude both postidentity thematization andan Arendtian language of plurality.In many ways, indeed,  race in this book has served as a kind of tropefor the issue of power, to suggest why politics, while it always must con-cern modes of being and becoming that emerge among interlocutorsin dialogue about plural identities and faiths, also must be somethingelse: adversaries struggling to reconstitute regimes that privilege someby subjugating others.In common is an agonal rather than consensualview of democracy that Connolly and I both endorse.But it may be thatthe angle of vision provided by racial politics intensifies the issue ofdomination and foregrounds a kind of response whose very intensityof commitment, judgment, and grief is an abiding (dangerous, terrify-ing, but sometimes needful) aspect of prophecy.An adversarial engagement with domination, on the one hand, andintensity of judgment, on the other hand, distinguishes the genre ofprophecy from prevailing forms of theorizing democratic politics.Akind of affinity, therefore, links Buber and Schmitt not only to abolition-ism and King s defense of extremism, but also to Baldwin s denuncia-tion of the innocence and equivocation of a racially constituted liberal-ism.They turn to prophecy and embrace the scorching irony that isa recurring and dangerous feature of the office, because they areconfronting the racial exception that at once defines and violates thedemocratic ordinary.These prophetic American figures do not invert a reified or abso-lutized friend enemy distinction, but they do not defuse or diffuse it,either.Partly, they see a worldly adversary in constituencies invested indomination, but partly, the  enemy is internal to each person as ca-pacities for pride, or conformity, or disavowal.They therefore stand withsome against others, but also in an agonal relation to every neighborand citizen, which means drawing a boundary within the self to identifyConclusion 243the terms of self-overcoming.Yet they do not chasten their judgment ofwhite supremacy, which remains an evil fundamentally at odds with ademocratic life whose possibility they doubt but whose value they do notquestion.They avowedly stand with some against others, therefore, butargue that ending white supremacy will truly benefit those others, whocall themselves white, though they cannot now perceive how.Changingthat judgment of benefit is a central goal of prophetic rhetoric.Insteadof polarization or pluralization, so to speak, prophetic figures work amediating position between part and whole to reconstitute a regime.15In distinguishing prophecy as a form of political theology I haveemphasized so far its features as an office, not only its characteristicmodes of address but therefore its adversarial view of power, intensityof judgment and language, and mediation of part and w