Agamben's Messianism

From what I’ve seen, Kafka’s parable “The Coming of the Messiah” is treated mostly as a series of detachable aphorisms as opposed to a literary unit. Thus, for instance, Agamben can take the second paragraph as an isolatable piece with no necessary connection to what preceded it. (Perhaps this is why he refuses the generic identification of “parable” and refers to it as an “enigmatic passage in Kafka’s notebooks.”) For his part, Agamben reads this passage as a gloss on the constellation that he identifies between another of Kafka’s parables, “Before the Law,” the exchange between Benjamin and Scholem on the status of law in Kafka, the Schmittian idea of the state of exception and a Jewish messianism. He says:

The messianic task of the man from the country…might then be precisely that of making the virtual state of exception real, of compelling the doorkeeper to close the door of the Law…For the Messiah will be able to enter only after the door is closed, which is to say, after the Law’s being in force without significance is at an end. This is the meaning of the enigmatic passage in Kafka’s notebooks where he writes, “The Messiah will only come when he is no longer necessary, he will only come after his arrival, he will come not on the last day, but on the very last day.” (Homo Sacer, 56-57)

This reading of messianism in connection to law – an essential connection, according to Agamben – occurs in what I might call Agamben’s “Jewish” phase. While he hints at the Pauline elaboration of the messianic idea several times in Homo Sacer and some of his earlier essays (notably, “the Messiah and the Sovereign” in Potentialities), he ruminates on the “unrealized” dimension of messianism long enough to make a political point. That point: “From the juridico-political perspective, messianism is therefore a theory of the state of exception – except for the fact that in messianism there is no authority in force to proclaim the state of exception; instead, there is the Messiah to subvert its power.”(Homo Sacer, 58) The fact that, following Kafka, Agamben sees a deferral of the arrival of the Messiah until “the door is closed…after the Law’s being in force without significance is at an end,” echoes a Talmudic tension. In the Talmud (Tractate Sanhedrin 97b – 98a) there is an exchange about when the Messiah will come:

Rab said: All the predestined dates [for redemption] have passed, and the matter [now] depends only on repentance and good deeds. But Samuel maintained: it is sufficient for a mourner to keep his [period of] mourning.

The basis of the disagreement consists in whether the Messiah will come as a result of good deeds or whether he will come of his initiative. Levinas summarizes the stakes as follows:

The two theses propounded by Rab and Samuel seem clearer: they testify to a basic alternative. Either morality … will save the world, or else what is needed is an objective event that surpasses morality and the individual’s good intentions. (Difficult Freedom, 72)

Agamben, by asserting that the Messiah will come “after the door is closed” seems to be aligning himself with Rab, insofar as the Messiah’s coming is contingent upon human action. We are situated, so it seems, on the hither side of the Messiah’s arrival. When we get to The Time that Remains, this unrealized dimension is little more than a “thwarted [Christian] messianism” – of which Derrida is the main proponent. There’s a shift in register in the latter book. What remains to be thought is how to appropriate the real state of exception that the Messiah inaugurates. This would be the “Christian” phase of Agamben’s messianism. But this is only a provisional reading of the issue. The categories of “Jewish” and “Christian” in this context are problematic for any number of reasons. It could be affirmed, however, that Agamben’s perspective on both sides of the Messiah correspond to an inflationary messianism. That is, a messianism in which human intervention is an essential part – e.g. Scholem’s Zionism – and the status of law is decisively confronted.