The Messianic and the Eschatological

Almost the whole of Agamben’s thinking on the messianic can be read under the sign of neutralization, or something in that semantic neighbourhood. I don’t know which analogical elaboration is exemplary (katargein, Aufhebung, aphorismo, hos me), but the “rabbinic apologue” that he refers to (which is Benjamin’s citation of Scholem’s gloss on Maimonodies’ gloss etc. on a Talumic text that winds up as the insight that the messianic era will be a only “minor adjustment” of the secular world) speaks to this as well. What is at stake is a certain distance that is marked between the effects of the messianic arrival and total negation. In each case the result is not a complete destruction (of law, for instance) but a minor modification. This is not to say, however, as in a deflationary messianism, that the world is thus redeemable and not worthy of total negation: this minimal difference is, for Agamben, “in every way, a decisive one” (TR, 69), it is a small difference that makes all the difference.

There is something here that is not unlike the status of the event in Badiou. From the perspective of the “state of the situation” an event is little more than a minor disruption; if it had its way, it would not develop into anything more than that. From the perspective of a subject of fidelity, however, the minor disruption is the opening onto the void that is constitutive of the situation: it is the potential beginning of a trajectory of truth. To stay with Badiou’s theoretical apparatus: Agamben does not develop his messianic thinking beyond the “evental site.” This, perhaps is connected to his refusal to allow a confusion between the messianic and the apocalyptic.

The most insidious misunderstanding of the messianic announcement does not consist in mistaking it for prophecy, which is turned toward the future, but for apocalypse, which contemplates the end of time. The apocalyptic is situated on the last day, the Day of Wrath. It sees the end fulfilled and describes what it sees. The time in which the apostle lives is, however, not the eschaton, it is not the end of time….What interests the apostle is not the last day, it is not the instant in which time ends, but the time that contracts itself and begins to end (1Cor 7.29), or if you prefer, the time that remains between time and its end. (TR, 62)

According to thought I am developing here, we could call Badiou an apocalyptic or eschatological thinker. Not, to be sure, in the common religious sense, but in terms of the coming to an end of time. It would not be, for Badiou, a matter of a consummation of history or any final end, however. It would be instead the pluralized eschatology of situations in general: each situation, insofar as a trajectory of truth has been initiated, comes to an end. There is no substrate of time or history to hold one event in continuity with the next. Therefore, times come to an end incessantly.

It’s not, I don’t think, that Agamben is not interested in the end, in the future, in the possibility of absolute novelty. It is a matter of pushing the immanent messianism of Paul (at least as Agamben reads it) as far as it will go. There is an eschatological dimension to Agamben’s thought, but it is not to be found in his messianism (this is something his “secular” critics do not always realize), at least not in its fullest elaboration. A coming community, a coming politics, a new political future are all aspects that can be found in Agamben’s work, but the messianic has to do with the “now.”