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.”

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.