Jameson and the Present

Partly inspired by a lecture by Fredric Jameson last night, I’m thinking about the status of the present when the future becomes the privileged temporal mode. Jameson’s talk was on the theme of utopia and the presence of the utopian impulse under the regime of global capitalism – which seems to admit no possible outside. His primary example of such a possibility was the genre of “cyber-punk.” I know almost nothing of the genre – except for what I’ve learned from The Matrix – but to him a story such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer seemed to register a utopian possibility, despite a reigning totality. The excess of productive activity on the part of the hackers represented, to him, the presence of another sphere of action, “outside” the matrix. He also referred to the uneven development of globalization: wherein the very existence of another form of life – one that would be called “underdeveloped” – is enough of an opening for something like “hope” for another world.

He failed though, I think, to answer the question posed by the respondent. It had something to do with the ontological status of the present. Is it, he asked, really total, undifferentiated, whole? Or, is it fractured, differentiated, incomplete, as such? This was no doubt a “political” question, but concerned something more like a “political ontology.” Jameson seemed not to be willing to go there (admittedly, it was a public lecture). It got me thinking, about Derrida, for one – clearly a subtext of the respondent’s question – but, behind Derrida, to the theme of much Jewish thinking on messianism.

The privileging of the future in terms of messianic expectation is a form of hope, but it is not simply that. It is not just a matter of a dissatisfaction with the present and a longing for something better; in this sense it is not utopian. It concerns, in Rosenzweig’s terms, the way that the past (Creation) only becomes legible in the present (Revelation) and the present and the past together only attain an ontological completion from the perspective of the future (Redemption), that is apres coup – which is to-come only in a specific sense: as a bringing of eternity into the present by way of human action. This seems to me to be a much more robust critique of the present, a much better “philosophy of history” than a mere subjective or collective longing for something better. And this why thinkers like Derrida and Benjamin have undertaken in different ways, not just a rethinking of history, but a re- or dis-articulation of the temporality that is history’s engine. Agamben is right, therefore, when he says, in Infancy and History, that the “original task of genuine revolution…is never merely to ‘change the world’, but also – and above all – to ‘change time.’ (91)

[Wow, an occasional post. I’m going to become a blogger if I’m not careful.]

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.

Politics Unborn: A Thougth Experiement on the (Re)production of a New Political Subject

[Partially in response to this post at the weblog]

Once the category of the “state of exception” is mastered in its formality, such states begin to appear ubiquitous. However, pointing out such instances serves no real political purpose. It is, at most, diagnostic. Similarly, numerous examples of the homo sacer, even beyond the extensive catalogue that Agamben cites, can be named without too much difficulty. But again, the identification of such instances is not the important point – nor, however, is nostalgically working to restore things to the way they were before the emergency or the sovereign decision. The political exigency that follows from the biopolitical predicament, according to Agamben, is to conceive of such “zones of indistinction” as themselves sites of new political possibilities.

Thus, to point out that the “fetus” or the “unborn” represents an exemplary figure of the homo sacer is not to say too much. To point out that a child in utero is neither living nor non-living properly speaking – insofar as the decision on this status is the one constantly in dispute – and that such an existence occupies a “zone of indistinction” between fact and law, by virtue of this undecidability, is not to see in Agamben’s analysis a tacit pro-life agenda.

Of significance, however, are the political consequences of such a realization when it comes to discerning the true political subject. The liberal model understands the political subject, in this case, to be the autonomous individual who is free to deal with the fact of pregnancy in the way that she sees fit – or the way that she sees fit within the realm of available law and technology. The conservative model locates the final say in an unimpregnable male (legislator, priest, doctor, ethicist). But there is yet another assessment of this situation, a third political subject, who becomes available in light of Agamben’s work. The site of resistance to biopolitics is life itself, a zoe that has become its own bios. Life itself becomes both the object of biopolitical capture and the subject of its resistance. Would not the unborn then become the political subject par excellence, insofar as such a life is the one which is inseparable from its form. The question then becomes: how to conceive of an unborn politics?

Lenten Reflection 4b: 2 Corinthians 5:16-21

2 Corinthians 5:16-21
5:16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way.
5:17 So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!
5:18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation;
5:19 that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.
5:20 So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.
5:21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Comment
I spoke earlier of Paul’s biopolitics – such that the passage to redemption is corporal. Here is yet another perspective on this biopolitics. Agamben argues, at the conclusion of Homo Sacer, contra Foucault, that there is no escape from the biopolitical predicament: every body is always already a biopolitical body. Thus, the “new economy of bodies and pleasures” that Foucault gestures towards at the end of History of Sexuality 1 is not really conceivable. Foucault, as far as Agamben is concerned, is not critical enough with his concepts. It is not merely a new relation between body and pleasure that is necessary but a, in some sense, a new body, a new corporal destiny. Further, this new body cannot be the return to an old body, there can be no nostalgia for a pre-biopolitical existence -- “There is no return from the camps to classical politics” (187).

In Paul we find something like the possibility of a new corporal destiny, not in terms of an escape from bodily existence – as it sometimes sounds in 2 Corinthians – but in terms of a participation in another future for the body: “we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves but for him who died and was raised for him” – these are the words that immediately precede our text. These are the conditions under which Paul can claim that “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation.” There is here the possibility of not just a new relation between body and world, but the possibility of a new body, of a new site for a biopolitical resistance to biopolitics. In this way Paul represents a possible completion of Agamben’s project to found a new politics which would be a zoe which is its own bios – this, by the way, is not a possibility that Agamben names in his Paul book.

Lenten Reflection 3b: 1 Corinthians 10:1-13 / Messianic Politics iv: Contraction

1 Corinthians 10:1-13
10:1 I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea,
10:2 and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea,
10:3 and all ate the same spiritual food,
10:4 and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.
10:5 Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them, and they were struck down in the wilderness.
10:6 Now these things occurred as examples for us, so that we might not desire evil as they did.
10:7 Do not become idolaters as some of them did; as it is written, "The people sat down to eat and drink, and they rose up to play."
10:8 We must not indulge in sexual immorality as some of them did, and twenty-three thousand fell in a single day.
10:9 We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did, and were destroyed by serpents.
10:10 And do not complain as some of them did, and were destroyed by the destroyer.
10:11 These things happened to them to serve as an example, and they were written down to instruct us, on whom the ends of the ages have come.
10:12 So if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall.
10:13 No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.

Comment
Paul establishes a relation between Israel of the Mosaic era and the church of the messianic era by way of a bizarre – but not unprecedented – form of interpretation: a typological interpretation (each occurrence of the word “example” [vv. 6 & 11] is a translation of a form of the Greek typos). Agamben is helpful here because he takes seriously Paul’s method in both its historical and normative aspects. He does not shy away in embarrassment from the method, nor does he allow it to evolve into the, now discredited, medieval mode of allegorical interpretation. What he does is examine this relation in terms of its role in shaping messianic temporality – the theme of his book. “What matters to us here,” he says,

Is not the fact that each event of the past – once it becomes figure [typos] – announces a future event and is fulfilled in it, but is the transformation of time implied by the typological relation. The problem here does not simply concern the biunivocal correspondence that binds typos to antitypos together in an exclusively hermeneutic relationship, according to the paradigm that prevailed in medieval culture; rather, it concerns a tension that clasps together and transforms past and future, typos and antitypos, in a inseparable constellation. The messianic is not just one of the two terms in this typological relation, it is the relation itself. This si the meaning of the Pauline expression “for us, upon whom the ends of the ages [aionon, the olamim] are come to face each other.” The two ends of the olam hazzeh and the olam babba contract into each other without coinciding; this face to face, this
contraction, is messianic time, and nothing else. Once again, for Paul, the messianic is not a third eon situated between two times; but rather, it is a caesura that divides the division between times and introduces a remnant, a zone of undecidablity, in which the past is dislocated into the present and the present is extended into the past. (74)

For Agamben Paul’s method does not negate the initial Israelite experience, it does not co-opt it for Christian purposes. Instead Paul discloses something of the structure of messianic time where the past does not relate to the present and the future according to a linear movement, where one event follows another in a determinate manner, “like the beads on a rosary.” The messianic event – which is for Paul, if not for Agamben, the resurrection of Jesus and the calling into existence of the ekklesia under the power of the Holy Spirit – inaugurates a rupture in the structure of time and renders its relationship to itself and our relationship to it substantially different. Agamben sees this realization in Benjamin’s description of messianic time as a “monstrous abbreviation” (as in the epigraph to this blog). Benjamin’s “now time” (Jetztzeit) and Paul’s “present time” (ho nyn kairos) both name, not a moment that follows chronologically from an earlier moment, but the possibility of past and future forming a “constellation” in an unpredictable, revolutionary moment.

Messianic Politics (iii): Law

Agamben is basically correct when he says of messianism that its “essential character” concerns a “particular relation to the law.” He argues that “in Judaism as in Christianity and Shiite Islam, the messianic event above all signifies a crisis and a radical transformation of the entire order of the law… The Messiah is… the figure through which religion confronts the problem of the Law, decisively reckoning with it” (Potentialities, 163). This would be true of both the inflationary and the deflationary traditions of messianism. The fundamental difference between them, then, would be the way that law is “reckoned” with. In either case the law would be “read” differently. However, while for the latter it is basically a hermeneutical question of a fidelity to the law in a new interpretive context, for the former it is ultimately a political question that has to do with the validity of the law as such. Agamben falls much more into the inflationary category but his reading of law (and of Benjamin) in the messianic era, as I hope to show before too long, is more complex than a simple antinomianism – the Pauline notion of katargein, which means to “render inoperative” (e.g. Rom 7.6), is significant here.

But behind Agamben, in the inflationary tradition, stands Benjamin. Inspired by Judith Butler’s excellent essay, I would like to examine Benjamin’s early text on law: “Critique of Violence.” Here it would be relatively easy to identify an antinomian or anarchistic impulse which does away with law in the interest of a radically new, indeed miraculously ordained, order. However, there is more at work in this text than that. Butler notes that “Benjamin nowhere argues that all legal systems should be opposed, and it is unclear on the basis of this text whether he opposes certain rules of law and not others. Moreover, if he traffics here with anarchism, we should at least pause over what anarchism might mean in this context and keep in mind that Benjamin takes seriously the commandment “Thou shalt not kill”” (203). Thus, according to Butler, Benjamin evades the charge of antinomianism in two moves. First, by way of occlusion: law receives no positive valuation in this essay, but this does not mean that it has none for Benjamin; and second, by recourse to a certain understanding of commandment. It is the second that most interests me here.

Benjamin begins his essay by highlighting the essential connection between law (and justice) and violence. “The task of a critique of violence,” he says, “can be summarized as that of expounding its relation to law and justice…With regard to [law], it is clear that the most elementary relationship within any legal system is that of ends and means, and, further, that violence can first be sought only in the realm of means, not ends” (277). Violence is only ever justified legally in terms of the legitimacy of the reason for which it is dispensed (“because they are an immanent threat to our national security,” “because it’s the only way to be sure he doesn’t do it again,” etc.). But, according to Benjamin, this is no valid criterion for critiquing violence, as it does not target the violence itself, but only the particular cases of its use (international disputes, capital punishment, etc.). Therefore, “a more exact criteria is needed, which would discriminate within the sphere of means themselves” (ibid).

In order to critique violence itself – as means – it is necessary to understand more fully its essential connection to law. The state’s monopoly on violence, claims Benjamin, is attained in the interest of preserving, not any particular law, but law as such (this is what Benjamin calls “law-preserving violence”). The eruption of any violence that falls outside of the rule of law threatens: (1) to reveal the violence constitutive of any legal order (what Benjamin calls “lawmaking violence”); and (2) to potentially found a new legal order. The state recognizes that violence is threatening to the whole legal edifice and therefore mostly opposes and extra-state exercise of it or, in some cases, strategically negotiates with it by making certain concessions (e.g. legalizing labour strikes).

Benjamin summarizes the connection between law and violence in its two modes: "All violence as a means is either lawmaking or law-preserving. If it lays claim to neither of these predicates, it forfeits all validity. It follows, however, that all violence as a means, even in the most favorable case, is implicated in the problematic of law itself" (287).

With respect to law-preserving violence, Benjamin claims that a legal contract “leads finally to possible violence. It confers on both parties the right to take recourse to violence in some form against the other, should he break the agreement. Not only that; like the outcome, the origin of every contract also points toward violence” (288) This latter aspect of law – its originary or lawmaking violence – is illustrated by what Benjamin calls “mythical violence.” Such a violence is “not a means but a manifestation.” (294) That is, “mythical violence in its archetypal form is a mere manifestation of the gods. Not a means to their ends, scarcely a manifestation of their will, but first of all a manifestation of their existence. Benjamin refers to the legend of Niobe in this respect (294). This is the fateful nature of violence in its lawmaking form, it is by fiat that violence is dispensed, not by virtue of a criminal act, as though a prior law had been transgressed; instead, law comes along after the fact, retroactively translating suffering into guilt. This is what distinguishes such violence from sheer destructiveness: “Although it brings a cruel death to Niobe’s children, it stops short of the life of their mother, whom it leaves behind, more guilty than before through the death of her children both as an eternally mute bearer of guilt and as a boundary stone on the frontier between men and gods.” (295) Thus law, originally violent and violently maintained, can establish itself as “power,” but never as “justice.” (295) Justice, which is singular, not generalizable, must be sought elsewhere, in another force, another violence that is “unalloyed” to any ends and binds itself no system of legality. Such a possibility exists, for Benjamin, only in a “divine violence.”

If mythical violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythical violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood (297).

Where the legend of Niobe was an exemplary case of lawmaking, mythical violence, Benjamin refers to the biblical story of Korah in Numbers 16 as an instance of divine violence. It is not clear to me that the story meets all of the criteria that Benjamin has just delineated as characteristic of divine violence – law-destroying, boundary-destroying, expiatory, bloodless (he does mention that the law-destroying aspect “cannot be shown in detail here”) – however, the bloodlessness of the Levites’ who went down “alive into Sheol (v.33) is an essential part of the story; and their “becoming holy at the cost of their lives” (v.38) speaks to the expiatory character. Benjamin acknowledges that holding up as exemplary a story of annihilation will itself provoke “violent reactions” and anticipates the counter argument that “taken to its logical conclusion it confers on men even lethal power against one another.” (298) Without a doubt, this counter argument should be raised. But Benjamin takes this opportunity to insert a discussion on the “commandment” as distinct from law. I will cite Benjamin at some length.

For the question “May I kill?” meets its irreducible answer in the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” This commandment precedes the deed, just as God was “preventing” the deed. But just as it may not be fear of punishment that enforces obedience, the injunction becomes inapplicable, incommensurable once the deed is accomplished. No judgment of the deed can be derived from the commandment. nd so neither the divine judgment, nor the grounds for this judgment, can be known in advance. Those who base a condemnation of all violent killing of one person by another on the commandment are therefore mistaken. It exists not as a criterion of judgment, but as a guideline for the actions of persons or communities who have to wrestle with it in solitude and, in exceptional cases, to take on themselves the responsibility of ignoring it. Thus it was understood by Judaism, which expressly rejected the condemnation of killing in self-defense. But those thinkers who take the opposed view refer to a more distant theorem, on which the possibly propose to base even the commandment itself. This is the doctrine of the sanctity of life, which they either apply to all animal or even vegetable life, or limit to human life (298).

I want to place this extended citation alongside another: a text from Rozensweig’s Star of Redemption that, no doubt, stands somewhere in the background of Benjamin’s reflections on commandment. I will reserve my own reflections on this juxtaposition for the next post.

Rosenzweig’s takes up the recurring biblical question: “What then is the commandment of all commandments?” He responds with the recurring biblical answer: “Love!...” (Deut 6.4-5; Mark 12.29-30; 1Cor 13.13; Gal 5.14). He then offers the following commentary:

Surely, love cannot be commanded; no third party can command it or obtain it by force. No third party can do this, but the One can. The commandment of love can only come from the mouth of the love. Only the one who loves, but really he can say and does say: Love me. From his mouth, the commandment of love is not a strange commandment, it is nothing other than the voice of love itself. The love of the lover has no other word to express itself than the commandment. Everything else is already no longer immediate expression, but explanation – explanation of love. The explanation of love is very deficient, and like every explanation, it always comes after the event; and therefore, since love of the lover is the present, it really always comes too late. If the beloved, in the eternal faithfulness of her love, did not open her arms to receive it, the explanation would fall completely into the void. But the commandment in the imperative, the immediate commandment, springing from the moment and already on the way to being said aloud at the moment of its springing up – for saying aloud and springing up are one and the same thing in the imperative to love – the “Love me” of the lover, this is the absolutely perfect expression, the perfectly pure language of love. Whereas the indicative has all the circumstances behind it that established the objectivity and whose purest form seems to be the past, the commandment is an absolutely pure present for which nothing has prepared it. And not only has nothing prepared it; it is absolutely unpremeditated. The imperative of the commandment makes no forecast for the future; it can imagine only the immediacy of obedience. If it were to think of a future or an “always,” it would be neither a commandment nor an order, but a law. The law counts on periods of time, on a future, on duration. The commandment knows only the moment; it waits for the outcome right within the moment of its growing audible, and when it possesses the spell of the genuine tone of a commandment, it will never be disappointing in this awaiting.

The commandment is thus – pure present. But, whereas every other commandment, at last when considered from the outside and as it were after the event, could have been just as well a law, the commandment of love alone is absolutely incapable of being law; it can only be commandment. All other commandments can pour their content into the form of the law, this one alone refuses to be decanted, its content tolerates only the form of the commandment, of the immediate presentness and unity where consciousness, expression and waiting for fulfillment are gathered together. So, as the one pure commandment, it is the highest of all commandments, and where it takes the lead as such, then all that could also be law by another route and seen from the outside also becomes a commandment. God’s first word to the soul that is united with him is the “Love me”; so, everything that he could still reveal to it otherwise under the form of law, is transformed without further ado into words which he commands it “today”; all this becomes the setting forth of the one and first commandment, the commandment to love him. All Revelation is placed under the great sign of the today; it is “today “ that God commands and it is “today that his voice is to be heard. It is the today in which the love of the lover lives – this imperative today of the commandment (190-192).

Messianic Politics (i): Two Traditions

After a long hiatus, I hope to begin posting again on a semi-regular basis. It is always difficult to maintain the intensity of expectation once the one who is expected actually arrives. It was probably no coincidence that the series of posts that I had planned to compose on the theme of the messianic were more difficult to write while in the midst of my daughter's parousia.

There are at least two traditions of messianism; but I am not thinking here of the ones that correspond to the different Abrahamic faiths. The traditions I have in mind transcend and encompass, to some degree, those of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. We can call the one an inflationary messianism and the other a deflationary. The former corresponds roughly to a "revolutionary" model while the later to a "reform" model; however, these names are imprecise enough to be abandoned. What is at stake in both the inflationary and the deflationary modes of the messianic is the status of law -- but again, this is not, fundamentally, the difference between Judaism and Christianity.

In the deflationary mode messianism represents a relatively minor alteration of the order of things. Here is the classic talmudic formulation of the messianic era:

"This world differs from [that of] the days of the Messiah only in respect of servitude to [foreign] powers." (Sanhedrin 99a)

The messianic era -- as distinct, it should be noted from redemption -- will differ for the Jews in one important respect: they will not be living under the power or law of any foreign nation. But law as such -- and this is the important distinction -- is not different. Torah will still be followed. Christian analogues can be found as well. For instance when Jesus says,

"Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill." (Matt 5.17)

This tradition of messianism continues up to the present day. The majority voice within both Judaism and Christianity is that of a deflationary messianism -- even if the church imagines itself to be beyond (Jewish) law, it persists, for the most part, in subjection to (state) law; this is due, no doubt, to a certain way of reading Romans 13 that favours the status quo. This is not to say, however, that deflationary messianism is commensurate with a reactionary politics or a rigid conservatism. Levinas and Rosenzweig, for instance, are thinkers of deflationary messianism.

Inflationary messianism, on the other hand, takes a different view of law in the messianic era. Agamben, borrowing heavily from Gershom Scholem's work on the messianic idea states the matter this way: "The Messiah is... the figure through which religion confronts the problem of the Law, decisively reckoning with it." (Potentialities,163).

Scholem saw the origins of this tradition less in the biblical literature -- which, in the Jewish tradition, according to Scholem, does not have a fully developed idea of messianism; it merely anticipates the messianic era -- and more in later messianic movements. Here the Sabbatian movement of 1648 is exemplary. This movement saw the messianic era as inaugurating a time where the Torah should no longer be kept; indeed, when the Torah should be overtly disobeyed. Other modern proponents of inflationary messianism would include Marx (in a disavowed form) and Benjamin (especially his "Critique of Violence" essay). Derrida is a figure who is slightly more difficult to place within this framework. His thinking of "the messianic without messianism" does not speak of a messianic era, only the messianic interruption of the present. To pursue the thought further would inevitably leave him too close to a "historical messianism" of one kind or another.

I preface my future posts on the messianic with this in order to show that messianism can be deployed in at least two modes. For now my focus will be on the inflationary messianism of Scholem, Benjamin, Agamben (and Taubes).