Agamben Symposium: Colby Dickinson

The divisions of sovereignty’


Πηγή εδώ

For years now, one of Giorgio Agamben’s major concerns has been the fracture that lies at the heart of modern humanity (i.e. humanity’s sense of sovereignty). This is something he has described in a variety of contexts as that which divides the experience of something from one’s knowledge of it (cf. his Infancy and History). Due to such a fracture, we are no longer able to experience life as we ought to. The task of poetry (as it deals with our experiences) is subsequently forever divided from that of philosophy (that which deals with our knowledge). Such divisions, I would add, have since become the preeminent focus of Agamben’s work, taking him on a quest against all forms of representation that would sever the ‘thing itself’ from its image. These thoughts, moreover, have taken him toward an inspection of similar divisions said to lie at the base of our perceptions of the divine (i.e. God’s sovereignty).
It should come as little surprise that a similar fracture lies at the heart of The Kingdom and the Glory, one focused on the divided nature of power itself, whether it be detected at work in the human being or in our constructs of God. One of the major points underscored by Agamben in this work is that ‘Power—every power, both human and divine […] must be, at the same time, kingdom and government, transcendent norm and immanent order’ (p. 82). The tensions that are created by the scission within us chart a course for ‘humanity’—for ‘being human’—as produced by an anthropological machinery that ceaselessly strives to articulate our existence (cf. Agamben’s The Open). And this would seem to explain why the creation of the human being has always been central to the political, philosophical and literary tasks that Agamben continuously critiques.
Regarding the comparison between the political and the theological specifically, Agamben furnishes a unique model for the exercise of power through a consideration of the dualistic tensions that govern over (and attempt to conceal) the fractured nature of power itself. And this would also seem to explain the very existence—and which appears as a necessary existence at that—of political theology. To make power socially operative, theology became the first major ‘institution’ (‘apparatus’ or ‘machinery’ would also be appropriate terms here) to put forth a particularly convincing paradigm to recuperate an Aristotelian definition of transcendence (God as at the origin of all things) in relation to immanence (the ‘secondary actions and causes’ of God’s very being, that is, the praxis that results from God’s nature) (p. 84). Aquinas’ subsequent appropriation of such a model, we are told, is what marks Christian theology forever after as it is intertwined with a specific form of political practice. God’s transcendent being is inevitably offset by our immanent order of government, just as our world points only to God’s being—a ‘necessary’ circular economy within our social existence. Theological speculations can therefore historically only move along an axis established by such a dualistic framework. Positions deemed more or less orthodox or more or less heretical will in reality only be fluctuations somewhere along this continuum. As Agamben puts it,

This apparent contradiction is nothing other than the expression of the ontological fracture between transcendence and immanence, which Christian theology inherits and develops from Aristotelianism. If we push to the limit the paradigm of the separate substance, we have the Gnosis, with its God foreign to the world and creation; if we follow to the end the paradigm of immanence, we have pantheism. Between these two extremes, the idea of order tries to think a difficult balance, which Christian theology is always in the process of losing and which it must at each turn regain. (p. 87)

The difficult and complex doctrine on the two natures of Christ is one such example that Agamben will isolate and elaborate upon in this context as an effort to maintain such a precarious equilibrium. Yet even a doctrine such as this one—from this viewpoint—is little more than another attempt to heal this same fracture at the heart of human identity. It is here that an economy of ‘human-being’ is established, as ‘Immanent and transcendent order once again refer back to each other in a paradoxical coincidence, which can nevertheless be understood only as a perpetual oikonomia, as a continuous activity of government of the world, one that implies a fracture between being and praxis and, at the same time, tries to heal it’ (p. 89; cf. p 111). Tries, but in the end, fails to heal.
Referring to the ‘transformation of classical ontology’ by subsequent Christian claims (and here relying heavily upon Augustine’s formulations), Agamben claims that western politics has its origins in western theological graftings of classical models for thinking-politics that are at the same time a form of political praxis. This is the inseparability of thought and praxis that will ultimately allow for a ‘pure critique’ to develop in his work (see the lucid exposition of this concept in Thanos Zartaloudis’ Giorgio Agamben: Power, Law and the Uses of Criticism). There is no doctrine that theology could espouse which does not also contain a practical, political program. Political theology is therefore not an ironic appellation, but an inherent correlation.
Not only is the substance of creatures nothing other than the activity of the divine dispositio, such that the being of creatures utterly depends on a praxis of government—it is, in its essence, praxis and government—but the very being of God—insofar as it is, in a special sense, measure, number, and weight, that is, order—is no longer only substance or thought, but also and in the same measure dispositio, praxis. Ordo names the incessant activity of government that presupposes and, at the same time, continually heals the fracture between transcendence and immanence, God and the world. (p. 90)
The fact that things appear as if they should be this way comes to us as a theological endorsement of divine providence (p. 111). Even Marx could thus be said to secularize this particular theological insight, now perceiving humans themselves as having to posit themselves again and again through their own ceaseless praxis (p. 91). As Agamben makes clear, modernity has not removed God from the scene; though it has turned to a repressed form of secularity, it has only intensified theology’s hold upon humanity (pp. 286-7).

Are there any paths open to a pantheistic deity beyond sovereign power?
Despite such condemnations of modern conjectures on the divine, I often wonder what Agamben is truly up to in his own musings on the nature of the divine, a point that The Kingdom and the Glory does not help clarify. For example, his ability to sketch a paradigm for perceiving the intertwined nature of politics and theology in the western world—one that places transcendence and immanence in a dynamic opposition—does not, however, address his own work elsewhere on the fundamental state of ‘absolute immanence’ that he takes up in its Spinozistic-Deleuzean register (I tried to address this theme somewhat in my Agamben and Theology). Can a form of philosophical (‘absolute’) immanence somehow escape the dualism of transcendence and immanence as posited by sovereign power, much as he claims that a form of ‘pure potentiality’ is beyond the dualism of potentiality and actuality (which also constitutes the axis of sovereign power)? How exactly would such a form of absolute immanence be removed from our political, representational tensions? That is, when he champions the positions of antinomian thinkers such as Saint Paul or Sabbatai Zevi, how is his version of antinomianism yet to escape being re-inscripted back into a binary system of representations?
This is, of course, no small point. It is rather the central question and point of critique surrounding Agamben’s work as a whole.
The ‘limit point’ of thought that Deleuze himself reached was one wherein he was able to consider the absolute indiscernability between immanence and transcendence, a point of vertigo where the inside and outside are virtually indistinguishable (see Agamben’s essay ‘Absolute Immanence’, p. 228). As can be understood from even a cursory glance at what he has been up to in trying to discern a ‘form of life’ that renders the distinction between law and life inoperative (cf. his recently published fourth volume of the Homo Sacer series, Altissima povertà), Agamben is seeking to bring the economies of the world and their representations to a point where they must grind their violent matrices of power to a halt. Agamben’s focus on the notion of ‘bare life’ is therefore an effort to highlight ‘the spectral dimension of the flesh correlative to a gap—a missing link—that haunts any narrative of the emergence of human subjectivity’, as Eric Santner has recently put it (Santner, The Royal Remains, p. 76).
What I would want to draw our attention to is the possibility that Agamben’s contentions with sovereign power and its relationship to our conceptions of the divine may in fact be playing out the dynamics of what Santner has referred to as the ‘pantheism debate’ that comes to the fore every century or so. In 1990, for example, Agamben’s remarks on God and the world in The Coming Community could be said to refer to some type of pantheism, a position certainly in keeping with his statements elsewhere on absolute immanence and other antinomian insistences. His resonance with certain theologians who have resisted sovereign (patriarchical) claims in favor of pantheistic urgings, such as Grace Jantzen has done, is therefore more than simply notable.
So how do such tendencies lean toward what Santner refers to as the ‘pantheism debate’, something that he suggests returns ‘at the end of each century under a different guise’ (p. 138n. 63). For Santner, this debate rages between two factions: what he calls the ‘biopolitical pantheists’ (Gilles Deleuze foremost among them), on the one hand, and the ‘creaturely messianists’ (including Walter Benjamin and Franz Rosenzweig), on the other. If Santner is indeed correct in labeling these contrasts as such, then Agamben’s work would appear to be an attempt to unite these diverse strands, much as his oeuvre often tries to unite its Deleuzean and Benjaminian elements. Such a reading of the messianic as Agamben attempts to formulate it, and as one can see already in the case of Benjamin, is coupled with the manner in which time (or creation) itself could be said to interrupt our constructed versions of history. In good parallel form, and as with any ‘object oriented’ approach, things themselves interrupt the constructions of our selves within history. As such, the force of the ‘natural’—beyond our ideological constructs of it—is asserted over and against our various conceptualizations of our world: a presentation beyond representation is consequently proclaimed to be possible. This would be the entrance of the ontological (the biopolitical) into our material world (hence, ‘pantheistic’ in a sense), the real mystery that humanity has tried to codify through its canonical impositions of anthropological construction, but which remains forever disruptive to such attempts (hence its messianic nature), according to Agamben’s claims.
This critique of history and of normative representations opens us up to the challenge of immanence as a path toward those forms of otherness that lie deep within us, interrupting our senses of self, community, history, sovereignty and the like. It is a political theology in the sense of evaluating the political tensions within a given theological field, a study which perhaps ultimately says little (if anything) about the nature of the divine itself. That is, it is a form of immanence that does not perhaps exclude the possibility of transcendence altogether. And this is why Agamben’s critique of the immanence/transcendence machinery of our world (government/kingdom) will always appear as a separate and yet intimately related issue alongside his own musings on the ‘real’ nature of the divine (i.e. any presumed pantheistic sentiments within his more strictly ontologically-constructive writings). His critiques, such as are registered in the Homo Sacer project, in fact seem rather to protect and preserve a space made available for the entrance of an indefinable and indescribable transcendence insofar as it serves (as ‘pure critique’) to eliminate all false forms of transcendence. The accompanying criticisms of traditional forms of transcendence (which Agamben shares with many a feminist theologians) are therefore a welcomed corrective to a sovereign (‘transcendent’ and hierarchical) discourse, though they perhaps do not yet do away with such discourses completely.
We are in fact often simply confronted in the end with the mystery of such tensions before us, one that ever widens rather than restricts its scope.
There is underneath this turn to an ‘absolute’ immanence what I will call a ‘political theology of immanence’—insofar as it is the collective voices of these critiques that merge with the ever-present possibility of what theology could be, an always present horizon for the divine to appear once again in the space traditionally occupied by (false) forms of transcendence (e.g. forms of very earthly sovereign power), though not necessarily as a completely immanent (pantheistic) deity, which Agamben among others, has hinted toward. Rather such a reading is to envision a political theology of immanence as an investigation of the theological from within, the minimum gesture of self-reflexivity of which theology has often suffered a lack. Such a political theology is not necessarily, it should be said, a speculation on the ontological nature of the divine. To conceive of a self-reflexive theological method, however, is certainly a challenge to those forms of theological discourse that are either purely ideological or based upon a transcendent-sovereign, patriarchal, colonial, or racist (hierarchical) structure, though it does not rule out the entrance of an ultimate transcendent deity tout court.
To acknowledge this possibility is to admit that the conflictual binary models constructed on the split between transcendence and immanence have often been grafted onto a reality that continues to exceed their representational limits, though it does not necessarily escape the realm of representations altogether. In fact, a political theology of immanence presents itself most prominently as a political theology insofar as it concerns itself with the contours of theology in the here and now, providing appropriate critiques of the theological endeavor yet with an aim toward preserving the mystery that lies at the heart of all revealed truths. As such, my hope would be that a political theology of immanence becomes capable of performing a certain justice to those excluded by or silenced within history (and its accompanying political representations), and that it yet also respects the mystery which could be said to lie at the heart of our most basic religious claims (in many ways a ‘political theology of transcendence’ though perhaps one needing today to be rehabilitated in light of present challenges). To ensure such a dual function—or that which is no doubt perceived by many as an impossible task—I would turn to something like the possibility of a radical theological hermeneutics that might begin to provide answers to such problematics as Agamben’s ‘pure critique’ opens .

Colby Dickinson is Assistant Professor of Theology at Loyola University, Chicago. He is the author of Agamben and Theology.

Joshua Dubler:Agamben Symposium

 

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Agamben Symposium: Joshua Dubler

Posted 7 June 2012 by Guest Post

Six months or so after Lehman Brothers disappeared, and two weeks after the Dow Jones hit a twelve-year low, the creators of South Park ran an episode called Margaritaville, the primary storyline of which recounted the failed attempt by one of the boys to return the eponymous blender that his idiot, moralizing father had bought. In a gleefully sloppy primer on the financial crisis, Stan follows the increasingly inscrutable chain of capital from the profligate consumers, to shady third-party financiers, to the securities bundlers of Wall Street, and ultimately, to the public sector ex post facto debt assumers. At the heart of financial darkness, Stan’s odyssey takes him to the Treasury Department where a tribunal of economists determines the value of his margarita maker to be ninety trillion dollars, a calculation determined, it is subsequently revealed, through a divining process involving men in powdered wigs, a kazoo, and a decapitated yet still ambulatory chicken tossed onto a wheel-of-fortune style game board labeled with a range of monetary, fiscal, political maneuvers: Socialize/ Let Fail/ Coup d’etat/ Bailout!
Treasury’s divining machine is but the coup de grace in a volley of absurdist riffs on the resonances between economics and religion, riffs that also include a bevy of street-corner apocalyptics preaching the need for penitent austerity before a wrathful Economy, and an idealistic Jew who with a platinum AMEX card takes on the collective debt of the country. (The economy is “not a supernatural all-knowing entity,” Kyle preaches, but “just an idea made up by people thousands of years ago… not real, and yet it is real…truly meaningless until we put our faith in it.”)
The economy of Margaritaville—the narrowly conceived economy of Econ departments and the stock pages—is notable in Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory largely for its absence. As an object of indefinite anticipation, it arrives in time for only a concluding appendix. For the preceding 250 pages, meanwhile, Agamben slowly sifts through two-millennia of Christian thought for the traces left by the concept over the course of its history. It is a dig by means of which he will coax the economy into revealing its unspoken theological secrets.

Anonymous artist, incarcerated at HM Prison Grendon

After a proto-secular preamble in Pseudo-Aristotle for whom the oikonomia was merely “the administration of the house” as opposed to that of the city, the concept begins to gather steam with the Church fathers. Agamben tracks the mutation from the “economy of the mystery”—which is how Justin characterizes Paul’s typological doctrine—to Irenaeus’ “mystery of the economy.” In the shift, oikonomia becomes the key for conceptualizing not merely the abstraction of the Trinity, but also the mysterious process through which the Trinity is articulated into the world, “conferring a hidden meaning upon every event” (50). This unity of divinity and economy, of being and practice, which characterizes the concept through late antiquity, soon fractures, splitting God into God the King on the one hand and God the Governor on the other. As King, God is transcendent, eternal and theoretical. As Governor, God is immanent, temporal and practical. From an anthropocentric standpoint, this split could not be more significant in that it makes possible and necessary both ethics (54), and more crucially for the story at hand, a governmental order (66). Subsequently, and what is true for Augustine will also be true for Hegel, “the problem of the ‘government’ of the world and its legitimization becomes the political problem that is in every sense decisive” (67).
That “Gnostic split” (140) between God the King and God the Governor is sutured in Providence. Through the two-tiered mechanism of the Providential Machine, God’s eternal Kingdom serves to found and legitimate a Christian government of men that must remain, inasmuch as the Christian history bends in the direction of humanity’s deliverance, on final analysis, extraneous. For the meantime, however, in this protracted cosmic interregnum, God’s agency is through the government of men wielded only vicariously. Consequently, Agamben argues, the problem of governance is paradigmatically not ontological but economic. Vis-à-vis the acts of governance, power is always allusive. Because every power “deputizes for another…there is not a ‘substance’ of power but only an economy of it.” (141). As far as power is concerned, that is to say, the pressing question is not what, but how.
If not a substance, power might be said to possesses a currency. That currency is glory. For the sustenance of both the divine Kingdom and Christian government, the flow of glory is necessarily wholly reciprocal. The government depends on the glory of God for its survival, but for his nourishment, God too needs glory, which he receives through the acclamations of men and women. And in this process of production and exchange, “the economy glorifies being, as being glorifies the economy” (209). Indeed, it is in this very velocity of circulation that glory is glorified. But this circulation on which both God and State so desperately depend is all that there is. In one of his big reveals, Agamben writes: “Government glorifies the Kingdom, and the Kingdom glorifies Government. But the center of the machine in empty, and the glory is nothing but the splendor that emanates from this emptiness, the inexhaustible kabhod that at once reveals and veils the central vacuity of the machine” (211). No gold standard props up this currency. The only thing backing it, rather, is a form of collective faith. The Amens and Hallelujahs of the church liturgy, and eventually, the displays of “public opinion” in modern politics, are not the instruments of power, they are power itself, a power derived from the glorious void that is located where its substance is supposed to be. And so, like Marx’s Protestant subject, freed in body at the cost of his soul, the contemporary media-saturated citizen is subject to “a glorious democracy, in which oikonomia is fully resolved into glory and the doxological function, freeing itself of liturgy and ceremonials, absolutizes itself to an unheard of extent and penetrates every area of social life” (259). Sacred pomp has been sublated into more devious and distributed forms. And so, just as the Protestant requires no sacraments for the greater glorification of God, so too are fascist parades, as a means for the glorification of the State, by now somewhat quaint.

anonymous artist, incarcerated at Wessex Youth Offending Service, 2009

The general arc of The Kingdom and the Glory is appealing and the fine granularity of Agamben’s archeology erodes one’s defenses. Nonetheless, at this preliminary stage of digestion, the book leaves me baffled in two distinct respects, which I mention here with the hope of feedback. My first site of puzzlement concerns what precisely Agamben is doing, and the second site pertains to what precisely Agamben hopes for what he is doing to do.
First—and this question could well be asked of much political theology—what precisely for Agamben is the ontological status of a concept across time? In some sense, the rules of the game are clear. By his own lights, Agamben is hoping to take Carl Schmitt’s seminal axiom that all central concepts of modern political theory are secularized theological concepts, and extend it to “the fundamental concepts of economy and the very idea of the reproductive life of human societies” (2). Contra Weber, secularization for Agamben is much more a matter of continuity than of rupture. In their secularized iterations, concepts evince a surplus of signification, which refer them back to their prior field or determinate interpretation. Agamben calls this surplus a “signature.” While a signature may be found wherever a concept has been displaced from one field to another, in the imperial realm of political theology into which the present study expands, that field, axiomatically, is theology. “Theological signature operates here as a sort of trompe l’oeil in which the very secularization of the world becomes the mark that identifies it as belonging to a divine oikonomia” (4). Much like in the resistance of the Freudian patient, the secular concept is one that protests too much the case of its non-religiosity. As Agamben dismisses one scholar who, in referring to the “traditional sense” of the term, fell prey to oikonomia’s ruses: “In truth, there is no theological ‘sense’ of the term, but first of all a displacement of its denotation onto the theological field, which is progressively misunderstood and perceived as a new meaning” (21). And so in its everyday usage the concept comes to obscure the theological character that to the Schmittian critic is nonetheless manifest.
What would be the proper metaphor for such a concept that at once obscures and betrays its displaced theological denotation? Because the historical movement of the concept over the centuries is crucial, the simple manifest/latent structure of the Freudian sign will surely not suffice. As well, because it effects the Schmittian critic rather than the subject at large, the language of the trompe l’oeil would seem to obscure more than it reveals. And so what? Are we talking about the concept’s DNA? Rings of xylem on the trunk of a tree? Russian dolls? Puppets and dwarfs? In the final analysis, how essential is the force of history? At times, (see, e.g., gubernatio, 126), Agamben’s concepts seem to possess an immanent telos. At other times, by contrast, (see, e.g., Aristotle’s rejection of fate as related to modern techniques of government, 124), the connection between the ancient and the modern seems much more tenuous, a matter less of genealogical provenance than of analogical resonance.
The hermeneutic fireworks that such revelations ignite not withstanding, what are the real consequences in and for practice of using modern concepts without attending to their displaced theological core/precursor/[ ]?
One yield seemingly—and here I jump from the internal logic of Agamben’s project to its intended implications—is a re-centering of political theory. “What our investigation has shown,” Agamben writes, “is that the real problem, the central mystery of politics is not sovereignty, but government; it is not God, but the angel; it is not the king, but ministry; it is not the law, but the police—that is to say, the governmental machine that they form and support” (276).

Alan Compo Norbert, via Prison Creative Arts Project

At risk of disrespecting one of the giants of our age with a spasm of anti-intellectualism, I feel compelled to ask: other than to the Schmittian archeologist, to whom is this reframing a surprise? I think back to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s critique of paranoid reading practices, which is as true today as it was the day she published it fifteen years ago. As Sedgwick complains: “Why bother exposing the ruses of power in a country where, at any given moment, 40 percent of young black men are enrolled in the penal system? In the United States and internationally, while there is plenty of hidden violence that requires exposure, there is also, and increasingly, an ethos where forms of violence that are hyper-visible from the state may be offered as an exemplary spectacle, rather than remaining to be unveiled as a scandalous secret” (Novel Gazing, 1997, 18). Sedgwick proceeds to talk about the visibility of torture, which back then required appealing to Argentina, i.e. someplace other than here. My point now is little more than Sedgwick’s point was then. If fighting against exploitation and injustice is what we are after, are we really suffering from the sort of collective misrecognitions for which a better archeology of concepts might serve as a corrective? In this age of clear, present and deliberate mass incarceration, perpetual war and unlimited corporate political spending for the purposes of things like climate change obstructionism, must we continue to vociferously dispel the baroque and subtle mysteriousness of our ideological ether?
So, however, it would seem, especially as far as the economy in its more colloquial sense is concerned. Indeed, it could be argued that the inscrutable, mysterious nature of the economy has been the dominant feature in the stories we have told about the financial collapse. I’m not talking about populists like Matt Bai or rationalist liberals like Paul Krugman (Thank God for them!) but in the narratives of NPR’s Planet Money, The Inside Job, and Michael Lewis’ Big Short and Boomerang, the human agents primarily responsible for our global economic mess are characterized less by their avarice or even their recklessness than by their cluelessness. Led through the nitty-gritty of collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps and other scholastic stuff I’m able to keep straight for about five minutes tops, the financial crisis comes across less a tragedy than a farce, not a crime but a folly. Again and again, the story is told of puffed up, ivy-educated 24-year olds on overpaid magician’s apprenticeships developing financial instruments that neither they nor anyone else understood, and—cue the kazoo—here we find ourselves in a brave new world of perpetual double-digit real domestic unemployment, austerity as brutal as it is mulish, and imploding countries on Europe’s periphery. There is much before us to be done, and yet, we choose to marvel.
As an intellectual matter, of course “the invisible hand” is theological! Who but an economist could possibly think otherwise? And yet, as liberal democracy wanes and neo-feudalism dawns, is it not exceedingly curious that the putative mysteriousness of the economy has become the open secret we must repeatedly declare?

Joshua Dubler is Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Rochester. He is the author of Down in the Chapel, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Agamben Symposium:Adam Kotsko

Genealogy and Political Theology:
On Method in Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory
The field of political theology has not yet been rigorously defined. It is more a field of affinities than a clearly delineated disciplinary space—a kind of “zone of indistinction” between theology and political theory where the terms of debate are still very much up for grabs. Even as the range and shape of political theology as a field of inquiry remain somewhat inchoate, however, there are points of reference that already seem more or less obvious or obligatory. The work of Giorgio Agamben is surely one of them, a status that The Kingdom and the Glory will just as surely reinforce.
Rarely has the work of documenting parallels between the political and the theological been carried to such a fine-grained level. Where much work in this field focuses on the sovereign decision and its analogies with the acts of God, here we are treated to visions of angels as God’s middle managers and of political ceremony as an echo of the acclamation that calls divinity into being. Yet at the same time as the analogy on which the field of political theology depends is filled in with such detail, the very notion of “political theology” (as developed by Carl Schmitt) is displaced in favor of the competing paradigm of “theological economy” (associated with Erik Peterson), and the miraculous “state of exception” fades in importance when compared to the providential “invisible hand.” By the end of Agamben’s analysis, it seems that the exemplary figure for what we call political theology is no longer the sovereign president, with his power to declare alleged terrorists homo sacer, but the technocratic central banker, whose invisible hand moves the entire economy through actions that few notice or understand.
Hence it seems likely that The Kingdom and the Glory’s influence will lead political theologians to devote greater attention to economics and to the concrete workings of government, and it is hard to object to such developments. Yet I believe that this work has something more fundamental to contribute to the field of political theology: its genealogical approach can point the way to greater methodological clarity in a field that too often relies on vague structural homologies.
Rather than directly laying out Agamben’s approach to genealogy, however, I will proceed by responding to a critique recently leveled against Agamben by Alberto Toscano (in “Divine Management”), which issues from a political engagement for which Agamben’s attention to matters of economy is all too belated: Marxist communism. In my view Toscano misconstrues Agamben’s project and its relationship to theology—but my purpose in addressing this issue is not so much to “correct” Toscano as to head off similar misunderstandings that could easily lead some in the field of political theology to embrace Agamben for the wrong reasons. Relatedly, Toscano’s attempt to play Agamben’s approach to genealogy off against more “standard” exemplars of the method like Nietzsche and Foucault points toward ways that Agamben’s argument in The Kingdom and the Glory could be expanded and deepened by future scholars.
Toscano lays great weight on the word “theological” in Agamben’s subtitle. For him, it indicates that Agamben is claiming that “the atheism or secularism which nominally characterize contemporary philosophy—be it liberal, conservative, or Marxist—are surface effects beneath which lie the compulsions of a theological matrix” (125). All this is reminiscent of a Radical Orthodox-style narrative according to which modernity is nothing but a derelict form of Christian heresy, and it is probably inevitable that at least a few theologians of that “sensibility” will embrace Agamben’s work on that basis.

Whether from a polemical or positive perspective, however, such a view of Agamben’s project here does not square with the rest of his work. I have tried to show elsewhere that Agamben’s method, drawn from Walter Benjamin, places no importance on the line between the religious and the secular (see my essay in After the Postsecular and the Postmodern). In The Sacrament of Language, for instance, he frequently castigates theorists of religion who too easily demarcate “the religious” as a purely separate sphere, and in The Kingdom and the Glory, he takes a similar line on the “secularization debate.” His dismissal of the latter may, as Toscano says, be “haughty” (127)—Agamben’s work is, to put it lightly, characterized by ample self-assurance—but it does not indicate any kind of preference for the religious over against the secular.
Rather than indicating an attempt to discredit secular modernity—and hence Marxism—it thus seems to me that the phrase “theological genealogy” indicates simply that he is carrying out the theological portion of a hypothetical complete genealogy of “economy and government.” That is, he is particularly concerned with the vicissitudes of the concept of oikonomia when it goes through a kind of hibernation in the rarefied realms of scholastic philosophy, providing only a sketchy account in the concluding appendix of how it reawakened in the thought of key early moderns, from which it would spring again into practice in the concrete techniques of governance.
This leads to Toscano’s critique of Agamben’s genealogical method, which he argues is too “substantial” and “idealist” to count as a proper genealogy. Here again, the notion of a “theological” genealogy assumes prime importance:

This has to do with the idea of a theological origin. Behind this reference lies not only Agamben’s sympathy towards the Schmittian notion of secularization but the conviction, mediated by a pervasive Heideggerianism, of a historical-ontological continuity which allows one to argue that our political horizon is still determined—and worse, unconsciously determined—by semantic and ideational structures forged within a Christian theological discourse. (128)

In Toscano’s view, such a stance puts Agamben dangerously close to embracing the Christian apologetic claim that the Christian patrimony has been somehow “stolen” by modernity and needs to be restored to its rightful place.
More importantly, Toscano also argues that it represents a betrayal of Foucault, for whom genealogical research was first of all about discontinuity. Toscano quotes several passages from Foucault, but one could also return to the genealogical ur-text of Nietzsche:

there is for historiography of any kind no more important proposition than the one it took such effort to establish but which really ought to be established now: the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart; whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it; all events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation, an adaptation through which any previous ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ are necessarily obscured or even obliterated…. the entire history of a ‘thing,’ an organ, a custom can in this way be a continuous sign-chain of ever new interpretations and adaptations whose causes do not even have to be related to one another but, on the contrary, in some cases succeed and alternate with one another in a purely chance fashion. (Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, Section 12)

The emphasis here is clearly on discontinuity. The thing that has “somehow come into being”—a phrasing that obviously displaces the question of origin—becomes caught up in a power struggle whose results could not have been predicted, and it is the aleatoric path of that power struggle that is of real interest. Yet in order for a genealogical narrative to make sense, there has to be some reference to origin and some sense of continuity. The thing that gets caught up in the power struggle has, after all, “somehow come into being,” and over the course of the power struggle it remains, in some sense, still recognizably that thing. It is, however, not that thing in the sense of a persistent substance or concept that would exhaustively determine in advance the kinds of relationships it would enter into or the uses to which it would be put—hence Agamben’s use of the term “signature” to indicate this less strictly defined point of continuity.
Genealogy does reject the easy continuity posited by something like the “history of ideas,” but that doesn’t mean there is no continuity whatsoever. At the same time that genealogy is concerned with discontinuity and rupture, it also reveals what might be called inertial effects. One can see this in Nietzsche’s Genealogy: certainly no one would have predicted that the logic of debt would get tangled up in the bad conscience and become guilt, but at the same time, the logic of guilt is still recognizable as a descendant of the logic of debt.
In this sense, I would argue that Agamben’s genealogy is very much in the spirit of the “classic” genealogists. Who would have guessed that oikonomia, a concept of household management, would be pressed into the service of imperial administration? And from there, who could have possibly anticipated that it would become an important point of reference for Christian articulations of the inner life of the Trinitarian God, then supply the paradigm for God’s indirect providential guidance of the course of world history, only to wind up as a guiding principle for the management of people and things toward the end of endless accumulation of capital? “Economy” remains somehow recognizable within each of these contexts, yet the shifts are strange and vertiginous, and the new contexts significantly change its character and function.
While I don’t agree with Toscano that Agamben betrays the genealogical method, I do concede that Agamben’s “pervasive Heideggerianism” (128) is problematic in several respects. The difficulty, however, is not so much that the influence of Heidegger leads him to a too-substantial view of the concepts or “signatures” at play in his genealogy, but rather that his Heideggerian sympathies lead him to flatten out the historical field through which they move. Like Heidegger, Agamben seems to view “the West” as an unproblematic historical unity, for which the advent of modernity represents at best a particularly extreme development. He certainly does not appear to regard the Christian era as something notably different from the late classical era, and his account of the history of Christian thought treats the patristic and medieval periods as essentially one undifferentiated field.
Agamben’s fidelity to the genealogical task pushes against this Heideggerian oversimplification, but the Heideggerian influence does artificially limit the number of “pivot points” in his narrative. It is clearly the case that Agamben has more work to do in connecting up his “theological genealogy” with modernity, but in my view he also still has more work to do in fully developing the “theological genealogy,” with greater attention to the twists and turns of the history of Christianity and of Christian thought. I would argue in addition that he needs to cast a wider net in terms of filling out the context within which the notion of “economy” operates in any given era—for instance, “economy” is central to the way the patristic writers understood the salvation that God had brought about in Christ, and so why couldn’t Agamben look at some of their narrative accounts of how that plan was supposed to have been carried out? The very significant difference between patristic and medieval narratives of salvation would have made it clear that no easy continuity can be found between the two era’s notions of “economy” (I carry out a detailed comparison of patristic and medieval accounts of the narrative of salvation in my book Politics of Redemption).
Overall, though, it seems to me that Agamben’s genealogical approach provides a rigorous and flexible methodology for the field of political theology—and in fact, it provides a point of view from which Agamben’s own project can be critiqued, deepened, and extended.

Adam Kotsko is Assistant Professor at Shimer College. He is the author, most recently, of Why We Love Sociopaths (Zero Books, 2012). He blogs at An und für sich.

Agamben Symposium: William Robert

Agamben Symposium: William Robert

Posted 22 June 2012 by Guest Post

All About Glory

Glory doesn’t work. Amen.

This condensed assertion and acclamation get at the heart of Giorgio Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory, the second part of the second part of his Homo Sacer project (whose volumes include Homo Sacer, State of Exception, and Remnants of Auschwitz). The Kingdom and the Glory’s subtitle, For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, allusively explains the Foucaultian-feeling rhythms according to which this text pulses—rhythms that animate the Homo Sacer project from its inception but which come to archaeological fruition in The Kingdom and the Glory. In Foucaultian fashion, The Kingdom and the Glory’s initial six sections trace a meticulous, albeit particular, conceptual genealogy through early and medieval Christian theologies (a genealogy replete with long quotations that serve as evidential support) whose impetus comes, indirectly, from an intertextual conversation between Erich Peterson and Carl Schmitt, which recurs throughout Agamben’s text. More directly, the impetus comes from Agamben’s explicit aim of catching, via theology, “a glimpse of something like the ultimate structure of the governmental machine of the West in the relation between oikonomia and Glory” (xii)—a relation he casts in State of Exception in terms of auctoritas and potestas.

Building on his earlier engagements with the Pauline epistles (most notably in The Time That Remains) and animated by archaeological fervor and philological attentiveness, Agamben wades deeply in the waters of early Christian theologies to discover the oikonomia animating the Trinity and debates concerning it. Why? Because, he asserts, “the link established by Christian theology between oikonomia and history is crucial to an understanding of Western philosophy [sic] of history” (46). (Despite this claim as well as his argument’s unmistakably dialectical character, The Kingdom and the Glory is nearly, and rather suspiciously, Hegel-free.) Following considerations of oikonomia and mystery, the providential machine, the angelic bureaucracy, and other topics, Agamben’s final chapter offers his archaeology of glory. As he does throughout, he begins with a modern reference (in this case, Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics) before moving through a premodern genealogy that, via Moses Maimonides, recalls exilic, prophetic, and apocalyptic scenes from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.

Among these scenes is the mystical throne vision that opens the prophetic Biblical book bearing Ezekiel’s name. Following an amazing sequence of images—one that implicitly illustrates what Agamben calls an “optical phenomenology of glory” (204)—Ezekiel reveals that he has seen the glory (in transliterated Hebrew, kabhod) of God. Well, not exactly. Technically, Ezekiel has seen “the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD” or (translated differently) “the appearance of the semblance of the Presence of the LORD” (Ezekiel 1.28, NRSV and JPS translations, respectively). Ezekiel sees, then, not God’s glory but an appearance of its semblance. Agamben cites this passage (201), but he doesn’t dwell on it—which is surprising, since it seems an incredible and incredibly illuminating example of what he finds compelling about glory. That is, Ezekiel does not see glory but something approximating something approximating glory. Glory remains unseen, perhaps unseeable, and Ezekiel’s vision of glory is, as a vision of glory, an empty vision—or a vision of an emptiness (more on this below.)

Glory thus functions as what Agamben, following Foucault and Melandri, names a signature: “something that in a sign or concept marks and exceeds such a sign or concept” (4) or, more elaborately, “something that, in a sign or a concept, exceeds it to refer it back to a specific interpretation or move it to another context, yet without exiting the field of the semiotic to construct a new meaning” (87). Agamben’s archaeology of glory is, then, an archaeology of signatures, for as he methodologically remarks, “archaeology is a science of signatures, and we need to be able to follow the signatures that displace the concepts and orient their interpretation toward different fields” (112). (For extended, methodological reflections on archaeology and signatures, see the second and third chapters of Agamben’s The Signature of All Things: On Method, which include references to a host of theological voices.)

Glory as signature points to the relations of Kingdom and Government, particularly insofar as “glory is the place where theology attempts to think the difficult coincidence between immanent trinity and economic trinity, theologia and oikonomia, being and praxis” (208). (This “difficult coincidence” becomes more difficult given that glory “is also the place in which the risk of non-coincidence between being and praxis and of a possible asymmetry in the [Trinitarian] relation between the three divine persons is at its highest” [209].) In this place of glory, then, a dialectic unfolds: government glorifies kingdom, and kingdom glorifies government, so that “Kingdom and Government constitute the two elements or faces of the same machine of power” (230). But, Agamben tellingly writes, “the center of the machine is empty, and glory is nothing but the splendor that emanates from this emptiness, the inexhaustible kabhod that at once reveals and veils the central vacuity of the machine” (211).

This “inexhaustible kabhod” recalls Ezekiel’s throne vision, in which the throne is essentially empty, thus exemplifying that the iconography of power, glory’s signature vacuity, is perfectly imaged by the empty throne. As Agamben remarks, “the empty throne is not, therefore, a symbol of regality but of glory” (245). He continues: “the apparatus of glory finds its perfect cypher in the majesty of the empty throne. Its purpose is to capture within the governmental machine that unthinkable inoperativity—making it is internal motor—that constitutes the ultimate mystery of divinity” (245). The empty throne is an image of glory that images glory’s inoperativity. Glory, Agamben maintains, occupies a place of inoperativity, since glory keeps ultimately hidden from view—for Ezekiel, for Agamben, and for us—an inoperativity both theological and political, divine and human, one so essential to both that it must be maintained in the form of glory as katapausis. In other words, glory is inoperative; it doesn’t work.

Here, Agamben seems to miss a point of potentially productive tangency with Jean-Luc Nancy’s work on inoperativity, or desoeuvrement. In The Inoperative Community’s title essay, Nancy develops an account of community as inoperativity that takes up Christian figures of divinity and relationality in ways that seem incredibly close to Agamben’s, so that Nancy’s inoperative community would appear as a supportive supplement to Agamben’s inoperative glory as the empty center of kingdom and government. Though I will forego here an exegetic unfolding of this contention, a reading of Nancy’s text alongside Agamben’s will evince their striking proximity—so striking that Agamben’s lack of references to Nancy seems a decided omission, for reasons that remain opaque (at least to me, particularly since Agamben explicitly discusses in Homo Sacer Nancy’s treatment of desoeuvrement). This missed encounter becomes a productive direction for future work on these themes—work that would, by way of Nancy and Agamben, also engage Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Peterson and Schmitt, and the very possibility or impossibility of political theology in Christian and post-Christian contexts. This productive direction would include in its horizon Nancy’s remarks on “biopolitics,” particularly since Agamben returns inoperativity to the sphere of life, of bios and zōē, in identifying subjectivity as “a central inoperativity,” one in which “the life that we live is only the life through which we live,” or “the live-ability of every life,” where “the bios coincides with the zōē without remainder” (251).

To return to glory’s inoperativity: the empty throne, as an image of glory, is not an empty vision but a vision of emptiness as inoperativity. The empty throne is an image of glory, a signature that cyphers God’s ultimate mystery, to which the only viable theological response becomes not predication but praise—praise as doxology and glorification. Once again, Agamben invokes Ezekiel’s throne vision, this time for its eschatological elements that are entwined with “the originary paradigm of all Christian liturgical doxologies” (244). (This entwining also reiterates Agamben’s naming of inoperativity as the “messianic operation par excellence” [249].) Glory, as inoperativity, is “the eternal amen” (239), with amen serving in Christian liturgical contexts as “the acclamation par excellence” (230). As such, amen is ultimately empty of signifying content, yet its emptiness—like that of the throne—is what grants its efficacy: “that of producing glory” (232). Dialectically, then, glory, as inoperativity, is “the eternal amen,” and amen, itself semantically inoperative, produces glory.

In other words, glory doesn’t work. Amen. Therein lies the oikonomia of inoperativity, the linguistic performance akin to the iconography of the empty throne, at the heart of The Kingdom and the Glory.
William Robert is Assistant Professor of Religion at Syracuse University. He is the author of Trials: Of Antigone and Jesus (Fordham, 2010).

Roland Boer:Some Thoughts on The Kingdom and the Glory

Agamben and the Arctic Lily: Some Thoughts on The Kingdom and the Glory
I began reading Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory as part of a larger reading agenda for a project called ‘The Sacred Economy’. Would not a book that seeks to re-examine the question of oikonomia, tracing it back to classical Greek usage in relation to the mundane domestic sphere, through its appropriation and retooling by the church ‘fathers’ and then its subsequent secularisation prove useful? For some strange reason, it proves to be so.
Of course, the near obsessive etymological sifting through texts that contain the word oikonomia is useful in a catalogue kind of fashion. Worthy of attention are the serious reflections over angelology as the key to a theory of managerial world power (the EU!), and the extended argument that all the peacock-like gowns, archaic mutterings, hocus-pocus and extravagant ritual and pomp are crucial for the very constitution of power. Perhaps the queer appropriations of such matters – via camp – had a greater insight than at first seemed to be the case (it is a pity Agamben does not offer such a camp reading). I must admit to feeling a little let down by the conclusion that all this pomp and ceremony has now been transferred to popular consensus, even to the media circus that passes for modern democracy. Given a choice, I always prefer the queer excess embodied in those fancy robes, mitres, measured steps and solemn monotones.
Be that as it may, I wish to register some scattered misgivings regarding Agamben’s latest offering. They concern theology and origins, secularisation, church history, universals and the arctic lily.
Theology and Origins
On the opening page, Agamben writes: ‘Locating government in its theological locus in the Trinitarian oikonomia does not mean to explain it by means of a hierarchy of causes, as if a more primordial genetic rank would necessarily pertain to theology’ (p. xi). Instead, he suggests that theology is a ‘privileged laboratory’, the ‘paradigmatic form’ of the ‘governmental machine’. This initial formulation gave me some hope that Agamben’s notorious searches for origins would at least be qualified. Privileged, if not a paradigmatic laboratory, theology might be, but certainly not a cause. Reading the book leaves me wondering whether there really is any difference between privilege, paradigm, hierarchy and origins.
Secularisation
Let me take the example of secularisation, which Agamben understands in a rather conventional sense. Eschewing Weber’s theory of disenchantment and detheologisation, Agamben opts for Schmitt’s argument that secularization enables theology ‘to be present and active in an eminent way’. That is, ‘it concerns a particular strategic relation that marks political concepts and refers them back to their theological origin’ (p. 4, my emphasis). He wishes to give this a Foucauldian twist, by designating secularisation as a ‘signature’, which may be defined as ‘something that in a sign or concept marks or exceeds such a sign or concept referring it back to a determinate interpretation or field, without for this reason leaving the semiotic to constitute a new meaning or a new concept’ (p. 4). Again, the emphasis is mine: not only do we have a theological origin, but theology provides the semantic and theoretical boundary fence, in which no gate may be found, and around which guards patrol, searching one for wire cutting implements. Turn you may, seeking a way out, but theology is ‘decisive at every turn’. Trapped thus, ‘secularization operates in the conceptual system of modernity as a signature that refers it back to theology’ (p. 4). Or to shift the metaphor, one may feel that one has stepped from heaven to earth, but earth itself turns out to be a manifestation of heaven.
It now seems special pleading, teasing perhaps, to suggest that he is not interested in causes, hierarchies or origins. Or rather, his argument is far more robust, secured by those beefy theoretical security guards: paradigm, laboratory, origin, enclosure, universe that one cannot leave.
In this light, the reader encounters one old saw after another, even if Agamben claims them, à la Foucault, as brilliant original insights: the ‘Hegelian Left’ replicates the ‘economic’ link between divine revelation and history, in which the human economy is a transferal of the divine (p. 46); Führung (Schmitt etc.) is a secularisation of the ‘pastoral paradigm’ (Foucault) (p. 76); Marx’s praxis, as the self-production of ‘man,’ is but the secularisation of the theological idea ‘of the being of creatures as divine operation’ (p. 90). And so on.
Church History
All of which brings me to church history, although it is a history implicit in Agamben’s etymological scouring of texts (his claims to ‘historical research’ notwithstanding). Church history? At a crucial but unacknowledged point, Agamben replicates Foucault’s unexamined decision to follow the Counter-Reformation in his archaeology of governmentality. Agamben is of course the champion of locating the blind spot, the unsaid of any work, to the extent of attempting to locate his own. But he is blinded here by his own apparent insight. So we find a seamless narrative that runs from the church ‘fathers’ through to Aquinas and Roman Catholic thinkers such as the eternally present Schmitt (who actually anticipates Foucault, p. 75) and a recovered Erik Peterson. That Peterson was himself a convert to Roman Catholicism may be read as the trace of Agamben’s own fateful decision to follow in Foucault’s steps.
The smoothness of this narrative appears in the ease with which Agamben moves back and forth between Gregory of Nazianzus or Clement of Alexandria – to cull but two from a large gaggle of church ‘fathers’ – and Thomas Aquinas, Erik Peterson, Schmitt, or any other of his odd collection of theologians. (The selectiveness of this gathering renders the grand Agambanesque swipes at ‘modern theologians’ somewhat amusing, if not exasperating.)
This point may be illustrated by a search for any significant Protestant, or indeed Orthodox, theologian. Luther appears occasionally, but significantly marginalised. So we encounter him in terms of the ‘Lutheran error’ (p. 137), or following Augustine in an amusing aside, castigating those who ask what God was doing before he made heaven and earth – ‘He sat in the forest, cutting rods to beat those who ask impertinent questions’ (p. 162). To be fair, Luther does have a more positive appearance, now offering a warning from the sidelines not to be blinded in the effort to ‘penetrate glory’ (195-6), but it is still from the sidelines. Or, if Agamben does engage in a more substantial discussion, as with Barth (pp. 211-16), it is only insofar as Barth uses ‘singularly lofty tones that seem more suited to a Catholic theologian’ (p. 215). As for Calvin … Tellingly, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli et al are absent from the bibliography. One can only suppose that they have nothing substantial to contribute on matters of the economy, governance, power, providence, politics or indeed glory.
Of course, my response has a partisan edge, a counter to Agamben resolute partisanship. But that partisanship operates with what may be called a singular universal of exclusion. Anyone who does not fit is absorbed, crushed or ignored. Would it not better to operate with a universal of inclusion, or perhaps multiple universes?
Translatability
The question of multiple universes brings me to what may be called translatability. On this matter, Agamben is torn. His search for the ultimate theological paradigm, his definition of secularisation, his version of church history all speak of the all-encompassing theological compound in which politics and philosophy play their games. Yet on at least one occasion, he glimpses the possibility that theology may provide one language, a limited collection of codes for speaking of such matters.
After a painstaking exploration of Kantorowicz, along with Alföldi and Schramm, he observes that ‘the relation between the theological and political is not univocal, but always runs in both directions’ (p. 193). Here is some promise, recognition of the limited and relative codes of theology in relation to politics. Now we might begin to think of revolution as the political code for grace and miracle, and vice versa. Or of the theological use of ‘economy’ as but one, restricted use – the narrative of the passage from domestic use to theological to political earlier in the book suggests as much. Agamben even notes Assmann’s astute counter to Schmitt: ‘the significant concepts of theology are theologized political concepts’. Schmitt of course urged the opposite – ‘all significant concepts of the modern secularized theological concepts’ (p. 193).
Too soon the opening is closed down, for according to Agamben, ‘every inversion of a thesis remains, however, in some sense implicitly in agreement with the original’. Schmitt’s authority remains undimmed. But this is not Agamben’s last word, for he goes on to find an even more originary moment. Rather than taking sides in this debate, he seeks the medium of exchange, the currency by which these two sides – theology and politics, spiritual power and profane power – may connect. And he finds it in glory, which provides a prior moment of indistinction, indetermination, an undifferentiated ‘secret point of contact’.
Arctic Lily
So finally the artic lily. The move I have just followed, in which Agamben seeks an amorphous and prior common ground between an opposition is common in his works. It appears, for instance, in his curious search for the amoebal pre-law that lies behind the opposition of faith and law in Paul’s thought, a pre-historical point from which all of Paul’s oppositions begin to make sense.
In that earlier work on Paul, Emile Benveniste provides the methodological inspiration for such a move. Yet it relies upon the flimsiest of linguistic arguments in order to concoct supposedly ancient Indo-European practices and institutions. Benveniste appears briefly in The Kingdom and the Glory, in an effort to locate the truth behind the roi mehaignié, the mutilated or ‘fisher’ king of the Grail Legend. This kind of linguistic dabbling, creating hypotheses on the basis of odd mythic traces, is a distinctly nineteenth and early twentieth century speculative practice tied up closely with the dubious Indo-European hypothesis.
I would like to call this method the arctic-lily method. Why arctic lily? More than three decades ago, I studied Sanskrit in a class of four – a steel worker, a single mother, a gay mathematics teacher and me. We met late in the evenings, filling the room with cigarette smoke, tossing down cheap sherries, led by a uniquely entertaining and bum-fondling professor. At one point, we came across a troublesome Sanskrit word (I forget which). Our professor paused, pondered and announced that it designated a specific flower.
‘Here we find’, he said, ‘a reference to the pre-historic origins of human civilisation above the Arctic Circle’.
Cigarettes hung on lips; sherries poised in mid-air.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The original meaning of this word is probably artic lily. Fermented, it produced the first alcoholic beverage made by human beings. Which goes to prove that human civilisation did indeed emerge first above the Arctic Circle’

Agamben Symposium: Charles Mathewes

1. Hollywood and academia may not often be thought of in one breath, but they do share some things, not the least being a hyperventilating and parochial culture of celebrity. Having been in this business now for a few of these cycles, I’ve seen ‘em come and I’ve seen ‘em go. Which figures are selected to be smiled upon by the fame machine seems almost random, a matter of tuche, the semi-theological bad luck of those who are selected, by a blind fate, or an erratic Greek deity. The perduring and valuable work of genuine scholars mounts in height and depth gradually over decades, chiseled out of serious matter, and their import is often recognized only in retrospect, late in a career or after the author is dead. Others—the academic version of one hit wonders—flash up in an instant, are talked about—though not as often talked to, and still less often carefully read—for a frenzied spasm of a few years, then are dropped like an empty foil bag of chips, left to blow heedlessly among the trees in the groves of academe, or to wander the halls of academic conferences, for decades to come.
I’m afraid, but I’m quite sure, that the work of Agamben falls into the celebrity category. This is too bad, because—as is so often the case—he has some worthy insights and challenges for scholars working in political theology. What, once his fifteen minutes are up, will they be?
Here I can only offer a somewhat educated conjecture. But it is true that much of what he is best known for now rests on dubious conceptual and etymological distinctions (zoe and bios), a series of reduction ad absurdum arguments whose scandalousness rests on their superficiality (Aristotle leads to Auschwitz? Moderns are all Muselmänner?), and insights remarkable to readers only insofar as their knowledge of history and the history of thought is deficient (state of exception? Louis XIV’s cannons had ultima ratio regis imprinted around their mouths, and anyone who has read Augustine on judging has encountered these worries before).
What I think he will be known for is raising, in a certain oblique way, a question about how fully language can wholly represent our reality. This is a post-Hegelian question, a question about the limits of language, of representation, and ultimately of our capacity to comprehend our world. And those of us who want to respond to it will of course have to contend with the fact that our response itself will likely take linguistic form, at least initially. (Such is certainly the case here.) The radicality of this critique is undeniable: like Hardt and Negri, and Benjamin and Adorno before them, there is a kind of radically apophatic, indeed atheological messianism, yet one so serious about the genuinely messianic character of its messianism that it raises questions, mostly indirectly but occasionally directly, about the ultimate difference between the theological and atheological messianism, when pressed to their uttermost extent.

2. This is a general claim, and one illustrated best perhaps by attention to a concrete case. Fortunately one such interesting case exists, in this interesting book by Agamben, and it lies at the heart of the whole project of his multivolume Homo Sacer. It is the question of what lies at the center, at the very heart, of Christian faith, and of the Christian cosmos. More specifically, Agamben raises questions about the centrality of praise to the Christian life, and claims to find some aporias inherent in this praise, aporias that, he thinks, reveal a devastating emptiness at the heart of Christian theology and through that, at the heart of modern society and especially modern politics.
Agamben correctly recognizes the centrality of praise in most prominent Christian accounts of God, creation, and the human (though his route to recognizing it is curious, at best), and he builds his own rival account around what he sees as the vacuity of the traditional picture. He understands that Christians believe that humans are created to praise, and offer well-merited praise to the God who created them wholly gratuitously ex nihilo. Yet God does not need this praise, for God’s own inner dynamism is already wholly, infinitely, engaged in the activity of loving God’s own being. So far, so good standard Trinitarian doctrine. But Agamben does something interesting here. He suggests that this praise, this giving of glory, is more primordial to God than love is—that love is really nothing but this giving of glory. God is, then, composed of nothing but praise—so that in God’s own aseity of the immanent trinity, “God is, in other words, literally composed of praise, and, by glorifiying him, men are admitted to participate in his most intimate existence” (pp. 220-21). Theosis, then, is nothing more than an especially dramatic form of narcissism transference.
This creates problems, Agamben thinks, because it suggests that “doxology is, perhaps, in some way a necessary part of the life of the divinity” (p. 221). (I especially appreciate the “perhaps” here, which is just one example of the Tourette-like scattering of graduate student pseudo-caution throughout the text.) Perhaps, for Agamben, God is nothing but praise, praise we give, hence nothing other but our alienated compliments. Perhaps the Triume perichoresis is nothing more than a vacuous whirlwind, our endless effort at trying to pat ourselves on the back, a self-congratulatory willing of amor sui into being via causa sui, a kind of solipsism arising ex nihilo.

3. From this, Agamben builds an account of a not-unrelated problem for modern politics. He says that “glory, the acclaimative and doxological aspect of power…seemed to have disappeared in modernity” (xii), but this is not so. As he puts it, “modern power is not only government but also glory, and…the ceremonial, liturgical, and acclamatory aspects that we have regarded as vestiges of the past actually constitute the basis of Western power” (p. xii). Thus the empty throne of which he makes so much, and the basis of his claim that, in politics as well as in theology, “the center of the governmental machine is empty” (p. xiii). From this he sees the empty echo-chamber of politics derived as well, as our desire to praise once manifest in theology has now become transubstantiated into a this-worldly political register, more or less. In this case the emperor is not only not glorious; he has no clothes, either. This is, in a way, Augustine and Calvin as read through Feuerbach, and then transposed into a semi-Foucauldian register.
I agree with that insight, though I come at it (I think) more honestly, by a reading of Augustine and Calvin on idolatry and our mind’s continuous desire to worship and praise, and by a reading of various civic republicans about the danger of tyranny. And I would also agree with him that “a more primordial genetic rank [does not] necessarily pertain to theology” (p. xi)—which I take to mean that he doesn’t want to say that politics is theology or it is nothing. But on second thought, that is what I want to say, at least in a way, at least insofar as it means this: a political psychology that ignores the theological dimensions of politics, as so many do today, is not simply stunted but in some important ways misoriented from the start, as the last decade or so has shown us time and time again.
But here is where his account becomes nihilistic and finally frivolous. It’s not just that his construal of theology is finally nihilistic; that I’ve seen before, of course. It’s rather that his picture of modern politics is so radically anchored upon that atheology to be fatuous. And the alternatives he urges on his audience, the gestures he makes towards another picture, are so apophatic, so anemic, as to amount to a cynical shrug.
What do I mean by this? Well, at least two things. First of all, the idea that glory has simply secularized into something like political “consensus” is extremely reductionistic and blinding. He says “to have completely integrated Glory with oikonomia in the acclaimative form of consensus is, more specifically, the specific task carried out by contemporary democracies and their government by consent” (p. xii)—actually, no; glory has been distributed through liberal society as expressed in the category of privacy and individuality, in the idea of the liberal individual, and in the fascinating and deeply problematic notion of celebrity, including academic celebrity of the sort Agamben himself enjoys at present and with which my response began above. That is, Agamben wants to imagine that the society of the spectacle is in some fundamental way essentially a matter of governmentality, that “everything is political” in the sense of being about subservience to an alien sovereign, that cultural forces have no autonomy but are simply a mask for the political. I recognize that this sort of paranoid reduction of all things to power is still common today, almost three decades after Foucault’s death; but I cannot accept it. This is a politics based on the cynicism of 1968—on the collapse of revolutions into triviality—a politics, that is, that cannot accommodate phenomena like 1989, the phenomenon of real, lasting, this-worldly revolution for the good.
Second, Agamben’s picture of the state as totalitarian is hysterically overdrawn and does not let him see the true character of the challenges facing us today, does not let him see the realities of politics today. His politics is almost entirely a way to say that no one has any real political power; that nothing ever really changes; that efforts to change things are wrong-footed from the start, and that efforts at pragmatic change in particular are for suckers; that the only change worth imagining, or hoping for (but note: not worth attempting, for it must come, not be created) is the pseudo-theological fantasy of what Bernard Yack long ago rightly named “the longing for total revolution,” though now this is moved in even straightforwardly mystificatory directions by translation into a pseudo-theological register. I can understand the apocalyptic disgust at the sordid compromises of real politics (hey—I live in the United States, after all!), the weariness at facing the ever-new, ever-old, and ever-perpetual task of, in Weber’s terms, the long, slow boring of very hard boards.
In this sense, in fact, despite his protestations, Agamben is not so much Arendtian as anti-Arendtian, or rather a late example of the sort of otherworldly and escapist philosophical thinking that she sought to oppose when it turned to politics. In a way I’m not surprised that this is what passes for advanced political thought on the Continent these days; the hangover from the orgy of Cold War Marxism lingers on, and in any event the character of European public life has not given anyone a taste for self-governance for quite some time, being as it is more a parody of politics than a site of consequential political deliberation. The utter evacuation of political life from the E.U. in favor of a bureaucratic technocracy—a phenomenon that is particularly pointed in Agamben’s home state of Italy, where the technocrats have now been replaced (if they were ever in place in the first place) by kleptocrats—these realities go a long way toward explaining the near-complete innocence about real politics that marks his writing at every turn.

4. Yet there is something of interest, though (perhaps unsurprisingly) it is framed not most immediately as a this-worldly political question, but rather as a theological one. It is the question on pp. 240-42 of the book, the question of whether or not Augustine’s account of paradise has any positivity to it at all. Agamben thinks it does not—that the entire thing is kind of a shell-game, meant to distract us from the gaping hole at the center, what he labels “the unthinkable nature of the inoperativity of the blessed” (p. 241), an “unsayable vacuity” (p. 242) at the heart of the City of God.
Obviously, Agamben is reading Augustine’s text in light of his larger point about the potential emptiness of theology itself, as nothing more than displaced praise. Augustine cannot say anything positive, on Agamben’s account, because there is nothing to be positive about. For Agamben, Augustine’s stuttering aphasia on these points, his appeal to paradox and incoherent metaphor, is a sign not that the reality is greater than language, but that there is nothing there at all: “at the beginning and the end of the highest power there stands, according to Christian theology, a figure not of action and government but of inoperativity” (p. 242). For Agamben, this is the devastating point:
…this means that the center of the governmental apparatus, the threshold at which Kingdom and Government ceaselessly communicate and ceaselessly distinguish themselves from one another, is, in reality, empty; it is only the Sabbath and katapausis—and, nevertheless, this inoperativity is so essential for the machine that it must at all costs be adopted and maintained at its center in the form of glory. (p. 242)
Now, there is something important identified here. Augustine, then, is ground zero of the core theological argument. And it is an interesting argument; it addresses a suitably deep point and makes an argument about it worth considering. But is it right?
There I think—you’ll be wholly unsurprised to hear—the evidence is not substantial for Agamben’s position, and in fact the text bears in it the components of an answer to this charge. The deep question driving these passages is, for Augustine, what happens in Heaven? What will become of our agency when the distentio of time has come to an end? While Agamben thinks that Augustine has nothing to say, in fact the bishop as quite a bit to affirm.
Certainly it is the case that Augustine recognizes a radical tension between life here, during the world, and life on the eschatological Sabbath. But the tension is not a disjunction. There is commerce across the boundary of time and eternity, Creation and God, “now” and “not yet.” He is well aware of the temptation to go fully apophatic about this, at least for Platonic or neo-Platonic reasons; but he understands himself to be forbidden to do this by his fidelity to the Scriptural witness and the larger theological heritage in which he wants to inscribe himself.
This fidelity manifests itself in two particular commitments which pervade Augustine’s argument—one pervading the argument of City of God in general, the other particularly palpable in the last several books, and especially Book 22, where Agamben’s reading is focused. The first commitment is Augustine’s commitment to the Incarnation-to affirming that God became human, the logos took on sarx, in order that creation, and especially humanity, might be drawn up into the divine life. The other commitment is Augustine’s commitment to the resurrection of the body—to the idea that the consummation of human existence will not be a matter of escaping or fleeing the body, but of the body transfigured, transformed in some utterly mysterious way.
The two of these commitments are part of what I would call Augustine’s sacramental imagination, his insistence that God is always already engaged in our world, more deeply than we are. It is this sacramental imagination that governs Augustine’s thought. (Though I don’t want to spend the time establishing it here, in fact this imagination suffuses the whole of the de civitate Dei, and governing the character of the argument and the rhetoric (from the choice of a “pagan” word, civis, to describe the community of the people of God, to the first word of the text—gloriosissimam, “most glorious,” arguably the central axiological term of pagan Roman thought (gloria), but using it to refer to the City of God.)
It is also this sacramental imagination that Agamben seems incapable of understanding. For all his emphasis on doxology, there’s remarkably little attention to the liturgical or ecclesiological or practical character of Christian life; and while he suggests that “the doxology…is the most dialectical part of theology” (p. 208), I would say instead that the Eucharist is the most dialectical—where flesh and blood are transfigured into something other, something far more real. But that is a thought that must wait for a longer forum for it to be developed.
Charles Mathewes is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. His publications include The Republic of Grace: Augustinian Thoughts for Dark Times and Evil and the Augustinian Tradition