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’