Between the Canon and the Messiah: The Structure of Faith in Contemporary Continental Thought 9781441192240, 9781472547958, 9781441177803

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Between the Canon and the Messiah

Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy is a major monograph series from Bloomsbury. The series features first-class scholarly research monographs across the field of Continental philosophy. Each work makes a major contribution to the field of philosophical research. Adorno’s Concept of Life, Alastiar Morgan Adorno’s Poetics of Critique, Steven Helmling Badiou and Derrida, Antonio Calcagno Badiou, Marion and St Paul, Adam Miller Being and Number in Heidegger’s Thought, Michael Roubach Crisis in Continental Philosophy, Robert Piercey Deleuze and Guattari, Fadi Abou-Rihan Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History, Jay Lampert Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation, Joe Hughes Derrida, Simon Morgan Wortham Derrida and Disinterest, Sean Gaston Derrida: Ethics Under Erasure, Nicole Anderson Domestication of Derrida, Lorenzo Fabbri Encountering Derrida, Simon Morgan Wortham Foucault’s Heidegger, Timothy Rayner Foucault’s Legacy, C. G. Prado Gabriel Marcel’s Ethics of Hope, Jill Graper Hernandez Gadamer and the Question of the Divine, Walter Lammi Gilles Deleuze, Constantin V. Boundas Heidegger and a Metaphysics of Feeling, Sharin N. Elkholy Heidegger and Authenticity, Mahon O’Brien Heidegger and Happiness, Matthew King Heidegger and Philosophical Atheology, Peter S. Dillard Heidegger and the Place of Ethics, Michael Lewis Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction, Michael Lewis Heidegger, Politics and Climate Change, Ruth Irwin Heidegger’s Early Philosophy, James Luchte In the Shadow of Phenomenology, Stephen H. Watson Irony of Heidegger, Andrew Haas Kant, Deleuze and Architectonics, Edward Willatt

Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology, Kirk M. Besmer Michel Henry, Jeffrey Hanson Nietzsche and the Anglo-Saxon Tradition, Louise Mabille Nietzsche’s Ethical Theory, Craig Dove Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, James Luchte Phenomenology, Institution and History, Stephen H. Watson Ricoeur and Lacan, Karl Simms Sartre’s Phenomenology, David Reisman Simultaneity and Delay, Jay Lampert Thinking Between Deleuze and Kant, Edward Willatt Who’s Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari?, Gregg Lambert Zizek and Heidegger, Thomas Brockelman

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Between the Canon and the Messiah The Structure of Faith in Contemporary Continental Thought Colby Dickinson

LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

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www.bloomsbury.com First published 2013 © Colby Dickinson, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Colby Dickinson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-9224-0 ePub: 978-1-4411-4203-0 ePDF: 978-1-4411-7780-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dickinson, Colby. Between the canon and the Messiah: the structure of faith in contemporary ­Continental thought/Colby Dickinson. p. cm. – (Bloomsbury studies in Continental philosophy) Includes bibliographical references (p.  ) and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-9224-0 (hardcover) – ISBN 978-1-4411-7780-3 (ebook) – ISBN 978-1-4411-4203-0 (epub) 1. Religion–Philosophy. 2. Philosophical theology. 3. Continental philosophy. 4. Theology. I. Title. BL51.D495 2013 202’.3–dc23 2012038376

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

To Lieven Boeve, Frederiek Depoortere, and Joeri Schrijvers who fostered this project until it became a reality and To my parents, Ron and Phyllis Dickinson supporters of life-long learning

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Contents Acknowledgments

x

Introduction

1

Part 1  Between Philosophy and Theology 1 2

The Legacy of an Antinomian Messianism within a Jewish Historical Context

15

Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben on the Processes of Messianicity and Canonicity

43

Part 2  The Radical Hermeneutics of Theology 3 4

The Violence of the Canon: A Contemporary Context for the Canonical Form

117

The Necessity of Hermeneutics

149

Conclusion

206

Notes Bibliography Index

211 251 265

Acknowledgments I am first of all in need of giving thanks and recognition to the K. U. Leuven Research Fund which has made this work possible and provided generous support over the course of the past several years. I would also like to thank the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek-Vlaanderen (FWO) and the Academische Stichting Leuven (ASL) for providing valuable conference funding when it was needed. Such financial supports were what, in the end, provided the means to conduct this research, and for this I am very grateful. A large percentage of the present study was presented at a number of conferences over the past four years, each of which provided a series of unique opportunities. I am thankful to both the organizers of such events as well as those who provided an abundance of funding to make such academic incursions possible. Such conferences include: Ethics, Identity and Recognition: Latin American Congress on Paul Ricoeur’s Thought, Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2011), Freud After Derrida: An International Interdisciplinary Conference, Winnipeg, Canada (2010), Conference on Continental Metaphysics, Dundee, Scotland (2010), Leuven Encounters in Systematic Theology VII, Leuven, Belgium (2009), International Walter Benjamin Association conference, Antwerp, Belgium (2009), UK-Ireland Society for Ricoeur Studies conference, Canterbury, England (2009) and Paul Ricoeur: Poetics and Religion, Leuven, Belgium (October 2008). I wish also to acknowledge that the following essays which appear in this book, either in part or in whole, were first published elsewhere in print. Chapter Two contains significantly reworked material from the article ‘Canon as an act of creation: Giorgio Agamben and the extended logic of the messianic’, Bijdragen: International Journal in Philosophy and Theology 71:2 (2010) 132–58. Chapter Three contains portions of ‘The Relationship of Canon and Messiah: The Convergence of Jan Assmann and Walter Benjamin on a Theory of Monotheistic Canon’, The Bible and Critical Theory 7:1 (2011) 1–15. And Chapter Four in­cludes material from ‘The Absent Notion of Canonicity in Paul Ricoeur’s Memory, History,  Forgetting’ in J. Verheyden, T. L. Hettema and P. Vandecasteele, eds., Paul Ricoeur: Poetics and Religion, ‘Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum

Acknowledgments

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Lovaniensium’ 240, Leuven: Peeters, 2011, pp. 487–501; ‘Examining the theo­ political dimensions of representation: The ‘exception’ in Ricoeur’s hermeneutics’ in Todd Mei and David Lewin, eds, From Ricoeur to Action: The Socio-Political Significance of Ricoeur’s Thinking, London: Continuum, 2012, pp. 229–45; and, ‘The guises of violence: Paul Ricoeur on the difficulties of constructing an ontotheological bridge between metaphor and politics’, in Greg Johnson and Dan Stiver, eds, Paul Ricoeur and the Task of Political Philosophy, Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2012. I am grateful to each of these journals, books and publishers for the permission to use these materials. There have been a number of people responsible for the production of this book, which began as my dissertation, and thanking them for their assistance now strikes me as no small matter. I wish first of all to thank the trio of persons most responsible for promoting my work, as well as the many methods of support they have thrown my way. Thanks to Lieven Boeve for offering his support and encouragement, as well as for the many opportunities to conduct research at this level. His insight and influence are directly responsible for the many paths my work has taken, and I am immensely indebted to his willingness to guide me on many counts. Thanks to Frederiek Depoortere for so many moments of support and understanding, as well as advice when I would need it suddenly. I have also benefitted greatly from his prolific research, something for which I am very grateful indeed. Thanks also to Joeri Schrijvers for valuable feedback and comment upon my research as it has progressed over the years. For these reasons, among others, I have been blessed by the kindness of all three. I am also grateful to the various members of the research group ‘Theology in a Postmodern Context’ within the Faculty of Theology, K. U. Leuven who provided a constant source of stimulation for my thoughts and a platform from which to spring invigorated into my own research. I was greatly enriched by the conversations that I had with colleagues in Leuven over the years, including but not limited to Martin Sebastian Kallungal, Gabor Ambrus, Justin Sands, John Friday, Joke Lambelin and Yves De Maeseneer. I have also been nourished by the excellent discussions on a variety of matters both poetic and literary with Kristien Justaert. I would also like to thank the many readers of this work, in part or whole, who provided feedback throughout the process. Besides those already mentioned, I would like to single out Jacques Haers, Ken Surin and Ward Blanton for taking the time to read the text and offer valuable feeback and advice.

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Acknowledgments

On a more personal level, I would like to extend a heartfelt thanks to the various babysitters of my son over the years who made life a lot easier when I was struggling to find the time (any time!) to accomplish my work: Myrna Keogh, Heidi Matz, the university crèche ‘Babyhome’, and Tantes Isabelle, Lien, Li, Birgid and Jelke at the Sancta Maria basis school have all been fantastic reminders of how raising a child is a task never undertaken alone. My parents, Ron and Phyllis, are deserving of multiple counts of thanks for their unending support of all that I have done in my life, especially the willingness to acquire for me nearly every book I would dutifully read as a child. I owe them a great deal of gratitude upon which I am still making payment. Lastly, for their support in all manner of things spoken and unspoken, and more importantly their ability to distract me when it was necessary (and even when it wasn’t!), I find myself humbled by the wealth of riches given to me by both Elisabeth and Rowan. This book is only possible because of their varied (and shared) roles in my life.

Introduction Re-examining the normative traditions of theological discourse In a recent book, The Theological and the Political, Mark Lewis Taylor suggests making a distinction between “Theology,” the traditional historical discourse on transcendence brought about by a hierarchical institutionalization of Christianity, and “the theological,” or that which moves along the margins of immanence, in the cracks and fissures of these institutionalized forms, offering a “transimmanent” perspective of the divine yet at work within our world.1 The “theological,” according to this reading, is defined in contrast to “Theology,” which often functions more as a “guild” discipline through its attempts to preserve and protect its own essence. The latter, in this light, functions less as a bearer of divine revelation than as a political and cultural institution. For Taylor, the former is a spectral force that moves through our world and gives the voices of the oppressed a chance to disrupt those monolithic and ideological discourses that constitute our realm of political, cultural, and religious representations, “Theology” included. As he words it, the “theological” “. . . traces and theorizes the ways that persons and groups rendered subordinate and vulnerable by agonistic politics and its systemic imposed social suffering nevertheless haunt, unsettle, and perhaps dissolve the structures of those systems.”2 For Taylor, the “theological” is clearly a larger phenomenon than it is usually considered as being—it is an unsettling presence that upends our most normative social claims and traditions, “Theology” foremost among them. “Theology,” from this viewpoint, through its many historical (and even ongoing) attempts to divide “orthodox” positions from their “heretical” counterparts, often renders itself blind to its own structural features as well as its inherent limitations. For Taylor, “Theology” as a discipline has been complicit throughout history with those hierarchical orders that have sought to retain power through their extension into other representational fabrics of society, such as the family, the church, and the nation-state, for example. Complicit

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Between the Canon and the Messiah

with a long history of abuses, from slavery to colonization, from the Crusades to the Inquisition, among others, “Theology” has often greatly invested itself in justifications of certain nefarious political projects—ones which, in turn, benefited from “Theology’s” blindness to its own involvement.3 The task, for Taylor, is somehow, and despite such damning charges levied against it, to assist “Theology” in seeing its shortsightedness through a renewed examination of its political components. He thus trains his focus upon the theological and the political, their interwoven relationship in all its glory, but also in all its agony. The insight that Taylor develops is in a certain sense—especially if viewed from within the boundaries of those who perform such guild “Theology”— provocative and unsettling. It is no surprise, however, that his argument runs parallel to many other voices, certainly those coming from feminist, postcolonial, liberation, and racially and ethnically-diverse backgrounds. What his position is attempting to address, no less, is the very manner in which politics typically unfolds within theological conversations, not to mention the world as a whole— those in power who have a vested interest in maintaining the normative structures of society are pitted against those who are bereft of power, their very existence, in many ways, a contestation of “the way things are.” Such arguments are hardly new to the history of politics and institutional structures. The real question, the one that continues to search for its moment of articulation, is how such a configuration of the political, as an embodiment of various contestations of power, is framed within theology today, or rather, how it could be framed better, especially for those not as accustomed to dealing with  such overtly political formulations within what might seem to them as being an otherwise “neutral” discourse (“Theology,” formally speaking). Such is the stage that is set for the present study, one that seeks to articulate the basic coordinates of this perpetual oscillation between normative, institutional structures of tradition and those accompanying forces that seek to undo their dominant narrative. That is, what I am seeking to unfold throughout this study as the pre-eminent structural feature of western monotheistic thought (primarily analyzed here in their Judaic and Christian forms) is, in some sense, just such an articulation of the political interactions that take place (and often) within the realm of “Theology.” My aim is to elucidate the theoretical edifice of such contrasts as they are witnessed—as a permanent and inherent tension between canonical forms (akin to Taylor’s “Theology”) and their messianic undoing (the “theological”). With this unending tension before us, I seek to disclose something of the true nature of the political struggle ceaselessly at work within

Introduction

3

the various components of what constitutes T/theology tout court. I am hoping, thus, to make a fundamental theological investigation into the nature of western philosophical and theological languages concerning this tension, as well as how it is often discussed under its associated philosophical conceptualization—the contrast between representation and presentation, as I hope to make clear. There is great merit to be found, I am wagering, in determining the essential coordinates of a theological terminology (of canons and messiahs) that seeks, not only to comprehend something of its own conceptual heritage, but also to understand its traditional development in light of a dualistically conceived realm of representations (the antinomies of thought or the dialectics of reasoning). By sketching this interaction, between the theological (canons/messiahs) and the philosophical (representation/presentation), I wish to perceive the formation of concepts that are central to both discourses as parallel movements, often feeding off each other and yielding insights that the other has either consciously or unconsciously adopted. Hence, a renewed understanding of the tensions that constitute any enduring representation—a task as central to our religious legacies as to our cultural, political and philosophical ones—is one that will mutually inform our sense of how canons function religiously. Likewise, any claim to present a “thing itself ” beyond its inscription in representational limits the definition of presentation par excellence—will share a certain affinity with those messianic dimensions of religious thought that threaten to render any normative structures of history neutralized. Such will be the justification, at any rate, for my taking up, from the outset of this study, those major philosophical debates concerning representation as a primary subject matter with significant implications for theological practice. The pressing question of this study, and one that I intend to address head-on, is whether or not a messianic undoing of our canonical traditions and norms leads inevitably to a necessary restructuring of such norms, possibly making them more just governing structures along the way, or whether such an undoing is a terminus in its own right, an open-ended, perpetual kenosis of sorts that eschews any structural–canonical attempts (i.e., doctrines, creeds, dogmas, scriptures) to express such a messianic event. While seeking an answer to this most pressing theological question, I hope to demonstrate that this issue, which otherwise would seem to concern itself only with historical religious traditions, is the same issue continuously affecting contemporary continental philosophy— no small claim, to be sure. My intention at several points throughout this study, therefore, is to analyze the philosophical discussion of such terminological

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Between the Canon and the Messiah

usages, and, by doing so, to point to those places within such conversations where their theological resonances are more than simply coincidental to the discussion at hand. I intend, as such, to show how the major lines of philosophical thought over the last century cannot help but invoke a certain theological line of inquiry at this juncture (somewhere along the lines of the “return to the religious” in contemporary philosophical thought), which is, for reasons I hope to make clearer, a point that, if scrutinized further, outlines the very foundations of what we consider “the theological” to be. These reflections are not the only stakes being weighed within the present work. They, in fact, constitute a portion of what I hope to uncover within Part One of this study. Before proceeding directly to my main focus, however, it might be helpful to gain a first glance into a related model of these dynamic tensions within representation, as such a model utilizes the same language with which I am here working and can serve, therefore, as a guide to our study as well as a preeminent illustration of what I am attempting to talk about. What such an illustration shows us, moreover, is that the preference given here to the use of the terms “canonical” and “messianic” is not accidental to the inquiry itself. It is rather the case that their usage opens us up to a wider horizon of cultural, political, and religious representations that we would do well to bring with us throughout the individual studies that follow. As will hopefully also become clear, the terms “canonical” and “messianic” serve as something of a shibboleth or pass code for unlocking the complex web of conceptual relations found in the writings of much twentieth century thought, and as such, merit a brief digression upon their theological background and usage. As I intend to show in what follows through the interwoven conceptual terminologies of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and Paul Ricoeur, these specific terms are central to the many varied conversations occurring in both theological and philosophical realms.

Dialectics versus the antinomies of (antinomian?) thought The tensions of religious thought I have outlined above form the basic coordi­ nates for understanding the—mainly philosophical—debates that will follow. As we will shortly see, from Walter Benjamin to Jacques Derrida, to Giorgio Agamben, a direct line of the development of these contrasting terms has been drawn, one wherein a particular brand of messianism appears to flavor

Introduction

5

everything it touches. In brief measure, and so that we might begin to grasp something of the nature of the phenomenon, it could be said that, for each of these authors, the force of the messianic, always understood as a “weak” force or one of utter poverty, is that which works from within a given canonical form to undo its normative or proprietary claims. The messianic, as Derrida will later claim, for example, is what offers us the hope for a justice always yet “to come,” and seemingly from beyond the inscriptions of law, for example. In this sense, every canonical form could be said, at some point in history, to receive its undoing at the hands of a messianic force working from within that particular history (i.e., within a given “History,” just as within a given “Theology”) to re-write its narrative and offer something more just perhaps, more worthy of those oppressed and marginalized voices which had previously been overrun by the “strong” force of the canonical form. In one sense, it could be argued that the messianic plays the antithesis to the canonical form’s thesis, an illustration of the grand dialectics of history portrayed at work within a specifically theological sphere. Such will be the contentions of Derrida, for example. In another sense, however, the messianic will be seen as the complete suspension of canonical forms, elements of thought that are too exclusive and exclusionary (purely antinomies) to be retained historically, if they can be retained at all. Such thought will define the counter impulses of Agamben, a thinker who will appear to us at times as more than just coincidentally antinomian. As such, I would like to further frame the terms of this debate, beyond the canonical/messianic or representation/presentation divisions, as really being ones concerning the contrast between dialectical thinking and those antinomian impulses mustered in the refusal of such totalizing gestures. This classic division, one initiated historically almost entirely within theological circles, is one that yet permeates and circulates through our contemporary western, theological, and philosophical discourses, whether we recognize its legacy and impact or not. The centrality of Walter Benjamin to this study is, therefore, also a reflection on his centrality to contemporary continental thought on the whole, and for this reason—the struggle between providing dialectics or antinomianism as a solution to the tensions present within thought is one, I would wager, that Benjamin tried to resolve directly, and was that which caused him to sketch a “productive” vision of history that incorporated elements from both his own Jewish heritage (“weak messianic forces”) and his Marxist revolutionary leanings (“dialectical images”). His efforts, as John McCole has put it, were in general

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focused upon “. . . the inextricable entwinement of elements of continuity and discontinuity in his conceptions of tradition and history.”4 By trying to find a solution to such an apparently irresolvable tension, Benjamin isolated the (Kantian) antinomies of thought as essential indicators of both religious and political historical activity. There was a fundamental aporia within our basic religious and political histories that Benjamin seized upon and wedded to the structures of thought as a whole.5 For Benjamin, but also for the benefit of framing the present study, the aporia of historical thought could be defined as such—tradition can only be founded through a rupture. Continuity is possible, but only at a cost, one calculated by the presence of the oppressed to history, and yet within history. Benjamin’s goal was to bring such oppressed or marginalized elements to light, what he sought to do through the restoration of a dialectical image of the oppressed that brought the past into the present, and which was also a bringing of “dialectics to a standstill.” The construction of such an image that is at once a continuation of tradition— but also its interruption—was what made “the antinomial tensions” that Benjamin focused upon both productive and successful, according to McCole.6 It is of course possible to read Benjamin as being, in some sense, an anti­ nomian thinker, one who sees the grinding to a halt of dialectics as the only possible way to maintain one’s fidelity to the oppressed of history (and such will be Agamben’s interpretation, as we will see). It is also possible to read him as being more open to the restoration of tradition, as we will see in my re-examination of Benjamin’s relationship to scripture (to be taken up below). At the very least, there are certain conceptual clarifications that need to be made within Benjamin’s all-too-incomplete account, clarifications that have been missing over time and that have consequently given rise to the struggles between Benjamin’s various inheritors who, more often than not, remain divided by their theological or political readings of his work. In many ways, what I am offering in this study is a possible solution to this struggle in interpreting Benjamin’s confrontation with this essential aporia of (theological and philosophical) thought. I am aiming in the end, then, to provide a hermeneutic, not only for reading Benjamin’s struggle with this particular aporia of historical representation, but also for reading those philosophical and theological debates between the tensions of canonical forms and messianic forces, as well as those representations—and any supposed presentation beyond representation—that accompany them. The question of dialectics, how they can be maintained, or how they can be evaded, if at all, finds a deep resonance in this study, in many ways providing

Introduction

7

impetus to this inquiry in its near entirety. In this sense, the various plays between dualistic understandings (e.g., canonical/messianic, law/justice, identity/difference, etc.) with which the authors under scrutiny engage, can be read as so many varied attempts to come to terms with the dialectical procedures of representation, as well as the issue of whether or not dialectics pertains only to our material world, or whether it holds any relevance for those traditionally “other-worldly” (religious) matters. Such is the background for the many questions that will continuously crop up here and there throughout this study, including whether or not a balance can be struck between presentation and representation, whether a form of life can exist outside of representational norms, or whether a messianic form can permanently (or just partially) disrupt such dialectical movements. Finding out whether the Kingdom of God is the same thing as a (often Marxist) political utopia, for example, depends on our understanding of dialectics and their role in (or beyond) historical and representational matters. Indeed, simply to ask whether the Kingdom of God is a political utopian form would, for many, already concede too much ground to the sphere of the political, forsaking the “deeper matters” of faith. But, then again, as others might contend, what would such “deeper matters” be, other than one’s very real and present relationship to something so defining of oneself such as one’s relationship to violence? Sifting through the various possible answers to these questions, from within a particular philosophical debate and opening up to its theological resonance, is the main aim of the present inquiry.

Outline of this study The work that follows is divided into two parts, each intending to draw conclusions related to—though also distinct from—the other. The first part is concerned mainly with problematizing the boundary between philosophy and theology. To do this, I draw upon the manner in which the contrast of canonical forms and messianic forces was (and is) played out in historically Judaic terms, though ones, I will argue, that have been at the center of several recent philosophical returns to Pauline literature. In particular, I will examine the related insights of Gershom Scholem and Jacob Taubes, two Jewish thinkers of the last century who sought to comprehend the paradox of a bizarre seventeenth-century Jewish movement known as Sabbatianism. Through tracing their commentaries on the movement,

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Between the Canon and the Messiah

I seek to perceive both thinkers’ oeuvres through their contrasts between orthodox (canonical) and heretical antinomian (messianic) forces working from within a Judaic representational worldview. As such, Taubes’ insistence upon the crucial distinction between presentation and representation as that which lies at the heart of the separation of Judaism from Christianity (or even Judaism from itself, much as Paul had once seen in the contrast of flesh from spirit) will help us to frame much of the philosophical discussion that follows. The concentration of this first part of the thesis is in demonstrating that such religious understandings and divisions are central to contemporary continental (philosophical) thought, though their incorporation into particular philosophical debates has not necessarily advanced the discussion as far as might be thought. To further describe this stalemate, I will next turn to an exemplary case of just such a situation—the debate that still rages (and despite the death of the former) between the philosophers Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben, the two obvious strands of this intellectual struggle with these dynamic and often competing forces of representation. By playing the one writer off the other, and vice versa, I am aiming to clarify the stakes of their divergence, as well as their indebtedness to the religious dimensions of thought outlined in the first chapter. As such, I will highlight how their framing of the interaction between canonical forms and their messianic undoing lies at the center of their various appraisals of sovereign power, law, violence, the tension between representation and presentation and, ultimately, religious identity. One of the major points I attempt to make is how their feud lies at the heart of the divisions often perceived between certain historical forms of Judaism and Christianity (as Taubes already suggested). As the analysis of the tensions between the canonical form and its accompanying messianic forces begins to adhere closely to this particular script of contemporary thought, it also begins to reveal its even closer alignment with the heart of theological speculation. This is to say that as we begin to look around for ways to bridge the gulf between the presentation of the “thing itself ” (“as such”) and its various representations (“as if ”), we begin to see the separation existing between religious identities (multiple Judaisms from myriad Christianities, and both groups even as individually split from within) as more than a simple divergence of opinion as to the Messiah’s potential (or actual) life and death. We begin, in fact, to re-conceive of belief itself as something of a political force continuously working within our world, though not an easy one to discern, to be sure. It is with such an insight in mind that I begin to view the

Introduction

9

recent increased emphasis placed upon a “theology of immanence” (as opposed to traditional transcendent forms) as the movement of a very relevant and timely “political theology,” one geared toward opening up our understanding of what constitutes the “theological” tout court. Indeed, Agamben’s turn toward a terminology that includes words such as “profanation,” “immanence,” and even “revelation” is an indicator that our current manner of thinking through the theological is perhaps in need of reformulation. The subsequent chapter begins to discern just what such a “theology of immanence” might look like in our world today, following fast on the heels of Taubes’ suggestion that Jewish messianic movements often turn toward certain forms of pantheistic belief in order to redeem the entirety of creation before them. By focusing on a brief historical sketch of where such “theologies of immanence” derive their inspiration (i.e., Baruch Spinoza, and company), I look toward exploring Agamben’s thought as a form of prophetic speech, one often juxtaposed uneasily against its more “canonical” counterparts within Judaic history and scripture. As such, I am hoping to recover something of the prophetic witness that Agamben’s work brings to light, seeking to retain its significant message as one portion of the fullness we consider theological witness to be. Though such a co-opting of antinomian impulses within a dialectical framework may appear too clean from certain perspectives, I do so with an eye already focused on the next part of this study, wherein I will take the opportunity to justify such co-opting methods from a hermeneutical standpoint. While the first part of this thesis is concerned mainly with problematizing the borders and boundaries that have been established between philosophy and theology—as also between representation and presentation, or canonical forms and messianic forces—the second part attempts to establish a form of radical hermeneutics as a possible solution to the aporias encountered in the first part. To do so, I try to sketch an alternate vision of reading canonical forms in relation to messianic forces, one that returns to the central scriptural canons at the origin of the debate. Accordingly, the first chapter of the second part will look into the tensions between the messianic and the canonical through the contemporary theorist Jan Assmann, a prominent thinker of historical and cultural memory. It is his ability to think through such matters within a religious–canonical setting that merits its special status in this study, as he provides a fitting complement to what follows, developing for us a criterion of violence as a key to reading differing canonical and religious movements within the ancient world. That these musings are not simply historical–literary constructs is illustrated by bringing

10

Between the Canon and the Messiah

their viewpoints into precarious alignment with the thought of Walter Benjamin, someone for whom the relationship between the canonical (scriptural) form and its “weak messianic” forces was an often veiled, though entirely dominant thematic within his writing, from beginning to end. By making an argument for Benjamin’s discovery of their intertwined nature, I am hoping to demonstrate not only his close proximity to the theories espoused by Assmann, but also the profound foundation that he laid for a good many continental philosophical thinkers (Derrida and Agamben foremost among them). By taking into account the influence of one’s historical context and back­ ground (even of the fact of historical context itself), something missing at key moments from both Derrida and Agamben, though critically present in Benjamin’s own life and work, as I intend to show, I therefore aim to develop a radical hermeneutics that takes the excessive (hyperbolic) role of language seriously, and thus, in a very practical sense, is able to deal with the distance between Derrida and Agamben, for example, as that which results from an attempt to displace ourselves from our historical grounding. By locating a possible reason within Benjamin’s life history for downplaying one element (the canonical) in favor of another (the messianic), we might be better able to discern some of the possible reasons for this displacement as well as the use of an excessively one-sided language. In turn, such an admittedly biographical reading may offer us another key for understanding and re-defining the impasse encountered in the first part of the study. In order to further solidify the claims of this second part, as well as to descend deeper into the development of a radical hermeneutical methodology, in the chapter that follows, I advance the analysis of these representational logics within the hermeneutical context expressed in the writings of Paul Ricoeur, a figure who often drifted in between the philosophical and the theological. In this fashion, I hope to provide further supporting evidence for the centrality of canonical forms and messianic forces in our positing of identity and tradition. I do so by noting how Ricoeur works through their various manifestations in the contrast between the Pharisee and the Prophet, the varied definitions of scripture that he works with, the role of violence in preserving cultural memory and, finally, the tensions present between metaphor and politics, before turning in the end to a consideration of what just such a radical hermeneutics might look like (with a little help from the insights of Judith Butler). By re-inspecting certain Judaic origins at question within Ricoeur’s work, I am ultimately seeking to confront the aporias at the heart of all representational logics so that we might begin to

Introduction

11

understand what genuine messianic (or antinomian) forces are already at work in our most cherished canonical formations. It is in this last chapter, moreover, that we can begin to see how Ricoeur’s understanding of the Aristotelian contrast between potentiality and actuality is actually able to provide some much needed clarification of the philosophical stakes of this study’s ongoing analysis. By bringing his view on their difference into juxtaposition with Agamben’s own take on the matter, I hope to show how Ricoeur’s work points toward an almost utopian hope, in many ways similar to Agamben’s claims, providing a new horizon for thought beyond the exclusionary representational logics in which we typically (socially and politically) live, but also fully immersed in the metaphoric (linguistic) nature of human existence. It is only in this way, I will conclude, that we might begin to see how hermeneutics can possibly take into account its apparently external antinomian elements. It should come as little surprise that the lengthy cast of characters assembled here for study is not as diverse as might appear at first glance. The influence of one author upon another, as I have tried to indicate throughout, is not simply a haphazard affair, but a delicate patchwork of resonances and affinities deliberately quilted together in order to arrive at a somewhat similar product.7 In the end, perhaps these affinities are even capable of becoming something more than mere speculations made concerning a possible utopian existence or a messianic “Kingdom” still to come or existing “elsewhere.” Perhaps they can even go so far as to call us back to re-determine the lives we live here and now in their present and often very political contexts. Such insights would certainly seem to provoke the formulation of a “radical political theology” indeed.8

12

Part One

Between Philosophy and Theology

14

1

The Legacy of an Antinomian Messianism within a Jewish Historical Context

It is significant to note that the contested views of dialectical thinking versus their antinomian counterparts have a long history of division from which to draw their present boundaries. Antinomianism, in fact, stretches as far back as Martin Luther, who coined the term in order to distinguish himself from those over-zealous reformers who saw their newfound faith as being at complete odds with one’s subservience to moral law. Luther’s own personal challenges to canon law and ecclesial order (such as his renunciations of priestly privilege or even his own marriage) seemed to many the impetus they were looking for in order to jettison a variety of laws in their near entirety, ecclesiastical and civic alike. Though Luther found himself disagreeing with other reformers on this point, his turn to the writings of Saint Paul in order to grasp something of the freedom he had been looking for (and which he found specifically in Paul’s letter to the Romans) was perhaps not coincidental to Pauline interests in general. Paul’s letters have often been glimpsed as heralding a new understanding of freedom since their inception, one founded upon a turn away from our “enslavement” to the law (and therefore to sin) and a turn to the spirit that goes beyond all earthly divisions. Whether or not Paul intended such wordings to lead to specific radicalized antinomian positions beyond all rule of law, or whether he simply wished to focus the hopes of a people recently parted from their Judaic heritage, remains a point of much contention. At the very least, however, Paul’s conjectures opened wide a startling new path for thought itself—one that continues to be debated in terms both philosophical and theological.

16

Between the Canon and the Messiah

Recurring antinomian gestures: On the return to Saint Paul in contemporary thought One can find in the late German exegete Günther Bornkamm’s writings, for example, a wealth of insight as to our contemporary divergence of opinions on the various receptions of Paul’s letters. His indication that the divergence between Jesus and Paul is a fundamental Christian theological problem has only been heightened in the last century by its being turned into an “open battle cry” between diverse thinkers.1 Take, for example, his comments on Ernst Bloch who, in his Atheismus im Christentum (1968), commits the supposed “Marxist mistake” of one-sidedly praising the revolutionary manner of Jesus’ teachings while simultaneously downplaying the significance of Paul.2 Bornkamm’s claim, on this count, is that Bloch seeks to focus on the radicality of Jesus’ teachings and to so vehemently oppose a Pauline discourse as to distort and lessen the eschatological emphasis within the original Christian message.3 Bornkamm, of course, wants nothing to do with such a severance, and sets his sights accordingly on recovering what he sees as the essential core of Pauline teaching. What is intriguing, and whether Bornkamm intends it to be so or not, is that such a recovery makes an unusual pact with the Marxist thinker on a point that will return to us time and again. As Bornkamm summarizes his own reception of Paul’s radical teachings, “Already in Jesus’ message as well as Paul’s, the people who are really in danger and lost are the ‘good’ who need no repentance, the Pharisee in the temple . . ., the lost son’s grumbling elder brother . . ., the laborers in the vineyard who calculated with their master the greater amount of work done and, in consequence, their claim to bigger pay.”4 Paul’s thought, Bornkamm finds, is not at odds with Jesus’ message, but rather the fitting extension of the same “gospel,” one that can be summarized as an attempt to highlight the unique mixture of “earthen vessels” and “treasure” that we all already are.5 Such a rendering of Paul’s message means that, quite significantly and radically alike, “The coming kingdom of God—on earth, not beyond it (here Bloch is absolutely correct)—is therefor already breaking in [Anbrechen].”6 It is not simply beyond us; it is already here—a constituent part of the material reality in which we dwell and which could be witnessed as such if thinkers like Bloch were not so quick to dismiss Saint Paul. Such is Bornkamm’s insight. Indeed, his conclusion seems to signal a profound possible rapprochement between Marxist and Pauline thought—if those perceptive enough were able to sense the connections lying between them. Despite Bornkamm’s chastising of Bloch, perhaps the latter’s

The Legacy of an Antinomian Messianism

17

reading of Marx’s historical insights as being only possible through his earlier religious critiques—that is, only by turning his focus away from “heavenly things” was Marx able to grasp something of the freedom possible for humanity here and now—bears a striking resemblance to Bornkamm’s eventual conclusions.7 It is doubly intriguing, of course, that the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou explicitly singles out Bornkamm’s book (along with Stanislas Breton’s Saint Paul) as part of a triangle of thinkers among whom he counts his own more recent contribution to Pauline scholarship.8 The fact that such an avowedly Marxist and atheistic thinker would praise Bornkamm’s theological work certainly does signal an affinity that should not go overlooked. It should also indicate to us the profound symmetry between certain contemporary continental philosophers who have chosen to focus upon the writings of Paul and a deep theological tradition of reading Pauline works in particular ways, as I hope to demonstrate. For its part, Badiou’s stated thesis for this short treatise on Paul concerns itself with the relationship between the establishment of a form of subjectivity freed from the law, something we can recognize even in a rudimentary reading of Luther’s works (though they are divergent in many other respects, to be sure).9 In Badiou’s quest to posit a “universal singularity” apart from its enslavement in law, he relies upon the Pauline letters in order to justify a separation from politics as we know it, bound as it is to the structures of law and order.10 As he quips, “What is essential for us is that this paradoxical connection between a subject without identity and a law without support provides the foundation for the possibility of a universal teaching [une prédication universelle] within history itself.”11 This is the location of the “universal” subject that Badiou is after, one not bound to the particularities of given situations. As such, Badiou notes how “To declare the nondifference between Jew and Greek establishes Christianity’s potential universality; to found the subject as division, rather than as perpetuation [maintenance] of a tradition, renders the subjective element adequate to this universality by terminating the predicative particularity of cultural subjects.”12 This is a universal teaching, moreover, that brings the dialectics of identity to a stoppage point, for, as he puts it, Paul is an “antidialectical” thinker, someone who chooses to adhere to the truth of a grace instead of returning to the inscriptions of law.13 It is a grace, however, that need not be sacralized—“This de-dialectization of the Christ-event [l’événement-Christ] allows us to extract a formal, wholly secularized conception of grace from the mythological core.”14

18

Between the Canon and the Messiah

Badiou’s aim, of course, is to “tear the lexicon of grace and encounter [arracher le lexique de la grace et de la rencontre] away from its religious confinement”15 and, thus, to recognize the “immanentization of the spirit” that comes about after Christ’s death.16 At the very least, there are echoes of Bornkamm’s thought in Badiou’s emphasis upon these purely “earthen vessels” that we are: The treasure is nothing but the event as such [l’événement lui-même], which is to say a completely precarious having-taken-place [avoir-eu-lieu]. It must be borne humbly, with a precariousness appropriate to it. [It] must be accomplished in weakness, for therein lies its strength. It shall be neither logos, nor sign, nor ravishment by the unutterable [l’indicible]. It shall have the rude harshness of public action, of naked declaration, without apparel [prestige] other than that of its real content. There will be nothing but what each can see and hear. This is the earthen vessel [le vase de terre].17

What Badiou (as well as his closest partners in this regard, Slavoj Žižek and Giorgio Agamben) also wants to do, however, is to initiate the next step toward “completing” the Judeo–Christian tradition within a Marxist framework—the profaning of grace or the recognition of a universal subject as removed from the confines of a particular religious tradition. What is being attempted, no less, is the establishment of an antinomianism unheard of since the time of Luther, when the term first acquired its meaning among those early Protestant commentators who sought to free themselves from the law, and as Paul’s writings to many had seemed to encourage. What we are witnessing today, I would wager, in the fashionable, philosophical return to Pauline thought, is something seen similarly at work in those extreme forms of antinomian thought that have, from time to time, surfaced in certain western religious circles, such as with the Jewish heretic Jacob Frank (1726–91). Gershom Scholem, for example, historically locates this progression toward the “holiness of sin” in the later messianic teachings of Frank, though it was not Frank, but earlier messianic claims that inspired such movements.18 As Scholem puts it, “Here the external world, the value of which was denied by the inner and secret rites, was that of rabbinical Jewry, for which the Messianic Judaism of Antinomianism, the secret annihilation of the Torah as its true fulfillment, became the secret substitute. But this external world could also be Mohammedanism, if one followed the example of Sabbatai Zevi, or Catholicism if one followed that of Frank.”19 Such antinomian impulses bear more than just a passing affinity with this present inquiry to discern the difference between antinomian and dialectical

The Legacy of an Antinomian Messianism

19

approaches to the constitutive tensions (canonical and messianic) within tradition; they dictate the very terms of how such a debate should be framed, illustrating along the way the profound significance which these entirely theological disagreements (orthodox versus heretical positions) hold for our western philosophical developments, as I intend to demonstrate throughout the remainder of this work. At present, however, a brief introduction into the terms of such antinomian impulses (seen most discernibly in the work of Gershom Scholem) and their consequences for contemporary philosophical returns to Pauline literature (in the work of Jacob Taubes) can provide a helpful point of departure for our study.

Gershom Scholem and Jacob Taubes on the historical significance of Sabbatianism As a fitting gesture toward the direction this century is headed, Daniel Boyarin, in his fairly recent monograph Border Lines, puts forth an intriguing hypothesis— it was Christianity that first gave rise to the partition between Judaism and the newly emergent followers of the Christ event through its intensive efforts to divide the religious world up into its orthodox and heretical movements. In short, the “Christian event” was little more than a codification of the various strains of Judaism (Judaisms) that had previously coexisted in a heterogeneous fashion alongside each other.20 Following this reading, the then-existent forms of rabbinic Judaism and a soon institutionalized form of Christianity quickly emerged as the two identifiable, albeit polarized, religious beliefs to develop shortly after this period of codification. Attempts to label each other as deviant, as well as the ensuing conflicts within their own groupings, only intensified those sustained efforts to draw up the “borderlines” between what was “orthodox” and what was “heretical.” The creation of this border, in consequence, between two faiths otherwise issuing from the same origin, henceforth became the source of our modern conceptualization of religion as an identifiable category. Moreover, and as I will try to explain in what follows, the dualistic foundations upon which the western concept of religion is based, one radically split between the canonical–orthodox formulations of a particular faith practice and their antinomian–heretical (“messianic”) counterparts, would seem to run even deeper, that is, straight into the very structures of how we define our shared sense of humanity.

20

Between the Canon and the Messiah

Boyarin’s thesis, despite its apparent radicality, is not the only voice to sound such a call to reread the history of western religious identifications. In this initial exploration of the philosophical and theological tensions that run throughout this study, I hope to illuminate why this division between Judaism and Christianity, which is truly a division between many Judaisms and multiple Christianities (or, we might say again more simply, a division internal to Judaism itself) is vital to our understanding of, not only western religion and religious practices within a contemporary context, but also of the integrity of each believing individual who is brought up within such religious contexts, thereby also demonstrating the extreme relevance of this drawing of borders for one’s own self-understanding and self-identity. Following Boyarin’s lead, what I will attempt to demonstrate is that by investigating the enduring significance of Sabbatianism as a heretical, antinomian movement within seventeenth-century Judaism, and through its various appropriations in the work of Gershom Scholem and Jacob Taubes, the significance that this movement still has for understanding the tensions present between a variety of still-developing Judaisms and Christianities today can be made manifest. Additionally, I will try to highlight how this single and striking historical example (as well as Giorgio Agamben’s subsequent taking up of this movement’s fundamental insights, as we will later see) also says a great deal about our attempts as humans to establish ourselves through clearly delineated lines of canonical order, most typically demonstrated throughout history in our religious (scriptural) traditions. That is, I intend to show how the rubrics utilized to study Sabbatian thought actually unveil a deeper structural affinity between canonical representations and their messianic undoing. In a recently published essay on the “essential” division between Judaism and Christianity (a simplified description to be sure), the late German Jewish scholar Jacob Taubes reduces their problematic relationship to the tensions between representation—to which, in his eyes, Judaism must remain faithful— and presentation, which Christianity, or any other messianic movement sprung from its Judaic origins, has tried to elicit through its apparent jettisoning of the law.21 Taubes points to the legacy of Sabbatianism in this regard, a seventeenthcentury Jewish messianic movement traced by Gershom Scholem, which had once sought to present the divine directly, without any (representative) mediation.22 Just as with the initial stance of Christianity, Sabbatianism attempted to reformulate the coordinates of Judaism from within, to “correct” in fact what Sabbatai Zevi, its founder, saw as the over-legalization of Judaic thought, giving favor instead to the messianic, antinomian subversion of its

The Legacy of an Antinomian Messianism

21

legalistic–representative frameworks. Occurring historically at another time of Rabbinic crisis, just as had Christianity before it, Sabbatianism signals, for Taubes, something of an internal tension within Judaism that needs to be comprehended and dealt with head-on, rather than continue to give rise to these historical messianic offshoots. It is, of course, also of interest that Taubes’ work lies at the center of several contemporary philosophical returns to the writing of Saint Paul. What is ultimately of great interest to Taubes within the Christian tradition is the manner in which Paul’s theology reflects both the perceived border between Judaism and Christianity and the inner tensions emanating from within Judaism itself, dynamics which Taubes suspects are at work in more than just the Jewish– Christian divide. In so many words, Taubes’ reading of the Pauline corpus as a heretical form of Judaic thought is essential to his understanding of Judaism itself, what motivates it as a sustained faith practice and causes it to fragment at certain points throughout history. His focus on Paul, then, would seem to take center stage among those subsequent elaborations on Pauline thought (Badiou, Žižek, Agamben) as it continues to set the course for how such Pauline ruminations are to be understood. As soon becomes clear when one reads through his sparse writings occasioned over the latter half of the past century, Taubes suspects that the same antinomian, messianic tendencies that had once motivated Paul’s separation from his own Jewish roots are the same tendencies that have pushed other Jewish messianic movements to maintain similar positions, such as those discernable in the Sabbatian legacy of the seventeenth century. Taking Gershom Scholem’s academic resurrection of the Sabbatian paradox as his starting point, Taubes links its origins and most basic conclusions directly to Paul’s theological motivations, a determination that will indicate how he sees Paul as being the real originator of Christianity. Before taking a look at his conjectures on Paul’s writings, however, I first want to delve into Taubes’ appropriation of Sabbatianism, though neither necessarily concerning the historical accuracy of his presentation nor his faithfulness to Scholem’s reading, but rather, in order to comprehend his depiction of the movement as it serves to facilitate his later claims. My aim in doing this is to illuminate Taubes’ profound indebtedness to Scholem, as well as his use of Scholem’s work in order to constitute his own views on the great western theological divide between Judaism and Christianity. Only by doing so will we be able to grasp the larger stakes of the debate between dialectical thinking and antinomian impulses.

22

Between the Canon and the Messiah

In a rather, almost hasty introduction to the Sabbatian movement, something which no doubt was occasioned by the nature of his illness at the time of his remarks,23 Taubes begins his all-too-brief series of lectures on Paul’s letter to the Romans with a solid foundation in the legacy of Sabbatai Zevi, a seventeenthcentury messianic figure with whom, according to Taubes, Judaism still needs to wrestle. As he lets the story unfold: It so happens that in 1648 a manic-depressive, mystically sensitive man comes to a Kabbalist in order to be cured by him of his manic-depressive states. In these manic phases, in this small town Jerusalem or Smyrna that he came from, he has committed obvious transgressions of Rabbinical law. He comes to this man, to this young, twenty-three-year-old Nathan of Gaza, who says to him: I can’t cure you, your suffering is a messianic suffering [messianische Leiden]. The soul of the Messiah [die Seele des Messias] reigns within you. And there ensues a folie à deux; on the one hand, the Messiah and, on the other hand, his proclaimer.24

Nathan of Gaza, playing the role of Paul to an apparent messianic figure, either unknowingly or not, deduces the reasons for this man’s occasional lapse in following Jewish law as being part of his “messianic suffering,” a sure sign (or retroactive legitimation, I would add) that something sacred is at work in the person of Sabbatai Zevi. It was Nathan’s subsequently “blasphemous” writings that were actually to give the movement its shape and its subsequent force beyond any messianic charisma either found or lacking in Sabbatai Zevi. Despite the wide popularity which the movement soon acquired, there was yet another, bigger obstacle to the movement’s ultimate success that was to come some years later, a paradox of faith that would forever after define the very soul of its followers—Sabbatai Zevi would convert to Islam. As Taubes tells the tale, “The Sultan is worried about this thing getting out of hand in the Jewish ghetto in Smyrna, Constantinople, and so on. And, on the advice of a converted Muslim doctor, he presents to the ‘Messiah’ the flowing alternatives: death or conversion to Islam.”25 Though portions of the Jewish people have been content throughout history to die for their faith rather than convert (though the figure of the Marrano constitutes an interesting departure from this trend), as Taubes points out, Sabbatai Zevi does the astounding thing and converts to Islam, obtaining in the process an annual salary at the court of the Sultan. In the face of multiple accusations of betrayal and a rising tide of dissent, his followers are faced with a potentially lethal discouragement in terms of their religious aspirations. How indeed will he be able to gather all the sparks of purity which the messiah was supposed to do, and as the Kabbalah had seemed to point toward?

The Legacy of an Antinomian Messianism

23

So now the problem arises: What is this supposed to mean? Well, that is a very deep mystery. He has descended into the abysses of impurity [Abgründe der Unreinheit], which is the world, so that he can there gather in the sparks of purity [Funken der Reinheit]. That is the Kabbalistic vision [Vorstellung]: the world lives off the sparks of purity, and when these are scattered throughout the world and when they are gathered, the world of impurity collapses into itself [bricht in sich zusammen].26

According to Kabbalistic lore, the sparks of holiness are everything that is important to Judaism on the whole and it is Sabbatai Zevi who has appeared to push them aside through his conversion to Islam.27 In the face of his conversion, things remain, as one might suspect, rather unclear—Are his followers to convert to Islam as well? How is one to read his act of conversion other than as a betrayal of his Judaic roots and of his most loyal followers? Despite the fact that the complexity of the situation would call for an extremely nuanced historical study, Taubes reduces the paradox to its most simple formulation—“There are different answers, and I can’t present all of them to you here, but the principle is clear: the inner experience of redemption [Die innere Erfahrung der Erlösung] is going to be reinterpreted [umgedeutet] in light of an external catastrophe and a slap in the face.”28 Taubes subsequently, and as we might suspect, references the various groups of Jews throughout history who were suspected of antinomian tendencies and who converted (or rather were forced to convert) to Catholicism en masse, though perhaps never fully, he hints, and indeed often converted with a hidden aim toward subverting the established Church. Instead of simply repeating an anti-Semitic accusation, however, the nature of these conjectures is rather to place emphasis back upon Judaism itself, and its relation to the law in general. The point of such an exercise is a decidedly singular one—Taubes claims to be demonstrating the “logic of this type of faith,” something he sees at work in this Jewish, and decidedly non-Greek, movement. As he puts it, “. . . the internal logic of events demanded a faith that is paradoxical, that is contradicted by the evidence.”29 Such is the thesis that he extends to the ancient Jewish rabbinic scholar, Paul (or Saul) of Tarsus. His dramatic rereading of Paul’s Letter to the Romans henceforth constitutes one of the great philosophical–theological movements of the last century. This is the case because it is Taubes’ reading of the Pauline writings that emphasizes how Paul’s legacy entails not only the development of an antinomian messianic position in relation to Judaism, but also the “transvaluation of all the

24

Between the Canon and the Messiah

values of this world [Umkehrung aller Werte dieser Welt],” culminating in a certain formation of a “political theology” that has since lost none of its vigor.30 In a word, and pointing toward his great indebtedness to Scholem for more than just historical material, Taubes lays out the very coordinates of where Scholem’s views emanate from: This paradoxical faith is what I’ve tried to explain to you from the point of view of religious history with respect to the messianic logic [messianischen Logik] in the history of Jewish mysticism, as a logic that is repeated in history. Whoever understands what Scholem presents in the eighth chapter of Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism can penetrate more deeply into Paul’s messianic logic than by reading the entire exegetical literature.31

What he uncovers is a messianic logic that is repeated throughout history—for him, the key to comprehending the Judaic–Christian divide tout court. It is no surprise that, as a result, he makes an overt nod toward Scholem’s insight, as we will see. It is in this eighth chapter of a book dedicated to the memory of Walter Benjamin, whose own take on the messianic played such a pivotal role within last century’s philosophical undercurrents, as I already hinted in the Introduction (see below for more on Benjamin), that Scholem deepens our understanding of Sabbatianism by drawing it into a comparison, not only with certain oppositional forms of Orthodox Judaism and Rabbinical thought, but also with Christianity, which he sees as a sort of precursor to later Judiac mystical movements focused upon the entrance of the Messiah into history. For Scholem, Nathan of Gaza, Sabbatai Zevi’s champion in writing, “. . . does not himself practice antinomianism; he interprets it. He raises an indefinable state of exaltation with its euphoria, which manifests itself in absurd, bizarre and sacrilegious actions, to the rank of a ‘sacred act’ in which a sublime reality becomes manifest: the state of the new ‘world of Tikkun [redemption or healing]’. ”32 And, this action, presumably, is what likewise occurred, though in another form, in the earliest stirrings of Christianity, or that section of it which Taubes will come to identify with the figure of Paul, someone who, Taubes points out, compared himself more to Moses than to Jesus.33 In essence, what Scholem points us toward is the manner in which the right combination of Kabbalah teaching and messianic expectation, fomented during a period of unrest among the Jewish people within this context, led Nathan of Gaza, according to Scholem, to interpret the heretical, antinomian tendencies of Sabbatai Zevi as actions of the Messiah. Despite these details of the movement’s rise to prominence, however, Scholem nonetheless targets

The Legacy of an Antinomian Messianism

25

Sabbatianism as a pivotal process within mystical Judaic thought, one that gave voice to the discontent of the general Jewish population of the time and as that which ultimately helped lead to reform within nineteenth-century Orthodox Judaism.34 This is a fact that has often been overlooked, Scholem notes, due to an Orthodox distaste for antinomian tendencies in general.35 Such distaste for the messianic, antinomian tendencies of Sabbatianism on the part of rabbinic, Orthodox Judaism would seem moreover to place the latter at odds with those forms of Lurianic thought that would define the messianic event as an immanent redemption (Tikkun) of all creation through the gathering up of the divine sparks currently residing in our world.36 In Scholem’s eyes, this immanent redemption became an outworking of processes originating within the human soul, a wrestling with the nature of faith and its paradoxes manifest in the unresolved tensions within Judaic law. For this reason, he can characterize Sabbatianism as more than being solely an historical heretical movement; he can speak of it as a seeking after the redemption of the soul itself. According to Scholem, Sabbatianism as a mystical heresy dates from the moment when the apostasy of Sabbatai Zevi, which was an entirely unforeseen occurrence, opened a gap between the two spheres in the drama of Redemption, the inner one of the soul and that of history. Inner and outer experience, inner and outer aspects of Geulah, of Redemption and Salvation, were suddenly and dramatically torn apart. This conflict, for which nobody was prepared, which nobody had ever dreamt could happen, went to the very root and core of existence. A choice became necessary. Every one had to ask himself whether he was willing to discover the truth about the expected redemption in the distressing course of history or in that inner reality which had revealed itself in the depths of the soul.37

Such a necessary choice when faced with the reality of what Sabbatianism was asking its adherents to follow is no easy task to undertake. As Scholem expands upon this choice, “Sabbatianism arose out of the awareness of an inherent contradiction, out of a paradox, and the law of its birth determined its subsequent development. It is built upon the tragic paradox of an apostate Savior and it thrives upon paradoxes of which one implies the other.”38 And this is the impulse which Scholem detects as an active force moving yet within both Sabbatianism and the general direction of Christianity. There are differences between these two parallel formulations of the messianic event to be sure, but they are minimal, for Taubes as for Scholem, and mainly centered on the “weaker” personality of Sabbatai Zevi.39 What Scholem is at pains

26

Between the Canon and the Messiah

to stress, however, is the very point that Taubes will seize upon so forcefully as well—both movements stem from an internal tension within Judaism, one that will recur almost cyclically and that will generate multiple Judaisms over time. The logic of the messianic dictates the historical rise of occasional antinomian tendencies that will not only offer an unrelenting realignment of the laws guiding Judaism, and of its various representations of itself, but will also turn the Jewish gaze inward, toward a form of discernment between the inner and outer manifestations of the Jewish spirit. Thus, from this inwardness comes the force of a potential division between the “inner” and the “outer” that had once driven Paul to distinguish between the inner and the outer Jew in terms of a contrast between the spirit and the flesh.40 For Scholem, historical forms of messianism arise as the antinomian tendency par excellence, the great catalyst within Judaism, and one end of these contradictory forces that are constantly in tension with one another—the law and its messianic undoing.41 Within a variety of Jewish contexts, and as was certainly the case for Paul, Jewish messianism as a certain development of an antinomian desire was an unstable force, one as likely to die out as quickly as it had begun. It was therefore often transformed into a universalist position so that it might gain greater appeal and applicability, yet one also at odds with the significant stress on particularity that Judaism would place upon its adherents (and in such a statement, we can already discern the seeds of thought that have motivated so many contemporary philosophical gestures, Badiou perhaps foremost among them). This was, and is, a factor that would ultimately cause these antinomian movements within Judaism to break from tradition and define themselves over and against the “chosen” people.42 As we have already seen, Scholem strove to depict Sabbatianism not so much as a transformation of Judaism, but rather as a transformation taking place within Judaism. It was one intended to reform and renew the essential Judaic message or impulse. In this sense, as David Biale has put it concerning Scholem’s reading, “Sabbatianism was not an aberration of Jewish history or a wild departure from traditional Judaism as a result of non-Jewish influences, but a movement whose origins lay in the heart of the legitimate tradition and whose heretical theology developed as a plausible offshoot of accepted concepts.”43 What Scholem sought to produce in his work was a vision of history as counter-history (much as Jan Assmann will later use the phrase, as we will see) wherein the discontinuities and ruptures that drive historical reformulations are given the weight and merit they deserve. In essence, Scholem considered the possibility for a “living

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relationship” with tradition to take place beyond the normative and generally constrictive framework of orthodoxy.44 It is in this way that he sought to provide a viable platform for the expression of these messianisms as part of the Jewish legacy, and despite their heretical transgressiveness—as voices that needed to be heard from within its walls and not ostracized outside them. As he put it, “Jewish so-called Existenz possesses a tension that never finds true release; it never burns itself out. And when in our history it does discharge, then it is foolishly decried (or, one might say unmasked) as ‘pseudo-Messianism’. ”45 The task, according to Scholem, is rather to see these movements for what they are—as challenges to the status quo of orthodox thought, challenges conditioned by particular historical developments (i.e., political, social, cultural, religious, etc) that foster such urges. These are the challenges that speak to the very nature of what seems to constitute any orthodox (or canonical) position. Another parallel trend in Judaic history which Scholem notes as converging with both Sabbatianism and Christianity is that of the Marranos, a grouping of certain Sefardic Jews from Spain who had been forced into public apostasy from 1391 to 1498 though they perhaps preserved something of their private faith in secret.46 This split in faith produced a “double life” for most, one that deeply resonated with the later teachings of Sabbatianism, as Scholem illustrates.47 Living this double life could, in fact, have provided the very experience which made Sabbatianism possible, what allowed it to take root and eventually to flourish. It is little surprise to Scholem that the writings of the Marrano Abraham Miguel Cardozo, who had also studied Christian theology for a time, came to envision the drama of salvation as a process wherein all true believers of Israel would have to embrace these same antinomian tendencies, live the “double life” of faith and only thus redeem the “fallen sparks” of the divine.48 The stakes of leading this antinomian “double life” were, and are great, for this is the very experience of faith that brings with it, not a destruction of, but a possible radical new relationship with the Torah. It provides what can be a subtle shift in perspective that allows an entirely new way of seeing things to emerge. In some historical cases, a “new mood,” as Scholem puts it, subsequently arose within certain Jewish communities traditionally devoted to the Law wherein they were able to express an antinomian tendency far greater than either Christianity or Islam previously had, since both of these movements had developed legal structures designed to prevent any further ignitions of messianic (or antinomian) disruption. These initial messianic disruptions had been constrained with an even greater orthodoxy than Judaism had ever produced precisely because

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they had begun as antinomian responses to a Judaic (or Judaic–Christian, as in the case of Islam) orthodoxy. Allowing such movements to be heard, however, began new expressions of thought that Scholem, for one, was quick to ascertain as vital to the progression of Judaism as a whole. The seeds for a radicalized hermeneutics ultimately to be born from such a reading as Scholem’s are to be found here. Two positions consequently developed within Judaism in order to account for these antinomian tendencies. The moderate view, on the one hand, held that it was only the Messiah himself who would live at variance with the Law; all other believers were still called to adhere to its rule. From this perspective, the Messiah alone would submerge himself in the world of sin and despair in order to salvage the Tikkun, to gather the holy sparks and redeem humanity. For believers to attempt this would only bring about the entrance of a form of nihilism through their attempts to enter into a paradox under which no one can truly live; it was the Messiah alone who could withstand such an aporetic existence. The more radical position, on the other hand, sought to universalize this paradoxical status of the Messiah in order to draw believers into a profoundly new form of religious life. As Scholem defines their witness—“The consequences which flowed from these religious ideas were purely nihilistic, above all the conception of a voluntary Marranism with the slogan: We must all descend into the realm of evil in order to vanquish it from within.”49 Their doctrine, in essence, was one that promoted a certain “holiness of sin.” The descent into an absolute antinomianism, what became in effect a form of nihilism, was to be transformed ultimately into a doctrine of redemption, one that upheld the paradoxes which the Messiah would seek to embody.50 Such subsequent movements sought, as Paul had once done, to proclaim those things once deemed impure as now pure, and therefore to follow their alltoo-human desires further than Judaic tradition had ever considered allowable. Hence, by not creating an analogous teaching of counterbalance that all things are permissible, but not all things are edifying, as Paul had once done,51 these messianic outbursts tended to plunge their followers into an ever-greater nihilistic outlook on existence. A religious myth of nihilism consequently arose as engaged in a permanent struggle with traditional religious frameworks. The Talmudic saying that “The subversion of the Torah can become its true fulfillment” now took on an entirely new meaning, one destined to resonate with later, similar antinomian, messianic tendencies (a temptation and interpretation of things that we will see return with the case of Agamben in the next chapter).52

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Despite the reality that these doctrines of a religious messianism were, as would be expected, condemned by the orthodox among the Judaic faithful, as Scholem notes, they nonetheless express a positive truth that needs to be understood—their nihilistic furor “. . . is after all only the confused and mistaken expression of their urge towards a fundamental regeneration of Jewish life, which under the historic conditions of those times could not find a normal expression.”53 The expression they did find, again historically speaking, was one of an inglorious descent into a nihilistic vision of redemption, one that nonetheless exposes its underlying logic as such—“Everyone must in some way share the fate of the Marranos: one’s heart and one’s mouth may not be the same.”54 And this was to be the case within Judaism, and not simply outside it. Sabbatianism, whether Jewish scholars were willing to admit it or not, according to Scholem, was the driving force behind the subsequent Jewish Enlightenment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.55 Or, as Biale has put it, “On a theoretical level, then, Sabbatianism prepared the ground for modern secularism and the Enlightenment. The doctrine of the holiness of sin became secular indifference to all traditional Jewish law.”56 The effects of antinomianism, whether perceived as a sustainable position or not, were therefore very real and vibrant in their impact upon the community of believers. These messianic impulses, as Scholem perceives them having been at work in history under many different names and guises, are primed for revolutionary zeal if any such “unbounded political apocalypse” should present itself, as was the case for some Jews who lived at the time of the French Revolution.57 Precipitous thoughts, such as those harbored in Sabbatianism, in Scholem’s judgment, are self-contradictory and hence prone to self-disintegration. Yet, as we are about to see in the work of Jacob Taubes, such a judgment may not be entirely foreclosed. That is, though he may have sensed the need to recognize and recover the heretical propensities of antinomian thought within a traditional framework, Scholem may have missed something altogether more radical about such movements than he first suspected.

Jacob Taubes and the division between “Judaisms” and “Christianities” In conclusion to an essay devoted to exploring the notion of theodicy as a concept situated in-between messianism and apocalypse, Engelhard Weigl finds that the

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only scholar to adopt the messianic motives of German–Jewish thought from the Weimar Republic of the early twentieth century (“following the footsteps of Walter Benjamin”) is Jacob Taubes.58 Noting the unique combination of Pauline and Benjaminian thought in Taubes’ work, Weigl exalts Taubes’ role as a thinker in this tradition by asserting that it was Taubes alone who continued on a messianic tradition that otherwise might have been destroyed by “Hitlerism and Stalinism” in kind.59 This is, of course, the same tradition that Agamben will later pick up and affirm quite pointedly in his own lectures on the apostle Paul and his relationship to Benjamin’s messianic themes, as we will see. What I seek to illuminate here, however, is the manner in which Taubes’ writings on the separation(s) between Judaism and Christianity (or even Judaism itself from within), as with his writings on religion and Paul in general, are a profound meditation upon the nature of our most basic western religious desires, ones that are born within the tensions of representation that Taubes outlines as inherent to the Judaic legacy. What Taubes’ thought grasps beyond Scholem’s perspective, however, is that such desires have often given rise over time even to our most basic formulations of the divine, a fact which has still yet to be comprehended in our current day. In “The Price of Messianism,” a brief polemical essay written against Scholem’s theses on the various historical forms of messianism, Taubes takes up the facts comprising the essence of his re-envisioning of the Judaic–Christian divide. After praising Scholem’s “substantial contribution” to our knowledge of messianism in general, he immediately launches into his polemic against Scholem’s critique of Christianity’s “interiorization of the messianic experience [Verinnerlichung der messianischen Erfahrung]”.60 Scholem’s facile division of the messianic ideal into its exterior, political (Judaic) and interior, spiritual (Christian) forms, according to Taubes, fails to bring out the true dynamics inherent in messianism. Again, echoing the themes that are resurgent within this analysis of the Jewish–Christian division, Taubes asks us to consider: . . . the dialectics in the messianic experience [messianischen Erfahrung] of a group at the moment when prophecy of redemption [Prophezeiung der Erlösung] fails. The “world” does not disintegrate, but the hope of redemption crumbles. If, however, the messianic community, because of its inward certainty, does not falter, the messianic experience is bound to turn inward; redemption is bound to be conceived as an event in the spiritual realm, reflected in the human soul. Interiorization is not a dividing line between “Judaism” and “Christianity”; it signifies a crisis within Jewish eschatology itself—in Pauline Christianity as

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well as in the Sabbatian movement of the seventeenth century. How else can redemption be defined after the Messiah has failed to redeem the external world except by turning inward?61

Rather than finding itself reliant upon forms of natural law, Judaic thought is represented by the Torah or divine law (halacha), and it is the fracture present within this divine law that gives the occasional messianic impulse its distinctive antinomian flavor, as was the case for Christianity nearly two millennia ago. The crisis at stake, then, is one regarding the validity of Jewish law itself and not necessarily the separation between the many Judaisms and Christianities. Such is Taubes’ assertion. Here is where the relevance of Paul’s version of the Christian messianic claim comes to the fore, as “Contrary to Scholem, I would argue that the strategy of Paul toward abrogation [Aufhebung] of the law was not dictated by pragmatic reasons . . . but followed strictly from his ‘immanent logic’ after acceptance of a Messiah justly crucified in consequence of the law.”62 Rather than read this as solely an “original” contribution to the realm of the religious, Taubes delves back into the furthest recesses of Judaism itself, finding therein the source for most of Christianity’s later claims—“The materials that Scholem has assembled and interpreted show beyond a shadow of a doubt that the symbols most alien to classic Judaism, such as the incarnation or the divinization [Vergöttlichung] of the Messiah, come to the fore in consequence of the inner logic in the messianic experience [inneren Logik der messianischen Erfahrung].”63 This is the “idea” of messianism, its internal logic working beyond any singular religious tradition and pouring into our cultural and political spheres, which Scholem has apparently overlooked. Hence, Paul is an antinomian in the extreme for Taubes, one who must see the law brought to its end, not only in its Judaic form, but in general, even in its national and cultural contexts. Paul is able to subdivide not only Jewish identity, but all identities into their external/internal elements since his messianic identifications lead him to do so. (This is a logic which Agamben, for example, merely repeats in his lectures on Paul, as we will see later on). Hence, “The crisis of eschatology becomes for Paul a crisis of conscience [Krise des Gewissens].”64 In this manner, a universal psychological principle of individuation is opened up as we are rendered divided within ourselves just as our conscience is divided into its internal/external elements. Paul’s initial embracing of an antinomian messianism actually gives birth to the “modern” subject so to speak, and more than a bit akin to Badiou’s development of a universal subject via these same Pauline coordinates.

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In Taubes’ estimation, there are only two genuine messianic movements that have taken place, historically-speaking—those in early Christianity and in the Sabbatian movement. And, as we are by now conditioned to expect, their coinciding is not an accident. Rather, The first occurs just before rabbinic Judaism has begun to mold the fantasy and the reality of the Jewish people, that is, before the destruction of the Second Temple. . . . The second comes to the fore at the time when rabbinic Judaism in its classic form begins to disintegrate—for rabbinic Judaism consistently opposed [ablehnend gegenüber] messianic movements.65

Because these messianic movements are re-interpreted (universalized, in Badiou’s language) by their respective communities of followers (most successfully through Paul of Tarsus, in the case of Jesus, and Nathan of Gaza, in the case of Sabbatai Zevi), they survive throughout history. Rather than these messianic figures being produced around the source of an enigma impermeable to historical scrutiny, Taubes rather suggests that they are consistent with the “inner logic” of the messianic idea: “It is in the interpretive context that the messianic message is to be found, not in the life-history [Lebenssgeschichte] of a person, which is as opaque [undurchsichtig] as all earthly events [irdischen Ereignisse] usually are.”66 The paradox within each faith is one that arises from within Judaic law itself, leading Taubes to formulate the essential problematic as such: “The horns of the dilemma cannot be escaped. Either messianism is nonsense, and dangerous nonsense at that, but the historic study of messianism is a scientific pursuit . . . or messianism, and not only the historic research of the ‘messianic idea,’ is meaningful inasmuch as it discloses a significant facet of human experience [menschlichen Erfahrung].”67 Rather than view the rise of Jewish messianism as a response to feelings of powerlessness, pace Scholem, Taubes reads its relevance as integral to the nature of law on the whole. As he quips, “Every endeavor to actualize [aktualisieren] the messianic idea was an attempt to jump into history, however mythically derailed [mythisch entgleisen] the attempt may have been. It is simply not the case that messianic fantasy and the formation of historical reality [die Gestaltung der geschichtlichen Wirklichkeit] stand at opposite poles.”68 Retreating from history, from this standpoint, was actually the position of the rabbinic view—“. . . the outlook that set itself against all messianic lay movements [messianische Laienbewegung] and cursed all messianic discharge [messianische Entladung] a priori with the stigma of “pseudo messianic’.”69 In this way, rabbinic Judaism developed a highly stabilized structure through

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which to posit itself and its people as if “outside” of history, living separate from those seen as immersed in history. As such, “Only those who jumped on messianic bandwagons, religious or secular, giving themselves entirely to their cause, burned themselves out in taking [verzehrten sich in der Übernahme] the messianic risk.”70 Twentieth-century Zionist aspirations would fall into this same category of thought, as their hopes in forming the nation of Israel were once again  also distrusted by those same rabbinic structures that had once been suspicious of figures such as Jesus or Sabbatai Zevi. This is so because, as Taubes renders it, “every attempt to bring about redemption on the level of history without a transfiguration [Verwandlung] of the messianic idea leads straight into the abyss.”71 What Taubes is aiming for, both here and elsewhere in his writings, comes to bear directly upon his reading of the gap separating Judaism from Christianity, or even multiple Judaisms from themselves. And this difference, for Taubes, is in its essential details no small matter. It has been the very fabric of our western culture and that which still influences “every moment of our lives”—an extremely bold and wide-sweeping claim to be sure.72 The history of their relations has dramatically been dominated by Christian success, both politically and socially, though this fact need not determine our present understanding of their relationship, nor set a trajectory for their future interaction. In fact, without this historical baggage, the tension between them becomes somewhat clearer. Generally speaking, Christianity is dependent upon its Judaic heritage, as Judaism is necessary for its plan of salvation to come to ultimate fruition. From the perspective of Judaism, however, Christianity is little more than another heretical movement, in no sense necessary for Judaism’s survival. Contrary to those Judaic philosophies of the last century that sought to incorporate Christianity into their grand religious narratives (e.g., Franz Rosenzweig),73 Taubes rather highlights the manner in which Christianity appears, at least historically, as an attempt to cope with a crisis present entirely within certain Rabbinic circles of Judaic thought—within, that is, the nature of law itself. Again, for Taubes, this tension was recognized nowhere more accurately than  in the writings of Paul, who, for his part, felt out the divisions with perceptive insight. As he puts it, “It is perhaps no paradox that Paul, a Pharisee and son of a Pharisee, who claimed to have studied under Gamaliel and to have excelled in his zeal for the law and tradition—that this same Paul was better prepared than modern Jewish apologists to define the basic issue dividing Judaism and Christianity. That issue is the law [Und diese Frage ist das Gesetz].”74 Paul’s conclusion, that Jesus was the longed-for messiah and that

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this occurrence superseded the rule of Judaic law, pushes Christianity into the realm of forever being a heretical Judaic sect in its denial of halacha or “the ‘way’ of the law in a man’s life [der “Weg” des Gesetzes im Leben der Menschen].”75 By portraying the fundamental division between the faiths as one centered on the issue of law, Taubes is able to shift focus away from the traditional criticism of Christianity’s perceivable threat to Judaism’s monotheistic adherence. Indeed, if Judaism’s central tenet had been simply its monotheistic core, how had it amply survived the “centuries-long predominance of the Lurianic kabbalah” with its insertion of Gnostic and even pagan mythologies into the Judaic system of belief? Kabbalah movements, he asserts, not only survived, but actually added a certain sense of prestige to Judaic traditions. This was so for the most part because they were able to enhance the strength and prominence of halacha in Jewish life.76 “Challenges not to Judaism’s monotheism, but to the validity [Gültigkeit] and interpretation of the law, shake [erschüttert] the Jewish religion and community to their foundations. Any messianic claim represents such a challenge because it claims to have ushered in [heraufzuführen] an age in which the law is superseded [überwunden].”77 Rather than this truth being capable of rendering Judaism as merely a “legalistic” religion (“Gesetzesreligion”), the path has been paved for a polyvalent halacha capable of absorbing rationalist, mystical or even ecstatic prophetic philosophies, something which history has demonstrated again and again. It can absorb quite a few divergent views it would seem, except for those views that deviate from an adherence to the law itself, views such as those which Paul and Sabbatai Zevi, for example, had manifested. The force of Taubes’ argument would seem to lie in the manner in which he is able to align the scope of Christian claims with other heretical–messianic impulses within Judaic tradition. Like the messianic transgressions of Sabbatai Zevi, Christianity appeared at a time in history when Rabbinic Judaism was experiencing an internal crisis of identity. In Taubes’ opinion, it was this internal tension within Judaism that ultimately supplied the motivation for a transgressive–messianic movement: Christian history, Jesus’ claim to the title of Messiah, and Paul’s theology of Christ as the end of the law [als dem Ende des Gesetzes], are not at all “unique events” [einzigartige Ereignisse] for Judaism, but things that have recurred in the Jewish pattern of religious existence [im jüdischen Grundmuster der religiösen Existenz]. Christian history, as I have said, constitutes no “mystery” for the Jewish religion. Christianity represents a crisis that is “typical” in Jewish history and

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expresses a typical Jewish “heresy”: antinomian messianism [der antinomistische Messianismus]—the belief that with the coming of the Messiah, not observance of the law, but faith in him is required for salvation [heilsbedeutsam].78

Christianity, like Sabbatianism, presented believers with a “paradox of faith,” one which in turn generated a vehicle for the expression of antinomian theological tendencies. Any subsequent antinomian trends in secular thought are thereby to be seen as being merely capitulations to a way of life that does not focus on halacha, or the law lying at the center of a Jewish way of living. To divide matters of religious expression into their spirit/letter (or grace/law) constituent parts is to cede major theological matters to Paul. Yet, despite this reality, he says, “Modern Jewish thinking is in large part a prisoner of this antinomianism, which pervades modern thought in general; in the world today the principle of law is reduced to a juridical device and the ‘pathological inclination of love’ [pathologische Neigung der Liebe] (Kant) is exalted [hochgepriesen] over against the ‘blind principle’ of justice [Gerechtigkeit].”79 This is how things have been framed historically, but, as Taubes tries to stress, things could have also happened otherwise. What he certainly aims to elucidate is the manner in which our cultural, religious, and political representations are established along these lines emanating from the Jewish tradition. In a sense pivotal to the present study, he makes the crucial linkage between halacha and representation as being central to his understanding of Judaic–Christian relations—“. . . halacha must become “external” and “juridical”; it must deal with the minutiae of life [Einzelheiten des Lebens] . . ..”80 Halacha is immersed in an inescapable world of representations and their nominal (normative) constructions to which Christian antinomian and its desire for a presentation (grace) beyond representation (law) seems forever wedded. The force of Christianity’s messianic claims over our present sources of cultural intelligibility are to be understood in this sense as the endless contrast between representation and presentation, justice and love, and even law and grace as they continue under a myriad of guises to abound in our world. Even the designators “conservative” and “liberal” would seem to be caricatures that do indeed stem from the same issues that motivate our religious identifications. Seen from this light, it is little surprise that politics and religion often go handin-hand, practically speaking, for many people. This connection is what will further enable Taubes to read Paul as one opposed not just to Judaic law but to the principle of law itself—a political challenge to all earthly forms of rule. If Taubes is to be heard on this point, this is a tension which originates from the same focal point (Judaism) and, though it occasionally

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deviates into various heretical forms, will remain within its original context as the tension is not easily resolvable, or even resolvable at all. Law and grace, in this polarized contrast, will continue to motivate the various religious beliefs found somewhere along a sliding-scale between representation and presentation, even if this contrast seems to arise from a source outside of Judaic thought (as with Christianity). It is, therefore, within this spectrum of Judaisms that Taubes attempts to posit an answer—“The controversy between the Jewish and Christian religions points to the perennial conflict between the principle of law [Prinzip des Gesetzes] and the principle of love [Prinzip der Liebe]. The ‘yoke of the law’ [Joch des Gesetzes] is challenged by the enthusiasm of love [Enthusiasmus der Liebe]. But the ‘justice of the law’ [Gerechtigkeit des Gesetzes] may, in the end, be the only challenge to the arbitrariness of love [Willkür der Liebe].”81 The tension between law and grace that he here seizes upon as foundational to all representations is what consequently aligns his work on Paul with his formulations on a contemporary political theology. Following Paul’s development of an antipolitical politics, something perhaps akin to Paul Fletcher’s more recent “(im)political theology,”82 Taubes produces a form of apocalypticism as an authentic form of political theology that is inherently on the side of the oppressed as it seeks to delegitimize political power.83 This perception and appropriation of Paul’s writings had been present even in his earliest writings, as his dissertation on western eschatological views can attest. There, in fact, this conjunction prompted a radical re-thinking of the role of the messianic within political thought on the whole, as well as further deepening our account of what ontological forms could be said to resonate within such accounts. In many ways, and as we shall see re-appear most pointedly in a moment through the work of Agamben, the connection between certain antinomian forms of messianic thought and an attempt to construct a “theology of immanence” begins here.

The re-entrance of immanence In his dissertation, published in English as Occidental Eschatology, Taubes juxtaposes the philosophies of the theistic–transcendental (Kierkegaard) with the atheistic–materialist (Marx), seeing their clash as one ultimately producing what appears to us as the necessity for decision—“The decision [Ent-scheidung] which Marx and Kierkegaard call for deepens the rift [Scheidung] and makes it absolute. That is why this call for a decision marks the beginning of a crisis that

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is still shaking our present age. For crisis is scission [Scheidung] arising from the call for decision [Entscheidung].”84 Echoing his later encounter with Carl Schmitt, the master-theorist of decision within the sphere of the political,85 Taubes here outlines the framework through which any radical political theology must be understood, a framework beyond where most theological and/or political philosophers have been willing to go—“The fusion of inside [Kierkegaardian inwardness] and outside [Marxist materialism] can only be attained if one is prepared to abandon the territory which holds Marx and Kierkegaard, even in their opposition, captive.”86 Just what this attainment will consist in remains, at least in this early work, somewhat unclear. What is left open as a possible alternative, however, is what had dropped out of Taubes’ argument after it was first introduced alongside the theistic– transcendental and the atheistic–materialist—the pantheistic–immanent, or that which he describes as an aesthetic–religious merger of God and the world that results in a “strange interchangeability [merkwürdigen Vertauschbarkeit] of ‘possible [möglich]’ and ‘real [wirklich]’. ”87 This would be to discern a theology of immanence as perhaps reaching its greatest point of intensity within Judaic thought.88 For the early Taubes, it is the contrast between the theistic–transcendental and the atheistic–materialist which necessitates a “leap [Sprung],” one that in turn formulates the very nature of what is considered to be imperative (“must [muß]”).89 In this at times highly speculative treatise, the pantheistic–immanent (thesis) is brought into contrast with the separation of God and the world (antithesis) in order to posit freedom as the only manner in which God can become “all in all. ”90 That is, to the world, humanity appears as divine; to the divine, humanity appears as worldly. In the synthesis of these opposing views, the union of God and the world occurs through the freedom granted to a humanity, which now becomes part of the “all in all” that is God. Consequently, for Taubes, this unique dialectic takes place solely among the only race of people who remain covenanted with God and, yet, are the “restless element in world history [unruhige Element in der Weltgeschichte],” even going so far as to give birth to history as we know it.91 Opposed to the paganism of nationhood, Israel comes to typify an estrangement from the world (“wilderness [Wüste]” living) wherein revelation is able to take place.92 In truth, “Abraham is a stranger on this earth [Fremdling auf Erden], a foreigner to the lands and nations he meets. Abraham’s race regards itself not as belonging to the nations, but as a nonnation [nicht-Volk]. This is exactly what the name Hebrew means.”93 Indeed, there are even utopian (“anarchical”) elements that Taubes detects

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as present within Israel’s quest to embody a theocracy with God as its sole authority.94 These are what he refers to as Israel’s vision of immanence in contrast to the worldly transcendent notions of sovereignty that have functioned mainly throughout history to posit and legitimate the political powers that be. This is a major distinction to be sure—Israel is perceived here as a purely immanent reality because there is no king and not because there is no God. One can sense through these conjectures, moreover, that Taubes is grasping a major line of Jewish thought. Aviezer Ravitzky, for one, likewise points to just such a reading of Jewish history as he describes the two major trends in contemporary Jewish messianic thought that run parallel to what Taubes is suggesting. These are trends, he suggests, conditioned by the internalization of messianic impulses themselves brought about through the failure of various historical messianic movements. On the one hand, lies a very political messianic religious Zionism and, on the other, a form of Hasidic thought known as Lubbavitcher (Habad).95 As Ravitzky explains, both movements are characteristic of Judaic messianic trends on the whole and as both spring from a moment of tremendous crisis to Jewish identity that soon turns into a triumphant, “successful” messianism the moment some semblance of hope appears in the midst of an earlier despairing.96 An intense dialectic of potential defeat and subsequent resurrection is consequently posited as the condition sine qua non of a messianic fervor that arises within a particularly intense historical event. Such was the case, as Ravitzky notes, for the Maccabean and Bar Kokhba revolts against Roman occupation, whenever Islamic rule was threatened during the medieval period (as in parts of Turkey, North Africa, and Italy), in the basic platform of Sabbatian belief during the seventeenth century and immediately following World War II in the aftermath of the Shoah. To note, the two strands of contemporary Judaic messianism that Ravitzky singles out have both demonstrated a turn to instances of pantheistic belief as part of their worldview, more than a coincidental point of convergence with the line of thought being pursued here.97 This turn would stand to reason for him since, if history is to be redeemed, and such is what the various Jewish messianisms sought to proclaim throughout history, then reality itself, in all its diversity and particularity, every inch of our material universe, is likely to be transformed as well, bringing divinity into each profaned object. “If the divine bounty encompasses and suffuses not only cosmic reality but also the historical sphere, how can there be any place left for an unredeemed person and for unredeemed time?” is how he puts it.98 What these Jewish movements testify to is the reality that

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. . . if one adheres to the transcendent concept of God, one is likely to speak of a catastrophic fall from divine favor, of a God who has distanced himself for a time from the people, from humanity, and from history. Yet this possibility has been closed to pantheists. Their God is supposed to be present here and now, within the cosmic and historical order, and not outside it.99

This messianic portrayal of a divine immanence has, in Ravitzky’s words, “had a fertilizing effect on theology,” something which has extended itself toward the more traditional, orthodox branches of Judaism in an effort to revitalize them.100 And, most profoundly, the dynamics most at stake for a meaningful theological articulation are opened to us—an orthodox, transcendent, canonical view of the divine is contrasted with an immanent, pantheistic model of messianic time— one wherein even the “objects” before us seemingly cry out to be heard (as a pantheistic model of our world would perhaps have it). What we witness in Taubes’ work specifically is, in many ways, a simple variation on this theme, something that will forever unite him with Benjamin’s vision of a “weak messianic force” moving throughout history, liberating those oppressed by history. That is, Taubes suggests that any true revolutionary (messianic) spirit will only be locatable within this framework of an immanent resistance to the transcendent political powers of this world. This is a state, we should keep in mind, which truly says nothing about God’s existence or possible interference in our world—it is solely a critique of a very this-worldly “transcendent” sovereign power. It is only by viewing things as such that Israel gives birth to the “forward-looking” figures who live in expectation of an apocalyptic revelation beyond worldly power—Daniel, Jesus, Bar Kochba and Sabbatai Zevi (and one would be tempted to add Agamben as well, as we will later see), to name but a few.101 Like Paul, Taubes quickly expands the mandate given to Israel through its covenant to all peoples who experience something of this faith of the oppressed, and of exilic life, giving it an international flavor beyond what Judaic thought has often embraced.102 It is moreover the common foundation of an apocalypticism that embraces an immanent eschatology that, in the end, unites the various strands of the “Mandaean, Manichaean, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic” faiths.103 To those persons estranged from the powers of this world, it is the apocalyptic message within each of these religious traditions which calls to them and offers them a sense of joy and comfort. This force working from within that calls each away from the transcendent sovereign powers that be is an immanent messianic force—the logic of the messianic that Taubes preached with an ever-increasing vigor.

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If we seek a symbol for such an internal tension, we are returned to the figure of the Marrano, the person divided from their own self, forever estranged from the official structures of political and religious representation, though bound to them in unusual ways as well. Echoing this early strain of his thought, Taubes will in fact later recall the figure of the Marrano as illustrative of such an individual who is able to transcend any given, particular religious representation. As he renders it, The Marranic experience [marranischen Erfahrung] was a constitutive step toward neutralizing the demarcation [Abgrenzung] between the established religious bodies of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Lurianic kabbalah and Sabbatian messianism recycled [wiederholen] the Marranic crisis of the religious consciousness in mythic terms. In the ideology [Lehre] of the apostate Messiah rings a melody that was expounded nonmythically in the radical critique of religion advanced by dissident Marranos. Cardozo and Spinoza were more than chronological contemporaries.104

This is undoubtedly a replaying of the tension between law and grace on purely immanent terms—as a structural feature of canonical-legal processes and their messianic undoing—and hence their absolute religious applicability; but it is also indicative of the distance people today display toward religious traditional identifications, such as we find in the work of Jacques Derrida, for instance, who on occasion toyed with the idea of identifying himself as a Marrano figure, as we will see in the chapters that follow. What both Taubes and Derrida seem to be taking from this figure of the Marrano is the only possible identification of the modern subject left to us—the soul divided from within, once a part of the Judaic tradition, but now always-already the last of a dying lineage. This identification with the Marrano is also what will preserve something of the necessity for representation on Taubes’ part, as even the Marrano sits between contested representations, playing witness to the very failures of representation. In a very real sense, the figure of the Marrano, if seen from these eyes, applies to us all, even those of us most fully immersed within a particular religious tradition, even one other than (but always also within) the structures of a Judaic faith.105 Just as was the case with Lurianic kabbalah, Sabbatianism and (from Scholem’s and Taube’s viewpoint) Christianity, those practicing their faith within these traditions are more than simply adept at providing representational responses to the various historical crises that assault one’s sense of a unified identity, such as was the case for the first Marranos.106 We, westerners, it would seem, were always-already Marranos of a sort from the beginning.

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What is opened up through this merger of the viewpoints of both Scholem and Taubes on the logic of the messianic is, in the end, a profound witness to the perennial struggle between orthodox and antinomian religious views present in a variety of western monotheistic religions and the cultures they helped shape. What this convergence further reveals is that such a struggle not only exposes the divided nature (and failures) of our self-identifications, but also points us toward what many will perceive as a complete re-envisioning of the role of the divine in our world, a possible “theology of immanence,” as I will later call it. At the very least, this challenge to traditional transcendent (sovereign) structures should provoke us to question our basic alignment of western theological insights and ontological forms (the basis for any alleged “ontotheology”), from our historical definitions of transcendence to those challenging calls for an immanent ontotheology to counteract traditional (transcendent) claims. It is important to keep in mind, however, and as Taubes himself managed to do, that such challenges to tradition are not necessarily calls for an abandonment of said norms, but rather an attempt to further discern the very nature of the religious logic that governs the particular “development of doctrine” that takes place over time. Whether Taubes’ exposition of these historical immanent, antinomian events within the Judaic heritage rings true or not, what is clear is that these debates have at least expanded into the terrain of philosophical thought. As I hope to make clearer in what follows, the contestations between representation and presentation—specifically through their co-opting of the language of canonical forms and messianic disruptions—have taken on a resonance that Taubes would no doubt recognize, though the argument has drifted further afield than he had perhaps suspected. What we will next witness in the series of debates that surround the oeuvres of both Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben is an unfolding of these Judaic legacies into the very fabric of contemporary philosophical reasoning (perhaps, one could argue, little more than an extension of the Jewish Enlightenment brought about by Sabbatianism!). At the same time, however, such philosophical thoughts are never far from their “theological origins,” if anything, they move us closer to a more profound discernment of what shape the theological takes (or could take) within a contemporary western context. The debate between Derrida and Agamben, one that could be perceived to be at the heart of philosophy in the modern age, is one that actually reformulates these basic divisions between transcendence and immanence, sovereignty and weakness, representation and presentation, and—though they may appear at times to downplay them—both canonical forms and their accompanying

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messianic forces. By highlighting the roles which each of these concepts plays in their work, I aim to bring to the fore such intertwined conceptualizations, ultimately seeking to demonstrate how their woven fabric is not only essential to the future of philosophical and political thought, but to religious and theological formulations as well.

2

Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben on the Processes of Messianicity and Canonicity

It was, of course, not coincidental that the people viewing shadows in the cave, according to Plato’s ancient allegory, were also chained to the wall, prisoners to someone’s nefarious scheming. They were, so the story goes, capable only of viewing what they had been meant to view, mere shadows on the wall, never knowing the full force of a reality illuminated by a sun that lay just beyond their confinement. There is some power, it would seem, with an interest in rendering these prisoners subject to their vision of things, their show of shadows and puppets. The philosopher, by Plato’s reckoning, is the one required to bring us to a new realization of reality, to free us from our enslavement to shadows, and present something beyond this absurd theater cast in darkness. The emancipatory desires of the Enlightenment, it could be said, bore just such a reasoning behind their efforts. Beyond this reading, however, there are yet other implications for Plato’s allegory as well, ones central to the concerns of this study. For example, what precisely is the reality of such un-real shadows projected within the cave? What are we to make of those who do in fact live in chains, and despite the myriad forms that our various global enslavements today take? Who places these chains, any form of chains, upon the prisoners, and who removes them in the end? And, as our complexity in understanding all of this intensifies, what politics are enabled within the cave in order to bring the prisoners to the surface? What powers are needed to do this? Who will stand up for such persons? And who will resist? Rather than appear as being mere speculation on basic philosophical principles, the answers to such questions, I believe, are what lie at the heart of our understanding of sovereign power and its ability to present itself as the power that dictates the social order based on the (either coerced or uncoerced) relinquishment of individual power toward its own establishment. The sovereign

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only exists through the institution of some degree of individual constraint (one’s “chains” as it were). Its power is a power that exists only through the will, given or taken—it matters little in the end—of the people whom sovereign power now claims to represent.1 Such powers, it should be noted (and in much the same terms that Plato evoked many centuries ago), are dependent upon their ability to enact a public performance of power, a show of sovereignty, one full of both majesty (Derrida’s term) and glory (Agamben’s), full of pomp and ceremonial ritual, all utilized to legitimate its claims to the throne of sovereign power. Our comprehension of even our most basic representations, such as those found in politics, culture, art and even in language itself (how a word can be said to re-present a thing), seems to be wholly dependent upon our relinquishing of any private meaning that such things might hold for us, and our admittance that we must either share in or be subordinate to the determination of representations that ensures our cultural intelligibility of such representative forms. It is an effort of great valiance to try to liberate one from their “enslavement” to the shadows of our shared symbolic universe, yet despite the tantalizing efforts of so many philosophers throughout time to do just that, the chains of representation are hard to shake off, and this is the case regardless of the violence they could be said to enact upon us. Though we may seek a permanent (“antinomian”) suspension of the dynamics that oscillate between violence and nonviolence (Benjamin’s “pure” or “divine” violence would perhaps fit just such a bill, as we will see), as Judith Butler has recently pointed out, transcending the historical tensions between violence and nonviolence would be to make a move toward evading the realm of representation altogether, hence, in some sense, perhaps avoiding our responsibilities within it as well.2 Moreover, it should be stated that religious representations are not exempt from such calculations; rather, they seem historically to play a pivotal role in such formulations. The connection between sovereign political power and religion (and certainly, theology) is certainly not a new insight, though it is one that continues to press the frontiers of what we consider both sovereign power and divine sovereignty to be.3 Whether political sovereignty is dependent upon its analogous theological formulations (as one of Agamben’s latest works, The Kingdom and the Glory, seeks to make clear) is a most pressing question to be sure, for those immersed in politics as well as in theology. The issue becomes doubly complicated, as I have already suggested, when the religious desire for a presentation beyond representation must take into account its own complicity with those historical and political representations intertwined with very

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earthly and very real bids for sovereign power. Despite Taubes’ intimations of a messianism aligned with the immanent presentation of an ontological form, how a divine, transcendent and sovereign being is supposed to remain removed from our most basic formulations of sovereign power and political representation remains unclear at this point, as does the question of how one could even be said to remove oneself from the chains of “sovereign” representation (as well as any associated violence which these chains enact, self-imposed or otherwise forced upon us). What hopefully has become somewhat clearer through all of this, however, is that the real question to be dealt with is the one that I have yet been pursuing from the start of this study—how a religious desire to transcend all representations (its “messianic” force) is to be understood in relation to our formulations of shared sovereign power (its “canonical” manifestation). One of the major insights of this research that I am hoping here to capitalize on is the fact that, though the terminology of a particular philosophical discussion is altered throughout time, the stakes, we might say, remain the same. What is added to this ongoing discussion by our next partners in dialogue, Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben, on the limits of the canonical in relation to the messianic, representation in relation to presentation, and even sovereign, transcendent power in relation to an immanent re-visioning of power altogether, will therefore occupy our attention in the hopes that the debate that takes place between them might further illuminate the stakes of such a combination of the theological and political. The fact that each author circulates around the same terrain which both Scholem and Taubes have prepared is, I hope, further evidence that such debates are, in many ways, simply a continued playing out of the same terms that have defined the fields of theology and philosophy from the start. To begin, I first wish to describe something of the nature of the Derridean deconstructive project, certainly as it coheres with certain conclusions underlined by Taubes in the last chapter, but also as it aligns itself with the structures of religious thought that I have been outlining thus far. The fact that Derrida’s work was often constructed in reference to a heavily weighted theological terminology (i.e., messianicity) should therefore come as little surprise to us. What I hope to demonstrate through the next few sections of this chapter, however, is that such a structure of religious logic runs throughout his work as a whole, dictating many more of his principles and concepts than has perhaps been noted. I will do so likewise in order to set the stage for the conflicts that will arise when Derrida’s oeuvre is juxtaposed with that of his alleged “antinomian counterpart,” Giorgio

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Agamben, whose own work I will take up in the latter half of this chapter. The debate between them, then, will occupy the remainder of Part One.

Derrida on economic and aneconomic processes For Derrida’s contemporary, Paul Ricoeur, the tensions within a given act of representation are entirely divided between their totalizing and exceptional elements (I will explore Ricoeur’s role in these conversations in a later chapter). These elements are pitted against each other in a manner that prevents any complete totalization from ever taking place, while simultaneously, and through this juxtaposition, yet securing meaning within the symbolic order.4 The exception will always hold in reserve a potential to upend the norm, to be sure, but the functioning of a norm is also to be seen as a necessity for social and cultural intelligibility. And this is how humanity engages itself both socially and culturally (and, we might add, religiously as well), by creating historical–canonical norms that change through time but also guarantee that a given population will comprehend each other.5 Seeing things thus is to present the philosophical concept of representation as an attempt at being a quasitotal framework, though it need not be one that claims an explicit, particular ontological form or nature. Representations, as with languages, change over time; they fluxuate and they eventually fade into the past. Yet, as we will see in a moment, they are also mainly perceived to be inevitable, indeed necessary, in order that they might guarantee our shared forms of social and cultural recognition. For Ricoeur, moreover, representations act “as a continuing canonization, in the same way as people have referred to continuing creation”.6 This linkage between canons and creation is not something that Derrida will attempt to substantiate, as I will show—indeed, his understanding of representation seems to point to the symbolic realm as removed from the created material world. And this is a fact that will severely limit his theological relevance, as he will not attempt to deal with the (divine) origins that theologians hold so dear. Due, I believe, to his adherence to a Kantian universal structure of human (religious) experience, Derrida’s reflections upon the nature of deconstruction (with its accompanying messianic vigor), and as depicted in relation to historical–canonical forms of representation, may yet offer us a profound insight into the role which the construction of canons plays within our ongoing theological discussions. And, to be sure, this is no slight matter.

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Seen from this angle, any principle of the canon (or the processes of canonicity that could be said to produce it, functioning here as the counterpoint to Derrida’s frequently used term messianicity) has the potential to create the space for law (another term for comprehending the governing norms of representation which I will take up in what follows) in order to establish itself within a particular cultural and historical context. This space is one which can become a location for justice—but also, it should be said, oppression—to occur. Canonicity, as history and its functioning demonstrate, only makes the space available for the conditions of normativity to be generated through its force of signification. Canons signify a cultural, symbolic reality. They do not, however, guarantee that justice will be done to those persons subject to their governing norms. A canon is only a force which determines how certain norms will become legible to the subjects who are in turn subjected to them.7 The matter of concern here, in no uncertain terms, lies with regard to the “general structure of experience” said to exist beyond any particular content given through a canonical form, that which is developed through an expansion of the antinomies of thought (i.e., freedom or determination, exception or norm, etc.) considered in order to explore the implications of, and for, religious experience.8 It was this reflection which at times brought Derrida close to the apophatic (mystical) tradition, and yet which kept him at a certain distance from it as well, refusing to simply align himself with a particular traditional religious framework in terms either of affirming or negating it.9 He rather stood at a remove from particular traditions and their associated canons altogether. Derrida’s proximity to the terms of (Jewish) religious tradition will turn out to be no coincidence, though, from this initial angle, it is not immediately obvious either why he should hold a particular tradition-bound conceptualization in such high regard since his focus is upon the structures of thought and not the content of a specific faith.10 Why bring religious terms or a religious understanding (such as accompanies terms like the “messianic” or the “canonical”) into the discussion at all? As Hent de Vries asks with regard to the “general state of experience”, “. . . why would the messianic or, for that matter, the apophatic, be the best analogy, indeed, the example par excellence, of this “structure” ”, especially, I would add, since it seems indebted to a particular religious tradition?11 This is a question well worth asking again and again, and one I will here repeat in order to sketch out the contours of a possible solution. It would seem at least at first glance that any answer would generally have to circulate around the (Kantian) antinomies at work in Derrida’s many

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philosophical (theologically-inflected) formulations, ones which de Vries succinctly articulates as such: The structure of revealability and of messianicity, Derrida would seem to suggest, is much larger than the cultural space in which (and as which) religions manifest themselves. Messianicity, thus defined, is no longer restricted to those who, in history, have in fact addressed themselves to the Messiah. It is the universal structure folded into every relation to the past, the present, the future, to life, and to death.12

According to de Vries, this reading is a juxtaposition between the elements of revealability and messianicity as the tension-filled polarities that they are, and which are embedded in the “general structure of experience.” Just as messianicity must forever deconstruct any given canonical representation, so too must those “other” representations (installed as products of revealability, the historical theologemes of a particular religious tradition or the canonical forms before us) be constantly active in our world. And this formulation of a necessary logic of shifting between the messianic and the canonical is what I have been analyzing thus far. Despite this formulation, however, and in the face of such a deconstruction of the norms which vitalize and give meaning to society, and as de Vries himself wonders, how are we to envision the re-inscription of the traditional theologemes of our world, to “renegotiate the limits and aporias of the very concepts in which history and the political are often framed?”13 This is where theology, as a discipline that is often slow to change or re-negotiate its traditional “theologemes,” must pay particularly close attention. What de Vries highlights as the fundamental structure of Derrida’s thought is the path which Derrida scholars today target as the Kantian antinomic framework under which he operates, though it is anything but antinomian in the sense I have been using the term.14 Rather, Derrida relies upon the Kantian antinomies of thought in order to produce a specific dialectic, one that focuses upon the never-ending road to a potentially more just world. Such a rich dialectic in fact gives rise to the correlation between the “destructive” elements of his thought and the more “constructive” principles that likewise emerge, even if sometimes simply as hints, in his later writings. In the words of Andrea Hurst, for example, Derrida maintains a precarious tension between what she calls the “economic” and the “aneconomic” as just such an example of his dialectical measures. For her part, Hurst charts the evolution

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of Derrida’s terminology, from a contrast between a “restricted” and a “general” economy in his earlier essay on Hegel in Writing and Difference,15 to the binary system of “economic” and “aneconomic” processes that characterizes the very structure of the transcendental operation, the antinomies of thought revisited again as it were. In general, Derrida’s aim seems to be, according to Hurst, to evidence a “. . . quasi-transcendental constitution as the aporetic interweaving of incompatible but equally necessary economic and aneconomic aporias.”16 This is posited, at least for Derrida, in critical relation to Emmanuel Levinas as a constant choosing between totality and infinity.17 It is a constant choosing indeed, though it is also always an impossible choice, a choice for the impossible that Derrida considers often under the rubric of the “double bind.” To quote Hurst again: “. . . the double bind that arises as a consequence of the fact that the aneconomic moment intrinsic to all economic conditions of possibility ruins any hope for their perfection.”18 Not perfectible, perhaps, but necessary for the dialectic to continue, and certainly the price that must be paid for cultural intelligibility and for the construction of the transcendental subject, two projects that Derrida will ultimately defend. This is something which Hurst also considers to be the aporia that governs Derrida’s entire philosophical project. In this manner, she can concede that “One might . . . find the ‘lesson of deconstruction’ condensed in the paradoxical injunction ‘give economy its chance’: allow economy a chance to happen; allow the aneconomic chance to happen to an economy.”19 According to Derrida, every economy, such as that concerning the functioning of legal structures, tries to conceal the fact that it does not ultimately bring justice. That is, any economy of representation will still do a certain degree of violence to those who are subject to its claims of normativity.20 This is the price of subjectivity, the entrance fee for having a cultural identity.21 This is even the case despite the fact that justice is never fully revealed in an economic process, only guaranteed by its aneconomic counterpart. For Derrida, the term “stricture” comes to express the symmetrical relationship between the economic and the aneconomic processes that are “bound together in a knot such that loosening one side tightens the other.”22 Considered as the “plural logic of the aporia,” it pronounces itself through the instance of the “double bind.” There will always be an impossible choosing between the economic, with its determinations for archivization, repetition, conservation and return, and the aneconomic, with its propensity for an anarchiving violence, aggression, destruction, dissolution, a plethora of characteristics all belonging, according to Hurst, to the operations of the Freudian death drive.23

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In summation, the aneconomic measures of messianicity tend unequivocally toward an “undoing” of given representations (i.e., their “death drive,” an antinomian, messianic force unfolding before us once again), while the economic, and here analyzed under the rubric of canonicity, tends toward the historical, canonical constructs before us, representations of the subject, and of meaning within the subject’s world. There is an unalterable relationship between these forces of canonicity (the “economic”) and messianicity (the “aneconomic”), which Derrida’s work brings to light, ones that determine our representational matrices tout court.

Deconstruction and canonicity There are many names by which to comprehend the processes of the economic, the forces of cultural inscription and intelligibility, just as there are many names for the aneconomic. Just a choice few for the former term suggested by Derrida include “revealability,” “archivization” and whatever gathers under the name of law, rule or norm. But there are also reasons, ones discernible in Derrida’s own work, to set course under the sign of canonicity specifically, or the structural term which binds the economic processes that tend toward totalization. In this manner, the overlap of synonymous terms might be consolidated, though perhaps not entirely conflated. What we can discern through his usage of this term is that the nexus of tensions present between canonical forms and messianic forces—the contrast central to the present study—is wholly available in Derrida’s own fluxuating vocabulary, and in such a way as to cement their conceptual relations, as I now intend to show. For example, in an interview with Richard Rand shortly after his presentation of the paper “Mochlos; or, the Conflict of the Faculties” at a conference at the University of Alabama in  1987, Derrida paused to consider, albeit briefly, the role that the processes of canonization might play in his thought, a topic which he was not as immediately drawn to as he was the structures of experience localized in the forces of messianicity.24 Yet, here, as in his work on the archive, Derrida touches most directly upon the conditions of historical and cultural intelligibility, as well as the destruction of texts which mirror the processes and functioning of memory.25 In this regard, the issue of the “eclipse” of a text becomes centrally problematic, and is described by him as being bound up entirely with the formulation of canons historically. As he puts it:

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This phenomenon of the supplement of the eclipse (a text hiding right up to the point of its essential dissimulation, or finding itself repressed, over-dissimulated, in the very withdrawal that initiates it) has, in fact, interested me to the point of obsession for a long time. But I also try to find a legitimate research topic there, pressing, even urgent. It joins the great questions of canonization.26

Without yet removing himself from the context of his essay “Mochlos,” a paper situated through its description of the Kantian-influenced “conflict of the faculties” on the nature and function of the university, Derrida depicts canons as that which draws him to reflect upon the nature of censorship and the “return of the repressed” in general, topics motivated in no small measure by Kant’s struggle with the censors of his day, as well as Freud’s psychological framework (a connection to which we will also return shortly). As Derrida conceives of the process itself: Why and how do the university, the editorial process, and memory in general practice their hierarchies, in terms of a body, a corpus, a problematic, a thematization, a language or an author? After all, what is this body? Why is such hegemony annihilated now and then without a remainder? For the figure of an eclipse is still governed by teleological optimism (already or still somehow Kantian). It assumes that any text, once occulted, minorized, abandoned, repressed or censored . . . ought to reappear, if possible like a star! Justice has to be done!27

And it is precisely this desire for an absolute justice to be entirely embodied or incarnated that Derrida objects to, as there is nothing inherent within the structure of experience itself that dictates that this must be so. Indeed, it is an “optimism” that would actually threaten the coming of justice in the first place, a justice which is selective and rightly so. This optimism, which I have never shared, also inspires a politico-psychoanalytic concept of repression: what was repressed is stored in the unconscious of a culture whose memory never loses a thing. There is a political unconscious, no doubt, and also a politico-academic unconscious – we should take them into account, so as to analyze, so as to act – but there are ashes also: of oblivion, of total destruction, whose “remains” in any case do not stay with us forever.28

An unending memory would indeed be unjust. It would be a monstrous and paralyzing experience, much like Jorge Luis Borges’ fictional character, Funes, in the story “Funes, His Memory,” the man who was seemingly cursed never to forget anything that had happened to him.29

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Cultural memory, in Derrida’s eyes, rightly does lose things—some things are burned to ash, annihilated from all record. This is the reality inherent to the processes which govern the rule of canonical forms, indeed which govern the production of history and of memory, and it is a necessary violence which cannot simply be eradicated, though it may be one that can be lessened in relation to its bid for more justice to be done. With regard to the effacement of texts from history, the lesson is clear: Not even an eclipse, then! The body in question is not even deprived for a while of light – it is simply burned. This incineration, this finitude of memory corresponds to a possibility so radical that the very concept of finitude (already theological) is in danger of being irrelevant. Without it, perhaps, the violences of censorship and repression would not even be imaginable.30

Here, it is the violence of finitude itself that is revealed as “the violence marking every procedure of legitimation or canonization”—a violence necessary for experience to be transmitted in any identifiable sense. This is also the violence which has caused many, including many working under the name of deconstruction, to mistakenly defend the destruction of all cultural canons, an attempt to bring forth a “justice” that Derrida himself considers impossible and undesirable.31 As the literary debates concerning the western canon which proliferated in the last two decades of the twentieth century have slightly faded in force, still lingering is the sense that the canons of western civilization, the once guardians of culture and authority, have been de-stabilized, threatening cultural intelligibility as a whole.32 Yet, as Derrida warns us, and quite without hesitation, Before growing indignant, as some have done, at the deconstructive and destabilizing analysis of certain canons, structures and procedures or events of canonization, we ought to consider all the devices and interests presiding over the establishment of “assured values.” Analyzing or reinscribing this history of canonization in a broader, more diversified, more intelligible field is hardly to argue for amnesia or the destruction of traditional works. I might be tempted to think the contrary.33

What Derrida outlines instead is a task of creative preservation that circum­ scribes the whole of deconstruction as a contemporary political project, as that which “. . . answers to a greater desire for memory, intelligibility and respon­ sibility in the face of tradition.”34 This reading envisions deconstruction neither as an endorsement nor as a condemnation of any given tradition, affixing neither

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“goodness” nor “badness” to any created order simply because it is an accepted one. It is rather to perceive the act of the deconstruction of a canonical form as the only way to re-create its canonical rule in a more just manner. In many ways, seeing things thus is to (re)conceive the common misunderstandings of deconstruction that would otherwise condemn it to being only an aberrant de-stabilizing (antinomian messianic) force, out to dismantle the otherwise stable norms of society and then leave them in ruins. Deconstruction, from this viewpoint, however, is rightly a de-stabilizing of the structures that maintain society though only insofar as it also operates to potentially increase the amount of justice we are capable of performing (and though this is never a guarantee either). It is not a seeking to eliminate social structures altogether—it rather seeks to assist them in possible reform. The (spectral) messianic forces that run throughout any canonical form will always disturb, though the canonical form will yet always persist. There are only canons for Derrida, just as there are only texts (or histories or subjectivities), and nothing lies outside of their corresponding grids. Deconstruction is, hence, equally concerned with promoting just structures of society even if they cannot always be named or identified as such. This is so, we are told, because “Deconstruction is never concluded because it was never nihilistic, contrary to what they say in Newsweek, but rather affirmative and generative.”35 “Affirmative,” “generative” constructs indeed—the traits of a canon, the structure which allows for the growth and transmission of societal and cultural legibility—this is the inseparable “other side” of the messianic force of justice that moves throughout deconstructive impulses and which yet remains at times something that Derrida can only point at (and mainly indirectly), like his comments on democracy being that which has not yet ever been present in our world, that which is always yet to come. The projected horizon of his project, however, is perhaps somewhat clearer, and this is its course: it is a discourse on responsibility as much as anything else, and so it “. . . ought rightly to lead to deliberate reflection, to a more systematic and more responsible reflection – without reactive evasion – about the history of canons.”36 These are the canons, no doubt, that are formed in the midst of intentional (forced) acts of amnesia, of censorship, these hallmarks of the process of canonicity, hallmarks which Derrida suggests must be studied if we are to understand how these processes function, if we are to begin the task of illuminating how canonicity has, and does, function historically.37 If messianicity, of which Derrida spoke often, is the structure of justice, of its coming, and is thereby connected intimately with the (infinite) task of responsibility, then

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canonicity would represent the grounds upon which finitude constitutes itself, of how it attempts to deal (in some measure) with the responsibility it has been given. It is the source of how history is constituted, as well as those memories which make up the subjects that contain them. None of these realities can be ignored or discarded in Derrida’s estimation, though such a conclusion will certainly put him at odds with those who would attempt to theorize a presentation beyond all representations.

The messianic confronts the canon in the work of Derrida Though the basic contours of Benjamin’s messianic reading of history have been received somewhat intact, subsequent developments of these initial themes have provided an occasion to modify or deepen the consequences of his thought, developing and yet staying within this general framework of a canonical logic locked in a struggle with its messianic other—the defining coordinates of his take on tradition. In the work of Derrida, for example, Benjamin’s attempt to establish a “non-violent” means without ends meets against the reality of formed cultural identities and the “necessary violence” it could be said to enact in terms of subject formation (more on this later).38 This is the inevitable impact of canons, as we have just seen. Utilizing the practice of circumcision as a concrete illustration, for example, Derrida has even provided comment upon the attempt at performing a “bloodless violence” which any cultural transmission is guilty of harboring in its most basic essence.39 Canonical representations are the basis for any culturally, politically, or religiously formed identity, so Derrida’s argument goes, and must be established in order to provide some form of cultural legibility. This would appear in many regards to be the genuine advancement of Benjamin’s thought into a contemporary context. Despite this slightly revised critique of violence (which I will take up more fully in the following section), Derrida does not depart from Benjamin’s overall portrayal of messianic forces. He more or less simply expands Benjamin’s claims to embrace the necessity of the canonical form as the identifiable manner in which content is historically appropriated. In fact, he seems at times only too content to analyze the structures upon which this preannounced messianic force depends, hence juxtaposing and contrasting messianic forces with a Marxist eschatological project, as Benjamin once did, in order to highlight the unique role of “messianic thought” in relation to justice and history.40 This deepening

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of Benjamin’s thought becomes at once a step away from directly invoking a religious tradition and yet a step toward realizing what religious import it could have in a modern context: in short, it becomes a structural assessment of the very conditions for identity. For Derrida, canonical forms are necessary, though the cost of allowing the sovereign–canonical form to re-enter into a relationship with the messianic is that it becomes philosophically impossible to champion any singular canonical form—everything must be deconstructed and constructed yet again over time. As a consequence, all mention of a historical particularity in terms of religious identity (i.e., its “messianism”) must be bracketed, though not necessarily done away with. It simply cannot, for a philosopher such as Derrida, be endorsed. It has been said that Benjamin’s break with Marx opened up a path for Derrida and others to pursue Benjamin’s thoughts in relation to a nonteleological messianic horizon of justice, bringing to center stage images of the victim and the marginalized, being always singular instances of representation even when collectively assembled in writing.41 Such was the basis for Derrida’s various later formulations of a democracy “always yet to come.” These messianic figures became, for Derrida, the ghosts (or “revenant”) that “haunt” our world riddled with injustice, forming the background for a “hauntology” of which Derrida outlines the most basic contours.42 Benjamin’s refusal to incarnate his principle of justice in relation to history, and thus contra Marx’s fully embodied workingclass, or communist utopian ideals, in actuality comes to mirror Derrida’s conception of a “spectrality,” which likewise refuses to become historically, and thus empirically, incarnate.43 This refusal is also reflected in Derrida’s insistence upon a nonteleological, noneschatological messianic form, or that which resists being identified with any historical messianism, as he puts it, and which gives rise in no small measure to the easily identifiable “relation without relation” formula which Derrida often repeated.44 Thereby, the structure of the “messianic without messianism” comes to reflect the “X without X” structure in general, an attempt to comprehend a “religion without religion,” or under what conditions one might today “belong without belonging”. Seen as such, this could perhaps be defined as a philosophical universalizing of a particular religious terminology, a treatment of form over content and a highlighting of the problematic nature of determining one’s identification with particular traditions, religions, nations, etc (as we have seen in the case of certain forms of antinomian thought). Here, the figure of the Marrano, as the historical Jewish figure yet forever divided from its Jewish heritage, comes to play a significant role in Derrida’s thought as well.

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With this condition of the “X without X” structure, and perhaps more than analogous to Carl Schmitt’s understanding of our political order being based upon a “state of exception,” Derrida posits a precondition of “undecidability [l’indécidabilité]” as what grounds any decision, promise or responsibility, and yet which itself remains a state that resists historical embodiment or incarnation.45 It is this same grounding which ensures that a horizon of justice be without teleological foundation, as any such conceptualization would preempt the justice possible in a democracy. Justice must be always yet “to come” and, hence, never fully concretized historically. This messianic force without need of religious legitimation would, as Derrida terms it, be a form of the “messianic without messianism [un messianique sans messianisme]”—solely the structure of the messianic, or an “idea of justice [une idée de la justice],” which lies behind every religious messianism and which presents a call for justice without an historical, empirical religious edifice (its canonical embodiment) accompanying it.46 This is also what guarantees that justice will always remain possible and will never be fully exhausted. This is not however to say that canonical religions should not exist, of course, but rather that they cannot be philosophically supported as such. Taking the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas as his starting point for these later reflections in his own career, and in many ways echoing a general Kantian sensibility for comprehending the structure of religious thought, Derrida conceives of messianicity, or the structure of the messianic claim to justice, as a form of “hospitality beyond all revelation [hospitalité par-delà toute révélation].”47 It is a tremendous affirmation of openness and open-ended gesturing to the other before us. Hence, it is also forever in-determinate, beyond all (religious, national, ideological, or canonical) particularity of content—an adherence to the form alone. This is, we might say, as much as philosophical deconstruction can offer through its messianic structuring. It should come as little surprise then that the discussion of messianism in Derrida’s work, as a structural form which intends a horizon of nonteleological justice (in a democratic form always yet to be realized), proceeds quickly to intermingle with issues of political representation found within today’s globalized society. Questions of refugees and exiles play more than a periphery role in his thought; indeed, these marginalized figures become central examples of where contemporary understandings of political (canonical) representation break down, though are not done away with completely.48 These figures more or less serve to deconstruct our notions of justice and democracy which otherwise drift toward some form of representational totalization—these being the temptations to “label”

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persons, or “put them in a box” as it were—in order to secure their intelligibility within the public sphere. These labeling actions perform a certain violence to these persons, a violence which Derrida ultimately seeks to lessen though not do away with entirely. As one recent deconstructivist has put it, any attempt to name something (to generate a canonical form) must likewise be accompanied by its disruptive accomplice, the event which cannot ever fully be named.49 This acknowledgment comes as both a confirmation of the necessity for naming, and also its most destabilizing element; it is the structure of a “name without a name” that underwrites every act of naming. This is what those marginal figures of our world today, such as the exiles and refugees who increase in number every year, remind us of, and what also highlights our inability to accurately address their precarious situation. This insight is also the outcome of our perceptions of those messianic forces which are capable of reading history “against the grain” and producing an alternate account of (sovereign) canonical narratives, though both remain entirely within the realm of representational conflict. Derrida’s defense of these “mirror” voices certainly stands in contrast to those who would further champion the canonical (and thus, always somewhat ideological) readings of history, yet he cannot do without the canonical form altogether, as we have seen. Derrida’s readers have, in fact, often mistaken him as advocating a complete dismissal of the canonical form. His attempt to stay within the confines of representation, however, meant that his deconstructing of canonical forms, in the end, equally sought for their preservation. His insistence upon a structure of messianicity as being central to just such a reading (of texts, of history) is what allowed his work to unfold directly in relation to the most canonical of forms. What I hope to show now, through one more major example, is the centrality which the concept of the canonical form continued to play throughout his career, especially as it merges with his various descriptions of the role of law and sovereignty in our world. Such an overlap, I would argue, is essential to understanding how the nexus of canon–sovereignty–transcendence is to be comprehended and addressed today.

Derrida on the mystical foundations of law and canonical forms In a heavily influential essay on the “Force of Law,” a conception we will take as our point of departure in analyzing the role of the canonical as a site of power

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approximate to that of law, Derrida produces a sustained engagement with— through a deconstruction of—Benjamin’s schemata of violence, as originally formulated in his seminal essay, “Critique of Violence.” Essentially concerned with the “force of law” at work in the founding and sustaining of law through different forms of violence, Derrida makes haste to expose the manner in which law lacks any original authority: “Since the origin of authority, the founding or grounding, the positing of the law cannot by definition rest on anything but themselves, they are themselves a violence without ground [une violence sans fondement].”50 By first recognizing this same critique at work in Pascal and Montaigne, Derrida invokes their attentiveness to the law’s opaque genesis, referring to any legal foundation as “mystical”: “Discourse here meets its limit— in itself, in its very performative power. It is what I propose to call here the mystical [le mystique].”51 Indeed, this is so, we are told, because . . . the operation that amounts to founding, inaugurating, justifying law [droit], to making law [faire la loi], would consist of a coup de force, of a performative and therefore interpretative violence that in itself is neither just nor unjust and that no justice and no earlier and previously founding law [droit], no preexisting foundation, could, by definition, guarantee or contradict or invalidate.52

There is an appearance of autonomy that surrounds the law, creating at the same time a perspective from which to view its mystical origins as a legitimate, and yet unjustifiable, foundation. The difficulty of comparing different legal codes, each grounded in a different community’s usage, is perfectly mirrored by the difficulty of comparing separate (i.e., national, religious) legal (and I would add canonical) codes. In this fashion, the form of law bears a sense of mystique just as law or the founding of a nation-state—that is, as if resting upon a mystical foundation. The law is theo-logical for Derrida because it is transcendent, performatively situating itself before the community over which it governs: One “touches” here without touching on this extraordinary paradox: the inaccessible transcendence of the law [la loi], before which and prior to which “man” stands fast, only appears infinitely transcendent and thus theological to the extent that, nearest to him, it depends only on him, on the performative act by which he institutes it: the law is transcendent, violent and nonviolent, because it depends only on who is before it (and so prior to it), on who produces it, founds it, authorizes it in an absolute performative whose presence always escapes him. The law is transcendent and theological, and so always to come [à venir], always promised, because it is immanent, finite,

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and thus already past. Every “subject” is caught up in this aporetic structure in advance.53

If one reads a basic definition of the canonical form into this discussion of the law, and, as will become clear in what follows, we are more than justified in doing so, one is able to see more than a passing resemblance between the two, at least as far as the contours of this study are concerned. The transcendent text of the canonical–legal form can be seen indeed as authorized by the performative presence of those who stand before it, the community it calls for, and which calls for it. The canonical form calls itself forward, like the founding of the rights of the state, regardless of whether a particular canon contains a series of law codes or not (as with the Hebrew scriptural canon for example). The problem is that law appears as transcendent in its foundations, yet its structure is purely immanent in its operations. The structure can be philosophically assessed, though its origins cannot. This is Derrida’s most basic foundational claim with respect to the theological: constructs can be dealt with philosophically; creation itself is left, however, to the realm of belief. Canons, of course, like law, are perhaps of transcendent origin (it will at least be possible to perceive or mistake them as such), but they function according to a very real and very concrete structure of experience. What remains (i.e., the canonical representations before us) is left subject only to the act of violence which severs the noncanonical (what is forgotten) from the canonical (what is remembered)—a violence which, Derrida reminds us, can never be completely done away with. Indeed, this necessary violence Derrida speaks of may in fact bring about a lasting and desirable order. Law therefore as a canonical form, and though canons are not limited to being laws, remains in Derrida’s estimation as ultimately unfounded, and thus as deconstructible. At the same time, however, this deconstructibility becomes its possibility for any historical evolution toward becoming a more just form, allowing it to move in its development beyond a particular fixed boundary in time. Formulating his major hypothesis in this regard, Derrida is able to consider how the very deconstructibility of law guarantees the definition of “deconstruction as the possibility of justice,” an experience of the impossible though it does not do away with the category of law altogether.54 This is made possible, in kind, by virtue of the fact that deconstruction inhabits the space of the aporias between law and justice, or in the terms of this study, between a concrete canon and its messianic undoing. Deconstruction consequently develops itself within: (1) an aporia of how justice demands a free decision for “the just” and yet the just act

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follows a certain law which the just act itself preserves or (re)justifies each time it is performed, (2) an aporia which shows deconstructionism to be situated as a type of justice internal to the law, the history of law, and political history, and engaged in an infinite work of continuously bringing justice to its historical forms, and (3) an aporia involving the decision of the just as an immediate, finite performance of an “irruptive violence” which “refounds” or “recasts” law and politics. It is an act that reinstates rules without having any knowledge of the rules upon which it initially acts. Pursuing the seeds of deconstructionism is not performed here then as a digressive act away from our main thematic, but rather to illustrate how the deconstructive act perfectly defines the very structure of the canonical form in relation to its messianic elements. This is an insight, moreover, that Derrida himself continued to pursue throughout his work, as I will continue to demonstrate. Justice comes across in this context like the prophetic speech of the Hebrew scriptures—as a disruptive response to the established law, an utterance of the impossible that demands an immediate action, an infinite work that interrupts institutionalized practice from within. In what might appear as contrary to the tendency of the processes of religious canons with regard to its language as an utterance of the divine (its monolinguistic tendency), Derridean justice presents itself in the address to the “other” in the language of the “other.” Justice as law, then, would imply a certain feigned universality which true justice does not aspire to attain.55 True justice will always come about as a messianic disruption at the heart of a given canonical form, and yet, it is a canonical form (as law) that must be maintained even if it is drastically altered throughout the course of history. As Derrida makes clear, the jurisdiction of law which would hold trial over the “other” under the language of the law does violence to the “other” and is the basis for the sacrificial systems upon which our cultures and subjectivities are built.56 It is also, I would contend, the basis for the juridical production of “the body of the subject,” for there “is no law that is not inscribed on bodies. Every law has a hold on the body.”57 The canonical form, as a site of power, thereby becomes a site of the juridical production of societies through their production of canonical subjects. Deconstruction, and here we might add the potentially ever more just canonical form as well (insofar as it maintains its openness to the other in an-other’s context), is a double movement of responsibility for “historical and interpretive memory,” on the one hand, and for “responsibility before the very concept of responsibility,” on the other.58 Concerning the former, this means practically

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engaging justice in the singularity of the “other,” even as the “other” “pretends to universality.” Concerning the latter, this means remaining always open to, that is, having an endless desire for, what remains inexhaustible—the possibility for justice. This is also to recognize how justice “as the experience of absolute alterity, is unpresentable, but it is the chance of the event and the condition of history [La justice, comme experience de l’altérité absolue, est imprésentable, mais c’est la chance de l’évévement et la condition de l’histoire].”59 Derrida turns to the canonical form in this context yet bereft of its religious origins, and this is why he must always defer the question of whether his project of deconstructionism is founded on a Jewish canon. In truth, since deconstructionism is situated in-between the canonical form and the messianic, no such answer could really be given. For example, when Derrida asks, toward the end of his article, whether the tendency toward establishing justice as a form of deconstructionism is particularly Jewish or Greek, he declines answering directly, stating only that deconstruction does not exist in the singular as such: “. . . I believe that deconstructive discourses, as they present themselves in their irreducible plurality, participate in an impure, contaminating, negotiated, bastard and violent fashion in all these filiations—let us call them Judeo-Greek to save time—of decision and the undecidable [de la decision et de l’indécidable].”60 This is so because all canons, whether Judeo–Christian–Islamic or Greek, in their dynamic relation of canonicity and the establishment of the canonical form, contain a deconstructive (messianic) justice at their core that functions as an aneconomic force within the text, one which comes to define the subsequent history of its interpretation, or to allow that such a history even exist in the first place. As to the origin of a religious canon itself, of course, its supposed condition of revelation, Derrida must remain mute as this would fall outside the bounds of a purely philosophical inquiry. This critique is especially of interest to us as it is Derrida himself who highlights the distinction toward the end of his essay on a Jewish, destructive, divine violence that does not shed blood in its sacrificial structure, as contrasted with the Greek, founding/sustaining, mythical violence, which does kill in order to legitimate its origins. In a move that seems rather similar to René Girard’s “deconstructive” reading of the sacrificial (mythological) structure of mimetic desiring and scapegoating, Derrida reads Benjamin’s text as a forerunner to deconstructivist thought, illuminating a violence that deconstructs the law from within in a bid to bring justice into our world—a divine revelatory violence pitted against a mythological, concealed violence.61

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We are left accordingly with an impression of the canonical form as that which alone produces a call for justice as being yet contentiously united with its legalistic character, and situated within its own intertextual boundaries. This is the case because the nature and dynamism inherent to canonicity comes to define the emergence of an excessive call for justice from within the canonical text. This also implicates deconstructionism as a messianic methodology and as a structural feature of the canonical form, situating Derrida himself between the arche and the telos, and never beyond their guiding boundaries.62 In no way does this insight negate the radical import of différance, or that which would seem to shun the one-ness of tradition in favor of multiple traditions;63 it is rather one aspect of a much larger process of constructing an always open, though grounded identity.64 In reality, this project of identity formation becomes one of avoiding the polarity between nihilism and logocentrism and is of central concern in regaining a positive, truthful notion of what the canonical form can be.65 The canon, viewed from the perspectives offered here, becomes a site of power, though not having any power inherently granted to it. It is power’s reservoir, so to speak. Its status is rather located in its being a site for the negotiation of identities, in the fullest cultural, political and religious sense—the domain of representations though not of ontologies. Being the site upon which particular powers can be invested likewise discloses the manner in which the canonical form can play host to revelation, though being clearly distinguishable from it (hence, there are both religious and literary canons, both being understood sites of cultural production, though the “origins” of the former are forever beyond philosophical study). Though the canonical form will always introduce an element of violence in its formation of the cultural, according to Derrida, there are different forms of violence to be distinguished: there is the violence which is willing to shed blood (the totalitarian, falsified, ideological) and that which seeks justice above all else (the democratic, truthful). Keeping this distinction in mind allows us to reformulate, not only our understanding of what the canonical form is, but also our perceptions of culture as related to canons and the processes of canonicity. It is also a stark reminder then of why we have such trouble letting go of our cultural and religious canonical forms: from this viewpoint, they are necessary for the establishment of personal and communal identities. Such a reading of the Derridean project is what will enable us to approach his later writings on the concept of sovereignty, as the very concept of sovereign power springs fully formed from the background just sketched. Sovereign power,

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as such, issues from the mystical origins of law and of canonical forms, and is therefore subject to the same messianic, deconstructive forces of justice that operate within it. Representations may be sovereign in our world, if we can put it in such a way, but they are the necessary measure of our world as well, inseparable though they are from the violences that permeate our inscriptions in them. This perhaps too simplistic rendition of the deconstructivist project is enough, I would suggest, to give us a sense of what Derrida was concerned with in general. It also provides us with enough material from which to grasp what will become one side only in an ongoing debate concerning any potential search for a presentation (pure life) beyond representation (the text), one often tied up in theoretical–philosophical edifices complex enough to elude a precise definition of this division between text and life—at least such is what I will here claim. What we have only just begun to discern is that, at the heart of this first divergence between Derrida and Agamben, lies the perplexing difficulty of exactly how one is to provide a just form between the dialectical poles of canonicity and messianicity, a question which the canonical form has often sought to approximate. It is of course also intriguing, though not wholly unexpected, that the discussion of canonical forms does occasionally arise in the guise of being a creationary force intermingling with a theologically-minded terminology. A theological concept of creation, or whatever religious formulation stretches itself out toward saying something relevant, perhaps even truthful, about an otherwise “absent origin” that philosophy wishes to trace, is an attempt to reckon with this fundamental philosophical aporia of our existence, our need to find a “form-oflife” in-between such poles of existence, as Agamben will himself frame things.66 What we are ultimately seeking after, and especially from a theological point of view, is not only a recognition of the difficulty of historically grounding creation in a particular, and thus limited, narrative, but also to grasp the significance of creation itself being always a continuous process, one which is often a recreation as much as it is also at the same time a de-creation. In many ways, the place and significance of creation as a theological concept dictates no less than a thorough re-examination of the alleged “absent origin” at the center of a (religious) canonical form about which theology yet wishes to speak, and toward which Derrida remains silent. What becomes clear in the following analysis, however, is that throughout the span of his career, Agamben has made sporadic and carefully positioned reference to the work of Derrida, indeed often using the latter’s work as an index

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of where his own projects were heading, yet stressing throughout his preference for a de-creation of things rather than their de-construction, and certainly rather than their canonical re-creation.67 In order to further clarify this distinction, it becomes necessary to inspect the weight of just such a contrast in the ongoing debate between Derrida’s legacy and the ongoing formulations of Agamben. Indeed, their shared vocabulary, including short treatises on such thematics as the messianic, friendship, the relationship of literature and philosophy, the nature of sovereignty, animality, testimony and witness, the (signifying) roles of langue and parole in relation to our being, as well as their explication of some of the last century’s greatest poets, has brought the work of Derrida and Agamben critically into some form of alignment. Despite referring to deconstructionism as a “thwarted messianism,” Agamben’s proximity to Derrida seems only to have increased over time, yet at the same time, keeping a great distance in many respects as well. In short, the first half of what follows intends to illustrate how Derrida has been, and remains, Agamben’s most relevant dialogue partner, something which Agamben’s work, on the whole, I will argue, demonstrates more than adequately. In this sense, the remainder of this chapter will seek to analyze Agamben’s various critiques of Derrida’s work, as well as Derrida’s responses to Agamben, in order to assess not only the weights and merits of each, but also their subsequent divergence and yet their sometimes indirect accord. Such an analysis, I am wagering, brings us closer to discerning the central concern that Taubes once faced: how we are to reconcile the divergent trends between messianic forces and canonical forms. To enact this fuller background against which to view such contrasts, I will first trace the development of the concept of sovereignty as a unique vantage point from which to view this debate between the tensions of representation, and as it appears both in Agamben’s critique of Derrida, as well as in Derrida’s subsequent critical remarks on Agamben made throughout his more recent (posthumously) published lectures, The Beast and the Sovereign. Moreover, it should be stressed that this is a response which has not yet been assessed in a small, but growing body of critical literature on the differences between them. As such, I hope to show how, despite their divergences, there remains a shared critique of sovereignty on both of their parts, one which illustrates what is perhaps a missed opportunity to extend both of their thoughts on sovereign power even further. I am also, however, seeking here to illuminate the aporias at the heart of representation that are brought to the fore through the alignment of each author’s subsequent critique of the other, so that these aporias, in the end,

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may be shown to rest behind all discussions of a possible presentation beyond representation, as well as the limits of representation in general, something no less troublesome for Derrida (and Kant before him) as for Agamben.68 In the second half of what follows, I try to deepen this account of their debate by focusing on the unstated legacy of Freud in the work of Agamben, a task which could only even be approachable through the various mediations of Derrida. The ongoing debate between Agamben and Derrida is at the same time then an illumination of the general conditions of representation which still govern the political and juridical spheres of testimony today. In this fashion, the works of both Derrida and Agamben will come in many ways to mirror the shared aims of Jan Assmann and Walter Benjamin, figures to be assessed in the first chapter of the second part, and especially as they are extremely relevant to a certain “Freudian” hermeneutic of canonical texts. Accordingly, the last sections of this chapter seek to examine how Agamben’s (re)formulations of Freud’s most basic insights, and, as a quest for a presentation beyond representation, could only be understood in relation to Derrida and his endeavors to work within our representational limitations. This tension, I believe, illustrates not only the divergence of views present within these two authors, but also, I will further argue, the general patterns of division that still mark the gaps separating the many Judaisms from the many Christianities today (or the gaps within any one western monotheism), just as we saw in the first chapter. By focusing on the divisions internal to Judaic (western religious) thought, I am hoping in the end to rejuvenate a theological account of creation (albeit from a philosophical perspective) and thereby to delve even deeper into the very problematic of representation, a structural logic that is inextricably intertwined with the nature of our basic western religious divisions—the major point which I intend to develop as this study reaches toward its conclusions.

Deconstruction as “thwarted messianism”: Agamben’s reading of Derrida For some time now, the contemporary Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben has come to stake out his philosophical positions in both stated and unstated relation to that of Derrida, certainly as regards his usage of Benjamin and the “messianic” forces of history, but also in relation to determining a “threshold of undecidability,” which can be said to prop up any sense of authority, as we

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have just seen.69 Despite Agamben’s multiple attempts to nuance his position in relation to deconstructive thought in general, his proximity to it seems only to increase over time.70 Divergences do, however, exist between his position and that of Derrida, differences which are central to our understanding of representation in a western context, and which I will take up as this chapter progresses. As one such salient example of their overlap, the formulation of a “pure potentiality” in relation to a “threshold of indecision” as foundational thoughts in Agamben’s work bears a certain resemblance to the conceptualization of “undecidability” as the precursor to a justice always yet “to come” (always, in this sense, “potential”) found in the work of Derrida. This is a reality for both authors which can, in fact, be said to ground every decision, but which cannot be foreclosed into becoming-content, and this despite the fact that Derrida does seem to give a defense of canonical contents.71 For Derrida, a problematic is opened up wherein the movement from a spectral messianic form to a concrete canonical representation is often difficult to justify—leaving him vulnerable to the charge that his philosophical formulations lack a concrete account of the political.72 For Agamben, it could be said, discerning how we are to live and move beyond sovereign representation is an even more difficult task. There is one thing, however, of which we can be sure—the act of signification is the gesture of sovereignty par excellence, something which the inscriptions of canonicity substantiate. This is the insight that has framed Agamben’s multiple critiques of Derrida over the years. For Agamben, Derrida is someone overly indebted to the consequences of signification in general, a state which Agamben refers to on occasion as our state of “original sin.”73 Agamben, for his part, is pursuing a characterization of the political that moves beyond signification and consequently beyond sovereign power, something that is seemingly a move to undo politics as we have come to know it. In essence, this is thought to be the case because Agamben’s political philosophy attempts to realize a sphere of exposure (“nudity”) beyond signification, our raw animality as it were that precedes us as it goes before us, before our categorization of ourselves as a form of “humanity” that otherwise appears to define us completely.74 Expressed as such, the border between the human and the animal, as arbitrary as it seemingly is, becomes the basis for all political articulations of identity or subjectivity: Exposition is the location of politics. If there is no animal politics, that is perhaps because animals are always already in the open and do not try to take possession of their own exposition; they simply live in it without caring about it. That is why they are not interested in mirrors, in the image as image. Human beings, on the other hand, separate images from things and give them a name precisely because

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they want to recognize themselves, that is, they want to take possession of their own very appearance. Human beings thus transform the open into a world, that is, into the battlefield of a political struggle without quarter. This struggle, whose object is truth, goes by the name of History.75

For Agamben, the Open is a potential space only, one capable of existing in its potentiality beyond the political sovereign gesture of actuality (Schmitt’s decisionism). It could however return to its potential alone, beyond those significations or representations that stem from our attempt to conceive of an actual (political) space. It is, therefore, a space that humanity has sought all-too-often to fill with images of itself, in an attempt to become sovereign (over animals, each other, etc). By developing this formulation of the Open, something he borrows from both Rainer Maria Rilke and Martin Heidegger’s subsequent elaborations upon Rilke, Agamben seeks to move beyond Derrida’s deconstructive project which merely, in his eyes, reaffirms the position and importance of the signifier and its signified representations.76 Derrida’s work is seen by him in fact to be in step with the metaphysical assumptions that have surrounded signification (and its sovereign claims) from the start. As early as 1977, Agamben highlighted this indebtedness to the signifier in Derrida’s work when he stated that: By restoring the originary character of the signifier, the grammatological project effects a salutary critique of the metaphysical inheritance that has crystallized in the notion of sign, but this does not mean that it has really succeeded in accomplishing that “step-backward-beyond” metaphysics – with greater prudence, the philosopher on whose thought that critique is based hesitated to declare that step complete or even merely possible.77

Without even naming Derrida (at least initially) as such, Agamben intends to frame the grammatological project as one yet caught up in the very metaphysical (ontotheological) gestures it seeks to deconstruct. Indeed, metaphysics itself is hereby defined as the apparent attempt to trap presence within acts of signification—something Agamben resolutely opposes.78 It is within a “fracture of [this] presence” that Agamben locates the “origin” of the human being (though again not a literal, historical origin), a figure capable of being established on the open grounds which deconstructionism appears to clear, but, in the end, only re-presents.79 As Agamben’s work has continued to make clear over the years, establishing our true “nature,” if such a word can even be used justly in this context, involves a return to our animal being beyond the constructed fabrications of the human

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subject, something which Agamben sees as not bound to the various ruses of signification and its myriad webs of representation.80 An exposure of our animal being is one that does not, and should not, rely upon a signified human subject in any sense. It has the capacity to become an authentic gesture beyond signification as much as it is beyond metaphysics, transcendence or the lingering taint of any ontotheological bid for sovereignty.81 And so, as Agamben words it: Although we must certainly honor Derrida as the thinker who has identified with the greatest rigor—developing Lévinas’s concept of the trace and Heidegger’s concept of difference—the original status of the gramma and of meaning in our culture, it is also true that he believed he had opened a way to surpassing metaphysics, while in truth he merely brought the fundamental problem of metaphysics to light.82

By this count, Derrida has been engaging in nothing less than metaphysics as a “fundamentology” throughout his entire career. Derrida, according to Agamben, has apparently sensed the negative foundations of what we inscribe upon ourselves (our “humanity,” seen through the lens of the “subject”), but he had not gone far enough as it were in eradicating their presence(s) in order to reveal a more primordial presence at its base, not a transcendent one, but the presence of the very real other before us. As Agamben, here, hopes to make clear, though we perhaps cannot conceive of a presence fully freed from difference (representation), we can, it would seem, conceive of “the originary situation of language” as “this plexus of eternally negative differences” that appears in the barrier which resists signification.83 The negativity persists then all the way down. As such, Derrida is, for Agamben, the ontotheologian par excellence. Though it might certainly be debatable as to whether or not Derrida himself later took up just such a position, Agamben’s critique seems to lose none of its force within his own writings.84 Years later, for example, in a series of lectures devoted to Paul’s “Letter to the Romans” (2000), Agamben takes up this same line of critique in order to establish his position once again vis-à-vis Derrida. In a subsection devoted to the concept of Aufhebung, Agamben lingers upon the impact of deconstruction upon this philosophical legacy of representation, its exposure of signification’s ruses and its false search for origins, yet its inability to escape from the logic of signification altogether. Taking up Derrida’s development of the concepts of the “trace” and of “originary supplement,” Agamben illustrates how, since his earliest work on Husserl and grammatology, Derrida has critiqued the primacy of presence within western metaphysics in order to demonstrate

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its presupposition of nonpresence and signification.85 Yet, as he there words it, other problems persist in Derrida’s reading of western thought: The concept of the “trace” names the impossibility of a sign to be extinguished in the fullness of a present and absolute presence. In this sense, the trace must be conceived as “before being,” the thing itself, always already as sign and repraesentamen, the signified always already in the position of signifier. There is no nostalgia for origins since there is no origin. The origin is produced as a retroactive effect of nonorigin and a trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin. These concepts (or better yet, these nonconcepts, or even as Derrida prefers to call them, these “undecidables”) call into question the primacy of presence and signification for the philosophical tradition, yet they do not truly call into question signification in general . . .. They therefore presuppose that there is still signification beyond presence and absence, meaning that nonpresence still signifies something, it posits itself as an “arche-trace,” a sort of archiphoneme between presence and absence. If there is no nostalgia for origins here, it is because its memory is contained in the form of signification itself. . . .86

Making clear his distance from any alleged “archive fever” (the mad and vain search for “origins” within the archive as Derrida had called it), Agamben deftly turns the argument back on Derrida in an attempt to show how the illusion of an existing origin is actually an effect of signification itself. The “trace,” one of Derrida’s most frequently cited concepts,87 is exposed as a sign of the “thing itself ” we are allegedly barred from every beholding. In truth, however, and this is where Agamben is headed, the trace is nothing other than the ultimate messianic disruption to creation (and not just constructs of representation). In a very Levinasian sounding formulation, he will suggest that it is the face exposed to us in its sheer nudity that is the thing itself we have been looking for, the thing which provokes us to love.88 The best that Derrida can seemingly achieve is to infinitely “defer” signification, but not to eradicate it altogether.89 This characterization, of course, has often led to the charge that deconstructionism itself is more concerned about interpretation and the infinite deferment of signification than about taking action in the world, or actually signifying a reality.90 Agamben’s claim of course would be that deconstructionism does allow action to take place, does allow sovereign (canonical) forms to constitute and reconstitute themselves time and again throughout history. And Agamben’s critique only extends outward from this point, aiming to label the entire deconstructionist project as one that begins and ends under these same false premises, providing in the end a justification for sovereign rule imposed

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through signifying political acts. Its focus upon the lack of origin or presence, in his mind, fails to consider the primary problematic caught up within the nature of signification itself, how it posits itself as a kind of origin. Deconstructionism’s focal points are therefore deemed “insignificant” in this light.91 For this reason, Agamben can levy the harshest critique that could perhaps be mustered against Derrida’s entire philosophical endeavor, claiming here that “Deconstruction is a thwarted messianism, a suspension of the messianic.”92 As such, its messianic disruptions affect representations only, not the presentation of life itself as a true messianic form might otherwise do (or at least so he will claim). Agamben explains this suspension of the messianic as that which comes about as a result of the infinite “deferment” of signification itself. This mistakenly happens due to the manner in which the messianic has been aligned with a presumed historical origin that some see as needing to be uncovered and fulfilled, thereby confusing the true nature of a genuine messianic disruption. In such a fashion, this suspended messianism causes the real weak force of the messianic to lose all sense of its originary meaning.93 Deconstruction, precisely as a “thwarted messianism,” is posited in stark contrast to Agamben’s “realized” messianism, which he envisions as being ontologically grounded in an infancy of our being (our animality) which is more originary than any metaphysically conceived “origins” of our humanity, even if it is not historically prior to our being as the term “infancy” might otherwise suggest.94 This is so because it goes before any signified, metaphysical constructs, or those mainly conceived within the history of religious speculation. In so many words, Agamben is accusing Derrida and the deconstructionist project of being complicit in the sovereign realm of significations, of providing a sort of pseudoreligiosity that mimics the western ontotheological project because it is yet essential to its maintenance of sovereign forms. Accordingly, he accuses Derrida of providing messianic hopes for justice without those claims ever being able to fully depart from the contentious dualism of an origin and its messianic redemption, both fully contained within a representational world (or world of representations). In so many words, Agamben seeks to deconstruct deconstructionism, to use its own insights in order to go beyond it as it were, to go before the human subject that metaphysics has sought to establish and thereby to undo the binary divisions that have propped up our thoughts for far too long. As he phrases it, The prestige of deconstruction in our time lies precisely in its having conceived of the entire text of tradition as being in force without significance, a being in force whose strength lies essentially in its undecidability and in having shown

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that such a being in force is, like the door of the Law in Kafka’s parable, absolutely impassable. But it is precisely concerning the sense of this being in force (and of the state of exception that it inaugurates) that our position distinguishes itself from that of deconstruction.95

The difference, as espoused in his work Homo Sacer, for example, hinges upon the relationship between this “being in force” and the origins of sovereignty— two measures which come together within a “zone of indifference” from which, Agamben alleges, deconstructionism cannot escape. This is the “state of exception,” of course, which potentially ushers in, and legitimates, the rule of sovereignty, and which likewise causes any system of thought based on this suspended state (and its grammar of exclusions) to be nothing more than a “paralyzed messianism that, like all messianism, nullifies the law, but then maintains it as the Nothing of Revelation in a perpetual and interminable state of exception . . .”.96 Since deconstructionism has shown itself, in Agamben’s eyes, to be in league with the force (or violence) of signification in general, Derrida’s project maintains the specter of sovereignty despite Derrida’s many attempts to distance himself from it. As Simon Morgan Wortham has put it, according to Agamben “. . . deconstruction effectively remains bound within precisely the same zone of indistinction that gives rise to the sovereign exception and to bare life, which conjointly form the ‘originary political element,’ an ‘element’ before which deconstruction therefore remains at once blind and powerless.”97

Agamben on the theopolitical dimensions of the “messianic” Trying to access the nature of this vacant “zone of indistinction,” often perceived akin to the political “state of exception,” is a difficult task. It is fleeting in its appearance, and more often than not completely covered over by those constructions of our “human being” (operations of the “anthropological machinery” as he calls it) that cloud our much vaster potential. It has not taken Agamben long, and as one might expect, to begin making connections between such gestures and the definitions that often proceed from the realm of the theological.98 In fact, Agamben draws an explicit connection between his development of the messianic and its theological heritage. Much like Badiou, he attempts to work within the theological and scriptural tradition in order to read things anew. Hence, for Agamben, the doctrine of the Incarnation becomes a focal point from which to base his formulations as such a doctrine is understood

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as Christianity’s attempt to reconcile the particular (historical) and the universal by bringing God into humanity and bridging the theoretical gap that Derrida, for one, would appear to fall straight into.99 The particular form of antinomian thought that will be on display in his writings is in-line with Benjamin’s seeming refusal to accept an incarnational logic. According to this rejection of a particular historical representation of the messianic, Agamben describes how the interruption of linear time does not necessarily create an opening beyond itself, that is, toward the transcendent, but is rather a dealing only with time itself, beyond its inscription into a codified (canonical) history. In this fashion, he retains what could be described as a certain (immanent) Jewish (Pauline) conception of messianism in favor of a Christian incarnated one, though he is far from taking his leave of Christianity altogether, as I will explain.100 What we witness here, however, is his entrance into the fray of representations through his refusal to re-present time. This, he claims, was actually Paul’s insight that he is now seeking to retrieve from its ecclesiastical confinement. This is an interesting position for Agamben to take, of course, especially as his view on incarnated history does come to at least somewhat resemble Derrida’s most basic claims. Completely immersed in the logic of the immanent realm of time’s remaining, Agamben reads Paul’s fundamental intuition concerning the reality of Jesus Messiah, for example, as such: “Paul’s faith starts with the resurrection, and he does not know Jesus in the flesh, only Jesus Messiah.”101 Here, the structure of historical faith is laid out before us—to know Jesus Messiah as the logic of the incarnation, yet at a certain (absolute) distance from Jesus “in the flesh,” center of the Incarnation. The refusal of the copula “is” between “Jesus” and “Messiah” in Paul’s writings is at this point only further evidence for Agamben that the historical reality of Jesus “in the flesh” is of little concern. Jesus’ historical person is truly not necessary to know or to understand, according to Agamben’s reading of Paul. It is solely this stress upon the “logic of the incarnation” that strikes Agamben as the reality which must be adhered to by faith. In fact, this is a faith that is faith solely through the act of looking at itself devoid of all particular content. In the end, it therefore runs the risk of presenting an incarnational logic that is yet removed from the Incarnation, an “incarnation without Incarnation” which seems to function as an extension of a deconstructionist logic. This would be by some counts to read the Derrida of The Politics of Friendship and Specters of Marx as much closer to Agamben than Agamben himself has, or may be willing to recognize.

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Yet, as Agamben will continue to state, he avoids being diagnosed with “archive fever” as he is not searching for a concrete, historical origin based in some transcendent revelation—rather, he is searching for the immanent presentation of a thing itself (its face, its life, in its sheer nudity) that is not divine but completely profaned.102 In this framework, the messianic does not speak per se, but rather exceeds all that is said, and it is this strand of thought that he detects in (or as some might say, “reads into”) Benjamin’s work. As he summarizes it apropos of our discussion: The word of faith manifests itself as the effective experience of a pure power of saying that, as such, does not coincide with any denotative proposition, or with the performative value of a speech act. Rather, it exists as an absolute nearness of the word. One therefore understands why, for Paul, messianic power finds its telos in weakness. The act itself of a pure potentiality of saying, a word that always remains close to itself, cannot be a signifying word that utters true opinions on the state of things, or a juridical performative that posits itself as fact.103

Potentiality, as Agamben names the ontological grounds of this threshold of “undecidability” under discussion here, becomes for him the basis for understanding the workings of a “weak messianic force” in both Paul and Benjamin. The messianic henceforth becomes that basic condition that renders the law inoperable and which can be said to “deconstruct” the origins of law itself, or the (political, and hence canonical) representations which accompany it. Its antinomian flavor returns with a more concerted force, one capable of de-activating the law altogether, rendering it completely as a thing of the past. This is the remnant of potentiality that is not consumed in the act, but is conserved in it each time and dwells there. If this remnant of potentiality is thus weak, if it cannot be accumulated in any form of knowledge or dogma, and if it cannot impose itself as a law, it does not follow that it is passive or inert. To the contrary, it acts in its own weakness, rendering the word of law inoperative in de-creating and dismantling the states of fact or of law, making them freely available for use.104

For Agamben, as for Benjamin, it is the essence of messianism that it is a theory of the “state of exception,” or that which interrupts (“de-creates”) the normal significations of law, though without becoming itself the sovereign power that is typically posited through the existence of such a state. On the contrary, Agamben states that messianism is that which subverts the sovereign’s power, that which

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is constantly engaged in acts of “de-creation” and thus, cannot become a constructive principle in and of itself.105 What is unique to Agamben’s claims here is that any attempt by the sovereign to totalize the power to signify would be upended by its accompanying messianic elements. This would approach being a messianism that truly never reaches a point of canonical creation, or incarnation, but instead forever remains a specter upon the margins of representation. This reading of the messianic would certainly seem to bear at least a minimum resemblance to the definition of what Derrida considered deconstruction to be. Yet, it is likewise, Agamben notes, a possible entrance of the “sacred” into our world, the zero point of revelation that Derrida had always shied away from pronouncing possible. For Agamben, it is not only possible, it is the only way to ethically approach another form of life before us, the only way to approach the other in the absolute singularity of their being. This attempt on Agamben’s part to re-institute a discourse on the possibility of the sacred into our world is certainly a movement beyond what Derrida was comfortable with, and it would be open to a criticism that he is ultimately performing some sort of theological maneuvering—that is, if it were not for the fact that Agamben is actually trying to dismantle the terrain normally conceived of as being both theological and transcendent. Agamben’s thought is on the contrary steered toward what is both profane and absolutely immanent. As one salient example of this in his work, he tries to demonstrate how the entrance of the sacred into our world is deliberately posited in contrast to the banning of the sacred under the conditions of which the nomos (“law”) of the sovereign appears.106 That is, if the sovereign, whether embodied as a ruler of a state or as a canonical reading (of history, of culture, etc), can only appear in the terrain cleared by the absence of the sacred, and therefore as the secular order in which politics is performed, then it is only the messianic elements which offer to reinstate sacredness into our world (our history, our culture, etc). Redemption, consequently, can only arise from within a messianic interruption of a canonical history, in many ways quite the opposite sense of redemption than quite a few dogmatic (content-driven) believers would attest. Yet, as with his deconstructivist critiques, the theological leanings in Agamben’s work are not always so clear either. Concerning the latter, the messianic is employed in his work as a force of “de-creation,” a “de-constructing” force working within a religious context that seemingly goes beyond being merely “theological.”107 Indeed, it would seem to disrupt theology’s attempt to posit a particular content of faith as eternally and universally true.

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The messianic, for Agamben, is that which de-stabilizes any act of naming within any particular religious tradition. It is, as it was for both Benjamin and Derrida, a structural feature of religious thought, pregnant with social, political, historical, and ethical consequences, leading us to further inquire as to whether this conception of the messianic is an almost Kantian gesture to confine religion, or canons, or all acts of naming, to their structural limitations alone, rendering any content within them as superfluous. This in turn raises the seemingly insurmountable status quaestionis: Does the “X without X” formula thereby imply the absence of any appropriable content within a religious tradition, especially if it is to remain faithful to the messianic core of religious thought, an exceptionality that defines its functioning and authority (or perhaps even its sovereignty)? In short, is the universal form of religious thought to be favored over the particular content or praxis of a religious tradition? It would appear, at times, that for Agamben, who functions here as perhaps more of a true deconstructivist than Derrida, it would imply exactly that, and in ways that Derrida, as we have just seen might not have completely agreed. This explicit challenge to the discipline of theology as a fundamental refusal to posit any religious or dogmatic content per se is certainly picked up by Agamben as a directly applicable theopolitical principle severed from any historical religious tradition and is yet discerned as the core of what constitutes any given tradition in the first place. It is the pure kernel of faith devoid of content.108 Therefore, in a work devoted to developing the conceptualization of the “messianic” in the context of a Pauline theology, he has leave to remark that: There is no such thing as a content of faith, and to profess the word of faith does not mean formulating true propositions on God and the world. To believe in Jesus Messiah does not mean believing in something about him . . . and the attempts of the Councils to formulate the content of faith in symbola can only be taken as a sublime irony.109

To what degree then can a member of a community, or that which inscribes its members with its narrative, exist or have an identity that is yet deprived of any potential for content? This would seem to be the lasting legacy of the messianic bequeathed by Benjamin, modified through Derrida, and brought to the threshold of an increasingly profane age in Agamben. It is at this point, however, that Agamben, though appearing to arise from within a parallel deconstructionist framework, illustrates his absolute distance from it as well.

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Distinguishing canons: Between more or less violence From a theological perspective, a central question is opened up through this line of inquiry into Derrida’s and Agamben’s thoughts that I now want to address directly. The question runs as such: what is the task of theology, if not to safeguard and, in some sense, to defend (or offer an apology for) the particularity of its “content of faith” over and against a stripped-down universalization of its most significant concepts as we seem to find in various shades in both thinkers? Or, are the actions of “safeguarding” and “defending” simply an attempt to enact those powers of sovereignty which theology should otherwise resist becoming? Or, from another angle perhaps, we could further ask: If the canonical scriptures have often been seen, alongside a canonical form of tradition (its history), as that bearer of truth for those religious peoples who gather to identify with, and be identified by, those particular forms, then how might their conscious de-stabilization, through the messianic elements which accompany them, affect those same identities? If their “content” were dissolved, as Agamben at times seems to indicate it should, what would be the living reality of a “whatever” community, or a “whatever” person, if they are not to slide into the relativistic soup which those (religious, national, ideological) communities often fear looming on their peripheries? Derrida seems to be suggesting that these contents will be de-constructed only to be subsequently re-constructed (and potentially, though not necessarily, in a more just fashion). Agamben, however, is poised to eliminate them altogether. This quandary certainly presents itself as more than a small problematic within Agamben’s work. Indeed, it could be said to constitute the fundamental thrust of his thought, one which I intend to frame more precisely through what follows. A first potential answer to these questions would include Derrida’s defense of the canonical form—its necessity as a marker of our cultural and religious identities, as we have seen. A second possible answer might involve the role that theology would play (as at times it definitely has played) as a central actor in how we conceive of the political contestations between canonical forms and their messianic undoing, certainly if read through Agamben’s lens, and especially if it lets go of its attempt to formulate and contain a monolithic, universalized content and admits of its position as being already in-between (religions, cultures, etc). From Agamben’s perspective, if religion can admit the contingency of its (canonical) content, taking on instead the “whatever” form that best displays the medium of love,110 then humanity might find itself

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immersed within a completely different political reality, something over and beyond the legitimating of sovereign power.111 The truth of why Agamben’s challenge appears as so difficult to comprehend is that he tries to think beyond all form of canonical representation and, thus, to think new forms of life lived in ways we currently know not how. If Carl Schmitt was correct in asserting that political concepts are secularized theological ones, then to acknowledge theology’s perpetual (continuous) hybrid and “weak” nature is thereby potentially an act of theology to reveal its place at the roots of what constitutes political identity in the first place, at the crossroads of cultures and beliefs, within the quotidian junctures of “whatever” relationships. And this would seem to be what Agamben is after—the disclosure of a state of existence beyond our ability at present to describe it. From such an angle, this formulation might be another way to say that rather than simply read the use of the messianic as an attempt at Judaizing thought as some have done,112 this is rather to read the appropriation of certain religious terms as indicating the situatedness of a particular religious identity as at the crossroads between other identities (religious, historical, national, ethnic, etc) and thus always-already in defiance of monolithically signified identities. Such is a play upon borders and identities which, in turn, provides a salient critique of stabilized norms at the same time as offering new modes for the (re)configuration of both religious and political identities beyond their canonical inscriptions.113 For Agamben, creation undoes the canon, continuously over and again. Agamben likewise foresees that the “coming community” (his necessarily vague postulation of where humanity needs to be headed) will be a community of justice without teleological aims, of a humanity united without the need for political representation.114 Indeed, presumably it would exist without the need for a separation which normally defines the space of symbolic signification (hence representation). In such fashion, he would appear to be going beyond the deconstructionist project, intimating a realm of social existence which does not rely upon the representations which deconstructionism aims to take apart though—in the end—also defend as necessary to our linguistic existence. In this alternate line of thought, he has even at times referred to this state of signification as the real “spectacle” of original sin, a state to which our politics is bound.115 Could it be then that what Agamben truly seeks is a community absent of all canons, and thus without (scriptural) religion or national–ideological markings as we know them?116 Would this be to espouse a form of religious nihilism to parallel his alleged politically nihilistic claims? It would at least certainly appear

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to be contrary to those deconstructionists who would somehow seek to salvage the particularity of religious canonical claims.117

Derrida’s response to Agamben In general, I do not think that Derrida would have completely disagreed with Agamben’s assessment of the deconstructivist project. Indeed, he seemed to indicate, on multiple occasions, that his work on sovereignty admitted the necessity of such a zone’s existence (as an exceptional space), though he also indicated that it was conditioned in such a way as to provide a critique of itself, a form of autoimmunity (wherein the self attacks itself), which the later Derrida took up thematically on multiple occasions.118 As we have already witnessed, the messianic forces within any given canonical form are what Derrida sees as just such an occurrence of justice. He even seems to concede that the forces of signification and of law are inherently violent in some sense, a reality from which we cannot escape.119 Though Agamben might disagree, it certainly remains to be seen whether or not we can actually live (culturally or otherwise) beyond, for example, the violence of linguistic signification. And this is why I find it more interesting—and potentially more fruitful at this point—to take up Derrida’s critique of Agamben rather than simply justify the Derridean position vis-à-vis Agamben’s critique. The stress thus far has been to read Agamben’s critique of Derrida and to weigh its merits or faults, and until recently, this was perhaps the only way to sustain the discussion. The recent publication of Derrida’s lectures on the concept of sovereignty, however, have provided us with a potential response to Agamben’s work, though indirectly, as he does not here address Agamben’s writings, which were either a response to deconstructionism or directly dedicated to him. Derrida’s only sustained engagement with Agamben, to my knowledge, appears in a series of lectures published under the title The Beast and the Sovereign.120 Though the title would no doubt apply to a large share of Agamben’s own interests, Derrida here intends to establish a subtle critique of Agamben’s most basic assertions, which lie at the heart of his own reflections on the concepts of sovereignty and animality, as well as the distinction between bios (communal, cultural life) and zoé (biological life) so essential to Agamben’s Homo Sacer project. Though Derrida deals exclusively with Agamben’s most popularized (political) work, Homo Sacer, his treatment of it contains implications for

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reading the entirety of Agamben’s oeuvre. Derrida begins his examination of the work by stating that he “warmly [vivement]” recommends it to be read, “because you will find in it many precious things, reflections and references on sovereignty [la souveraineté] and on the questions that interest us”.121 Despite this being the case, however, he immediately seizes upon what Agamben seems to have overlooked or in some sense “forgotten” to include within a brief section of his work entitled “The Ban and the Wolf ”. Ignoring the content of Derrida’s critique for the moment, I would simply point out that there is more than a bit of irony present in this gesture, as Derrida is attempting to point out the material that Agamben has apparently forgotten and which, in some sense, so Derrida claims, conditions Agamben’s “most irrepressible gesture” of pointing out what others have forgotten or left out of their work. To make matters even more interesting, this gesture, of course, is nearly identical to what Agamben himself had earlier done to Derrida, as he points out in his short essay “The Friend” how he found himself lamenting Derrida’s willful omission of a crucial philological point in his book The Politics of Friendship.122 Essentially, Agamben claims in his essay to have sent Derrida notice that the phrase “O friends, there are no friends,” a line credited to Diogenes Laertius and central to Derrida’s overall argument in his book, is a uncorrected typographical error that should actually read “He who has (many) friends, does not have a single friend.” This translation, of course, renders Derrida’s reading less than insightful. Derrida, Agamben assumes, ignored Agamben’s advice on purpose so that he, like Nietzsche before him, could both illustrate the necessity of friendship and distrust friends at the same time. Derrida’s charge in his own lectures, however, is essentially that Agamben, an author normally finely attuned to the various genealogies of terms and concepts, has forgotten to address the image(s) of wolves so frequently aligned with the figure of the sovereign. What Derrida contends no less, is that Agamben’s omission serves in part to undermine his overall argument, and is yet characteristic of his methodology. As he puts it: These forgettings of wolves [ces oublis de loups], and of wolves that have as it were a priority, are the more interesting and even amusing in that, as is regularly the case with this author, his most irrepressible gesture consists regularly in recognizing priorities that have supposedly been overlooked, ignored, neglected, not known or recognized, for want of knowledge, for want of reading or lucidity or force of thought—priorities, then, first times [premières fois], inaugural initiatives, instituting events that have supposedly been denied or neglected,

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Yet, this simple point which may, at first glance, appear to be little more than a subtle critique of style and method, or perhaps as a jab at Agamben for slighting him, in characteristic Derridean fashion becomes much more than that: he is rather claiming that Agamben’s methodology is an expression of his attempt to be sovereign, as author, as scholar. As Derrida immediately quips after this critique: “I point this out with a smile only to recall that this is the very definition, vocation, or essential claim of sovereignty [la revendication essentielle de la souveraineté].”124 And he goes on to add to this charge that it is almost always a false claim that is made when one attempts to be the first, but one, nevertheless, which is made in order to get people to believe the priority of the claim itself and to lend some sense of sovereignty (and thus veracity) to the claim. It is, in Derrida’s eyes then, a methodology of sovereignty that Agamben displays in his writing, one that presents itself as the only authentic source of truth because it alone has been able to access the presence lying at the origins.125 This is the same basic position which Derrida will utilize when he takes up Agamben’s too rigid distinction between bios and zoé later on in the work, a position which ultimately does not hold for Derrida. For Agamben, this distinction is essential to establishing his views on contemporary politics and the biopolitical dimensions of sovereign power.126 Yet, despite the centrality of this distinction, Derrida’s contention is that it is not as clear as Agamben might like it to be, that bios and zoé are not as divergent as Agamben maintains: “What is unfortunate is that this distinction is never so clear and secure, and that Agamben himself has to admit that there are exceptions, for example in the case of God, who, says Aristotle’s Metaphysics, has a . . . noble and eternal life.”127 And it is precisely where such distinctions do not hold, according to Derrida’s logic, that a sovereign decision is made in order to resolve the conceptual impasse that seems otherwise intraversable. Hence, he finds that Agamben’s attempt to link the division between bios and zoé to both an ancient and a modern context falls flat: What is difficult to sustain, in this thesis, is the idea of an entry . . . into a zone of irreducible indifferentiation [une zone d’indifférenciation irréductible], when the differentiation has never been secure (I would say Agamben furtively admits

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as much); and, above all, what remains even more difficult to sustain is the idea that there is in this something modern or new; for Agamben himself . . . is keen to recall that it is as ancient as can be, immemorial and archaic.128

It is precisely here that Derrida suspects the methods of the sovereign lurk, for “. . . just when Agamben seems to want to inscribe himself, with some reservations, in Foucault’s tracks, where Foucault will have been almost the first, as Agamben, for his part, will have been the first to say that Foucault was almost the first to say, that what appears to be modern, as you will hear, is in truth immemorial.”129 And again, the race to be the first to disclose the origin is the race to become sovereign, the task of the sovereign author that Agamben has supposedly dedicated himself to embodying—a fateful surrendering of the self to archive fever. Derrida subsequently takes Agamben to task as well for omitting certain “key” passages from Heidegger, an otherwise obvious reference point for all of Agamben’s work, and which Agamben must, we are told, himself have known: “I’m sure he knows these texts, even if he seems to have omitted them or needed to omit them, as he well knows that he wouldn’t have been the first to read them, which no doubt discouraged him from looking at them more closely.”130 The assumption now being, of course, that Derrida is almost capable of detecting the reasons why certain key passages have been omitted in order that a certain mastery of the concept can be presented without exceptions being present there simultaneously to call them into question. In essence, Agamben seems, according to Derrida, unwilling to admit that certain strains of thought had been made manifest earlier in a particular location because these would seem, not simply to contradict the claims he is making, but, more damningly, to posit his own work as the first to reveal the profound truth, the first to see what others have failed to see, to establish himself as sovereign in the realm of thought and of academics.131 Hence, there arises Agamben’s haste to be “twice first” as Derrida puts it, to be prior to all contrary claims: What surprises me most, incidentally, and constantly disconcerts me in Agamben’s argumentation and rhetoric, is that he clearly recognizes what I have just said, namely that biopolitics is an arch-ancient thing (even if today it has new means and new structures). It is an arch-ancient thing and bound up with the very idea of sovereignty. But then, if one recognizes this, why all the effort to pretend to wake politics up to something that is supposedly, I quote, “the decisive event of modernity”? In truth, Agamben, giving nothing up [ne renonçant à rien], like the unconscious, wants to be twice first [deux fois le premier], the first to see and announce, and the first to remind: he wants both to be the first to

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Agamben would, by this count, be immersed in multiple attempts to generate origins and to proclaim these origins within his work in order to make his work sovereign over other readings, to provide the once and for all definitive reading as it were. In contrast to Agamben’s tactics, Derrida suggests that we should give up on ever disclosing the “founding event” just as we should give up the “founding text” of any philosophical reflection. The focus that Derrida grants to Agamben’s methodology, then, is not to be detached from Agamben’s claims concerning the genealogy of sovereignty in the ancient and modern worlds— just as Derrida’s methods, even his writing style, are not to be separated from his claims.133 There is only for Derrida a working-with the texts before us, a making do with what is already there, even if, perhaps, this methodology in some sense repeats the gesture of ignoring certain “evidences” to the contrary, such as what Agamben charges Derrida with doing when he, for his part, chose to ignore Agamben’s philological advice on the topic of friendship. And so, who is guiltier of complicity with sovereignty, Agamben or Derrida? And what could be said about both men’s attempts to “outdo” the other here? To what extent is Derrida guilty of the same charges he brings against Agamben, or vice versa? To what degree do Agamben and Derrida both engage in the same or similar tactics in order to peddle their readings as much as a merchant peddles their wares? Are both authors merely playing the same game, to critique another in order to establish a scholarly position, and to claim that their reading is, in some sense, the definitive reading of a concept or text? Or, and perhaps more profoundly, we might add, is there any other way for it to be done, for a critical position to be established as such? Though it might seem unfair at this point to simply declare that both authors engage in the same tactics as if the content of their writings played little role in these matters, both do seem to be guilty in some sense of “the pot calling the kettle black.” And yet, perhaps in more ways than just this, Derrida and Agamben are not so far removed from one another as both have claimed throughout the years. Let us recall that sovereignty appears here in two forms: from Agamben’s perspective, the sovereign act is one of signification, of naming things, which he charges Derrida as being complicit with through his deconstruction of these names, a gesture which does not yet question the act of giving names itself.134 The only way beyond this is to go before all signified representations constructed

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in a space of (sovereign) actuality to a place of presentation given in a space of pure (nonsovereign) potentiality. From Derrida’s viewpoint, however, the sovereign act is one which attempts to establish itself as at the origin(s), and to claim uniquely that it goes before all other origins, even the origins of all representations themselves. Agamben’s claims for an authentic presentation prior to representation, by this count, are complicit with this form of sovereign power and are reflected accordingly in both his rhetoric and philological musings, though he certainly does not admit as much. From this standpoint, Agamben appears as being too hasty and too eager to make his philosophical claims. According to Derrida’s reading, sovereign power will efface itself at some point; the logic of autoimmunity dictates that it be so. In the meantime, we should point out where they are unjust, and try to be less violent in our construction of representations that are otherwise inevitable and necessary for our formulations of subjectivity.135 Yet, in this reading, other questions linger—for example, when Agamben speaks of the “division of division itself,” a division brought on by those cultural representations he works tirelessly to render inoperative (his Pauline inheritance, similar to Taubes’ reading of the tensions inherent to Judaism), is he not in some sense repeating Derrida’s “double division” of sovereign claims, a form of “autoimmunity” in action, and thereby recognizing this fundamental deconstructivist gesture as a necessary measure for our world?136 Is this not also what Derrida was in some sense moving toward through his own reflections on the human–animal divide, something which Agamben’s work seems only to echo even further?137 And when Derrida challenges Agamben’s sovereign methods, does he not himself engage in such tactics from time to time in order to posit his own reading as the dominant reading of a text, as Agamben himself has pointed out? (To which, we might add, is this not the only option available to those of us utilizing language in any capacity?) And, furthermore, is not Agamben’s entire work an indicator that all of language, and certainly our use of it, is an immersion in sovereign power (as signification), an immersion which still needs to be brought to light and then brought back to a “pre-linguistic” encounter with the other as the face before us? Would this not also, then, be a sort of acknowledgment in some sense that, of course, his analysis will collude with a sovereign voice (of the author as the sovereign voice) at some point? If Agamben seeks to go before language, perhaps he should also account more for the fact that he himself points toward this realm through language, a fact which must, if we are to be honest, put him at odds with himself from time to time.

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The tensions produced in this juxtaposition, however, seem to run much deeper than a simple dispute between two authors. As I have already indicated, I believe our very understanding of theology and its relationship to philosophical methods (as well as philosophy to theological methods) lies somewhere in the spaces opened up through this debate. Herein lies a difficulty that appears to stem from an aporia deeply lodged within our attempts to represent nothing less than reality itself.

Beyond the archive, toward the canon: The irresolvable tension between Derrida and Agamben Agamben’s persistent critique of the work of Derrida on the issue of presentation/ representation has in fact the potential to be moved from a sub-specialty of certain scholars to the forefront of any discussion concerning the legacy of western thought in a contemporary context.138 For this reason, it is not surprising that the articles that have chosen to engage the productive tension between these two thinkers have begun to sense the dire implications for how we currently perceive the fields of (and various interactions between) politics, ethics, philosophy, and theology, among others.139 Yet, where does the exact difference between Agamben and Derrida lie? To summarize what we have seen thus far, for the former, there is a presentation beyond representation that is possible, that we should (politically) strive for and that will come to constitute the only truly “ethical” subject beyond the worldly (violent) representations that otherwise constrain us. For Agamben, that is, any attempt to maintain representative frameworks is a bid for sovereign power and a denial of the presence (of the other) that is yet possible to experience. For Derrida, however, there are only representations before us, ones which we can acknowledge as violent, more or less, though we can and should seek to enact more just representations on the whole. This is brought to reality, of course, through the simultaneous realization that we will never actually enable or encounter a pure presentation, and that any attempt to do so, in fact, merely conceals an embedded will-to-sovereignty, the minimal totalitarian gesture. This is to say that within the debate that rages between Agamben and Derrida, both accuse the other of trying to be sovereign, of being guilty of the highest charge which the other seemingly has to accuse them with as we have just seen. It is no surprise, then, that this debate has started to attract a significant amount of attention over the past several years.

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Agamben, for his part, has rehearsed (and continues to rehearse) this tension between them on a number of related thematics.140 His work would seemingly exemplify the search for a presentation as such that is capable of defying the representational logic of the as if. Derrida, on the other hand, seems to be mired within a Kantian register of the regulative ideal that plays off the as if nature of all representational claims (that we must accept all representations as if they presented the thing as such) precisely in order to introduce the topic of responsibility within our given representational frameworks. In this, he affirms life without a phenomenology of presence to accompany it, without its metaphysical presumptions—a situation wherein all there is left to work with is what there is before us, the texts we cannot escape, and, likewise often, their remainder and the ashes of archives. In what follows, I seek to illuminate the tension between these two authors more pronouncedly by drawing upon their multiple attempts to formulate a concept of the archive and its relation to re/ presentation. In the end, what I hope to show is that their work, taken together, actually constitutes a unique way to approach an aporia of existence itself, measured by messianic forces and canonical forms, and as something often caught precariously between presentation and representation. Here, I will wager, lies the central philosophical dilemma at the core of our theological thoughts. In doing so, I am also hoping to demonstrate a renewed relevance of the canonical form which is, by no means, limited to its religious connotations alone. The canonical form can be seen as the determining factor behind how we produce cultural intelligibility. Yet, the manner in which both authors depict the historical resonance of this form underlies their often misunderstood relationship with the various religious traditions they analyze, those very same historical phenomena that are so wedded to canonical (scriptural) writings. Perceiving the canonical form within the context of the religious, and as each appears in these author’s respective works, can of consequence vastly illuminate our understanding, not only of the tension present between Derrida and Agamben, but also perhaps between different canonical religions, a task eminently worth undertaking.

Archives/Fevers It is not difficult to imagine how Derrida might have responded to this contrast between his own work and that of Agamben, indeed, not even to imagine, but to see how he did respond to such contrasts between presentation and representation

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within his work. With regard to Foucault’s methodology, for example, something which Agamben explicitly appends in good measure,141 Derrida contended that Foucault’s archaeological–genealogical project opened up a path of thinking toward a “relativity without recourse.” That is, he claimed that Foucault’s work was at times an attempt, without support from either reason or logos, made to remove oneself from language, though it also claimed (inconsistently) to be a history, an inscription into philosophical thought which must indeed seek to confine the madman within.142 Concerning Foucault, at least, Derrida was quick to point out that any effort to formulate a “Decision” as to the boundary that separates reason from madness ran the risk of reinstituting a metaphysics of presence, of casting a sovereign choice for an arbitrary (or “mystical”) foundation at the heart of all “rational” thought.143 It is an attempt to posit an event “subsequent to the unity of an original presence” in Derrida’s estimation.144 This is, in essence, what he contends that Foucault wagered in trying to let madness speak for itself beyond its being framed by Foucault’s own archeological method—indeed, he, Foucault, had wanted madness to present itself, beyond any historical representations that would alter and distort it.145 And this is precisely what Derrida will attempt to deny him. His critique of Foucault, as we will see slowly unfold in Derrida’s writing, is essentially the same basic charge that he will levy against Agamben years later in his seminars on The Beast and the Sovereign where he aligns Agamben’s Homo Sacer project with the originary sovereign act of trying to locate the origins of the Decision itself, as we have already seen.146 For Derrida, this problematic approach latent within Foucault’s methodology is not limited to either Foucault or Agamben. It was Freud’s fundamental error as well. As Derrida will emblematically portray it, Freud sought to sift through the archive as an archaeologist on the trail of a ruin, on the trail of a presence that he believes will finally speak for itself. Freud believed, according to Derrida, that the origins would present themselves, that the “stones would speak [“Les pierres parlent!”]” of their own accord, and hence eclipse our need to provide commentary and interpretation.147 The archaeologist, pace both Freud and Foucault, sifts the archive as if commanded by a sort of fever, hoping to find the object that can speak for itself, that is, hoping to efface the archive’s collected debris in an attempt to render the archive itself superfluous (inoperative) in some sense and therefore without its basic functionality. Hence, Derrida can speak of the archaeologist’s race to be first to the source, origin or presence, and the pleasure subsequently associated with the find.148 These are the charges that he will repeatedly bring against those archaeologists (Freud, Foucault, Agamben) who come closest to

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where his work often steers itself (into the archives of history) before veering off at the last minute in the refusal of a concrete, historical presence. It is important to recall that, for Derrida, sovereignty was defined by him, even as early as his remarks on the work of Rousseau in Of Grammatology, as a form of presence, indeed as a “delight in [jouissance] presence.”149 What Derrida finds mistaken in Rousseau, and consequently in the entire history of western metaphysics, is a primacy that has been granted to presence, one that “. .  . supposes at once that representation follows a first presence and restores a final presence.”150 Representation, as posited through the “dangerous supplement” of writing, speaks neither of presence nor of absence, and it is, yet, all we have before us, that which undoes any attempt to construct a universal ontological form.151 In his opinion, then, those who pursue an archaeological method are attempting to provide a sense of presence that cannot, and should not, be provided. What each archaeologist suffers from moreover is what he will come to term as an “archive fever” [“mal d’archive”], diagnosed by Derrida in three stages (or theses). The archive, like memory, is a vast repository drawn upon for ideological reasons, to establish either law or the self, for example. The archaeologist, as a psychoanalyst, sifts through the archive looking for the arche (or origin) of these established structures, a task which, according to Derrida, cannot ever be completed and which only serves to lead the seeker into a state of archive fever, an interminable and fruitless quest. The three stages of this fever are discernable because each one appears to maintain a desire (1) to find the origin exposed, naked on the archeological level, a desire which will never find fulfillment as such, (2) to archive, a process which takes place due to the functioning of the death drive as an attempt to re-instate a presence that forever remains absent, and (3) to encounter an originary (primordial) presence speaking for itself, of its own accord, but only in effect achieving a representational reality that translates itself into an establishment of a nomological archive of law, institution, domiciliation or filiation, and not the long sought after originary presence. This last charge appears as damning enough to Derrida that he would consequently contend that, despite Freud’s uncovering of such a principle, he nonetheless succumbed to the patriarchal logic that governed, and still governs, his work.152 The search for presence actually led Freud to a stronger (sovereign) re-presenting which served to conceal and distort its original intention. In essence, archive fever is then the desire to be sovereign, to be the patriarchal master of the materials within the archive, and ultimately a desire to efface the archive and render oneself as an “I” that has become a sovereign self.153

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There is no return to some state of “infancy” for Derrida as there will be for Agamben, who appears to Derrida to stretch far back into the archives for an origin of some sort.154 For Derrida, there is only a death we are driven toward. Death is what there is before us, in this world wherein death itself is the only end for all of these representations as we have come to know them. This reality is for him the blatant demonstration of an aporia with which we cannot negotiate: representation is all we have and there is no subversion of this economy, even if spectral aneconomic forces seem to undermine their claims to dominate or to totalize their representational (economic) limits. Derrida’s discussion of archivization as a Freudian project expands, in this sense, into a coupling of processes. He develops, in this regard, and through the course of his analysis, a conception of a “spectral messianicity,” as the forwardlooking, necessary partner in the couplet of archivization and messianicity. Like archivization, messianicity is an undeconstructable structural element which guarantees the hope of a promise always yet to come, but which resists, in Derrida’s estimation, ever becoming a concrete messianism as evidenced in particular religious traditions.155 It resists ever becoming a presence per se. It can only deconstruct what has been posited as a concrete, historical representation. In this fashion, it will come to serve as a central interpretive lens throughout Derrida’s later writings. It is an illumination of messianicity as an essential act that takes place within any historiographical operation, for a “spectral messianicity [messianicité spectrale] is at work in the concept of the archive and ties it, like religion, like history, like science itself, to a very singular experience of the promise [i.e., Judaism]. And we are never far from Freud in saying this.”156 Though this is immediately followed by the caution, of course, as Derrida would often be fond of reminding his audience, that “Messianicity does not mean messianism [Messianicité ne veut pas dire messianisme].” The link between messianicity and religious identity is alluded to, but not clarified, hinted at but not defined—or, at least, never really defined concretely, historically. His insistence that the (spectral) structure of messianicity does not equal an historical messianism relies upon the (spectral) structure of the archive as its foregrounding, presumably also serving to foreground, though this remains unstated, the historical messianisms of a canonical text (with Judaism being the most relevant example in this context). Any historical messianism, however, is by definition not rooted solely in the archive but in the canonical work, which is associated with the archive, and yet is distinct from it. This is a distinction to be made between the archive and the canonical which Derrida does not make

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here, and presumably this might play some role in his distancing of himself from historical messianisms which, like the canonical, are particular and limited in their applicability toward a more universal structure, despite being caught up in a ceaseless sliding between the particularity of religious traditions and the structures of religiosity in general.157 An underdeveloped concept in Derrida’s work in many ways, thus, remains the desire for a form of canonicity mirroring his use of a certain messianicity and as yet distinguishable from an “archive fever,” though a resemblance certainly remains between them. Indeed, both canonicity and archivization are obsessive traits characterized by their dual roles as measures of preservation and yet effacement. The difference between them, however, is as subtle as that between writing itself and any canonical form it subsequently acquires. There is even a sense in which literature, according to Derrida, “emancipated from the Scriptures [émancipée de l’Écriture sainte]” would contain no trace of canonicity, only of a desire for archiving which apparently replaces it.158 Yet, the archive, from which literature, or the written, draws its body of texts (the process of archivization), does stand vulnerable to the narrower form of the canonical, which constantly threatens to partially erase the archive through the desire for the canonical (canonicity) which limits and divides (and hence, could be said to “destroy” or “burn”) the content of the archive. As history testifies, canons arise from the refinement of a particular archive which they otherwise efface.159 This discussion of canonicity is opened up further through Derrida’s work, and despite his rarely addressing the topic as such, through the presentation of the structural nature of the archive and its relation to scripture, a relationship which he does address, though he does not fully develop. The problem of a transition from the archive to the canon—the question of how one can justly constitute a politics then—is one that Derrida was reticent to address directly. The dual desires of the archive, to preserve and yet to destroy, are the founding limits of the written, but they are not exactly the limits of the canonical form. Canonicity, in this sense, and here going somewhat beyond Derrida’s analysis, though entirely within its scope and trajectory, is the next step beyond the written, a repetition of the processes of archivization, but at yet another concrete remove. There is, here, a redoubling of the dynamism between archivization and messianicity, but one which further narrows the dimensions of both. With canonicity, no longer is the archive as “open” to new works or new discoveries: the step toward the canonical begins a process of closure, one which may in fact close permanently (as with religious scripture) or remain somewhat open and yet

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more restrictive (as with literary canons, or those various cultural formulations of the “classics”). Canons are the representations that have been established in society—not the spectral possibility of a presence to appear, or that which archives often tempt us with. The canonical text becomes, therefore, the “ultimate text,” one that is capable of (at times) muting the messianic spectral forces that threaten to undo its restricted scope. The triumph of the written over the oral is repeated, or re-doubled, in the triumph of the canonical over the written. Messianicity, which Derrida emphatically installs as the call for a presence which will never come,160 is replaced, as it were, by a presence which will always be grounded elsewhere, though not necessarily disclosed either, a nonspectral presence which aligns itself with the narrowed focus of the canonical form. At the same time, this displaced presence could be said to represent a tension within the canonical itself—this is its messianic impulse that has often become a real historical manifestation of a Messiah, a reality which, by Derrida’s reading, exposes a “structural state of emergency” as characteristic of the canonical and as a result of an ever-increasing desire for canonicity.161 The messianic still reigns within the deconstructivist project, however, because canons are not themselves an instance of presence. They are only a measure of the representations that guide our social–symbolic understandings, a standard collection of normative “texts” that guarantee our cultural intelligibility. Hence, there is a need, in Derrida’s opinion, to “liberate” literature from the (canonical) scriptures (the experience and raison d’être of messianicity), though we will still have to rely upon canons and their cultural significations or representations. This would also serve to explain why messianicity (rooted in the archive) is favored over historical messianisms (rooted in a particular canon), though why canons (and the religions that proceed from them) cannot be done away with completely. This would also serve to illuminate why Derrida’s most acquainted dialogue partners are firmly placed within the western philosophical canon and why Derrida will, on occasion, defend the use of canons and their role in history, as we have already seen, a point frequently overlooked in those (mis) characterizations of Derrida’s corpus as a singularly de-stabilizing project.162 Canons, in Derrida’s estimation, are still an archive, but a refined version of the archive, one lacking nuance or depth—more ideological—but still yet necessary for representational purposes. The archive, and canons by extension, is necessary for forming the selves which may, should and will be called into question, though ultimately not effaced, religious identities as well as secular,

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and the line between them, especially in Derrida’s eyes, is not always so clear. In the end, as in the beginning, all we subjects have is this text, either canonical or archival, these representations. If messianicity, of which Derrida spoke often, is the structure of justice, of its coming, and is thereby intimately connected with the (infinite) task of responsibility, then canonicity would represent the grounds upon which finitude constitutes itself, of how it attempts to deal (in some measure) with the responsibility it has been given. Making the transition from the ontological–deconstructive (spectral, archival) side of thought to the ontic–concrete, and very political (ideological and canonical) side of human living, however, often remains an undisclosed problematic in Derrida’s work, as Kenneth Surin, for one, has pointed out.163 Just as difficult as it was for Heidegger, one of Derrida’s strongest influences within his writing, to move from the ontological to the ontic realm of existence, so too is it challenging for Derrida to make just such a movement.164 Derrida is able to express the necessity for canonical forms in our world, as we have seen, though he provides little substantial evidence for how we are to (justly) construct such forms. The question of how we are to deal with the actual presence of sovereign canonical forms in our world is left open in Derrida’s work, and this despite his later frequent references to the subject of sovereignty. I will therefore propose in what follows that the simplest way to understand this Derridean impasse between the necessity for canonical forms and the difficulty of actually forming them is the problem of sovereign power, something which becomes clearer when one juxtaposes Derrida’s work with that of Agamben, whose own work on sovereignty appears to put him at complete odds with the former.

Agamben on testimony and the archive What unfolds in Derrida’s work is precisely what Agamben statedly opposes throughout his entire oeuvre, from its beginnings to the present day. Take, for example, the central argument behind Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz, a work which remains his most heavily critiqued piece of writing, though it does not substantially deviate from his overall philosophical trajectory, and, I would argue, must be understood within this context.165 If anything, this work in particular profoundly reaffirms his commitment to de-constructing, displacing and ultimately seeking to eradicate those prevalent notions of subjectivity that continue to dominate our fields of representation, these canonical forms that

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Derrida comes, in the end, to uphold. Agamben’s philosophical project, in many ways, is an accounting for the “unsaid” within every said, of pushing beyond every enunciation within language and toward a prelinguistic “unsaid” realm that could be described as grounding our every utterance.166 In this sense, and as a redefining of the most basic concepts already employed in this study, the self is, for him, constructed in-between these two realms of the “said” and “unsaid”, that is, in the archive, which is yet forgotten the moment we pronounce the “I.”167 We depend upon the archive’s being-there, but we do not necessarily reference it at the moment of positing the “I” symbolically in language. Our personal and collective archives both remain “unsaid” in what is “said” to be us; that is, we render the archive inoperative the moment we posit a sovereign self. And, the sovereign self, of course, is what Derrida, according to Agamben, has been defending all along. Whereas for Derrida the archive is all we have to work with, the very foundation for all deconstructive acts and what we necessarily return to over and again in order to more justly shore up what has been more or less responsibly said, for Agamben, however, who seeks to move beyond representation, there is another layer of conceptual analysis that will perhaps yield greater insight as well as the possibility of existing beyond what can be re-presented: that of testimony. Testimony, which deals with the internal and external limits of language, is opposed to the archive, which itself only refers to the relationship between the said and the unsaid. Testimony goes deeper into the nature of language, not simply dealing with the content of linguistic statements, as in the gatherings of the archives, but in fact to refer to the existence of language itself. As he renders it, testimony is “. . . between the sayable and the unsayable in every language – that is, between a potentiality of speech and its existence, between a possibility and an impossibility of speech.”168 To “think a potentiality” is to contemplate a break in possibility, we are told, a caesura that divides all speech between its potentiality and impotentiality. This is the caesura that otherwise gives rise to the impulses which drive the creation of the subject, an impulse that Agamben would like to resist. Agamben’s focus is moreover quickly narrowed to what Derrida would not consider as a genuine possibility: a realm outside of language, outside the text, which Agamben attempts to gather under the concept of testimony or that which seemingly is exterior to language itself. Testimony is “unsayable” in language but, for this reason, must constitute the point of departure for any serious consideration of the possibilities of our “creaturely-being” beyond any

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manufactured “human being” established as a form of subjectivity within the realm of representations.169 Framing the opposition of archive to testimony is Agamben’s way (once again) to contest the formation of a “human subjectivity” within language as the only possible re/presentation of the creaturely animal that we otherwise are.170 What he is attempting to do, no less, is to re-open the question of our (political) subjectivities via a regression to a more primordial state of our being, one more “creaturely” than “human” (defined as a classifiable species).171 That is, the archive is hereby exposed by Agamben as that which has served to “bracket the subject” entirely, to “reduce” it to an “empty position”, to found itself “. . . on the subject’s disappearance into the anonymous murmur of statements.”172 Derrida, for his part, would seem to follow Husserl’s lead in tenaciously clinging to those western forms of subjectivity that deny our creatureliness its due, favoring instead a reliance upon the established (though well contested) grounds of the subject.173 In contrast, for Agamben, testimony appears to call the entire notion of subjectivity, founded upon these dichotomous understandings of the self, into question. Testimony, in this sense, seeks to regress the human subject into a prelinguistic position beyond any predetermined cultural significations, a place he will often refer to as being one of “pure potentiality,” or our “creaturely being.”174 In this manner, the traditional western subject is portrayed as that figure which seeks to transcend its potentiality and to emerge as sovereign in its actuality as it seeks to define itself over and against an animality it cannot ever truly escape from being. It appears as cast (or constructed) in the division that rests between the human and the inhuman, between the possible and the impossible, the witness and the Muselmann of the camps, with these last two figures being intertwined to such a point that they cannot be separated at all; they in fact codetermine the site of the subject that Agamben opposes.175 The subject comes to rely upon its exclusionary sense of self, and so must create other “inhuman” figures in front of which it props itself up as it were. Testimony, we are told, is nothing more than the intimate unity between the survivor and the Muselmann, which slowly works away at this form of subjectivity from within. It is at this point that one can see more clearly the limitations Agamben hopes to reveal in Derrida’s thought as even a de-construction of the self is reliant upon the realm of construction itself. Deconstructionism would then be complicit in the construction of the sovereign human- being over against the “other” animals as much as it would also aid sovereign power in justifying its position within the world.

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As Agamben will relentlessly contend, the Muselmann was the figure origi­nating from the camps that became a sort of physical evidence of the “catastrophe of the subject,” the figure of the “walking dead,” a human being pushed to the limits of their existence.176 This catastrophe is spelled out in the paradoxical relationship of the witness, who can only testify to what they themselves have not undergone, and the Muselmann, who cannot testify on behalf of themselves, whose very words have been taken from them and who remain the “unsaid” within every “said” testimony. What this duality reveals, for Agamben, is the contingency of language, as well as our inability to pronounce the existence of language itself as part and parcel of our constitution of human subjectivities.177 Language, for Agamben, is a completely contingent capacity that marks the human being as a potential (and always political) subject. It is therefore something which we are capable of “regressing” beyond, as in before, to a prelinguistic, prerepresentative state of being, a state which he has, on occasion, referred to as filled with gestures beyond any mimetic inscription.178 This is a state which many have called a bid for “political nihilism,” or what others, Derrida perhaps among them, would contend is an attempt to access a primordial “state of nature” as our “origin,” another measure taken to become sovereign. Agamben will nonetheless argue that he is not seeking access to an “origin,” but rather to an “originary” point that can never be accessed as an historical “origin,” and which is a fascination only for those who have first constructed a (political) subjectivity which he hopes to avoid.179 His contrast between the archive and testimony is intended to access a point prior to the establishment of the subject, a figure truly indebted to the originary act of sovereign power. For Agamben, there is no alternative political subjectivity that he wishes to locate either within or external to an original state of nature. According to him, to assume that he is after something such as this is a fundamental misreading of his project, one that Derrida would appear at times to be guilty of. Rather, in his own words, he is attempting to invert the search for origins itself, to posit a profane creaturely existence ontologically (but not necessarily “chronologically”) prior to any constructed subjectivity. That is, the structures of subjectivity are themselves dependent upon a transcendental positing of a self-as-subject, something which is rigorously indebted to those ontotheological rubrics of a (politically) sovereign form of transcendence. Agamben looks to undo these formulations of the self through a regression beyond (because before) the subject, to a purely immanent “form of life” he sees at work over and beyond our traditional “human” forms.180

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By portraying things as such, the truly “ethical subject”, as Agamben sees it, moves beyond the coordinates of subjectivity and becomes solely a “form of life” who testifies directly to the processes of de-subjectification undergone by the many Muselmann or homo sacer who inhabit our world today because it is a “form of life” consequently aware of its being a very “form of life” beyond any inscribed subjectivity.181 Transcendent sovereign forms have no legitimacy in this realm; they are eclipsed by being avoided, by remaining in a state of “infancy” that is our pure potentiality beyond the actuality of any sovereign power. As such, we are able to see how the act of bearing witness becomes a bold act undertaken by the faithful remnant: “. . . to establish oneself in a living language as if it were dead, or in a dead language as if it were living – in any case, outside both the archive and the corpus of what has already been said.”182 The processes of de-subjectification take on an elaborate meaning when viewed later from the perspective of Freudian regression, which Agamben invokes in an essay entitled “Philosophical Archaeology.” Here, the traumatic character of the inexperienced becomes the basis for every experience, an unconscious latency that sustains every historical tradition. Agamben, of course, cites Freud’s Moses and Monotheism as the source of such ruminations, though he intends to go beyond Freud and, again with Foucault, toward a regression of the subject prior to the divisions which seemingly enact its existence.183 “Archaeological regression,” as he terms it, is a process of “going back to the hither side of the dividing line between the conscious and the unconscious,” one that “also reaches the fault line where memory and forgetting, lived and non-lived experience both communicate with and separate from each other.”184 This is where Agamben will likewise draw a firm line between his utilization of the notion of regression and the Freudian one, at least insofar as the Freudian concept sought to restore a previous stage of our (individual or collective) existence, as when Freud himself attempted to locate an unconscious traumatic (latent) memory, such as the murder of Moses within the cultural memory of the Jewish people. What Agamben is trying to do, in effect, is to regress as a form of “decomposition,” “displacement,” or “bypassing” of any prior actual “state” of existence—the de-creation he has been after from the start. In this sense, the content of any presupposed state truly does not even matter; rather, he is after something else, that is, he is after the “modalities, circumstances, and moments in which the split, by means of repression, constituted it as origin.”185 There is an attempt being made here on Agamben’s part to place himself beyond Derrida’s critique of the archaeological method, though Agamben’s success in doing so

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has yet to be established. It remains, as Leland de la Durantaye has remarked, an “open” question within the relationship between these two thinkers.186 What is clear, at any rate, is that Agamben sees this point as the drawing of a line in the sand, a stark demarcation of his difference from Derrida as well as his chance to establish a position beyond subjectivity/representation as we have known it. Any historical act therefore which attempts to bar the regressive pursuit, such as “canonization” (named specifically as such), he notes, is to be thrust aside in order to regain access to this originary spot.187 Language itself would also seem to be a moment of canonization that needs to be overcome so that an idealizable prelinguistic state (our “infancy”) can appear as a necessary sought after achievement, a coming political task for future generations to establish in some sense, though what sense he exactly intends remains somewhat unclear.188 What is clear is that a certain “de-canonization” appears in his work as an essential step in archaeologically regressing to the unlived source of our presence. The target goal is yet a rare experience of the unlived moment, the “memory of forgetting” that is “the only path of access to the present.”189 It is not a repetition of a trauma or primal scene, but something more originary and ephemeral, an archē that is nonchronologically given; it is a bipolar field of historical tensions that crisscross from this archē to the present, framing subjects along the way which Agamben hopes eventually to bypass so that the true singularity of each creaturely being might better be respected.

Lingering questions Is the aporia of representation present to us now, after witnessing the stakes of this debate more clearly? Is the aporia one of presence? Is it our presence or that of the divine? Furthermore, what is the ontological status of an aporia at all? Or, again, if I might be so bold, is this presence of an aporia the real religious question which collapses both Agamben and Derrida into the same lasting struggle to articulate our essence or existence within language, our being-in-language? Are their divergent perspectives really so different if viewed from this angle, as both do seem to spring from a common (“Judaic”) source, a common canonical heritage that seemingly also divides them? Certainly, both authors seek to pinpoint a realm beyond the economic, beyond the historical oikonomia that governs all of our western, rational thoughts.190 They do so as the only possible grounds for justice to appear within the economic, as in Derrida’s

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case, or for another realm entirely to present itself beyond the political, as in Agamben’s. Will both of their efforts then be something of a presentation of the impossible beyond the economic that Derrida envisions as being beyond the scope of Freud?191 And does Agamben manage to evade this problematic by repeating Freud’s (and Foucault’s) gesture for an inaccessible origin, though with a slight twist at the end? That is to say, does Agamben manage to let the stones themselves speak? Or does he, in the end, let the aporia itself speak loudest, despite the fact that he himself seems determined to move beyond Derrida’s inscription within the aporetic?192 I doubt that any such tension between them becomes immediately resolvable. It seems in fact to be as complicated a relationship as the one existing for centuries between the many forms of both Judaism and Christianity, placing each author at a certain (though not always lengthy) distance from these religions entangled the most at the point of their historical impasse. This is also what makes the initial analysis of Taubes useful in clarifying the discussion between Derrida and Agamben. On the one hand, the Judaic, in its quest for justice, trusting that all kings will eventually see how limited their kingdoms are and will finally allow justice to reign through them, over them, in their every sovereign gesture. The Judaic, trusting in the law and its political representations always standing before it, and pushing for a messianic justice to come within these labored representations that are all we have, the only text with which we will have to struggle. And, on the other hand, the Christian, appearing as being beyond all kingdoms, allowing all representations to exist as they are because beyond them. Indeed, the Christian paradigm presenting a presence beyond all veils of sovereign power. Such was the insight that lingered in Taubes’ formulation of a dialectical Judaism and its antinomian counterparts. In addition to this contrast, we could also ask: can we believe that such a presentation beyond representation is possible? Could not Derrida believe this to be possible in some (entirely immanent) sense (such as the naked exposure of the human being to another exposed and vulnerable person)? His position and response to questions of religious revelation often seemed to indicate that he did not think it possible as an unmediated experience.193 The question, of course, is whether or not Agamben’s proposal itself is believable, whether or not one can access this originary site of our (prelinguistic) infancy beyond our entrenched notions of subjectivity, a task that seems to waken in his work as a pseudotheological project.194 Yet, we might still ask, is this step of avoiding the sovereign subject who decides that he/she is a subject always bound to a

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given representational logic possible? And perhaps this is the genuine question of religious desire, the question, then, of belief as much as of philosophical or political speculation.195 It would certainly, at the least, provide an explanation as to why so many antinomian traditions (e.g., nondoctrinal Christian movements, Judaic messianic figures, or various immanent theologies) continue to spring up and abound to this day. Illustrating the demonstrable tension between Derrida and Agamben is perhaps another way to re-introduce the problematic that once appeared when Derrida asked whether the trauma which set loose this economy of desire (for archivization) is located in the archeological gaze backward upon the singular event which caused it, or whether it is locatable in the internal bind brought about by the archival impasse itself. This latter option, the one that Derrida ultimately champions, is aligned, of course, with the great aporia of religious identification, the one that Derrida himself commented upon on numerous occasions.196 It is one at times reducible to asking which came first, the religious revelation or the structure of revealability itself, that is, the possibility of its manifestation.197 And despite the aporia which this question presents us with, there is still the nature of belief itself to contend with, the major problematic that arises when the implications of this question are thought through. The quest for an authentic religious revelation is a quest for the origin itself, for the (transcendent) presence that enters our world from the outside. It is that which commands our belief, a belief which the archaeologist seemingly renounces and yet declares at the same time. As Derrida himself put it in the context of diagnosing “archive fever.” Belief, the radical phenomenon of believing, the only relationship possible to the other as other [à l’autre en tant qu’autre], does not in the end have any possible place, any irreducible status in Freudian psychoanalysis. Which it nonetheless makes possible. From which we have the archaeological outbidding of a return to the reality, here to the originary effectivity of a base of immediate perception.198

This is the belief which psychoanalysis seems to make possible, the belief in a moment when the specters will talk directly to us, when a presence is revealed “as such” and without the mediation of the archive, yet a state which psychoanalysis seems to deny within the very same breath. It produces the zero degree of religious revelation, but at the cost of having to efface its relationship to it, something tremendously present, not only in Freud’s renunciation of his Judaism, but also in Agamben’s attempt to construct a wholly profane philosophy which in effect comes to mirror in many ways the originary Christian proclamation beyond

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its subsequent historical, canonical forms. But, as Derrida seems to suggest by holding fast to the schemata of necessary representations, this appears not to be a real belief, one situated in relation to an actual other before us, one who must remain wholly other, if Derrida is to be believed. And thus, the real question is exposed with regard to the tension between Derrida and Agamben—whom do we believe? Or, better, what do we even believe to be possible? There are two conclusions that I have been working toward throughout this chapter thus far, and which bear repeating. The first can be glimpsed through the dynamic tensions between the messianic and canonical forms, those polarized elements which western thought has operated under for centuries and which even a philosophy as radical as Derrida’s was seemingly not able to work beyond. In short, there is a lot to be learned from recognizing how there will always be messianic elements working from within a given canonical form that consistently yet undo its representational logic. In this sense, there is no genuine canonicity without its accompanying force of messianicity—a truth whose concealment or revelation can serve to indicate the levels of violence present in varying canonical forms. Despite this insight, however, everything is still bound at the level of the text (representation), offering little chance of proceeding beyond such an inscription. This model, it is important to stress, is never really surpassed as such—it is more or less only “fulfilled” by the second conclusion which Agamben also points toward. This is no doubt why Agamben’s work will seem so close to Derrida’s (and despite the obvious distance), as he does not negate the work of deconstruction, but rather only seeks to “fulfill” (i.e., embody, perhaps even “incarnate”) its most basic claims. He presents, in essence, a theology of creation as both creation and de-creation, as a “becoming-pure-potentiality” that goes beyond the realm of representations in order to grasp the “form-of-life” before us.199 If we can say that the Kingdom of God is to resemble such a community always yet “to come,” one without need of separation or representation, then perhaps we are better able to comprehend the theological framework upon which Agamben relies in constituting his political formulations. This completely reworked theological horizon demonstrates how the messianic works not simply from within given representations in order to de-stabilize them, but rather as that which deals with created matter itself, forming an eschatological horizon against which all particular identifications are rendered null and void. There is some truth to the claim that Agamben’s project is a certain form of political nihilism, the foreclosure of representations in a pure potentiality, the shape of

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the coming community and the political–philosophical task yet to come.200 But, perhaps it is also what Paul once sought after in rendering all distinctions likewise void (“neither male nor female,” etc, truly then engaged in the creation of a “whatever” being if ever there was one)—a fruitful theological principle of creation as de-creation, as the eventual grinding of representation to a halt, as the coming of another community that is a strange Kingdom, an example from which countless other “originals” can spring without an accompanying notion of sovereignty. Despite the ease with which we might be able to summarize the partial stakes of this debate, things are not always so clear or concisely expressed. Indeed, we must move closer to the heart of the matter, and explore a “radical” form of hermeneutics that may, in fact, be best able to address this irresolvable tension between Derrida and Agamben, something which I shall take up in Part Two of this study. What follows at the end of this chapter, however, allows us to take an extra step toward comprehending the ever-heightened stakes of an “immanent theology” as it potentially flows from Agamben’s counterclaims to sovereign power. By taking a moment to assess such an evolution in thought, I am aiming to further elucidate upon the (theological and philosophical) consequences that such immanent conjectures provide us with, as well as illustrate how Agamben’s challenge to Derrida’s defense of representational forms is not an isolated occurrence. If anything, it lies at the very center of discerning the very porous nature of both theological and philosophical inquiries as they have intersected and merged over the years.

Toward a prophetic “theology of creation” Though one of the major reasons for undertaking an examination of the debates surrounding Derrida and Agamben was simply to illustrate the close proximity of philosophy and theology in terms of the conceptual overlap between them, I would be amiss if I did not also draw out some of the major conclusions which this debate on the immanence versus transcendence brings to light. These are conclusions, moreover, that have significant and lasting consequences for the ways in which both philosophy and theology conduct themselves. As such, I would like to briefly underscore some of the implications that follow from Agamben’s “theological” reading of history, as well as the challenges of immanence that are brought to the tables of both theology and philosophy. By

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doing so, I hope to show how his work can begin to introduce us to another way in which to view a potential theology of creation “beyond” representation (though not entirely absent from it either), something which has not been explored as such in its theopolitical dimensions. Such an attempt, however, should not be read as a flat endorsement of Agamben’s philosophical project; rather, I wish to inspect some of the major implications of his thought before moving toward the formulation of a radical hermeneutics—and here going perhaps somewhat beyond Agamben’s claims—that yet takes seriously its antinomian (perhaps even “prophetic”) challenges. To begin, it might perhaps be easiest to assess the implications of Agamben’s thought by noting how his critique of Derrida shares in large measure with his critique of (Christian) theology: both, for him, are a sort of absolute prioritizing (“divinization” even) of the word, of the logos, or of language. In a recent genealogical exploration of the oath, Agamben refers to language itself as being considered a sacrament to those who wish to legitimate their historical being (context and language) in light of a supposed divine presence.201 It is not too much of a stretch, I would add, to see those figures that would defend the need for contextual, representational claims (i.e., Derrida) as likewise being faithful to the logos in some measure. Yet, if Agamben does not wish to be a member of such a divinization of the logos—what he has elsewhere called the “real revelation” of the power of the existence of language over us202—what is it that he wishes to direct us to as the focal point of our attention? The answer, I will wager, is that of creation itself, the created matter that lies before us (and which we, in fact, are), completely outside the bounds of language. By calling attention to a created matter beyond language, Agamben hopes to challenge the hold of representations upon us, and also perhaps to redeem creation itself. It is helpful to recall on this point that, for Agamben, creation can be understood through the inseparable bond between image and created (bodily) being, something which has been fractured since the inception of language. Restoring their inseparability, and hence trying to accede to a place of pure presentation of the “thing itself,” is in fact one of the defining tasks of the “coming community,” as he puts it. This is what he will also refer to as the “epochal process of the emancipation of the human body from its theological foundations.”203 We can, of course, read this comment as aligned with his calls for profanation and an atheological vision of humanity, though there are likewise valuable critiques of our cultural and economic measures embedded within such remarks.

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This can be discerned, for example, in the way he rereads the perhaps too hastily condemned aspects of reification, the subtle transformation of people’s images into objects in the hands of capitalistic profitability and manipulation. Rather than dismiss such processes tout court, Agamben finds in them a secret solidarity with his own aims, an appealing potential within them that most likely speaks to us in what we often see (i.e., the true appeal of advertising). As he describes it, The commodification of the human body, while subjecting it to the iron laws of massification and exchange value, seemed at the same time to redeem the body from the stigma of ineffability that had marked it for millennia. Breaking away from the double chains of biological destiny and individual biography, it took its leave of both the inarticulate cry of the tragic body and the dumb silence of the comic body, and thus appeared for the first time perfectly communicable, entirely illuminated.204

Beyond its inscription in a theological–cultural tradition, the body, freed from its subservience to such dictates, is now capable of becoming-otherwise, a realization of its true potential that yet refuses to become “actual” in any concrete sense. “Neither generic nor individual, neither an image of the divinity nor an animal form, the body now became something truly whatever.”205 We are, in Agamben’s eyes, to take a lesson from the reification of the human body under the domination of capitalism. The act of “becoming-object” is something as liberating as it is constraining, if seen from the right angle. It can certainly lead to the destruction of very real bodies reduced to an object-like status (and his reference to the horrors of the Nazi German camps makes this more than simply an example). Yet, he maintains, the linkage of image and body that advertising and pornography both seek to consolidate contains a kernel of truth that humanity would do well to notice. There is a way to read creation, it would seem, in such a way as to redeem even the objects that we ourselves have become, or rather, always were. Such a positive evaluation of our object-nature, for example, is what we have seen taking place in those immanent object-oriented philosophies seeking to defend rather than destroy our relationships to the objects around us. Interestingly, and in relation to what has just been said, the interrelated themes of creation and redemption have recently become a focus within Agamben’s reflections, offering us a chance to envision his claims in relation to Derrida from yet another angle. I am here arguing that Agamben is actually opening up a new path by which to understand creation “beyond representation” (in deconstructivist terms, to find something “outside the text”), another attempt

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to deal with the problematic transition from theoretical structures to our actual, concrete (political) realities—perhaps the stumbling block for many philosophical and political theorists, Derrida included. In this sense, there is the potential for a “theology of creation” (or philosophy of objects, “objectoriented” thought) to develop in the wake of these reflections which embrace the singularity of every created thing, the original “antinomian” force within each linguistically inscripted human being. For Agamben, there is yet a messianism that deals concretely with our created (material) realities, a force so strong as even to impact our evolution as a species.206 Here, as in his comments on structure/form being more important than content, there is a form of messianism, Agamben’s focus on salvation indicates, that takes precedence over any canonical form. This is the case because such a messianism is directly involved with the ongoing activities of creation themselves, not just the texts and histories that make up our representational and symbolic worlds. Agamben seeks as such to develop an ontology of forms in the space once reserved for the theological, beyond our given representational limits. Rather than espouse an analogy of being, Agamben tries to understand how we are capable of living beyond the prescribed limits of language. The utilization of the archaeological method, for Agamben, as for Benjamin, whom he cites, is an act intended to “go back” through creation in order to “give it back to the salvation from which it originates.”207 This gesture is made so that “. . . the two works are not simply separate but rather persist in a single place, where the work of salvation acts as a kind of a priori that is immanent in the work of creation and makes it possible.”208 Hence, we are only beyond (or before) creation when we are returned to the redemption which preceded it. But instead of this being a dramatic one-sided emphasis placed upon the messianic elements within a dichotomous representational logic, Agamben’s plea is rather that we find a way to return to creation, but only after first standing outside of it, in the place of redemption. Only then, he seems to be suggesting, would we be able to return to a creation beyond representation, much like Saint Paul once seemed to indicate, after we have first comprehended the ultimate failure underlying all constructed representations. It is in such a manner that we are to understand Agamben when he states (rather enigmatically) that “Only for those who will have known how to save it, will creation be possible.”209 Only for those who have stepped outside of creation, of history and its identifications, will a revisiting of creation be possible. And it is this externality to creation that immediately marks this viewpoint as “theological.”210 Only at this point, presumably, will an ethics beyond those

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governed by representations (such as Derrida’s) be possible as well. This is precisely the location to insert Agamben’s ethical formulations on encountering the “face” before us as a “whatever singularity” that presents (exposes, in its nudity, rather than re-presents) itself.211 In this sense—and as a major conclusion to his work which theology has still yet to embrace the consequences of— creation exists as a nonrepresentational space beyond the exclusions which ground sovereign power in our world. Hence, creation can be seen to exist as a movement beyond representation through the paradigmatic example212 which actually uplifts the singularity of every created thing. And it is in this profound recognition of the singularity of “whatever” thing that exposes its face to us that an equally profound “theology of creation” would be discernable beyond any canonical formation—though I would add, this does not necessarily indicate that we must do away with all canonical forms. It does, however, present us with a fitting challenge to our valued cultural–canonical and religious norms and traditions. What is placed before us is the possibility for a theology of creation that produces new forms of life beyond the violences of representational schemes. In this nearly paradoxical formulation, we perhaps sense the essence of what Agamben has been driving at: for those who know how, creation is a genuine possibility . . . but only after all forms of representation have first been destroyed. This would be nothing short of a radical re-envisioning of what theology could be in our world, how it might assist in revealing the very beings who stand before us all already, and not as “subjects” who stand marked by the sovereign representations to which we must conform. In many ways, and sharing with an entire host of existent theologies, Agamben is pointing us toward the prophetic side of western religious thought, the side that Judaism had once sought to suppress (in favor of its rabbinical traditions) and that Christianity had thought surpassed (taking on the “apostolic” mantle instead). Such a reading of things has recently appeared in his own writing.213 Sharing with perhaps a number of prophetic theologies that have arisen over the past half-century, Agamben’s willingness to embrace a form of radicality as diverse as creation itself over the inscripted canonical norms of a given western religion certainly puts him at odds with the given narration of tradition. Yet, it also serves as a pronounced reminder that any attempt to produce a theological hermeneutics, even a “radical” one, must pay attention to such calls, and be willing, if justice demands it, not to simply tame its prophetic vocation. If Agamben’s work is more prophetic than apostolic, we would do well to recall his

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own words that prophecy “. . . is not an institution whose functions and figures could be clearly delineated; rather, it is something like a force or a tension that is in constant struggle with other forces that seek to limit it in its modalities, primarily in its time.”214 Learning how to return to creation after first encountering redemption offers us a chance to work beyond the prescribed boundaries of representational claims, a prophetic task that is often at hand. It could likewise be said in such a context that, when “the coming community” Agamben speaks of actually arrives, there will be no need for the processes of canonicity to create the various subjectivities that dot the horizons of representations. Likewise, there will be no need for a messianic force which undoes each instance of identification. If this sounds more than a bit like a rich theological description of the “Kingdom of God,” then perhaps it is no coincidence. Yet, it could also be said that this is not exactly a complete sketch of the complex reality in which we dwell, especially theologically-speaking. Our immersion in language, which may or may not be our state of “original sin,” dictates otherwise. Meaning can only be culled from the linguistic background that surrounds us on every side. The question of how we are able to sustain such creative, antinomian and simply prophetic impulses within a framework of canonical and dialectical thought is the major task now before us, and one that I will attempt to address in the second part of this work where I attempt to re-read the relationship of the canonical and the messianic as one that demands the formulation of a radical hermeneutics to describe its rich and multilayered reality.

Revisiting immanence as a messianic disruption: The return to Judaic origins A natural outgrowth of a critical position on immanence (such as espoused by Taubes or Agamben), it could be said, turns us toward the “objects” just outside of our official histories, “objects” which cause us to refocus our gaze and to restructure our narratives accordingly. And though certain theorists might have dismantled our illusion of a “modern” viewpoint, they have not taken us beyond all forms of symbolic mediation, all languages and representations which would seem, for their part, to oscillate within this same sliding scale of their canonical and messianic elements. This is the very problematic that Agamben has focused upon, though come up short of demonstrating a viable alternative so to speak.

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Perhaps this is the case, if we stop to listen, because the problem is embedded deeper within us then the so-called modern narrative. Perhaps it lies even within our earliest religious discourses, as I have been suggesting throughout, that which lies at the origins of a certain strain of Judaic messianism. The tension between immanence and transcendence that has dictated much of our speculations on the nature of the divine could also perhaps be described as a constituent feature of the experience of language itself, of our being immersed in a linguistic–symbolic world that we ourselves are never completely “at home” in. It therefore bears the scars of political involvement as much as any human community can bear. As I have been trying to make explicit throughout this study, there will always be an oscillation in language between its canonical and messianic elements—a truth that Judaism firmly seized upon shortly after its conception (and which philosophers such as Derrida have detected). And this reality would seem to be what finally, at long last, merges these two nearly parallel worlds of religion and language. Both attempt to make us feel more comfortable in a world where we truly will never feel completely at ease. This would serve to explain as well why Agamben has recently chosen to make reference to language as being itself a kind of “sacrament.”215 By viewing the alignment of religion and language as such, we can see how the dualistic framework of transcendence and immanence posited in religious terms is the same dynamic at work in both our attempts to codify our symbolic universe, those processes of canonical attestation that grant us a shared measure of cultural intelligibility—in essence, that grant us language itself—and every messianic (antinomian) disruption of those very same canonical measures. If Jesus or “the Jew” is only a figura of thought, the outworking of all canonical measures, as philosophers such as Spinoza had seen it, then this figure is most certainly split from within by its messianic disruptions as well. As Sarah Hammerschlag has recently argued, perhaps the figura in question is a moment of ambivalence nested within the very nature of metaphor.216 This is an ambivalence, of course, that can become quite problematic when a metaphysical discourse such as scripture becomes a text utilized to make normative claims concerning social, cultural, political and religious identities. It is also an ambivalence that scripturally-based religions cannot do without, though the original religious impulses which gave rise to those same scriptures historically may have more in common with such sentiments than we often acknowledge. The former point would lie with the likes of Derrida, and the latter recognizably with Agamben, as we have seen. The conclusion, however, remains the same: we are

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in need of a radical (theological) hermeneutics that takes seriously any such (antinomian) calls for a theology of immanence while simultaneously reflecting the reality of our inscription in language, metaphor and contextual (historical) meaning. By evaluating the situation as such, perhaps we are in a better position to view those many attempts to posit transcendence historically as embedded within the difficult task of articulating how we are able to maneuver from metaphor to narrative, or, one might add, from the body to identity.217 As Paul Ricoeur, for one, reminds us, “Being-as means being and not being [Être-comme signifie être et ne pas être].”218 This is the nature of all metaphorical statements and that which constantly throws a wrench into our continuous attempts to base our political representations upon ontotheological (transcendent) claims—though it should be said that this view of representation does not ultimately do away with such ontotheological supports either. Seeing metaphor as always-already fractured from within is perhaps the only way, he warns us, to do justice to the relationship between metaphorical truth and ontology.219 Those previous discourses based upon the analogy of being have fought too hard for an autonomous sphere for speculative thought to take place within, one that ended up being completely severed from its poetic–metaphorical roots.220 And this is what has often moved more orthodox positions to the ivory tower of a certain scrupulous moralism. Ricoeur was not wrong, I would say, to link the inherent ambivalence of the metaphor to the rise of ontotheology (and its sovereign claims), for the contested domain of representations and their historical ties to the philosophical– theological legacy of transcendence runs straight through the rule of metaphor. It is a necessity that proceeds “. . . from the very structures of the mind, which it is the task of transcendental philosophy to articulate.”221 There is a “tensional truth” immanent to the rule of metaphor, a “dialectic that reigns between the experience of belonging as a whole and the power of distanciation that opens up the space of speculative thought.”222 The contrast between transcendence and immanence is little more than a replaying of this “tensional truth” that exists in the contrast of speculative thought and poetic expression. Beyond the contested games of power that masquerade as either transcendence or immanence, there perhaps lies another reality that we cannot do without. It would be as difficult to sever ourselves from it as it would be to dissociate ourselves from either language or religion, according to Ricoeur’s reading. Whether or not the divine dwells within this substratum of representation is another question, however, one that very much needs to be addressed once we have put all these power struggles

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behind us. The very fate of a modern theology certainly would seem to hang in the balance.

Conclusions formulated on the basis of Part One Throughout Part One, I tried to show how the recurring split between dialectic and antinomian forces, first isolated in a modern context through the work of Taubes and Scholem, has only gained in intensity over the past half-century, in both philosophical and theological terms. It is this fundamental division which has likewise been at the heart of recent philosophical returns to the writings of Saint Paul, giving such studies a particular historical backdrop against which to be viewed. My attempt to focus the debate between Derrida and Agamben upon just such a contrast was, therefore, an attempt to demonstrate how these same tension-filled dynamics lie at the heart of philosophical reasoning as well as the structures of religious experience. As such, Derrida’s work in isolating the structures of representational thought would seem to be right on target with this form of an originally “Judaic” understanding. And though it may sound like the furthest thing from Agamben’s profane philosophy, for his part, he seems to be seeking to repeat this performance of an internalized tension within Judaic thought by attempting to isolate revelation as a form of pure presentation itself, a presence beyond representation that he sees mirrored in both the Christian proclamation and the messianism of Sabbatai Zevi. As I have argued elsewhere, Agamben’s most significant (ontological) claims often come to mirror similar ones deeply embedded within the Christian tradition (even if that tradition often denies them the light of day).223 What the present study helps us to see is that if such claims hold any merit, then what Agamben seems to clamor for is a precanonical, prepolitical presentation of the Christian event—a sort of pre-Constantinian Church that first arose as a loose grouping of eschatologically-minded pacificists who wrote next to nothing down, were baptized exposed to the world in their nakedness and who struggled hardest to preserve the Christ-event that seemed to transcend all attempts to codify it in writing. His is a clamoring for something like the Kingdom of God at least insofar as his hopes exceed any scriptural– canonical form and, therefore, appear to us as a sort of utopian gesture. It should come as little surprise that Agamben’s work does in fact mirror many of Scholem’s characterizations of Sabbatianism, something which Agamben himself appears to recognize when he references Sabbatai Zevi from time to time or when he

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speaks of the transgression of a law as its real fulfillment, an act he reads as analogous to Jesus’ fulfillment of the law.224 Rather than affix an oversimplified “Judaic” label to Derrida’s insistence upon the realm of representations, as Agamben’s analysis might otherwise seem to indicate, Derrida seems, in reality, content to oscillate between these two poles, that is, to remain rooted in a representational framework while simultaneously acknowledging the limits or aporias of thought that alone present themselves as an aporia, and which may or may not be presentable “as such.” It is a (re) presencing that Derrida stubbornly (and perhaps correctly) clings to—the canonical form as it appears in our world seemingly as of necessity, or at least as the only way to sustain our cultural and religious identities. He is Judaic, then, or Christian, or Muslim, or all of the above, or none, insofar as these religious identities uphold an allegiance to the logic of the canonical form itself. If Judaism is the source of the canonical, then, yes, he is Judaic above all else; but this would, in the end, also be an incomplete label to affix to him. In many ways, it appears as an incomplete label to affix to anyone. There is a presence within any given canonical text, a messianic legacy, that Derrida recognizes, though reveres almost with a holy distance, we might say, not daring (perhaps wisely) to approach it as it cannot, perhaps should not, be approached. It must remain veiled within the holy of holies, within the texts that are built up around it. These are also, however, the texts, lest we forget, that Agamben would like to tear away so that the presence within might be beheld for what it is, as the curtain was said to be torn from top to bottom upon Jesus’ death, revealing what lay inside this very same holy of holies, the presence of what we have only thus far been able to conceive of as an aporia of our existence. Just such a desire, as we will now see, lies deep within the Christian message, but is not limited to this religious context alone. Of course, the major points of contrast within the first part were also on display: the canonical and the messianic. The aim was to demonstrate how, if messianicity is the structural element of canonical religion which typifies the aneconomic processes of thought, and as it is embodied in the various historical messianisms before us, then it would be canonicity that typifies the economic processes more accurately, and thus over and beyond the processes of archivization Derrida had already dealt with.225 This is so because canonicity more directly engages with the risk of responsibility, with the selection and exclusion of certain cultural and religious texts alongside the preservation of others. Canonicity becomes, in this light, a working-with the chaos that is

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already given, that is already archived, to bring order and definition through the imposition of a cultural language (or even language itself). Canons are what guarantee the general recognizability of cultural and social norms. This is a performative “calling to be” that mimics the act of divine creation in its effort to canonize and to establish a history that gives meaning to the temporal situation in which we find ourselves, and yet is at a remove from any genuine created reality insofar as it deals only with representations and not ontological realities (its inherent “political” problem so to speak). This is also, however, what enables us to contemplate a form of hermeneutics that is not tied down to a particular ontological (or “ontotheological”) form, hence, in the end, giving this project its radical descriptor. That is, canons produce a symbolic reality that culturally mirrors the physical and literal marks of creation without actually claiming to deal with (or transform) created matter. It is no coincidence then that Derrida would claim that any real “origins” are transcendentally and theologically posited, and thus beyond philosophical reflection. Their structures, however, are laid bare to us as they remain immanent to our experiences and understanding. This distinction would also appear to place a firm wedge between dealing with canonicity as an act of dealing with representations and any attempt to go beyond canonical forms as an attempt to engage those ongoing acts of a “continuous creation” (as Ricoeur has hinted toward, and which Agamben takes very seriously). By seeing this difference, as I have tried to illuminate throughout this study, we might be able to more directly address the question(s) of how theology today discerns a continuous act of creation apart from a symbolic generator of meaning (canonical forms) and this despite the fact that, for many, a canon yet functions as significantly in our world as the physical generation of created matter. Indeed, canonical forms are often mistaken as presenting a cultural construct as being “naturally” the way things are (i.e., gendered and sexual norms, racial and ethnic “characteristics,” etc). Untangling such distinctions certainly reopens nature versus culture debates, but it also gives theology a chance to better discern its role and background in such contestations. Canons, as foundational elements for western religious traditions specifically, are indeed a “creative” platform from which doctrines and spiritual traditions spring, an ever-renewing (and renewable) wellspring for theological practice, though not necessarily dealing with (or dictating) a “theology of creation” in a literal, material sense (other than that they do point to a narrative account of our “origins”). In representational terms, however, and here is where a genuine

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insight on the relationship between canons and creation perhaps lies, canonicity can be seen to struggle with an excess of responsibility for created matter, an excess that is the origin of responsibility itself. This is a fact which illustrates as well why canonicity must not cease past the formation of any one particular canon (or canon within a canon) as it reflects the reality of our being wedded to creation, to the matter that we are often at a loss as to how to deal with it. That is, matter (our actual existing bodies and lives, and what constitutes our material reality) will yet continue to seek its own justice (even without an immediately obvious or recognizable voice). And perhaps this gives us some clue as to why ethical discussions of late have become so preoccupied with the defense of those without voices, a category which includes everything from children and those without political representation (or homeland), to animals and the environment. This is the continuing state of things, and will be for some time, I would suggest, insofar as justice will never have been totalized through the imposition of any one particular canonical or representational form.226 There will always be a more or less voiceless member of our global symbiotic world in need of being heard more clearly. One of the implicit conclusions of the first part of this study is that there is certainly a structural overlap between canonical and created forms. This relationship, however, is complicated by Derrida’s reference to the tension between economic and aneconomic processes within a “general structure of experience” that extends its reach to our understanding of creation as well. This insight, of course, must lead to greater theological reflection on the processes that lead to the creation of, and which sustain the importance of, a canon of scripture. Such processes of canonicity must also be engaged in a productive tension with created matter itself—with the re-presentation of creation itself. A more thorough comprehension of these dynamics might also help to prevent the temptation often lingering within Christian theology to foreclose the messianic elements ceaselessly at work within a canonical form upon the historical reality of the Incarnation, which may be, in fact, both textually and actually-created, though the one certainly informs the other and vice versa. This desire for a concrete historical mediation (a “created” form) between canonical structures and their messianic undoing, in turn, tends to seek an always approximate historical embodiment of the messianic impulse (messianicity), for example, as its resemblance (i.e., the image of the priest, etc.). Textually, this is a temptation that must be, Derrida cautions us, resisted at all costs. Messianicity must yet be given the chance to work its task of justice through whatever canonical form

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continues to aspire to be more just throughout history. That is to say, for Derrida, this is precisely the juncture where the messianic must be kept open, kept perpetually fluid, as it were, not to dissociate it from an historical incarnation (e.g., the historical Christ), but so that its “blood” we might say, can continue to flow. This is said, not in order to negate an historical–incarnational reality (which remains an open possibility, and certainly is a reality within a Christian context), but rather in order to continuously sustain a horizon for the coming of a more just world (perhaps even as the “Kingdom of God”).

Recognizing the challenges of a “political theology of immanence” A related problematic arises with regard to creation itself being redeemed by a messianic figure, something mirrored by the canon’s relation to a ongoing (textual) messianicity. Separating the dynamics of a textual nature from the (literally biological) realities of created matter—representation versus presentation, yet again, on another level—is another terribly complicated issue encountered herein. But, in fact, such an extension is what I am here proposing that Agamben has done insofar as he has sought to “out deconstruct” the master deconstructionist, taking Derrida’s methods and applying them not only to texts, but also to created matter itself, the step that Derrida was himself unwilling to make. Agamben’s prophetic pronouncement has been to declare a messianic force that works—beyond any textual messianicity—on created matter itself. This is the radical challenge he presents most clearly to our traditional theological representational claims. In many ways, what we are encountering here is a replaying of what Eric Santner has referred to as the “pantheism debate,” something that he suggests returns “at the end of each century under a different guise.”227 For Santner, this debate rages between two factions, what he calls “biopolitical pantheists” (Deleuze foremost among them), on the one hand, and forms of “creaturely messianism” (including Benjamin and Rosenzweig), on the other. If Santner is indeed correct in identifying these contrasts as such, then Agamben’s work would certainly seem to be an attempt to unite these diverse strands. Such a reading of the messianic as Agamben attempts to formulate, and as we saw earlier 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 (a point that takes us back to Taubes’ initial reading of Jewish antinomian impulses). In good parallel form, and as with any “object-oriented” approach, things themselves interrupt

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the constructions of our selves within history—the stones themselves cry out to be heard (Luke 19:40). As such, the force of the “natural”—beyond our ideological constructs of it—is asserted over and against our various conceptualizations of our world. This would be the entrance of the ontological into our material world (hence, “pantheistic” in a sense), the real mystery that humanity has tried to codify through its canonical impositions, but which remains forever disruptive to such attempts (hence its messianic nature), according to Agamben’s claims. The notion of a God interrupting history merges with these varied accounts of an ontological vehemence intruding upon our canonical constructions insofar as this God is indeed outside of the created realities we have before us, beyond our representations, and deconstructing them (pace Derrida), but also, at times, perhaps even de-creating the very beings we are (pace Agamben). This critique of history and of canonical forms we have been following throughout 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, though it perhaps ultimately says little (if anything) about the nature of the divine itself. That is, it is a form of immanence that does not exclude the possibility of transcendence altogether. It, in fact, might even serve ultimately to protect and preserve a space made available for the entrance of an indefinable and indescribable transcendence. The accompanying criticisms of traditional forms of transcendence (such as Agamben, among many feminist theologians, for example) are therefore a welcomed corrective to a sovereign (“transcendent” and hierarchical) discourse, though they perhaps do not yet do away with such discourses completely, as I will demonstrate in Part Two. We are, in fact, often simply confronted in the end with only the mystery of such tensions before us—one that ever widens rather than restricts its scope. There is underneath this turn to 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, though not necessarily as a completely immanent (pantheistic) deity, and which Agamben, among others, has hinted at. Rather, this is to envision a political theology of immanence as an investigation of the theological from within, the minimum gesture of selfreflexivity of which theology has often suffered a lack, and a thought that returns us to those imperative calls for a self-reflexive theology expressed today. It is not necessarily, it should be said, speculation on the ontological nature of the

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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 altogether. To acknowledge this fact 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. 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 which lies at the heart of all revealed truths. As such, my hope is 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 that 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 reformulated in light of the present challenges). To ensure such a dual function, something no doubt perceived by many as an impossible task, I will turn in the second part of this study to the possibility of a radical theological hermeneutics that might give answer to such problematics.

Part Two

The Radical Hermeneutics of Theology

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3

The Violence of the Canon: A Contemporary Context for the Canonical Form

As the previous chapters have demonstrated, the dynamic tensions here under scrutiny, if seen in the fullest spectrum of color, are those that point directly toward the core issues of religious identity amidst centuries of theological speculation. From their earliest usages in scriptural formations, the concepts of a canon and of a Messiah have continued to play an elucidating role in terms of how we continue to understand those given representations of a particular religious tradition in the western world. At the same time, however, such accounts have steered the debate into the terrain of a philosophical debate that has detached itself from the concrete, historical particulars of religious canons and those communities that adhere to their normative claims. Such a purely philosophical interest, though of supreme concern in terms of the conceptual clarifications that take place on that level, is yet limited in its ability to provide answers to the conceptual aporias that arise between such contrasting terms. As such, the irresolvable antinomies of thought continue to dominate the discussion in many ways. The purpose of this second part of the study is, therefore, to attempt to bring a new perspective to light on how we might better comprehend the historical situatedness of the tensions between canonical forms and messianic forces, seeing their concrete developments alongside each other as well as their role within the historical languages they embody as they develop throughout time. My intention is to sketch a re-reading of these contrasting forces, in many ways similar to what has already been said, yet deviating from previous accounts in that this particular reading attempts to focus on the manner in which a hermeneutics could be said to develop in between these polarized tensions, one that we necessarily cannot ignore. I am, here, beginning a sketch of a radical theological hermeneutics that takes seriously the challenges to our traditional religious notions of transcendence, sovereign power, and canonical forms, while

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simultaneously developing a practical methodology for portraying the failures of representation as our only (and even perhaps best) means by which to ensure that our relationships with one another (as well as the divine) continue. Accordingly, this chapter will delve further into a specific portrayal of canonical forces as bearers of cultural memory, before turning explicitly to the controversial figure who perhaps symbolically lies at the heart of this study—Walter Benjamin. That is, it is the contestations over his legacy that very much determine the course of where our answers will lie. It is also his initial formulation of the “weak messianic forces” of history that were forged in the midst of a personal and cultural crisis that in the end claimed his own life. It is by looking to such a struggle, both personal and theoretical—and certainly of great contextual interest—that we can begin to glimpse a possible solution to the apparently “irresolvable” tensions that come out of the first part of this work. Specifically, I seek to highlight some of the essential dynamics of the canonical form and its messianic counterpart as described through the work of often unrelated authors. As such, I intend to develop the implications of the German Egyptologist and cultural theorist Jan Assmann’s thoughts in juxtaposition with Benjamin, and as regards the back-and-forth movement from canons to messianic forces. I aim to trace the evolution in Assmann’s contemporary work from those issues surrounding the processes of canonization to his more recent development of a form of “weak thought” in relation to religious violence, shortly before turning to Benjamin’s portrayal of a “weak messianic force” moving through history, which is only conceivable in close proximity to a scriptural legacy and a divine (or “pure”) violence, as he saw it. In doing so, I draw a line connecting the work of each to the other in order to solidify the structure and function of the monotheistic canon as being not only at the heart of western civilization, but also at the heart of all cultural transmissions today. That is, the formal elements at work in the canonical–messianic relationship as espoused by these prominent cultural commentators can be determined as applicable to identity formations made within most late modern subjectivities, whether political, cultural or religious—at least insofar as the western realm of representations appears to be governed by a canonical sense of normativity. A closer inspection of how these elements were brought together in their original religious context might therefore better enable us to discern the effects which canons have upon the construction of identities in a globalized world as well as to take our study further into the heart of contemporary philosophical and theological thought today.

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By interpreting Benjamin’s at-times-fragmentary corpus as such, I am also aiming to somewhat problematize Agamben’s interpretation of Benjamin as a strictly antinomian thinker in the same mold as (his version of) Saint Paul. Reading Benjamin’s incomplete work as a result of his hyperbolic use of language—enacted as a response to the growing threats of a fascist regime bent on eradicating him (as a German Jew) from this world—I will develop a more hermeneutical perspective on Benjamin’s thought, composed from the suggestive fragments of his last great project. This focus on the use of an excessive, hyperbolic language as a particular tactical response to an extreme historical situation (i.e., Nazism) is what, in turn, will allow me to formulate the beginnings of a radical hermeneutics that steers itself not toward either side of the representational/presentational divide, but rather enters into the failures of representations themselves in order to find there a certain “presentation” of sorts. Such a reading, though jumping a bit ahead of myself here, is what I will then try to “radicalize”—as well as test—in the subsequent, and last chapter, focused on the work of Paul Ricoeur. It is through such a radicalization of hermeneutics, I contend, that we are able to glimpse a way out of the theoretical impasse we have been left with as we depart the debate waged by both Derrida and Agamben.

Jan Assmann on the historical emergence of the canon Toward the end of Taubes that The Political Theology of Paul, we find him merely reading and glossing large sections of a particular Freudian work, one often dismissed as among the least plausible of Freud’s writings. The work appears in this context, however, as being yet so revolutionary to Taubes that he has little time to provide commentary: the radical insights of the text must be allowed to speak for themselves. So important are these ideas taken from Freud that the entire universalization of the Jewish message, now forever bound up with its Pauline furtherance, according to Taubes, can only now be re-thought and re-interpreted: “What is here developed as a conceptual network [begriffliches Netz] in the way of historical truth, of tradition and memory, of distortion [Verstellung]—against this, all the so-called exegeses that come from here are simply trivial.”1 Despite Taubes’ enthusiasm, the initial consensus reaction to Sigmund Freud’s late work Moses and Monotheism was that it was a speculative exposition of an almost absurd claim—that Moses was, in fact, an Egyptian and that it was a

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repressed version of Egyptian monotheism that he revived and propagated as what was to become the Judaic faith.2 This initial reaction, however, subsided with time and gave way to a growing interest in his work by philosophers, critical theorists, and psychoanalytic schools of thought, which not only embraced his work on Moses, but saw it as a exemplary forerunner to the field of cultural studies.3 One of the most significant, and recent, contributions to this large body of work has come from the Egyptologist Jan Assmann, whose work on Freud, Moses, and any alleged Egyptian ties, has actually led him to (re)consider the role which the canonical form plays in formulating a cultural–religious worldview, that is, its role in terms of historical representation and repressed desire (its latency). This has led Assmann, for his part, to construct a more developed, more encompassing speculative system of his own, which expands beyond Freud’s project in order to depict the role of canons in introducing a particular cultural and ideological violence of division within cultures. In Assmann’s redefining of the Freudian project, there is an obvious direct debt paid to Freud’s work on Moses, though there is also a substantial nuance taken toward it. According to Assmann, the revealing of the centrality of the canonical form has been a project of the “unthought” that need not arise from beneath the surface of the text, as Freud himself sought to indicate through his depiction of the “unconscious” of a text. This is the case for Assmann because texts dealing with historical representation, exemplified but not limited to the canonical form, actually reveal their truth on the surface. As he elaborates: What Freud unearths [zutage fördert] and dramatizes as a revelation [Enthüllung] is not the historical truth, but merely some theoretical constructs that turn out to be superfluous. The truth can be found in the texts themselves. They speak of memory [Gedächtnis], remembrance [Erinnern], forgetting [Vergessen], and the repressed [Verdrängen], of trauma and guilt. In order to uncover this network [Semantik] of meanings we have no need to practice the hermeneutics of distrust; nor need we read these texts against the grain. We need only listen to them attentively [aufmerksam zuhören].4

He undertakes, in contrast to Freud, what he terms as a “mnemohistory,” a study of the past not as it historically happened but as it is remembered by the texts themselves. The task of such a study is to listen to the text in such a way as to unveil any ideological script that unfolds in the narrative, not to dig beneath it for one that must be presumed as repressed. This is actually a process, he states, which intends on getting behind the “mythical elements” embedded within traditions

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themselves. Any history passed through a tradition is already a myth, while still maintaining a sense of historicity, once it is “remembered, narrated, and used.”5 And, in return, this mythic discourse, once materialized as tradition, reproduces itself through its subjects.6 As we will later see, Assmann will read Freud in this manner in order to somewhat dislodge what he sees as the ideological script of monotheism presented in its canonical Judaic form—though in the end, he might not be able to do away with it altogether. To begin, it is the book of Deuteronomy, Assmann contends, which contains theories of individual, collective, and cultural memory, and which confronts the Jewish people with the presence of a “counterfactual memory” (kontrapräsentischen Erinnerung) issued in the imperative toward them—to remember a “framework” (Rahmen) outside their present reality (e.g., recalling the nomadic life in the midst of the promised land or hunger in the midst of abundance, etc). This is a task given to the people of Israel to keep “present to the mind a yesterday that conflicts with every tomorrow.”7 The presence of “counterfactual” memory arises not only from the consolidation of 40  years of cultural memory as a mnemonic technique, but also as closely bound to a monotheistic conception of revelation since both manifest characteristics of an “extraterritorial nature.” Placing the divine giving of the Law in the wilderness becomes symbolic of a nomadic wandering, an “extraterritorial” mandate which situates the Law as separate from any locality: “This means that the laws that they are to remember and abide by are not the laws of the land [die Gesetze des Landes], but the extraterritorial laws [extraterritorialen Gesetze] from Mount Sinai.”8 This (re)defining of revelation and its relation to the canonical form is a movement intended to expand upon Freud’s project of perceiving writing as a nomadic exercise always displacing itself in order to reveal the “fuller” consequences of producing a written, sacred canon.9 In general, this reading of Freud allows Assmann to complete a (re)formu­ lation of the definition of the canon, along with the desire for canonicity, as a “counter-religion” insofar as it bears what continuously becomes a displaced revelation.10 “Counter-religions,” according to Assmann, and as the name implies, seek to counter already existing religious trends by positing a “counterhistory” of their own, one always set in motion by, and thereby inherently connected to, an established canonical text. These “counterhistories” aim to distort the self-image, identity, and memory of their adversary, offering their own “‘official” version of these constituent features through the instantiation of the canonical form.11 For Assmann, history in any form, including the canonical, becomes mythical,

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again, once it is “remembered, narrated, and used,” hence providing for itself its base ideological usage, though not actually serving to negate the historicity of its account.12 Even an “imagined community” based upon a canonical foundation, to appropriate Benedict Anderson’s highly celebrated phrase, can accurately represent history though it functions politically in a polarized, and an even further polarizing ideological manner.13 Assmann, through recognizing the pivotal role that an Egyptian monotheism played in forming the Israelite religion, establishes a structural parallel between revelation, on the one hand, or that which is itself bound by the processes of the canonical (e.g., characterized by remembering, progression, and a monotheistic or ‘Mosaic distinction’ between true and false) and translation, on the other hand, or that which remained more ancient and bound to an oral culture (e.g., characterized by forgetting, regression, and a polytheistic worldview).14 As this tension outlines, he links revelation and canonization as fundamentally intertwined projects since religions based on a written revelation, and not simply the monotheistic ones, according to Assmann, . . . are all founded on a corpus of canonical writings [ein Korpus kanonisierter Schriften] and thus on a highly authoritative codification of memory [eine hochverbindliche Kodifikation von Erinnerung]. To belong to such a religion calls for this codified memory [kodifizierten Gedächtnisses] to be accepted and taken to heart [Verinnerlichung und Beherzigung]. Evidently, the importance of the codification and canonization of memory is linked to the structure of the revelation [der Struktur der Offenbarung]. All revealed knowledge [offenbarte Wissen] is by definition knowledge of something outside the world [außerweltlich].15

Faith, in this manner, becomes equated with memory, and, thanks to Freud, an “inner spiritual guide” to be viewed as a progression over the antiquated desire for natural evidence once so heartily sought to justify religious belief. For Assmann, however, the decisive point remains the internal split in the subject brought about by monotheism’s claims to divide reality into true and false—a split which renders the human heart itself subject to the dual traumas of desiring to be at home in the world (its pagan element), but also being told to reject, and forget, the false idols of paganism (its monotheistic side).16 There is, here, a division of the world brought about by the canonical form itself. We are left, therefore, at the end of the discussion of Freud’s role within cultural analysis, with a de-centering of the trauma of monotheism, locating it not in the “Oedipal deep structure of the human psyche [Tiefenstruktur der menschlichen Seele], but in the Mosaic

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distinction [Mosaischen Unterscheidung] between true and false,” which the canonical introduces into culture and which could only be perpetually enacted because it becomes grounded as revelation.17 The binary divisions introduced by the “Mosaic distinction,” in Assmann’s view, begin to perform what will become a “monotheizing” tendency of the canonical. In doing so, the canonical work introduces a fundamental division into culture, one which in effect could be said to generate a system of cultural significations and, consequently, create the apparent “non-canonical” or marginalized elements upon its fringes. Though all of this attests quite highly to the canonical form’s ability to generate cultural norms, it is by focusing on the “return of the repressed,” or a resurgence of the marginalized within (at times even seemingly against) canonically instituted divisions, that we first begin to discern the cultural role of canonicity on a whole new level. Quite generally, the canonical form, as it were, is often said to “forget” the heretical and/or apocryphal (messianic) text/s, only to face their reemergence later, often during periods of religious renewal, an acknowledgment which becomes perhaps Assmann’s strongest claim concerning polytheism’s relation to monotheism.18 Functioning as signifier for an entire cultural–symbolic system, the canonical form produces an atmosphere that, for Assmann, could be said to do violence (in a sense, yet to be fully determined) to the marginalized elements otherwise excluded from representation. It is precisely this line of argumentation that has been at the heart of several criticisms concerning Assmann’s work as a whole, and which he addresses in his more recent works Of God and Gods and The Price of Monotheism.19 Noteworthy in this regard is the criticism offered by then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) on Assmann’s alleged linkage between monotheism and violence, something which moved Ratzinger to remind those in the Catholic tradition of Christ’s proclamation of peace, as well as to point out how other, noncanonical religions have brought various violences into the world too.20 Responding to critics, such as Smith and Ratzinger, who have seen his work as advocating a (sort of) return to polytheism through the erasure of the true/false dichotomy, Assmann nuances his position somewhat by referring here to the “latent monotheism within polytheism” as well as by offering a further distinction (beyond the simplified “Mosaic” one he offered earlier) between an intrasystemic violence (one yet translatable between cultures, and perhaps best exemplified by acts such as child sacrifice and its opposition) and extrasystemic violence (one that is nontranslatable, hence conversionary only, and with numerous historical violent examples easily at hand). Within this grid of violences, Assmann is able

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to critique monotheism’s basic contention that it is opposed to intrasystemic violence, while yet simultaneously giving rise to extrasystemic violence through its acts of (often forced) conversion or destruction.21 This reading, of course, still runs in stark contrast with Ratzinger’s attempt to diminish both the intra and extrasystemic violence said to stem from Christianity’s core. By later giving nuance to his position in response to his critics, Assmann has actually, in part, come to defend a monotheistic worldview by illustrating its indebtedness to a particular conceptualization of justice. In essence, the contrast for Assmann becomes one between an implicit theology (the cosmogony of a polytheistic worldview) and an explicit theology (the created order of the monotheistic one).22 Monotheism, from this perspective, becomes the inventor of “religion” as a concept, as well as an embodied political practice, bringing a developed concept of justice from outside the traditional realm of (mythical–violent) religion and into its inner self-definition. In this fashion, the monotheistic worldview is not only able to stand up as a critic of existing political structures, but is also capable of narrating a history based upon a divine notion of justice.23 In his view, Judaism was able to prevent itself from becoming indebted to a system of violence by refusing to universalize its historical claims, leaving them open to the processes of an eschatology never foreclosed within history, and thereby also maintaining justice as an always open horizon against which all (“righteous”) religious acts are formed.24 By this route of recirculation around his most analyzed concepts, Assmann comes very close to espousing a similar claim made in the last century by Walter Benjamin concerning the relation of the messianic to a divine, and bloodless, violence (a connection which I will take up in the second half of this chapter). By such means, Assmann is also able to denounce any religion associated with manifest violent forms and to declare that the “power of religion rests on nonviolence.”25 This “weak form of truth” espoused here is a non(or less)-violent appeal to be sure, one coupled with its basic position as being a counter-force to political power, something which can be found at the origins of all monotheistic, canonical claims, according to Assmann—though, as is true, the history of their reception has often proved anything but nonviolent. It is striking, however, that Assmann’s clarifications have themselves gravitated toward a reading of the non-violence at the center of the biblical canonical framework, something which now brings him into sharp relief against the backdrop of opinions already formed concerning his work.

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A “weak notion of truth” In general, scholars receiving these initial claims on the nature of canons formulated in Assmann’s work, both from a religious perspective and from without, have not found too much cause for criticism. It is rather when Assmann begins to draw conclusions on the relationship between these claims and violence (either as being inherent to it, which he at times seems to indicate, or that it is a perversion of the original intent, as he later tries to clarify) that he begins to run into firm critiques as such. In short, Assmann attempts to incorporate the “messianic” into his account of the canonical form as his work increasingly came under fire for its seemingly inherent linkage of monotheism and violence. Assmann’s introduction of the “Mosaic distinction,” as the polarized division of the world into two camps, the righteous and the wicked, the faithful and the idolaters, and hence as the defining characteristic of canonical thought, brought him before a torrent of both critical reception and harsh dismissal. His subsequent writings have sought to provide a clarification much needed in response to both his critics and allies alike, for his position had often been misread as advocating a return to some form of a primordial polytheistic worldview.26 To counter this caricature, he carefully elaborates his position by stating that he is . . . not suggesting that one return to “Egypt,” to the polytheistic system of mutual translatability and recognition, but rather that one step forward toward a religion that clings to the idea of the unity of God and commits itself to the moral commandments, while at the same time returning to a weak notion of truth in the sense expressed by Lessing and Mendelssohn: a truth that exists beyond the absolute knowledge of human beings, one that can only be aimed at but never possessed.27

It is at this point, with reference to a “weak notion of truth,” one made often in relation to a nonsovereign theology, that Assmann comes extremely close to restating some of the central principles behind the work of Benjamin.28 This is not a coincidence, I am here asserting, but rather an indicator of the continuum that can be established between the forces of the canonical and those of the messianic, as I have already outlined. The omission of Benjamin’s name here, and of his claims on behalf of a “weak messianic power” that sought, in some sense at least, to overcome the violence of a universalized (“sovereign”) reading of history, is somewhat surprising, especially given the fact that only a few pages earlier Assmann had developed

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his views on religious violence solely in reference to Benjamin’s essay on the “Critique of Violence.”29 It was in this context that Assmann had sought to expand upon Benjamin’s polarized scheme of divine versus mythical violence in order to propose five different types of violence, culminating in a thoroughly re-worked definition of “religious violence” given in relation to monotheism and its canon, specifically.30 As one might expect, considering his work on the “Mosaic distinction,” Assmann inquires before answering: “What then is religious violence? By this term I mean a kind of violence that stems from the distinction between friend and foe in a religious sense. The religious meaning of this distinction rests on the distinction between true and false.” However, he is careful to nuance his position now in ways that he had previously failed to do, and thus, he states that there is yet an allegiance to religious truth that can yet be presented nonviolently. In this regard, Assmann admits at least this much: It has by now become imperative to dissociate religion from violence. Violence belongs to the sphere of the political, and a religion that uses violence fails to fulfill its proper mission in this world and remains entangled in the sphere of the political. The power of religion rests on nonviolence. Only through a complete rejection of violence is monotheism able to fulfill its liberating mission of forming an alternative counterpower to the totalizing claims of the political.31

Assmann is intending to sever the theological from the political, to divide the “theo-political,” and in a sense to refute Schmitt’s assertion that theological and the political are inextricably intertwined. Yet, how distinct a religious violence that divides the world into a friend/enemy dichotomy could be from the realm of the political remains relatively unclear in his work, as he does little more than state that they are not identical.32 Thus, at the end of these essays, he concludes with a “weak” conception of truth offered as a message of nonviolence that echoes many themes running throughout Benjamin’s own work (perhaps best captured in his bid for a “bloodless” violence).33 For Benjamin, indeed, this would be familiar terrain, especially as he concluded his oeuvre with his remarks “On the Concept of History” where a “weak messianic force” is said to work, and which I will take up in a moment.34 In the context of Assmann’s conjectures, however, I am prone to ask: Can violence be so easily removed from the sphere of divine dealings with humanity? Or, conversely, can it be (even if ideally) eradicated from what constitutes political interaction? As we have already seen, canonical forms seem to bear at least a minimal violent gesture of cultural signification within their very existence.

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Though the logic of his claims is often fuzzy and subject to alleged misreading and misunderstandings on these matters, the train of thought that led Assmann to move from the history and usage of the canonical form to the “weak forces” moving throughout history is, I would suggest, a parallel motion to what Benjamin would pursue throughout his lifetime (though in a different manner to be sure), beginning with a focus upon these same messianic forces and moving toward the canonical, sacred scriptures in some sense. As Brian Britt has pointed out, the sacred text was an implicit guiding thread throughout Benjamin’s entire career, despite his efforts at times to distance himself from its concrete traditions and religious practices.35 What Benjamin evidences, moreover, and as I am here claiming, not only confirms Assmann’s basic intuitions (despite their possible shortcomings), but actually advances the fundamental connection between them much further, providing a clear “line of sight” between the canonical and the messianic that does not sever the political from the religious, a connection in sharp contrast to what Assmann is intending to present. I will, therefore, attempt to elucidate this disjuncture more fully through a closer look at Benjamin’s reading of this “theo-political” relationship of the canonical and the messianic.

Messianic forces within canonical representations in Walter Benjamin An inadvertent consequence of forming a canon is that any given canonical representation will eventually come to be challenged as hegemonic, even if it is “sealed” (closed) as holy writ. For open (literary, political, social or cultural) canons, an alteration to the canonical code may indeed be an easier task to accomplish, hence the historical insignificance of its “messianic elements,” for once they have rendered justice, they are easily discarded in favor of new canonical formulations. For closed canons, however, change only comes through a re-reading (re-interpreting) of the material already present, illuminating once again the dynamic tensions which are to be found within any canonical formation, be it either open or closed. This is a fact that would serve to demonstrate why the messianic elements of a closed canon are, at times, thrust to the fore as well as how they endure historically: they must be constantly upon the horizon, or viewed as perceivable, if the closed canon is itself to be seen as worth continuing. As one biblical scholar has noted, “The canon, then, does not lend itself to a definitive solution of the problem of religious authority. The juxtaposition in it of law and

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prophecy suggests rather an unresolved tension, an unstable equilibrium.”36 This “unresolved tension” is what ultimately opens canons up to their own internal, de-stablizing elements, ones that potentially challenge any hegemonic claims made on behalf of a given canonical formation.37 The canonical form, by definition it would seem, is torn from within by its own messianic elements of disruption, those forces often labeled as “prophetic” that contest and challenge the ruling norms of a given canonical representation, albeit of historical, cultural, political, or religious identification. It might indeed be suggested that it was the (“weak”) force of the messianic which led in this direction, toward the historical (and I would simply qualify “historical” further with another descriptor, the “canonical”) image that so fascinated Walter Benjamin over the course of an alltoo-short and trying career. The inclusion of Benjamin on this point will also hopefully become illus­ trative of Assmann’s recent, close proximity to him, a closeness which the present study argues is not a coincidence, but rather a natural outcome of a conceptual interaction. In no uncertain terms, it unfolds as such: Assmann, in his early work on the canonical form, had neglected to account for this “messianic” aspect of a religious canon. Hence, as his later work will testify, he, on the one hand, starts from an analysis of the canonical form and slowly extends his study toward a logic of the messianic in order to clarify his claims, to clarify in fact what often appears as an aporia lodged at the heart of all historical (dialectical) representations—their violence and yet, their necessity. Benjamin, on the other hand, starts from the “weak force” of the messianic functioning in history only to later reach back toward canonical forms (though they are present in his earlier work on scripture and language as in his dialogue “The Rainbow,” as we will see shortly), though this was something in many ways he could only point toward, or indicate as the direction in which his work tended on the whole. It could perhaps also be said that it is no coincidence that Benjamin’s work was formed in the face of a dissolution of Jewish identity, formed, that is, at a time when the meaning given to history by a canonical form would acquire a great deal of significance and would encounter one of its greatest challenges as the threat of complete annihilation. It was the crisis of Jewish identity within the experience of the early twentieth century that would, in fact, drive Benjamin to consider a course of redemption in relation to history, and to reformulate some of the same insights which have driven Assmann’s work to date, as we will soon see. From this angle, we might be able to perceive how a strand of messianism develops out of the cry for justice to be done to a people on the edge of being

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wiped clean from all cultural–canonical memory, a bid to instate themselves at the origins, or absent center, of history.38 This is equally the direct route that Assmann will pursue when he states that “History, or God’s interaction with humanity (or with his chosen people), is based upon justice. The latter, in other words, appears to function as a generator of history.”39 This is the history, I would only add, that was set in motion and given meaning by a specific canonical intervention. A rift is thereby opened between polytheism and its “usurper” monotheism, offering two distinct versions of history with two clearly incompatible visions of humanity’s relation to the divine. For Assmann, a transformation is effected wherein “Historia divina, the stories told about the gods that reveal their personalities and vicissitudes, is turned into historia sacra, the story of the one God and his chosen people.”40 A “totally new conception of reality” was brought to life by the act of canonizing the sacred tradition of a people, and a “theologizing of history” was to begin which would reach “its apogee with Biblical . . . historiography.”41 This juxtaposition of two different versions of history, the Judaic and the polytheistic/pagan, would not be something far removed from Benjamin’s own conceptualization of history. Rather, he also came to see the distinction between a Judaic–biblical version of history and its pagan counterpart as the roots of his own formulations of a historical dialectical materialism. Indeed, as we will soon see, this tension provided the opening through which the messianic would enter into his deliberations on the dialectical image and the justice yet to be accorded the “losers” of history. It was, I would add, central to his own reformulation of historical representation on the whole. In this sense, and as I now intend to illustrate, Assmann’s work actually connects to Benjamin’s at this fundamental juncture, an overlap that will otherwise serve to bring about a profound interrelation of the canonical and the messianic that has yet to be fully realized in contemporary philosophical and theological discourses.

Benjamin and the sacred text Though Benjamin’s views on the “weak messianic forces” moving through history have received numerous comments and applications, his views on scripture have remained far more muted.42 Any connection between the two, however, as I here intend to posit, has remained almost entirely without mention. By setting the stage as such, I will accordingly move through a close reading of some of

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Benjamin’s fundamental texts concerning the role which the canonical form might have played in his work, rather than present a more general overview of his writings, as was more easily done in the work of Assmann, for example. This will be the case as well because the presentation of Benjamin I wish to let unfold is a more original interpretation of his work that will also, hopefully, serve as a unification of some of his most fragmentary writings. Regarding the messianic, and here functioning as a term utilized in order to get our bearings within his diverse corpus of writings, it has become almost commonplace to demonstrate how Benjamin’s use of the concept was not only something he had directly adapted from its Jewish heritage, but was also central to understanding the theological thematics of his work on the whole.43 Despite the frequent use of the concept in his work,44 it was not until near the very end of his life that the term acquired the connotations for which it has subsequently been known. In a difficult-to-date piece of writing appropriately labeled “TheologicalPolitical Fragment,” Benjamin gave some initial flesh to his conceptualization of the term through his pronouncement that “Only the Messiah himself completes [vollendet] all history, in the sense that he alone redeems [erlöst], completes [vollendet], creates [schafft] its relation to the messianic.”45 Conceived as a counter-force to the secular idea of happiness, Messiah charges all of history with the messianic impulses that run like an electric current throughout its length, giving it its consequent shape and understanding, and this despite its apparent externality to it. Indeed, it was initially Benjamin’s break with a Marxist teleological reading of history that gave rise to, and fostered his insistence upon a “weak messianic force” working through history in order to redeem those who had seemingly been forgotten by history, a counter-dialectic that sought the origins and not some progressive, utopian end goal.46 This was something no doubt on his mind as he raced, ultimately in vain, to escape some of the darkest forces known to history.47 In response to the German political theorist Carl Schmitt’s delineating of a “political theology” which would unveil the figure of the (political) sovereign as theologically legitimated in some sense, Benjamin sought to demonstrate how the sovereign’s power to declare a “state of exception” to normal rule was in fact countered by the subtle, even “weak” messianic forces that moved against such an inherently violent (unjustifiable) reign.48 In this manner, Benjamin sought to revolutionize historiographical methods (i.e., the feigned objectivity of historicism) in order to de-stabilize the exercise of sovereign power in the modern era, something which he is often credited for having paved the way toward.49

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No matter whether one reads this entrance of the messianic into the political realm as indebted to a strictly Jewish perspective (Scholem) or as opening to a Pauline–Christian one (Agamben), the religious roots of its general usage offer a suggestive reading of contemporary philosophy’s “return to religion” as perhaps truly being a “return to the messianic core of religious thought,” such as Taubes has already suggested.50 Indeed, such a core seems to be at the heart of those who are currently engaged in such a renewal of religious thought, or even theology. Writers as diversely identified with deconstructionism (H. de Vries) and the emergence of “weak thought” (J. Caputo, G. Vattimo) or with Hegelian–Lacanian leanings (S. Žižek, E. Santner) have all claimed a certain messianic horizon to be the backdrop against which their thought forms.51 In some sense, each author, most typically in defiance of the totalizing rubrics of sovereign power, as with Benjamin before them, issues a call to remember what has been repressed by the “victors of history” in order to serve the promotion of justice within the messianic horizons of history. The centrality of Benjamin’s “weak messianic force” to today’s thinkers seems primarily to stem from the juxtaposition of his views on formulating a potential for “pure” or “divine violence” taken in light of his conceptualizations of history and redemption. In contemplating movements beyond the violence of the state, Benjamin chose to highlight the role played by the victims of history, the marginalized elements within any given cultural, canonical memory. It was their ability to “strike” or suspend the governing norms, he would say in his “Critique of Violence,” that would give these masses a power over against the sovereign’s ability to declare his own exceptions.52 This was the closest Benjamin was to come in formulating what a truly “divine violence” might in fact be. In doing so, he staunchly opposed any totalizing presentation of history, offering up instead the “pure means” of history without any ideological ends, a breaking open of a mythical (cyclical) violence through a sense of responsibility to past generations of oppressed peoples. Thereby, a “messianic cessation” of historical representations ensues, providing an alternative history beyond the tragic– mythical orientations of society.53 In this movement away from the tragic–mythic narratives that have dominated societies for centuries, Benjamin utilized the Hebraic notion of the messianic as a disruptive force that introduces difference itself into our canonical representations of history. Just as the messiah was envisioned to be the redemptive figure of political liberation for the Jewish people (as the one who would ultimately come to overthrow the “false” sovereign powers that oppressed them), Benjamin found a way to generate an alternative meaning to historical

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events through a “messianic cessation” of the way in which they were violently narrated for ideological ends. This manipulation which tries to pass itself off as objective fact was a reality with which he was no doubt more than familiar, and which most likely caused him to emphasize the messianic forces at the near complete expense of sovereign (canonical) norms. It was for this reason that Benjamin maintained a paradoxical relationship with scripture, at times seeming to rely heavily upon its cultural influence and relevance (i.e., the “messianic”), and at others, muting its influence almost entirely due to its sovereign claims (i.e., its “canonical” form).54 Though I will not here rework the numerous readings which his notion of the messianic has received, I will briefly outline the manner in which it functions. In his series of theses “On the Concept of History,” Benjamin refers to a “secret agreement [eine geheime Verabredung] between past generations [Geschlechtern] and the present one,” an agreement wherein a “weak messianic power” [eine schwache messianische Kraft] holds a past claim on us, one that “cannot be settled [abzufertigen] cheaply.”55 Essentially, history contains a limitless series of images, of those marginalized (or “dangerous”) memories (Erinnerung gefährlich) that hold the power to overthrow our present perceptions of the past, that is, our traditions as we have constituted them.56 When these “dialectical images” are realized, the “objective” (canonical) version of historical events is overthrown, so to speak. This counter-force (as a “tradition of the oppressed”) indeed shatters the illusion of the homogenous time of history, positing instead a “messianic arrest of happening [einer messianischen Stillstellung des Geschehens],” what he otherwise calls “a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed [unterdrückte].”57 For the historian who can envision such a clash within historical normativity, there is only “a conception of the present as now-time [Jetztzeit] shot through with splinters of messianic time [Splitter der messianischen eingesprengt sind].”58 And if there was any doubt that Benjamin was, here, attempting to reformulate a predominantly Judaic term, he concludes his much celebrated theses with reference to the Jews who had first begun to see history “splintered” in just such a fashion, past, present, and even future— indeed, for the Jews, we are told, “. . . every second was the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter.”59 In this radical re-conceptualization lies a profound critique of any historicist “objective” approach to historical understanding, for there is no monolithic (“homogenous”) time to which one can make unobjectionable reference. As Benjamin was to formulate many times over in his Arcades Project

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(Passagen-Werk), the historicist project, as the viewpoint of the “victors” of history, was a bankrupt endeavor bound to be brought down (eventually and ultimately) by the “weak messianic forces” latent beneath any contemporary understanding of historical events. This reading of history would furthermore give rise to Benjamin’s critique of, and departure from, Marx, for any reading of history that would consistently side with the oppressed of history, and hence over and against the oppressed when they become those holding political power, is one that would bring all “dialectics to a standstill.”60 It is also an interpretation of history that will find many deep resonances with its Jewish readers, something captured directly by the role of the Judaic scriptures in determining Jewish self-understanding. For this reason, it becomes imperative to link Benjamin’s comments on the messianic, as the disruptive force to any “objective” historical record, to their Judaic origins in scripture, something which Benjamin himself contemplated from time to time, and which seems never to have vanished altogether from his horizons.61 Though Benjamin did acknowledge what is perceived as the inherent violence (Gewalt) of transforming the “natural” individual into the “cultural” one,62 the direct mention of a canon in Benjamin’s work is a rare occurrence, and therefore, all the more to be taken seriously when it does appear, as in his early dialogue, “The Rainbow” (“Der Regenbogen”).63 Though the mention of the canonical form there is hardly a fully developed concept, it is presented as that which proceeds “divinely” (göttlich hervorgeht) from the imagination (der Phantasie), but is itself caught up in the realm of form, and thus lacks the true beauty of something like the rainbow, which is presented to us without form, pure nature as it were.64 He hints at a pure perception possibly taking place beyond all (canonical) forms, though a roughly contemporaneous fragment alludes toward the possibility of even perception itself being part of a canonical viewpoint, that is, perception as itself being formed within something like the structures of language. As he puts it: The canon as form is to be defined conceptually [begrifflich]. But form is only one side of the canon; the other side is content, which is not to be grasped conceptually. The complete musical work is canon, in language and no longer audible; the topos of the canon is language. Completion of music ruptures [bricht] in the poetic, in the uncompleted.—The canon is in perception [Anschauung]65

It is extremely intriguing, from the standpoint of this study, that the very next fragment among Benjamin’s corpus would begin with the contemplation of the “actual messianic moment [die Aktuell messianischen Momente]” within the artwork that is said to act in some sense as its content in the midst of form’s

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delayed appearance.66 Conceiving of the messianic moment as such is to suggest that a pure content is presented (or present-able) in the time that remains between the form’s disintegration and its final appearance, when the thing itself (like the natural rainbow) can be glimpsed beyond its form. In the absence of form, the “actual messianic moment” appears as an instance of pure content, something which Benjamin tells us is completely “up to us,” perhaps because it is all and only us, and this is the case even though “form persists [Form verharrt]” in our world. As we will see later on, this reading of Benjamin’s early work alongside his fragmentary notes from the same time period will demonstrate a profound resonance with later interpretations of his work, most notably in the writings of Agamben, for whom the “time that remains” becomes the messianic moment par excellence—the only moment wherein we might glimpse something of the “whatever being” beyond all forms and representations. Here, Benjamin merely hints at such a construction, and does not develop its implications any further, such as what he might have done in juxtaposing these thoughts alongside his comments on scripture. Despite this apparent absence, however, I will seek to illustrate how the logic of these early sketches on the relationship between the canonical form and the messianic moment do not drop out from his work altogether. They, in fact, reappear shortly before his untimely death, in another fragment that sought to unite the entire corpus of his work upon these same thematic grounds.

Fragmentary glimpses of the canonical form For example, in a note written to himself on the back of a letter dated December 22, 1938, and as what was to be perhaps his last addition to the outline of his monumental Arcades Project (No. 25 in “Materials for the Exposé of 1935”), Benjamin sketched some notes concerning the “ephemeral nature” of the dialectical image, that revolutionary image of the oppressed which had been silenced from history. As a recurring central concept in his work, the dialectical image, or the always singular and yet entirely fluid result of bringing “dialectics to a standstill,” is here shown to be the object of history presented in contrast with the “fixity of the philological object.”67 Certainly not a “timeless truth,” as a universal approach to history might prefer, the dialectical image was a process of awakening to what lies already singularly pronounced within history, not that which is caught up in a progression toward an historically immanent end or goal.

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As he had already outlined among the cards preserved of the project, the image, in its legibility, in the “now-time” (Jetztzeit) of its recognizability, is present in a singular sense at a particular time only; but this time, as with the relevant image it accompanies, changes for each epoch.68 In this manner, it presents a unique portrait of what it means to do justice to history, from within history, and to seek the fulfillment of time as an infinite process that is ever-changing in each epoch, or for each age. Time, in essence, interrupts history and this becomes his vision of messianic time.69 It is also here that the theological motifs which saturate his work surface again most directly in accordance with his use of the “messianic” as a “weak force” working from within to fulfill or redeem a history yet only presentable in a (renewed, or “more just”) canonical form. Indeed, the weak messianic force is portrayed as a movement to make history theological in some sense, over and beyond its secular form as the “Theological–Political Fragment” had hinted at, to posit history as an act of remembrance and as opposed to science: What science has “determined” [festgestellt], remembrance [Eingedenken] can modify. Such mindfulness [Eingedenken] can make the incomplete (happiness) into something complete, and the complete (suffering) into something incomplete. That is theology; but in remembrance [Eingedenken] we have an experience [Erfahrung] that forbids us to conceive of history as fundamentally atheological [grundsätzlich atheologisch], little as it may be granted us to try to write it with immediately theological concepts [theologischen Begriffen].70

Theology, again, must be veiled, or hidden, as the dwarf inside the puppet (to borrow the image of the “magical” chess-playing automaton from Benjamin’s theses on the concept of history), yet its essential importance is not reduced in the least. Consequently, this is also why he is able to state that his thought is “saturated” with theology though his direct engagement with the discipline is often muted.71 This is, of course, how we are also led to read the relationship between the puppet and that dwarf inside it who controls it, that is, between historical materialism and its “master,” theology, in the first of his theses on the concept of history.72 As Benjamin’s thought progresses toward the projected end of The Arcades Project, we find on the back of the same letter that the very next sentence reads, “Where the text is itself the absolute historical object [Gegenstand]—as in theology—it holds fast to the moment of extreme ephemerality [äußersten Flüchtigkeit] in the character of a ‘revelation’ [Offenbarung].”73 This is revelation seen as, in some sense, defined by its precarious placement at the “moment

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of extreme ephemerality” or even “volatility” (Flüchtigkeit), and that presents itself only through the absolute historical object, here identified as the sacred text. In this sense, history itself could be said to spring from the sacred text as it were, or, as he succinctly renders it immediately afterward, “The idea of a history of humanity as idea of the sacred text. In fact, the history of humanity— as prophecy—has, at all times, been read out [herausgelesen] of the sacred text.”74 Just as Assmann was wont to link revelation and the sacred canon to the rise of cultural identity and history, so too does Benjamin seem to signal something in this direction, though the intimations of this relationship are at this point vague and needing to be connected with the larger scope of his work on the whole. Here, though in rough fragmentary form, he contemplates what the next successive move might look like, what questions it would need to address in the context of his Arcades Project. As he rather enigmatically pens it in direct sequence with the citations mentioned above: “The new and ever identical [Immergleiche] as the categories of historical semblance [historischen Scheins].—How stands the matter with regard to eternity [Ewigkeit]?” And again, the semblance of history, a universalized history which Benjamin opposed throughout his work to the messianic dialectical image, is brought into close relief against the backdrop of the sacred, or the eternal, and left there as if this juxtaposition alone were enough to properly guide our thoughts. What seems to be clear, at least to Benjamin, however, as he ends this fragmentary note, is that the “dissolution [Auflösung] of historical semblance must follow the same trajectory as the construction of the dialectical image [dialektischen Bildes].”75 That is, the justice wrought from the focusing of the dialectical image, the fulfillment potentially brought to history through its realization (dissolution, or resolution) —which was for him a theological premise—must run counter to the universal history offered by a school of historicism itself too indebted to its hopes of becoming a science. Its reliance upon “historical semblance” (historischen Scheins), a realm of distorted, ideological (mis)readings of historical events, must be dissolved. It is this school of historicist thought, in fact, which misses the fundamental relationship of identity construction that takes place in the continuum spanned between the messianic and the canonical. In place of maintaining any tension between them, historicism would opt for a strict, and always becoming stricter, canonical (orthodox) reading of history, hence its attempt to fully utilize the canon’s inherently ideological nature. It is the sacred text, for Benjamin, from which history springs, what now, thanks to Assmann’s insight, we can say is the basic structure of the (monotheistic) canonical text in determining the meaning given to history.

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We can trace this same line of thought elsewhere in Benjamin’s writings, especially in his work on language and translation where the biblical text becomes a model for a larger pattern of thought, one wherein the interlinear translation of the scriptures serves as an exemplary form.76 As Benjamin succinctly renders it in his essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” a title that alone bears witness to the split between the universal and particular with which history wrestles, If in what follows the nature of language [das Wesen der Sprache] is considered on the basis of the first chapter of Genesis, the object is neither biblical interpretation nor subjection of the Bible to objective consideration as revealed truth [offenbarte Wahrheit], but the discovery of what emerges [sich ergibt] of itself from the biblical text with regard to the nature of language; and the Bible is only initially [zunächst] indispensible for this purpose, because the present argument broadly follows it in presupposing language as an ultimate reality [eine letzte Wirklichkeit], perceptible only in its manifestation [Entfaltung], inexplicable and mystical. The Bible, in regarding itself as a revelation, must necessarily evolve the fundamental linguistic facts [die sprachlichen Grundtatsachen].77

The sacred text provides a unique insight, and point of departure, for viewing the “fundamental linguistic facts” of our existence, and Benjamin seems content to leave this at face value. Through this, we are led to believe that the sacred text says something profound concerning the “fundamental linguistic facts” of our existence, and is therefore “only initially indispensible” for discerning the structure of our linguistic existence. Just as Assmann had pointed toward the significance of revelation within the act of canonization, Benjamin situates revelation in the linguistic being of humanity, something which the canonical form attempts to capture and propagate through history. This is the case because: . . . the equation of mental and linguistic being is of great metaphysical moment [Tragweite] to linguistic theory because it leads to the concept that has again and again, as if of its own accord [der sich immer wieder wie von selbst], elevated itself to the center of linguistic philosophy and constituted its most intimate connection with the philosophy of religion. This is the concept of revelation [der Begriff der Offenbarung].78

As Agamben, who is incidentally (and significantly) Benjamin’s Italian translator and editor, will later comment upon this fact, what is revealed, what appears as sacred, is the starting place of language itself, the very fact that language exists and which itself cannot be stated; this is the fact that religion aspires to present.79

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The canon, in some sense appears to be that form which most directly deals with the linguistic fact of our being, and which attempts to preserve that being in the face of a catastrophe that threatens to silence this precarious nature of existence. Hence, a tight overlap is presented between canons and the particular national or ethnic language in which they are communicated, a fact to which Jerome’s Latin, Luther’s German, or King James’ English all nicely attest. From this vantage point, we are able to see how Benjamin was, in a sense, always already only working in the domain of history opened up by the processes of canonization, indeed articulating the forgotten byways of history in order to “blast” away at their continuity and to reassert the messianic force of justice. His was a project directly indebted to the Judaic tradition’s inscription of meaning within history (and language for that matter), a search for the origin of revelation that could not be conceived otherwise. It was also an effort to conceive of the dialectical image as the seeker after origins lost to history, lost within history, within the originary, canonical form and in great need of recovery if justice was, or is, ever to be performed. This is to speak of origins that can perhaps only be touched, if ever so slightly, through the messianic elements within a particular canonical formulation, and this is perhaps also to see the messianic as the elusive origin, as the instance of what was in the beginning that could not ever fully be named or actually realized. The affinity here between conceiving of the messianic elements as an elusive originary presence and the positing of the Christian messianic claims as those being a “Word” situated, but not created, in the beginning should certainly not be overlooked in this regard.80 In many ways, this recovery was always one concerning origins. Indeed, Benjamin himself had only slowly begun to realize through the course of his work that the concept of “origin” he had been dealing with in his book on the Origins of German Tragic Drama was the same central motif hidden deep within his voluminous Arcades Project.81 What he discovered was that both senses of origin had a profound religious heritage, a trajectory that in effect mirrors Assmann’s contentions that Judaism’s most fundamental insights were originally (pagan) Egyptian. As Benjamin saw it, “Origin [Ursprung]—it is, in effect, the concept of Ur-phenomenon [Begriff des Urphänomens] extracted from the pagan context of nature [heidnischen Naturzusammenhange] and brought into the Jewish contexts [Zusammenhänge] of history. Now, in my work on the arcades [Passagenarbeit] I am equally concerned with fathoming an origin [Ursprungsergründung].”82 Perhaps reflecting in many ways the entrance of creation itself into history (as, I might suggest, Agamben’s “theology of creation” might enter into Derrida’s adherence to the realm of representations), the “Jewish contexts of history”

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were not to fall away once being initially utilized either; they were to form the basis, in a sense, though remaining only structural perhaps throughout his work, of representing humanity’s encounter with the always particular historical catastrophe, giving their interaction a religious twist beyond simply evoking the almost routine questions of theodicy. Catastrophe, in essence, was that which threatened to obscure or hide away forever the origins sought after. As he was to express in his Arcades Project concerning the nature of the historical phenomena in need of saving from oblivion, What are phenomena rescued [gerettet] from? Not only, and not in the main, from the discredit and neglect into which they have fallen, but from the catastrophe represented very often by a certain strain in their dissemination [Überlieferung], their “enshrinement as heritage” [Würdigung als Erbe].—They are saved through the exhibition of the fissure [Aufweisung des Sprungs] within them.—There is a tradition [Überlieferung] that is catastrophe.83

Dealing with the essence of this “tradition that is catastrophe,” I would here assert, is the basis of the Judaic canon, center of the experience of Judaism and its “enshrinement as heritage.” It was a tradition formed (canonized) in the face of catastrophe, a tradition that responded to catastrophe with the introduction of the canon into our world. This would be, if Benjamin is here read correctly, as a second catastrophe equal to the first, the enshrinement of a heritage (as canon) that is itself catastrophic. Yet, it is also an enshrinement that would raise up its own internal messianic elements (the “fissure” or Sprung within) to disrupt its own “catastrophic” attempts at canonization. In no uncertain terms, this is why the messianic would seem to figure so prominently for Benjamin, and yet it also might serve to explain why the (Judaic) canon was always kept at a distance, though never that far removed from him either, even if it was seen by him to be a catastrophe of some sort because it sought to “objectify” history in a very concrete sense. Despite Benjamin’s critique of the canonical form, I would suggest that so profound was this act of canonization in the midst of historical crisis that the idea of meaning in history itself could be said to be born from this act, something which Benjamin had not yet abolished entirely from his thought. Indeed, as I have already argued, it is something that cannot be banished from our understanding of history as such. As the Jewish historian Yosef Yerushalmi has put it, “If Herodotus was the father of history, the fathers of meaning in history were the Jews.”84 And as Yerushalmi further makes clear, any attempt to counter the narrative strength of mythical recurrence runs straight through

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the terrain of, not to mention utilizes the tactics of signification indebted to, Judaism’s monotheistic canonical processes. As he so poignantly summarizes matters: after the canon was closed, the Jews stopped writing history.85 And they stopped writing history because it now sprang solely from the canon itself, albeit entangled with centuries of subsequent canonical interpretations of canonical texts. But, and here is where it becomes impossible for Benjamin to take up the messianic and yet entirely shed the canonical: there is yet another connection that Yerushalmi highlights and to which we must pay careful attention. By his count, destruction and redemption are now forever dialectically linked together in the figure of the Messiah who is indissociable from the (canonical) representations of history, and therefore, as the Talmud tells us, “On the day the Temple was destroyed the Messiah was born.”86 In other words, the words central to this study: it was a catastrophe that forged the canon, and it was this same catastrophe that also formed the historically embedded conceptualization of a messianic figure. The two are inseparable because born of the same historical crises. If Yerushalmi is correct in asserting that Judaism managed to unite cyclical time, the time of ritual and liturgy, with an historical time, and without yet slipping into the realm of myth,87 then Benjamin’s project certainly would appear to us as an attempt to sever cyclical time from historical time, to engage a “pure” involvement of the messianic removed from the canonical, perhaps so strongly kept separate as a result of an intense grappling with the age in which he lived and worked, an age where particular ideological–canonical constructs were attempting to totalize (to make “completely objective” in relation to history) a virulent racist and antisemitic hatred. In other words, Benjamin’s efforts could be read as an attempt to save meaning within history (its “theological” element because external to historical events) while discarding the objective accuracy of history itself, something always bound to its potential misreading, bound in fact to always be catastrophic in some sense. This could ultimately be the reason why Benjamin could never fully develop a form of “nonviolence” (as Assmann will attempt to do), precisely because he realized the always ideological manner in which cultural–canonical representations, and even language itself, operate. In his personal life, Benjamin faced the resurgence of another catastrophe so great as to nearly destroy the Jewish population of Europe, a crisis that indeed did bring immense devastation to the people of history and the book, and in which his life story could only appear as emblematic.88 He was dealing with the shattering of tradition, caught simultaneously in the midst of the

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modern forces of reason and a fascism bent on destruction. In short, he was grappling with the upending of certain canonical forms of cultural memory and of history itself, upended by the forces of the messianic working from within and by external forces of destruction working from without . . . a time of crisis indeed. It would seem in some sense almost justifiable that Benjamin came to rely so heavily upon a one-sided reading of the relationship between the messianic and the canonical, for it was the former which provided so much hope in the face of destruction, in the face of those nationalist, ideological– canonical readings which sought to perform a most perverse violence upon certain “oppressed traditions” of history. His emphasis upon a hyperbolic language of messianic forces, at the exclusion of an equally merited emphasis on canonical, or scriptural forms, was in many ways an attempt to strike back with the only excessive response at his discretion: his words. In such a way, we can see how language itself, rather than manifest itself as a contagion of some sort in need of eradication, was actually an essential factor in providing Benjamin his sense of self in the face of an immanent death. There is little surprise, then, that he would reach his last destination in a terrible physical condition, having hiked far beyond his abilities, all the while tenaciously clutching a precious (though now lost) manuscript in his briefcase. These were his words, and therefore his life. Reading his biographical context as a significant part of the overall argumentation he was making is not a measure I take lightly. On the contrary, it is by paying such notice to the nature of his language, its very moment of articulation, that we are able to recover not only the hyperbolic excess of his statements, but also the importance of historical context itself, the very real fragmentation and catastrophe that his era witnessed in a unique and compelling manner. Benjamin’s own life was not removed from his articulations, a point which many contemporary theorists have either tenaciously defended (i.e., feminist, postcolonial, liberation) or neglected altogether (and even the most rigorous ones, such as Agamben, may manage to fall somewhat into this category). Understanding the relevance which one’s historical context holds for the discernment of one’s position is ultimately something a radical hermeneutics must develop (and as I will try to gesture toward on occasion) as, once the traditional ontological supports for defining our varied natures are displaced, the very (historical, contextual) ground upon which we stand acquires a weight far beyond what we are typically accustomed to dealing with through scholarly measures.

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Toward forming the canonical in Benjamin So ultimately, what place does the catastrophic canonical form hold in Benjamin’s estimation? It would appear that the question to be put to Benjamin, based on what we have just seen, should rather be: Can the canonical form be so easily dismissed after proving so “initially indispensible” to him? I doubt that this is the case, even if Benjamin were to wish it so (or if his subsequent interpreters, perhaps even Agamben, would like it to be so). What we are witnessing is the appearance of the messianic as the logic of the canonical pushed to its edges, a project at the limits of cultural intelligibility. For as much as the messianic might appear to de-stabilize the norms of cultural and societal legibility, it is a force yet operative within the domain of representations, acting in response to these representations and from within representation’s own limitations.89 It is ultimately representation itself that can be divided from within, thereby offering us a more legitimate method for reading canonical forms and traditions, as this hermeneutical project will claim. It was those forces that we saw only hinted at toward the end of the last section, those bent on destroying tradition (ultimately what he was to label as reason and fascism), which were to coincide most profoundly in Benjamin’s essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”—a combination that serves to illustrate most insightfully (once again) the close proximity which Benjamin’s work on the messianic maintains with the contours of the canonical, though without being stated explicitly by him as such. From the outset, the essay itself “reproduces” the problematic of the relationship between the canonical and the messianic which the present era, he says, will grapple with under the banners of “tradition” and “authenticity.” The terms are synonymous enough (canonical/ tradition, messianic/authenticity) to reveal the deep structures at work here. Indeed, the transformation from the one to the other runs straight through the Reformation and its attitudes toward the canonical sacred text, illustrating Benjamin’s point with a decisive rigor, as I intend to demonstrate in what follows. The contrast between tradition and authenticity is actually central to comprehending the way in which, according to Stéphane Mosès, aesthetics plays the mediator between theology and politics in Benjamin’s work.90 This mediation essentially raises the stakes concerning the role which art has played, and continues to play, in the modern world. As Benjamin lays it out before us, It might be stated as a general formula that the technology of reproduction [Die Reproduktionstechnik] detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition [Bereich der Tradition]. By replicating the work many times over, it

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substitutes a mass existence [massenweises] for a unique existence [einmaligen Vorkommens]. And in permitting the reproduction to reach the recipient in his or her own situation, it actualizes that which is reproduced.91

Hence, we are confronted with the “power” which reproduction holds over the identity of the people, a power which could be said to be generated from the technology itself. Consequently, “These two processes lead to a massive upheaval in the domain of objects handed down from the past [gewaltigen Erschütterung des Tradierten]—a shattering of tradition [Erschütterung der Tradition] which is the reverse side of the present crisis and renewal of humanity [Erneuerung der Menschheit].”92 As this historical instance makes profoundly clearer, this “power” of cultural reproduction, which I will here assert is distilled into its “purest” technological form as a canon of sorts, is an external, selective, and technological memory device born of a particular culture and tradition, and yet capable of replicating those same formations over time. It is to this principle of a canonical manifestation that Benjamin here turns his focus, and to which his thoughts return over and again, as I have already tried to demonstrate through his direct reference to the sacred textual form toward the end of his life. To perceive the canon as the bulwark of societal representations, as well as the “purest” form of cultural inscription and reproduction to have ever been invented, would not be a far stretch from his remarks here on the nature of technological forms. Just such a declaration could very likely have been posted (albeit indirectly implied) along with Luther’s theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, such was the tenacious allegiance to the canonical form (in this case, of scripture) pledged during the Reformation. Indeed, for its part, the Reformation was, if seen in this light, a mass movement almost entirely indebted to the technological advancement of print, something not conceivable for the earlier “vulgar” translations of the bible (e.g., John Wycliffe), and which was yet saturated entirely within an epoch given over to the “present crisis and renewal of humanity.” Indeed, though Benjamin himself does not indicate as much, the “Protestant” undertones present in his essay are often immediately discernable, as we shall see. Grasping the social significance of advancing technologies is, in Benjamin’s eyes, inconceivable without also fathoming the accompanying destructive “liquidation of the value of tradition in the cultural heritage [die Liquidierung des Traditionswertes am Kulturerbe].”93 In many ways, this is a struggle that only mirrors that between dialectics (taken as “progress”) and his messianic aim of bringing dialectics to a “standstill.” His project acquires a significant gravity in relation to the catastrophic (“destructive”) tradition that could be said to

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be the canonical precisely because it has been brought about by technological advancement. The radicality of this conjunctive trend is found within the realm of the aesthetic: art, especially in its “shock value” form, destroys tradition. This occurs as technology liberates art from its subservience to tradition, its foundation in ritual, from the fact that it was so thickly embedded in a tradition which granted it its use value. Now, we are told, instead of being founded in ritual, art is founded on politics.94 And, as Mosès again makes clear, this transition from the aesthetic paradigm to the political is yet in conjunction with a third, that of the theological.95 As an external provider of meaning to the aesthetic, the theological is consequently linked to (albeit indirectly, and as “hidden” within) the political. It is accordingly the aesthetic paradigm which comes to mediate, in Benjamin’s later work, between the theological and the political, opening Benjamin’s remarks on art in this context to an overt theo-political reading. In this sense, and as Benjamin would conclude, we are not ever really able to separate the theological from the aesthetic, or the aesthetic from the political. Benjamin’s separation of tradition and technology, however, is produced at the expense of the interwoven relationship between them, something which can be evidenced by the manner in which certain technologies could be said to shape tradition itself. Hence, our ability to see the Reformation as bound up with the technological triumph of the printing press, a connection which indeed shattered and still shatters tradition, and leads to its tenacious allegiance to the canonical form alone (again in this case biblical–scriptural as sola scriptura). Though Benjamin is not dealing with the same scriptural–canonical form that the Protestant reformers were, he could almost point toward nothing less than the rise of something akin to “Protestant values” when he states that “Literary competence is no longer founded on specialized higher education [spezialisierten] but on polytechnic training [polytechnischen Ausbildung], and thus is common property [Gemeingut].”96 And it is in this way that tradition is continually upended by the reforming hands of technology, even a technology that extends a (modified) tradition over time, even a technology that is “catastrophic” for tradition as it were. It is in this sense that the canonical form itself becomes the focal point of these reflections between Benjamin and the Reformation despite their apparent, and very real, distance from each other. And this is where Assmann’s main contribution to our study should return to the forefront of our thoughts, as the presentation of the canon, and not just any “sacred text,” would be a fitting compliment to what Benjamin is perhaps trying to ascertain. It is precisely in terms of this sliding scale between being capable and being incapable of improvement, between being open and being

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closed, or between the canonical rule and its messianic de-stabilization, that tradition receives the form of a canonized representation, and thus seems in some sense to clarify the problematic descriptions with which Benjamin was here wrestling. It is a form which finds the biblical–canonical version to be only initially indispensible, but then quickly expands to include all forms of cultural– canonical representation (and hence, we can see why this stress upon the form over the content has led many down a path of “messianic thinking” beyond particular canonical traditions). This is even to provide another justification for why he saw the need to read the historical object of dialectical materialism as embodied through sacred scripture—a form clearly not entirely free from attempting its own universalized history or its own ideological readings of the victors and losers of history. In essence contradictory, he does seem to be discarding one myth for another, without his reasons for doing so being entirely clear.97 Yet, there is a difference present in relation to history and to the potential for justice to be done, a difference which needs to be isolated and clarified through its relation to the canonical form. It is a difference discernable in terms of the canon’s relation to violence. On this nexus between the canonical and violence, we find Assmann’s later determination to sever the bond between them as essential, for a canon which would espouse such a dialectical materialism, as Benjamin had defined the messianic project, would be one that was (self-) aware of its relationship to violence, though perhaps not completely “nonviolent” as Assmann might otherwise hope. It would be a canon which harbored its messianic elements on the surface of its text and which offered a redemptive hope for a “lesserviolence” through this very feature of its existence. It is, therefore, not surprising that Benjamin’s essay on art and technology points at its end toward violence on a grand scale, for “All efforts to aestheticize politics culminate [gipfeln] in one point. That point is war [der Krieg].”98 The triad of aesthetics–politics–theology must be kept functioning as separate, and yet within the same economy, not made to merge one into the other, even if one is occasionally “hidden” within the other. The issue at stake here, and it is one which might help clarify the origin of the canonical form, is one of property relations (of land, of nationhood, of identity) and the technology (which is canonical in form) that is capable of preserving those ties between persons and their (right to a) dwelling throughout time. As his citation of F. T. Marinetti makes clear, the modern ethos of war is one that attempts to “immortalize” the human being, to push humanity beyond itself in dominion over itself.99 This is the same impetus (though as an opposing force

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tending toward less violence) of what the Judaic canon was attempting to achieve. This would be to view the canonical form as a unique (historical) attempt to preserve the identity of a people pushed to the edges of extinction who yet wish to survive into the future. As Benjamin tries in fact to demonstrate, “Imperialist war is an uprising on the part of technology [Aufstand der Technik], which demands repayment in ‘human material’ [Menschenmaterial] for the natural material society has denied it,” a process which could be as true for canons as for the “false sacrality” of warfare and its myths.100 If society has denied a “natural human material” from arising, something which may not actually exist as such, it is no surprise that Benjamin looked, or was beginning to look again at the end of his all-too-short career, to a canonical manifestation (the biblical–scriptures) in order to find an alternative route for overcoming the violence done through war, which itself is the most obvious example of how the “victors of history” dominate when the messianic elements within our cultural representations are almost completely effaced from memory.

Initial conclusions As some commentators on Benjamin’s work have noted, and as Assmann’s uniting of Benjamin, the canon and violence illustrates, Benjamin’s remarks on divine violence are not to be read in isolation from his comments on scripture.101 In so many words, this is to say that we cannot separate Benjamin’s views on divine violence from the forces that work through the canons of history and their accompanying messianic elements. This link is what enables us to utilize Benjamin’s work in order to form an account of what I would here term a “just canon,” a canon that strives to become conscious of its relationship to violence, something the Judaic canon, with its focus on the victims and marginalized figures of history, can be said to accomplish in some fashion. Through this nexus of thoughts, we might subsequently be able to see how, in contrast to lawmaking which is always “powermaking,” “Justice [Gerechtigkeit] is the principle of all divine endmaking [göttlichen Zwecksetzung] . . .,” a reversal of the norms which have inspired political thought since its inception.102 In short, the hypothesis that emerges from this chapter, as well as the entire thesis being presented here, develops as such: if there is a “messianic arrest of happening” which is also a “revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed,” it interrupts (or “blasts”) the continuity of the representation of

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history presented in canonical form, but only truly more or less in accord with the degree to which such a canonical representation unveils its own relationship to violence. The less the canonical element does it, the louder must this “weak messianic force” be sounded; the more the canonical element exposes its own proximity and propensity to violence in an effort to stem its tide, the quieter may the messianic forces grow.103 Though Assmann might like to escape from an always violent “matrix” of cultural–canonical representations, Benjamin makes clear that this is neither desirable nor possible. Rather, if canonical– representational identities are to be justly formed in our globalized age, then a deeper understanding of these forces at work is necessary, for those inside religious structures as much as for those external to them. It is only therefore by dividing the canonical form from within through a discernment of corresponding violences that we might begin to perceive the differences between existing canons. As Assmann and Benjamin both have pointed to in almost the entirety of their work, and by accounting for the convergences that are too uncanny to disregard, this would be to form an image of the canon that is able to preserve its nonviolent (or less violent) heritage by resisting the temptations to universalize history as fact, to allow the voices of the oppressed to be guaranteed and heard, and to engage in a dialectical materialist vision of history even as it proclaims a sense of something transcendent to it. For Benjamin, it was the sheer machinery of Nazi (ideological, canonical) representations that was so loud as to make it seem that only the “weak messianic forces” of history were the ones capable of speaking a just word to humanity. But, as Assmann’s progression from the canonical to the messianic has shown, and to avoid such catastrophic encounters in the future, a better understanding of the relationship between them must be sought, one which constantly seeks to enact “more just” historical representations, ones never fully siding with either the oppressed once they come to power (as certain forms of historical Marxist–Communism were wont to do) or with the dominant perspectives on society (as historicism had attempted to do), but with those who perpetually reveal the violences at work in our world, those who are perpetually aware of the oppressions at hand. In this manner, perhaps a hermeneutics of violence could be established between the canonical and the messianic elements of every historical representation in order to further the horizon of justice within which every identity is ultimately constructed. At the least, it could be said in light of Agamben’s challenges to representation that finding a platform for re-envisioning and sustaining a coherent contempo­

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rary theological viewpoint on canonical forms is no easy task. We are, therefore, and in order to pursue this line of inquiry further, almost compelled to ask: where does Agamben’s attempt to locate an immanent theology beyond the contours of representational thinking ultimately place us? Does his gesture merely repeat so many Jewish messianic and antinomian responses to the sufferings of exclusion and exile? How are we to take seriously such antinomian responses from within a dialectical framework? As I have already gestured, however, perhaps the scope of our inquiry can be deepened by repeating the Pauline gesture that Agamben finds so useful: the “division of division itself.” By thus making distinctions between canons which already serve to “divide” culture into various forms (Assmann’s Mosaic distinction), perhaps we are in a position to better discern the failures of representation and to thus point to a peculiar “presentation” beyond representation, though maybe not entirely the same thing as Agamben has in mind. Accordingly, and in order to make the first step toward developing a radical hermeneutics of use for theological methodologies, I would indicate that we make such a “division of division itself ” within canonical forms, something accomplished through the division between those canons that condone and those that condemn certain acts of social and cultural violence. Though such a distinction may not appear to resolve the “violent” imposition of canonical forms upon us in the first place, I would suggest rather that, much as Paul had already suggested in his letters, the division of canonical forms according to their positions concerning violence is a movement that in a certain sense ‘de-activates’ the normative violence imposed by a given canonical form, perhaps even going so far as to provide a certain sense of liberation to its communal members through its ultimate recognition of the failures of representation. Establishing a criterion of violence with regard to (western) canonical forms thereby enables us to “think beyond” the binary divisions enacted between immanence/transcendence and presentation/representation in order to work toward, not only more just forms of cultural representation, but also a “presentation” of reality beyond the normativity typically associated with representational claims. To further work through such conclusions, I intend in the final chapter to more fully detail the implications of such a hermeneutical position by applying such insights to the work of Paul Ricoeur. It is my hope that by doing so I am able, not only to confirm my basic hypothesis on the relationship of canonical forms to messianic forces, but also to give an answer to the (“antinomian”) desire to permanently transcend our given representations.

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What I will here seek to address are the central political implications of the existent tension between the messianic and the canonical form as they were unfolded in Benjamin’s writings and have progressed to the current moment. As we have already seen, the nature of what we consider as “revolutionary” in Benjamin’s thought stems from a certain one-sided emphasis on the messianic forces working within canonical forms as if they were entirely independent of them. His emphasis is perhaps historically justifiable in some sense as what he faced toward the end of his life was the counterpart to this position—the fascist, totalitarian gesture of an absolute focus placed upon certain canonical cultural forms, as if they functioned “timelessly,” and independent of any possible messianic undoing. What I hope to develop further through an inspection of these themes in the work of Ricoeur is that the recognition of the necessary interaction between both forces results in the basic position of a radicalized hermeneutics that can yet be productive in theological terms. In Ricoeur’s thought, the search for origins (arche) that canonicity seeks comes to be balanced by the focus on ends (telos) that messianicity constantly seeks what we are now in a better position to articulate. As his professional division between the philosophical and the theological became less rigid toward the end of his life, I argue, Paul Ricoeur’s increased emphasis upon the religious perspective embedded within all representational formations tended to open his work toward these messianic, revolutionary impulses that bring about a possible presentation beyond representation, or, as he would come to word it, envisioning a world without work as the new condition of our humanity, even if such an envisioning appears to us as an impossible (and impractical) task. In this manner, I hope to demonstrate how there is yet more of a convergence between Agamben’s antinomianism and Ricoeur’s hermeneutics than might be first suspected, something only perceivable once we have acknowledged the “insoluble solution” (aporia) to the debate between

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Derrida and Agamben, or that which Ricoeur’s work will be utilized to isolate in a manner previously unarticulated. Beginning with several recent popularized notions of the “exception” identified with a “messianic” core of politico–philosophical import (E. Santner, G. Agamben, S. Žižek, J. Butler), the first section of this chapter seeks to develop a “hermeneutics of canonicity” through Ricoeur’s work on myth, narrative, and the tensions said to reside at the center of the specifically biblical canon, though the dynamics of this canon become applicable to all canonical forms in general. This is done in order that contemporary accounts of political representation seemingly removed from any accompanying hermeneutics might open themselves toward the manner in which canonical representations, as a central defining element of cultural intelligibility, could be said to generate their own exceptions, what is here termed canonicity. By turning to Ricoeur’s contrast between Phariseeism and the Prophetic spirit in his early The Symbolism of Evil, as well as his later remarks on the biblical canon, I intend to show how the perceivable “failure” to account for the “exception” at the heart of representation actually reveals a misreading of the hermeneutical project and is, thus, of great interest for contemporary political and social theory. For Ricoeur, a fundamental canonical tension, exemplified here as a biblical (scriptural) tension between the prophet and the Pharisee, generates the “rules” which could be said to govern any given (hermeneutical) field of representations and their operation as a sociopolitical force, “rules” which yet maintain a certain “exceptionalism” at their core. What follows from this foundation in the next section is an attempt to examine the development of the canonical form in Ricoeur’s work as it proceeds from this tension between Phariseeism and the Prophetic spirit within the biblical corpus. Accordingly, I will pursue a number of threads in his writing that all consolidate upon one of the various conceptions of the canonical form, presenting its characteristics from a number of angles within his diverse body of writings. By inspecting these varied definitions, I hope to demonstrate how the canonical form is a central concept within Ricoeur’s oeuvre on the whole. Subsequently, I turn to look at the manner in which ontotheology has been conceived since the last century as that which provides the foundations for our sovereign political forms of power. It has been perceived as the support for any transition from a creative, religious imagination, a world of symbol and metaphor, to those concrete forms of history, politics, and even language upon which we so often depend. It is for this very reason that ontotheology is also often linked to those violent acts that frequently accompany these very same

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movements. Yet, and despite the apparent necessity of ontotheology, I am inclined to ask: do we, in the end, perceive the construction of an ontotheological bridge between metaphor and politics as a necessity that admits equally of the necessity for sovereign power in our world, or as merely one possible, contingent route to be taken among others? The answers we give to this question, as I maintain throughout this study, say as much about our philosophical views as they do about our political ones, a connection not always immediately clear in our basic political formulations. By focusing on the distinction between Ricoeur’s hermeneutics and the more recent contentions of Agamben concerning the origins of political thought, I intend to inspect the manner in which both of their political and philosophical formulations turn upon a reading of Aristotle’s distinction between potentiality and actuality, a crucial portion of his Metaphysics upon which so much depends. As such, Ricoeur’s work points to the same problematic unearthed in Benjamin’s writing, the delicate tension between the canonical form and its messianic undoing that, if severed one from the other, often results in extreme political or religious viewpoints. In the final few sections of this chapter, I aim to deal explicitly with the issue of representation in Ricoeur’s work, hoping in the end to establish a form of radicalized hermeneutics by bringing his work into conjunction with that of Judith Butler. By looking first at Judith Butler’s descriptions of “giving an account of oneself ” in relation to her strategic use of Levinas, I intend to reflect upon the complex nature of identity formations in relation to the social, cultural, and political dynamics that inform them. In this sense, we see how to be human is often portrayed as a constant risking of the self and yet  also as an effort to be responsible in the face of a violent other who threatens to visibly undo us, even (and perhaps, especially) if this other comes at us from within. By situating the discussion of identity construction and its others in relation to an index of violences (i.e., violent vs. nonviolent responses traced as a measure of how responsible a person can be for themselves as well as for the other before or within them), I hope to broaden the scope of my analysis by showing how Butler’s work opens onto a hermeneutical plane that accepts some of the (necessary) violences of representation itself. As should be clear by now, such a hermeneutics is clearly aligned with the previous analysis of divergent canonical forms. Such insights are doubly intriguing insofar as they can be conjoined with the Levinasian core unveiled within Ricoeur’s later ethical reflections, one that bears a striking affinity with Butler’s writings, as I intend to show. Indeed, the

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dialogue he occasions with Levinas is further revealed as the central factor in determining Ricoeur’s comprehension of the selves that we all are. By focusing on this Levinasian resonance, I intend to demonstrate how comprehending the precarious contours of our self-formed and yet socially-given identity constructions is nonetheless essential to understanding the starting point and foundation for any contemporary formulation of a radical hermeneutics as well as any sustainable ethical position. By meditating on the nature of representation in Ricoeur’s work, I look to demonstrate how a bridge might at long last be possible between dialectical and antinomian (“utopian”) thought, one that can be viewed from within a radical hermeneutical position, thereby also providing a resolution to the philosophical and theological problematic opened up in the first part of this study.

The “exceptionalism” of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics and the bid for an ethical canon It was the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard who first put the “exception” under the spotlight of modern thought. For him, a focus on those elements exceptional to any and every system of thought (of logic, of history, of those representations attempting to encompass any whole) was an anti-Hegelian insistence on a form of subjectivity that sought to bring the lurching forward of dialectics to a kind of standstill.1 When, subsequently, in the next century, the German political jurist Carl Schmitt insisted on the political significance of the “state of exception” in determining the authority of sovereign rule nearly a century later, reference was made by him directly to Kierkegaard’s theological assertions.2 By recognizing the connection between these two thinkers of the exception, and despite the multiple differences between them, a deeper context is opened up by which to (re)view the significance of Schmitt’s dictum that all political concepts are secularized theological ones. Schmitt is able to present this connection precisely by continuing to bring a Kierkegaardian conception of the (religious) subject (as the exceptional element within any society) to bear upon the politics of an immanently secularized world, something with which Kierkegaard himself was undoubtedly familiar.3 This is to say that what provoked Kierkegaard to reflect on the role of the Christian in an increasingly secular society was perhaps a similar impetus to what led Schmitt to reflect upon the rubrics of sovereignty at work in political systems.

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It is this “subjectivity of exception” that could be said to lie at the heart of what we might call the “logic of the religious” within an immanent political world, something which finds a deep resonance in that later twentieth century thought often conglomerated under the heading of “political theology,” the very roots of which, in many ways, I am pursuing throughout the entirety of this study.4 For example, when Benjamin utilized Schmitt’s basic insights on the state of exception in order to conceive of a “weak messianic force” working through history that could redeem history’s victims to (dialectical) progress, he relied upon the exceptions to any given canonical history in order to paint such a portrait.5 This was to be a reading of history, for Benjamin, which he pointedly refused to label as “atheological.”6 He called upon the structures of subjectivity formed as exceptions to the rule of (again, a Hegelian) “progress” in order to depict the forces of identity construction otherwise at work in history.7 In this way, he was to formulate the notion of an exception to any given representation as the “exigency of the forgotten,” the call issued from the repressed victims of a given canonical form of history to remember what in his eyes can never truly be forgotten.8 The incorporation of such a religiously inflected term as the “messianic” into Benjamin’s formulations of history is not coincidental to the link between exceptionalism and religious identity, as I have already indicated. Rather, this link is essential to recovering a realistic conception of historical justice. It would also not be surprising that Benjamin saw his work as saturated with the theological, like an ink blotter in relation to its ink, as he would describe it, for the theological was precisely the hidden impetus behind his critical political and historical formulations in many regards.9 A late modern strand of focus upon the “exception” as the defining norm of representations, along with its latent theological core, seems, in many regards, to flow from Benjamin’s merger of the theological with the political. Indeed, its messianic vigor has been the subject of many recent philosophical musings, from Derrida to Butler, and from Agamben to Žižek.10 One recent commentator upon the relation of the messianic to the exception, Eric L. Santner, has in fact incorporated some of the fundamental intuitions of Benjamin, Agamben and Žižek to illustrate the “exceptionalism” that currently dominates any attempt to “think the canonical,” whether that be a canonical form of representation (i.e., history, gender) or a literary or scriptural canon.11 For Santner, as for Benjamin before him, it is these “messianic” forces of exceptionalism that disrupt the canons at work within various cultures throughout the world, providing a universal ethical plea for justice to be done in terms of political and cultural

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representation. Their potential to disrupt is what allows Santner to refer to this tension as an inherent structural “state of emergency” within any given canonical form. And this example would serve to illustrate why this language of the messianic has spread far afield from its Judaic–religious heritage. I would only pause here at this stage and over material with which the reader is by now already familiar to demonstrate how it can be shown through Santner’s depiction of a “structural state of emergency,” that a general hermeneutics could be said to develop from this structure of the canonical form. Moreover, this perpetual state of tension could be further disclosed as its defining movement of “canonicity,” the perpetual generation of normative social, cultural, religious, and political representations, over and beyond a singular historical instance of the canonization of a particular text. Like those tiny boxes on forms which ask the respondent to identify themselves with a particular social grouping (i.e., race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, religious heritage, etc.), all representations, more or less, adhere to a certain sense of canonical normativity, utilized in order to provide a coherent (social and cultural) intelligibility within a person’s affiliated community. Though canons and their accompanying representations do change over time (just as the list of possible categories on a form keeps expanding), they nonetheless present themselves as a quasipermanent entity within a given historical context, that is, as the arbiter, judge, and rule of normativity within any given field of representation. Canonicity can, thus, be defined as the always ongoing processes of canonization, which do not cease with the production of a particular canon—they evolve, often with serious social and political consequences. These basic insights on the nature of the hermeneutical field of representations will subsequently be picked up and examined in greater fullness in this section through the work of Ricoeur, someone whom contemporary thinkers on the exception have kept at a certain distance. Yet, as his work has demonstrated, from the earliest studies in Fallible Man to his later work both on (biblical) narrative, and on history, memory, and forgetting, the place of canonical representations is pivotal for establishing any sense of self in relation to history. Such a turn toward a “hermeneutics of the exception” (as a “hermeneutics of canonicity”) will accordingly enable us, not only to make an essential connection between these diverse worlds of contemporary critical and hermeneutical theory, but will also serve to deepen the scope of what constitutes an exception in the first place. In essence, and as we will see in a moment, the hope for many contemporary philosophers is that a more fully developed hermeneutics of the exception will

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be able to properly juxtapose the messianic in relation to the canonical form. To realize these messianic forces at work in history, as Benjamin was wont to do, we must see them as always in relation to a particular, given canonical tradition from within which they arose and to which they are forever bound. This, and nothing less, is the nature of representation itself. Indeed, this is what Ricoeur’s work in its earliest formulations consistently points to and can help us to further envision. Exploring Santner’s “structural state of emergency” as that which perhaps best defines this fracture of canonical authority can also be a fitting gesture toward forming a general hermeneutics that takes into account the contemporary (and yet  also, ancient) tension between the canonical and the messianic. Indeed, a subsequently developed notion of canonicity could be moreover utilized as a cipher for translating contemporary thinkers of the exception (such as Benjamin, Derrida, and Agamben) into a hermeneutical framework, something which I intend to substantiate through a juxtaposition of this element of exceptionalism with the hermeneutics of Ricoeur. The use of Ricoeur’s work in further defining the scope of what a “hermeneutics of canonicity” could be is not coincidental. It is a combination of his writings on biblical scripture, authority, and heteronomy, taken together within the general hermeneutical framework he has constituted, which provides us with a more fruitful option for continuing to develop these insights upon the processes of canonicity and their relation to the exceptional, messianic forces already at work in each canonical form.

The “hermeneutics of canonicity”: Phariseeism and its relation to the Prophetic Ricoeur’s entire oeuvre provides just such an appropriate and unified ground for advancing a generalized theory of exceptionalism (or messianic force) and its relation to particular canonical readings of history. For example, and as an illustration of just how central these thoughts are to his work, in an early study translated as The Symbolism of Evil, Ricoeur’s conception of myth as a narrative of symbols lies at the heart of discerning a narrative identity that is formed through canonical representations.12 Why this depiction of narrative should inform our understanding of exceptionalism becomes clearer when we perceive how the text functions in relation to its reader. Narratives are representations, of course, into which one can “re-write” one’s own identity in a heteronymous relationship

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with the text, according to Ricoeur, illustrating the absolute significance that canons hold in relation to identity formation, but also the manner in which we are interrupted (or displaced) by an external source become internalized.13 Indeed, this same general framework is what will ultimately provoke his ethical formulations much later in his work, as this heteronymous relationship with an other (representation) beyond us becomes the basis of seeing “oneself as another.”14 Incorporated into this schema is the same problematic which makes it difficult to dismiss any particular, contingent canonical tradition and/or text, in favor of a detached universal structure of (religious) thought. The exception will always in some sense enter into the self, transforming its identification with itself, indeed becoming that self that is now another. For Ricoeur, the linkage of the contingent and the universal takes place within the terrain of myth, defined as the narrative form outside the boundaries of time and space that is yet given over to symbolization, and which, by definition, reflects both a presence and an absence. Myth proclaims a truth concerning the relationship between the ontological and the historical that neither philosophy nor science can attest to, namely the suspension of conceptual opposition in the face of a narrative, a perpetuation of the play of presence and absence within the fields of representation and identity formation. As regards our study here, and as Ricoeur outlines it, the narration of a myth provides a connection between what otherwise cannot be connected—the movement from an original goodness (our ontological situation) to our sinful “fallen-ness,” the guilt and alienation we feel and experience (our existential, historical situation). A myth consequently fulfills a very important role in constructing worldviews and cannot be reduced to an allegorization which, once fulfilled, is discarded. It serves a significant role in our lives by opening up a fundamental and irreducible tension that unites what ultimately cannot be fully united. In this sense, we might perceive myth as the precarious unity that exists between the canonical and the messianic, as several contemporary discourses have likewise framed it. Perhaps, like his work on translation, narrative identity can be seen as a practical response to a theoretically impossible relationship, a theme which has its echoes in the work of Benjamin and Derrida to be sure.15 This “impossibility,” in a very direct sense, will give rise to the aporia that constitutes the fundamental essence of authority, as Ricoeur develops in his later work, which will thereby also thwart any attempt to sever the universal structure of the canonical form from its particular historical embodiments, as we will see in a moment.

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Limiting myself at this point to his work in The Symbolism of Evil, I would like to argue that it is this irresolvable tension that asserts itself most directly through the relationship of the Prophet and the Pharisee. Though the discussion of Phariseeism in relation to Prophetism is undoubtedly bound to a particular religious (Judaic) tradition, Ricoeur nonetheless sees the tension between them as being the indivisible whole upon which the consciousness of sin (as the condition under which we embody these internalized tensions) in general depends.16 Given over to a particular typology of sin, Phariseeism is located by Ricoeur as the “birthplace” and “summit of perfection” of this modality of the consciousness of guilt known as “scrupulousness,” a moral type in which all humans are able to recognize their own experience.17 There is no doubt that Phariseeism is most typically associated with legalism, moral slavery, hardheartedness of heart, and literalism, he tells us; but, beginning with Ezra and the formation of the Torah, Phariseeism is here rather posited as the (particular) origin of the monotheistic experience, at least insofar as it was determined as a “light to the nations.”18 It is indissociable from the “canonical experience” it (in part, as one side of the tension) gives rise to. It cannot simply be dismissed or surpassed (though “fulfilled” is still perhaps an option). With its roots in the prophetic vocation, this form of Judaic thought depicts an ethical framework that is yet connected to a historical representation of the founding “event,” the exodus of a chosen people. It is the conjunction of ethics and contingency within the particularity of this narrative, and its Law, that, for Ricoeur, resists becoming a universalized ethical structure.19 Indeed, the juridical nature of the “Jewish mind,” as Ricoeur puts it, proceeded case by case and therefore resisted the conceptualization and systematization that surrounded the functioning of Roman law.20 This resistance, which Judaism demonstrated toward becoming a universalized ethical structure, comes to characterize it as a religious tradition, embodied as a seemingly permanent “state of exception” with regard to other religions. It is from this fractured location that the canonical form takes its point of origination, a point which is always recreated in the subsequent wake of all those processes of canonicity that evolve over time and yet continue to produce subjects bound to a particular canonical text. What soon becomes clear from this is that, for Ricoeur, there is an indissociable bond between this form of legalism and the subsequent addition of the prophetic voice necessarily added before the canon was closed, one that instigates the dynamism of the biblical scriptures as a whole, and which could be said in a certain sense to govern all of its canonical procedures, as I intend to demonstrate. There is a “rhythm,” Ricoeur calls it, of prophetism and legalism

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which runs throughout the Hebraic narrative. Indeed, Ricoeur is almost at pains to stress how biblical scholarship has often portrayed Phariseeism in a negative light, instead of pronouncing the dynamic unity between Phariseeism and Prophetism, a unity which must be allowed to exist if the canon is itself to remain normative as such. There is, in fact, an unbroken “ethical tension,” he states, which comes to be born in this dynamic interlacing, or even “incomplete assimilation” of elements.21 The “consciousness of sin,” as fundamental to our understanding of self in relation to myth, narrative, and symbolic interaction, is dependent upon such a tension as that between the Prophet and the Pharisee (or, the messianic and the canonical). Identity itself, as part of a larger representational framework that is constantly engaged in making normative statements and subsequent revisions of those same claims, is founded upon the inability of the one to ever fully assimilate the other. Or, as Ricoeur would have it, “So far, then, is the law from being a concession of prophetic circles to the archaic religion of the priests that prophetism presupposes the law and refers to the law.”22 This would certainly seem to be a far cry from seeing the prophetic voice as one completely at odds with the legalistic forms of religious tradition (as Agamben had been hinting toward earlier). Thus he intends to present, or “re-present,” Phariseeism from another angle altogether, one which illustrates its integral unifying power for the biblical canon. Indeed, it becomes necessary for him to state that it was contrary to the literalism of the Sadducees that the Pharisees were engaged in an effort to “fulfill” the Law, to see it brought to its culminating point as “spirit.” It is meant to become a living law through the institution of the oral Torah, itself now elevated to the level of the written Torah.23 The Torah, seen through the processes of halacha, becomes “inexhaustible,” “unlimited,” and “flexible,” contrary to other popular representations of it as an attempted totalizing legalism.24 The “practical program for living” that Ricoeur outlines is obtainable, it is what can be done in this lifetime, and not an abstract ideal situated far out of reach. It is obtainable through one’s meriting of a reward. This unique contribution of “meriting” a reward leads directly to its obverse correlate, that of the “repentance” offered for one’s sins, the “return” to God that Judaism offers throughout its narrative.25 In this context of Phariseeism, grace will always yet be found for the good will. The scrupulousness of Phariseeism can certainly lead, indeed sometimes almost led inevitably, to the “ritualization of ethics” as a “corollary of its heteronomy.”26 It can become a seeking after an “exactness” that ritual observance strives to fulfill. This can also lead to the full realization of its particular dangers:

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(1) of juridicization, (2) of ritualization, (3) of obligation, and (4) of separation, each of which can be seen as a forgetting of intentions (its spirit) through an increased focus upon legal detail (its letter). For Ricoeur, however, it is not just these risks that Phariseeism invokes; in fact, it is the realization of these dangers that forestalls the universalization of the ethical paradigm offered here through Judaism, resting rather in a particularity that “becomes for others a stumbling block and for [itself] a solitary [un solitaire].”27 Thus, we can see how the specific failing of scrupulousness is hypocrisy, the inevitable conclusion of a stagnant Phariseeism. Does this type of moral scrupulousness, as Ricoeur asks, lead us to contrast a true Pharisee, constantly progressing to new domains, new applications of the law, with a false one of stagnation, alienation, and hypocrisy? For Ricoeur, this question offers no simple solution. Indeed, it was just such a line of inquiry which once plagued St. Paul who, for his part, saw the law transformed into the origin of sin, subsequently seen in his development of the contrast between the law as flesh and the spirit of Christ (cf. Romans 8): as Ricoeur formulates it, “. . . the attempt to reduce sin by observance becomes sin. That is the real meaning of the curse of the law [la malédiction de la loi].”28 The all-encompassing nature of Phariseeism, its temptation to provide the sole medium through which to comprehend Judaic thought, is essential for understanding its relationship with prophetism—the “absorption of all the outbursts of prophecy into the Mosaic figure seems to me to be the key to the formation of any scrupulous conscience.”29 Though a rudimentary distinction between “Christianity” and “Judaism” may be rooted in the tension between the Pharisee and the Prophet, Ricoeur is careful to maintain the integrity of both, while seemingly at the cost of neither. It is only the absolute favoring of one of these polar oppositions that seems to bring about a distortion of a more fundamental (and ineradicable) ethical tension, which must be maintained in order for ethics itself to ever function. And this point seems worth repeating, especially as it will recur throughout this study. We are Jews or we are Christians, inseparably connected throughout history because representative of the tensions that produce “history” in its canonical form, as has been clear in many ways since the first chapter. The overall import of his thoughts on the canonical form remains central to understanding the significance of this tension at the core of all representational thinking. This new epoch in thought, the original context of the ascendency of the religion of the Torah came to signal a fundamental transition from creation to interpretation (i.e., the apparent “absorption” of prophecy into Phariseeism).

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Ricoeur’s sensitivity to the historical reception of a text pushes him to consider the lasting historical import of Phariseeism, and its governance of Judaic life, as of great significance in relation to the historical prophetic task. Despite the fact that Phariseeism survived long past the end of prophecy, the “ethical tension” between these two forms of religious thought remains as a central hermeneutical principle established with regard to the dynamics of not only biblical–canonical scriptures, but also of canonical–representational forms altogether, even if one side seems to dominate over another within a particular canonically-bound tradition. This tension, in fact, is what comes to define the concept of covenant itself, as well as the structures of canonicity, as Ricoeur’s subsequent work will later affirm, and as we will see shortly. Here, again, as I have been suggesting, a messianic (prophetic) justice is interlocked with a canonical (Pharisaic) bid to totalize all representative forms, and though the latter will have always appeared to have “won” the battle, so to speak, it is the former which will actually serve over time to change the coordinates of said representations. In this sense, all canons can be said to maintain an aporia at their core, one which threatens to expose a concealed lack of authority, but which nonetheless also serves in some sense to ground it. This was, and is, a principle that Ricoeur subsequently took up from time to time throughout his career, demonstrating a remarkable consistency with which he addressed, either directly or indirectly, questions of the canonical and, by extension, of canonicity. It is also a perspective that adds a great deal of insight to the studies we have been pursuing throughout this work. Accordingly, in the section that follows, I will attempt to further such insights by outlining how this fundamental canonical tension casts a long shadow over Ricoeur’s further developments of the canonical form, thereby more fully sketching out what a hermeneutics of representation owes to the tensions between the canonical and the messianic. As I hope will also become clear, such a long shadow also says volumes about the interwoven nature of both philosophical and theological methods, a pursuit I have been investigating since the beginning of this study and which is only further confirmed by Ricoeur’s oeuvre.

The “exceptions” and aporias of authority The major contributions of Ricoeur to our understanding of how canonicity functions take several shapes, and provide us with a closer inspection of the examples of “exceptionalism” present in his work and which seem themselves

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to flow directly from the already discussed tension between the Prophetic and the Pharisaic. Certainly, in a broader sense, the many elements of the biblical canonical scriptures are characterized by Ricoeur in a diversity of ways, including, as we have just seen, as a form of myth. The tensions which are held in check, but never resolved within the realm of myth, seem to be comparable to his remarks elsewhere on the combination of plurivocal elements that can be said to unite a diverse body of texts under one governing rubric.30 What I would like now to consider, however, are three interrelated notions of the canonical that appear in Ricoeur’s work and that seem to illuminate, not only the tension between the canonical and its messianic core, but also the social, ethical and political consequences that can be said to spring from the recognition of such a permanent tension. I do so with the intention of illustrating a definition of canonical forms that takes into account a hermeneutical perspective. Accordingly, I will take a closer inspection of the canonical form as it appears in Ricoeur’s writings as being: (1) a particular, though not always explicit, combination of aporia and authority,31 (2) as with his theories of narrativity in general, a sequence of totalization, de-totalization, and re-totalization, coming to mirror in many ways, according to Ricoeur himself, the cycle of life, death and resurrection which the New Testament records,32 and (3) an act of both the “bringing together” and “perpetuation” of a particular tradition always bound up with a given canonical community that reads it.33 Each of these characterizations is not exclusive or rigid, however; in some sense, their overlap is essential for understanding the complexities of the canonical form itself. Thus, it will be necessary to look at all of these characteristics in general, and insofar as they interact with one another, in order to provide a more comprehensive evaluation of the processes which define canonicity as a whole. In this fashion, Ricoeur’s work on myth (hence, on the tension between Prophet and Pharisee) can be brought into comparison with his work on narrative as viewed through the dynamic tension of aporia and authority which comes to govern the realms of historical memory and representation. For it is this tension between aporia and authority that constitutes a more fundamental tension that, in turn, propels the desires for/of canonicity. By first assessing Ricoeur’s position on the canonical form and thereby establishing some sense of what canonicity might be, we can attempt to determine how Ricoeur’s work, beyond his earlier excursion into the Pharisaic/Prophetic dualism, could be said to point toward the messianic elements of the exception which have come to dominate certain contemporary sociopolitical discussions. Firstly, the tension present between aporia and authority, and in relation to what I am calling “the processes of canonicity,” I believe motivates the heart of

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Ricoeur’s writings on biblical hermeneutics, as well as its linkage to his work on the whole. For example, in the context of a discussion concerning Yosef Yerushalmi’s historiographical operations toward the end of one of his last works, Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricoeur makes the comment that it was the very act of closing the canon that gave the biblical corpus “the authority of Holy Scripture.”34 He makes clear in a footnote that the addition of the word “holy,” like the Jewish identity established through its relation with the Torah, sets it apart “from the rest of discourse and hence from critical appraisal.”35 What Ricoeur signals is that there is a clash which has arisen between memory, the meaning of history, and historiography, one which he will admittedly say that he is not able to resolve as such; it remains, he says, an aporia at the heart of the canonical.36 Indeed, it seems for Ricoeur to be the “burden of history” which we all bear, like the Jewish people themselves, that brings about a “discontentment” with our readings of history, since history itself cannot be completely totalized in its representational forms. Exclusions and remainders, it would seem, inherently accompany any attempt to generate a canonical form. The fundamental aporia of a canonical text, one that seems inextricably intertwined with its authoritative claims, is that it is a text divided from within, by its messianic (prophetic) and canonical (Pharisaic) tensions. There are some memories which must be forgotten, and, inevitably, a sort of ideological script of history takes form around those remaining particular memories. Yet, these are memories which are capable of being contested by the tensions present within the canonical text itself. Any (canonical) authority is consequently beset by the aporias which linger interminably at its core. In this fashion, we are all of us, Ricoeur remarks, the “bastard children [les enfants bâtards] of Jewish memory” caught between this past and “the secularized history of the nineteenth century.”37 This problem of sacred versus ideological text is not a new contrast here explored by Ricoeur. In his earlier essay on the concept of revelation, or the very nature of a potentially “sacred text,” he seemed quick to point out the difficulty of presenting a text bereft of its historical conditions, and this gave him leave to remark, for example, on the “destructive activity” of freezing the text as a reaction against heresy, to view revelation as an historical process, though “. . . the notion of sacred text is something antihistorical. I am frightened [Je suis effrayé] by this word ‘sacred.’ ”38 Though one could draw a carefully placed distinction between revelation and the sacred canonical in an attempt to overcome this “fear” of an ideological presence within the canonical, it would do little to affect the processes of canonicity per se, which are always, even if just slightly,

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invested in discourses which are generally considered as being “ideological.”39 As James Fodor, for example, has indicated, the validity of such a fear springing up to crush any sense of “truth” coming from a sacred canon stems from the perception that conceiving of the text as strictly autonomous in its “otherness” could be construed as a form of fundamentalism which embraces revelation as a “talisman” against critique, and which neglects the historical conditions behind any text.40 It is this “vulgar form of heteronomy,” as Fodor terms the consequent relationship between the sacred text and believer, that Ricoeur in fact sought to remove from general perceptions toward a “sacred” text, though it is a perception which is not easily erased in practical terms. It is in this sense that I would like, secondly, to juxtapose the aporia at the heart of the canonical with the aporia of totality found in Ricoeur’s analysis of a threefold structure of time. For example, and in yet another context, Ricoeur states that the narrative structure is that which appears in its final (canonical) form as prefiguring, configuring and refiguring.41 It is through the aporias at work in narrative structures that the notion of canonicity in the work of Ricoeur opens up to the exceptionalism also within focus of this study. In this schema of historical representation, Ricoeur depicts the fracturing of the totalizations of history into a cycle of totalization, de-totalization, and re-totalization, an always imperfect, but necessary process of forming comprehensive and meaningful narratives, the deep-structures of political and social representation. Canons, then, would be subject to the same processes of totalization, appearing as complete, but constantly being subject to the de- and re-totalization which must accompany them (much as we saw in the case of Derrida earlier). Being such, we can glimpse how the canonical form is constantly negotiating between its being a quasitotality and its exceptional elements, a never-ending process of the generation of meaning and identity through the representations that are totalized, de-totalized, and re-totalized. These processes which come to define the very nature of what canonicity could be said to be also provides a hermeneutical framework by which all representations are, in fact, governed. Yet, how does this affect the hermeneutics of reading a closed, canonical form, such as religious scripture? And what might an answer to this question tell us about the nature of canons (whether open or closed) in general? In the first instance, it is the prophetic (“messianic”) elements, those elements which strive for an unceasing justice, which constantly prevent the legalism of Phariseeism from ever totalizing, as we saw above. Closed canons, if they are to maintain any call to justice as a possible reality, must demonstrate a certain openness

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to, and recognition of, this tension. In the second instance, it is through the aporias inherent to authority that we sense an opening toward the potential for a “hospitality” of the canonical text, something which I will here seek to develop in relation to the processes of canonicity, and which I will develop toward the end of this section as an ethical–canonical injunction concerning violence—linking Ricoeur’s findings to the conclusion of the previous chapter. In general, these tensions within representation are divided between their totalizing and exceptional elements pitted against each other in a manner which prevents any complete totalization from ever taking place, while simultaneously securing meaning within the symbolic order. Hence, whenever this dynamic is recognized as a normative structure, it can immediately be seen as indebted to the Judaic canonical tradition as Ricoeur has already indicated. Representation as a form of quasitotalization comes to function as a form of recognition which acts “as a continuing canonization, in the same way as people have referred to continuing creation.”42 It is in fact this “continuing canonization” that marks the processes of canonicity, acts of “continuous creation” which render its processes more than just theologically speculative; there are very concrete social and political consequences at stake in such acts. Thirdly, reading this analysis through another of Ricoeur’s models for perceiving scripture, we can also see how it is through the authority of the canon that tradition is perpetuated through time, albeit in a sort of state of constant disruption at the hands of its messianic elements.43 It is this third viewpoint that signals the truly human aspect of this tension—the need which communities share in their desire to see their traditions and languages gathered together, codified and extended through time. Thus, their perpetuation also becomes an extension of the original “bringing together” (as the very definition of canonization) of texts and peoples which proceed and accompany it. It is this dynamic interaction that takes place between the acts of “bringing together” and “perpetuation” which cannot be subsumed solely under the auspices of one process or the other. It must be both acts occurring simultaneously and throughout time—these are the processes of canonicity. It is a genuine realization of the processes of canonicity that might help provide some solutions to current political–cultural problematics that seem governed by a desire only to perpetuate a given canonical norm, perceivable, either metaphorically or not, as the drawing and fortifying of boundaries and borders. If Ricoeur is right, it is the fundamental act of “bringing together” that lies at the roots of any canonical manifestation which must constantly struggle with the discontinuities found within any attempt to perpetuate its rule. And it is precisely this struggle which could potentially best

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reveal the recognition of the “other” as an exception (its messianic force) within one’s own (canonical) identity. The sociopolitical relevance of such an outlook is, to say the least, extremely profound. Any search for a “common ground” between divergent viewpoints, as a “bringing together” must ultimately begin with, becomes the basis for the always “impossible” but nevertheless vital act of translation, something which Ricoeur elsewhere terms an act of “equivalence without identity [equivalence sans identité].”44 It is through the conceptualization and reality of translation, of bringing the other into my language, that a fundamental act of hospitality can be performed despite the apparent rigidity of canonical boundaries, especially linguistic ones. If viewed from this angle, we can see how translation becomes a fundamental act of perpetuation, serving as a reminder, not only of the difficulties of perpetuation in cultural–historical terms, but also as a reminder of the biblical canon’s original context within a threatened and eventually colonized culture, its perpetual exilic position as it were. It is in this translational sense that hermeneutics firmly roots itself within our understanding of the canonical form and which Ricoeur’s writings on translation, and its subsequent demand for hospitality, might further serve to develop. The “ethical tension,” or the tension which in fact produces “the ethical,” present in the canonical form comes in the end to distinguish the differing canonical forms in our world as it points toward a “just” form of canons that should in fact be hospitable to the other, the foreigner, all excluded or even just marginalized figures within a given canon. Seeing things this way would be a step toward developing a hermeneutical consciousness of an “otherness” that remains within any canonical language, history, religion, or cultural tradition, but which is forcefully repressed in certain historical canons to be sure. As was highly relevant for Ricoeur, it was the advent of the Jewish scriptures, and their oppressive situation, we should recall, which first brought this dynamic to light. Read in conjunction with his remarks on Levinas at the conclusion of Oneself as Another, this form of canonical hospitality produces a marked focus upon the exception to any attempt at totalization.45

A happy canon? If we are to attempt to comprehend Ricoeur’s formulation of the canonical, in its ideological as well as its sacred forms, we are left at this point with some very perplexing questions, such as: if all canonical works are then some form of

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ideology, is there a way to gauge their ideological commitments over against their sacred content? Does the recognition of the ideological undercurrents within a canonical religious text serve to dismiss their sacrality in some way, or does it in fact open up a justifiable political dimension toward being religious? In what way would scripture then not be subject to critical assessment? And, perhaps most appropriately in light of where his work had taken him in the search to relate history and memory/forgetting, is the sacred canonical text, by this logic, the exactly appropriate coincidence of forgetting what should be forgotten and remembering what should be remembered? Ricoeur does not offer any direct answers to these important questions which arise when one juxtaposes his views on the sacred text with his work on memory, history, and forgetting. Bearing this in mind, what becomes clear, at least in this later work, is that a necessary forgetting comes to represent the necessity of moving forward in history, of establishing identities, of making life livable, in contrast, he reminds us, to “Funes the Memorious,” Borges’ clever fictional creation who lies nearly paralyzed on his bed, unable to forget anything he has experienced in his life.46 Perhaps this description of memory’s necessity is also a signal toward the essentiality of “forgetting” the noncanonical, a sign cast in stark relief to the obsessive assemblage by some of the archive, a contrasting bulwark forever attempting to stopper the processes of forgetting. In this way, we can see how the archive is endless, always re-opened, always awaiting the next find of material that will be added on; the archive is boundless.47 The sacred canon, on the other hand, is fixed in its boundaries, closed, and awaits nothing to be added to its depth. It might here be suggested, and as it offers a completion to Ricoeur’s analysis of memory in relation to the canonical, that if it is the archive that tries never to forget, it is the canon that accepts a “forgetfulness” of what does not accord with its self-referential identity, a forgetfulness that does not attempt to “silence evil,” but rather is done in a peaceful mode, and “without anger [sans colère].”48 This would bring us, of course, as it brought Ricoeur in his study, to the doorstep of forgiveness. A canon must be (or constantly strive to become), and here following Ricoeur very closely on this, that which practices forgiveness, or “the horizon common to memory, history, and forgetting.”49 Here in consideration of the canonical form independent of (though still based upon) its religious function, this idea of a canon being that which forgives would certainly, if practiced, provide a fitting challenge to any who attack a canon’s existence solely based upon what it appears to exclude (as was the main contention of Agamben). By definition,

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a canon’s degree of “forgiveness” might rather be revealed in its recognition of the “other” lying at its own core.50 This is to say that viewing forgiveness from a hermeneutical perspective allows us to see the broader implications for forgiving in general, that is, to demonstrate forgiveness as an act immersed in a field of pre-existing social representations. What becomes evident from this is that the canonical form, as with memory, must engage in acts of forgetfulness, not to purposely exclude or do violence to others outside the canonical community, but in order to establish the boundaries of identification (representation) in the first place. This is what we might here call, following so many thinkers of the past century, the “violent” mark of cultural and symbolic signification. As the case has often been made, a canon can only function as canon if it is perceived as such by the community which reads it, or which invests it with such a power over the members of the community.51 This focus upon the community’s relationship with the “sacred” text serves to illustrate how it is the boundaries between the sacred text and the nonsacred text, as “other” sacred texts, that define the religious community itself; “Becoming Canon and becoming Church go hand in hand.”52 The presence of those who are not quite in the community, but not quite out of the community, in fact, poses a modern-day dilemma according to Ricoeur. What becomes of the sacred text in this day and age? Does it open itself to other, formerly noncanonical texts, texts embraced by those partially in the community, but partially outside it as well? Yet, as Ricoeur points out, if these boundaries disappear, then the community itself disappears.53 Whatever change occurs in the text, another corresponding change occurs in the social identity of the community, thereby confirming the reciprocity between text and community. This is not to say, he reminds us, that these boundaries should not change; this is merely to signal the significance of what is at stake in such a redefining of the canonical. Yet, and despite this general truth of their relations, the canonical community must demonstrate permeable boundaries in relation to the others of society, not denying representational claims (recognition) on the level of the political, which would be solely an extension of a totalitarian canonical form; rather, a recognition must be offered to any “other” of a community which yet respects the distance between the different groups, an issue that Ricoeur himself takes up in his Course of Recognition.54 The canonical work offers itself as the privileged site of the generation of “symbolic mediators” that form the basis for representation and the various forms of social bonding without doing violence toward other, separate representational claims.55 This is perhaps similar to what Natalie Melas

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has referred to as ending the Eurocentric grounds for comparison; that is, finding a common ground between conflicting canons without presupposing their unity.56 In so many words, Ricoeur could be said to develop a conception of the canonical form which includes a distinction between a “more truthful” and a “more falsified” canon, expanding this to include, among their other fruits, either a “happy memory” or an abused and repressed one, though the tools for measuring such an ideological engagement remain at times somewhat vague in his work. The linkage between such a view, however, and what we saw in the previous chapter regarding canonical forms is a parallel hermeneutical development that we cannot overlook. Essentially, this contrast between canons is solidified in his earlier work on revelation in terms of subject engagement with the narrative of the sacred text, producing either an imaginative relationship of text and reader or a “vulgar form of heteronomy,” as noted above. The relationship that Ricoeur speaks of between text and reader (generally), or canon and subject (specifically and with a slightly different relationship), can be sensed in the movement toward a recognition of oneself within the narrative, a movement which always remains as an openness to the “radically other” within the text, or to the “otherness” of the text itself. This is at once to perceive the canonical text as separate from oneself and yet as invested in a relationship with its subjects. As Ricoeur remarks among some of his comments on revelation, it is a relationship of dependence which is often mistaken for a submissive, or servile will so contrary to the enlightenment project of autonomy, and as such not as likely to be perceived as the opening of the imagination toward the world which it is, and which the text creates.57 It is, rather, “a non-heteronomous dependence of conscious reflection on external testimonies.”58 This understanding might perhaps serve as Ricoeur’s modification made upon modernity’s near total rejection of one’s perceived subordination of reason to religious belief. Indeed, and though Ricoeur may appear later on to revise his position on the conflict of autonomy and heteronomy, placing them in a relationship where one’s autonomy is already bound up in a heteronomous relationship, he does not depart from endorsing the nonviolent appeal which a consciousness that renounces political sovereignty is capable of encountering in poetic discourse.59 Ricoeur, here perhaps following Levinas rather closely, though often from a critical distance, pronounces how canons are capable of producing a form of sovereignty that remains “neighborly” in the sense that it is always bound up in a particular, communal identity, illustrating the presence of an-other that

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we ourselves are. It is this recognition which is able to remain nonviolent in its appeal even as it marks one as a member of its social offspring, presenting what we might follow Benjamin (and thus Assmann who cites Benjamin on just this point) in terming an act of “bloodless violence.” It is (ideally) this “bloodless violence” that the canon enacts when it forms a community, or even a culture within a community, inscribing its marks upon its subjects who gain an identity within the boundaries which the canon delineates. This is the case, moreover, even if the canon’s origins arise from within a violent history. Such a hermeneutic indeed follows from the analysis of the last chapter regarding the more or less violent distinctions to be made between different, already established canons. Though this definition does not address the violences which certain “more violent” canons could be said to produce (in terms of memories repressed, abused, etc) in terms of the processes of canonicity themselves, this understanding also provides a certain validation to those attempts to form a canon within a canon in an effort to attain justice (not only like Luther’s preference for Romans over James, but also in those readings which downplay certain biblical–canonical elements like its frequent justifications for slavery, etc).60 This ethical principle of focusing on a canon’s exceptional elements could also be said to generate a hermeneutics of canonicity as a privileged site of ethical activity, a project possibly aligned with the ever-present search for justice, one that could lay stress upon the importance of forgetting certain historical events, even if recorded in canonical form, in order to cultivate what Ricoeur referred to on occasion as a “happy memory.”61 In this light, the canon would seem to be (or, to constantly become) that which could cultivate a “happy memory” and in contrast to a purely ideological script appearing as (politically) totalitarian in its formation and applicability, or as that which seeks to abuse and distort memory. The failure to promote such a canonical form of “happy memory” would inevitably yield to the dissolution of the canon’s force, or its substantial hold, within and upon the culture it has helped shape. If this is indeed an apt description of a canon’s relationship to the culture which it governs, the relative absence of the canonical from Ricoeur’s epic tome on memory, history, and forgetting seems to be somewhat inexplicable and perhaps constitutes a missed opportunity to unite two often separate strands of his thought—the philosophical and the theological.62 Though, from another angle, perhaps this absence actually serves to explain the separation between these disciplines.

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At a time in history when the impact of sacred canonical texts wanes upon society, while other canonical media proliferate, when traditional religious communities disintegrate while the redefinition of other communal, transnational boundaries takes place daily, a closer inspection of the political consequences of this particular hermeneutic of communal and personal identity in relation to the canonical form seems essential.63 It would be of great importance to examine more carefully the relations of memory and forgetting, according to Ricoeur’s typology, as regards modern nation states, religious communities and social networks created and sustained by our global culture. To what degree do they cultivate or deny a “happy memory” and how might we, as global citizens, begin, sensitively and yet openly, to judge their successes and failures? Despite the daunting nature of giving answer to such questions, it remains our “modern dilemma” to work out these answers. There is no doubt that canons, whether secular or sacred, open or closed, are particular products of a contingent history, dependent upon the varied circumstances which gave rise to their creation.64 Despite this fact, however, they are also expressions of a general structure of human existence, a need to bring together elements of a people, a language, a culture—and to perpetuate those elements forward through time. They are a sign of survival as much as of refinement and culture. The choice of one particular cultural heritage, given to survive at the loss of another, can actually appear as an act of violence, no matter how subtle or overt. In an age of globalization and the various confrontations between different canonical cultures, a particular canonical reading will always dominate over another as long as we are dealing with a world of signifying social and political representations. New hybrid identities will arise, though even they will eventually become part of another dominant canonical norm. It is therefore a most fitting gesture to inspect, as Ricoeur demonstrates through the entirety of his work, the tensions inherent in any canonical text, tensions which can actually point toward a form of the canonical that itself provides a voice for the (messianic) elements necessary to counter any potential claims of totalization, or those of a greater violence seeking only to silence other traditions so that its own might survive. This would be a canon forever opening itself up to its messianic core of exceptionalism, a profound demonstration of its plurivocal elements coming into harmony with the unity (canonicity) of its texts in an attempt to lessen the hermeneutical violence of representations. This would be, in effect, an effort to seek justice no matter the loss, and perhaps most importantly, even if it is a loss to the self or to the canonical community in which the self takes root.

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Following on the heels of Derrida’s work and the conclusions drawn in the last chapter, I would suggest that Ricoeur’s work again demonstrates a general perceivable necessity for establishing a “ruling” canon, or canon within a canon, as a “necessary violence” created for the sake of cultural intelligibility, even and especially if it is a hybrid result of multiple cultures overlapping. Indeed, this is the nature of canonicity and any religion which holds a canonical form. But, perhaps in some sense too, there is a possibility opened up to us by Ricoeur’s work to read the rise and loss of canons as acts of justice carried out in historical terms, as bids for less violence instead of more. Though, as history indicates, this is not always the reason for a particular canonical culture’s demise or success. The historical task that unfolds before us is one in which we must strive, even through the recognition or elision of disparate texts, for the coming of an ever greater justice. This is to let certain (less violent) canons “reign” over other (more violent) ones, or, more practically even, to sift through the myriad of cultural–canonical material (within any particular given social field) in order to discern which elements are best preserved and which ones are needing to be discarded.65 This would, following Ricoeur’s appropriation of Levinas, be an effort to seek a form of hospitality that would posit a host who is willing to do violence even to him or herself, to let parts of one’s own cultural heritage drop off into oblivion, in order to champion the furtherance of justice itself. This dominion of the less violent over the more is what prompted Benjamin to label its force as “weak.” Yet, this force, this “weak” force alone, would perhaps be the only genuine manner in which to recognize the messianic (or perhaps even the Messiah) moving among us. The first part of this chapter has attempted to formulate a canonical hermeneutics in relation to Ricoeur’s work, providing obvious points of connection with, though also a further development of, the arguments elaborated previously (specifically as regards Assmann, Benjamin and Derrida). Such a reading is necessary, I believe, in order to provide a sound hermeneutics for interpreting these core dynamics lying at the heart of much philosophical and theological discussion of the past century. In what follows, I seek to continue the discussion already begun by bringing Ricoeur’s work further into dialogue with the ongoing debates addressed in the first part of this study, specifically as regards the contestations of Agamben. It is as such that I hope to deal with the potential for revolutionary (ultimately antinomian) activity within a hermeneutical framework. After taking a look at their convergence and yet distance, I will aim in the last part of this chapter to discuss the possibility of a radical hermeneutics that takes seriously the challenges brought against representational claims while simultaneously providing a renewed possibility for their role within our world.

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The guises of violence, or on the difficulties of constructing an ontotheological bridge between metaphor and politics Listen: the day the Palestinians become an institution, I will no longer be on their side. The day the Palestinians become a nation like other nations, I won’t be there anymore. Jean Genet

A complicating factor in developing a hermeneutical understanding however comes about when one considers the nature of revolutionary political (or theological) action, something which could be said to spring up—at least in the last century—as an (over)reliance upon the abandonment of traditional representational forms. Indeed, from the basic platforms of communism to the near-permanent “states of exception” that have dominated a number of ill-fated political projects, we have been witness to a number of nationalistic constructions that sought to portray themselves as a form of “permanent revolution,” though they could remain concretely as anything but.66 Indeed, the question that remains as relevant now as it was in the past is whether a true revolutionary spirit could ever transition into a politically solidified form? It would seem that it could only stay revolutionary at the cost of all canonical, shared forms of understanding— meaning that once a revolution becomes a “legitimate” and recognized political state, its revolutionary potential disappears and something essential is lost, as the writer and political activist Jean Genet, for one, had previously noted.67 Despite this apparent paradox, our fascination with revolutions and their potential seems to continue activating something within us that is yet essential to our experience of “being human.” Perhaps it awakens a sense of the otherness within us that we cannot ever really codify or define. Or perhaps it calls us to renegotiate those canonical selves that we are in the present, producing ever new variations of what we potentially could be. No matter what the exact nature of this fascination is, we are constantly tempted to embrace the potential within us over the rather staid political forms around us and with which we interact daily. This is to say that political slogans promising “change” will always appeal to us on some level, no matter how infrequently actual change is truly possible. In what follows, I will try to develop a determined look at this contrast as it becomes pronounced in the philosophical contrast between potentiality and actuality, or at least between the manner in which we could be said to dwell in either state. The distinction between them is no small matter—indeed at the

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heart of this tension, I would conjecture, lie the roots of our most basic political, philosophical, and theological differences. As many an astute thinker has noticed over the centuries, the difference between philosophy and politics is often a tightly maintained border. And perhaps this is rightly so. How one’s abstract theoretical musings become a concrete social reality for most is a terribly complicated issue. What more could be said about those thinkers who strayed too far into the wrong sort of political views based on their incomplete philosophical speculations (i.e., Heidegger, among others)? To throw religion into the mix in our attempts to locate a “true” or just political form would only seem to complicate matters even further and maybe run the risk of providing a legitimation for violences that would otherwise appear as simply absurd in the extreme. Despite this caution, one that we would ordinarily do well to heed with all due warning, I intend to look at the interwoven nature of these three disciplinary boundaries (philosophy, politics, and religion) inasmuch as they are often inextricably presented as an ontotheological matrix. By contrasting the work of Ricoeur with that of Agamben, I aim to bring to light some of the undisclosed connections and developments in Ricoeur’s thought that are in need of elucidation, so that a more full-bodied approach to his oeuvre might be possible. In this way, I am also aiming to provide some conclusion to the seemingly interminable struggle between representation and presentation that has thus far, in some sense, dominated the present study. Accordingly, I will seek to analyze the basic position of hermeneutics as expressed in the Aristotelian contrast between potentiality and actuality by first addressing Ricoeur’s comments on history and memory, as well as metaphor and ontotheology, in order to outline how his long-standing philosophical distance to theological claims comes to be almost completely reworked in his later writings. It is in these later writings, in fact, where a position that seeks to indicate a rereading of hermeneutics as we have come to know it thus far appears. As such, I aim to look at both the contrast and the apparent similarity between Ricoeur and the more “radical” Agamben, for whom any vestige of the political seems to be a capitulation to an unnecessary violence.

History or time There is a picture by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is

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open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm. —Walter Benjamin, Thesis IX, “On the Concept of History”68

The stark contrasts of such a depiction of history are what have undoubtedly given this image—culled from one of Walter Benjamin’s last philosophical and cultural testaments—its lasting significance. For Benjamin, history has often been caught up in its objectified (historicist) narrations such as modernity had sought to isolate, the history of the victors to be sure, even if solely undertaken as an academic enterprise or as part of any given historiographical act. Such historians were to be critiqued for their feigned objectivity, according to Benjamin, one that he placed severely at odds with a dialectical image of “weak messianic” proportions intended to upstage these monolithic visions of history, as we have already seen in the last chapter. As such, what Benjamin shows us through his image of the angel of history is the challenge inherent to all acts of historical representation—to locate the discrepancy between our recorded versions of history and time itself, the great disrupter of any attempt to codify the events that unfold within it.69 It comes as little surprise then that, when Ricoeur takes up those very questions which lie at the base of all historical representations and their relation to justice, he muses for a spell on this image, for, as he puts it “How could we fail to mention here Klee’s figure titled Angelus Novus, as it was described by Walter Benjamin in the ninth of his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’?”70 He subsequently recounts the thesis at length before speculating as to its meaning, also in-line with Benjamin’s own reflections on the subject: “What, then, is for us this storm that so paralyzes the angel of history? Is it not, under the figure of progress which is contested today, the history that human beings make and that comes crashing into the history that historians write?” Time provides an alternate vision of history through the histories that human beings ceaselessly create over and against it. If this is indeed the case, he quickly retorts, “. . . then the presumed meaning of history is no longer dependent on the latter but on the citizen who responds [donne une suite] to the events of the past. For the professional historian there

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remains, short of that receding horizon, the uncanniness of history [l’inquiétante étrangeté], the unending competition between memory’s vow of faithfulness, and the search for truth in history.”71 With reference to the potential of each citizen, the everyday human being over and against the historian’s often ideological gaze, Ricoeur constructs another entry point for his “little ethics.”72 It is within this constant struggle between one’s loyalty to a particular narrative of history, for whatever ideological, religious or cultural reasons, and these alternate accounts of history that are perpetually spun alongside the former, undermining their totalizing accounts from within, that the human being constructs itself, through its memories and through its recognition of the essential nature of narrative in one’s identity.73 As with his work on the relationship between the canonical community and those individual selves constituted within these bounds, for example, the structural narratives of both cultural and individual forms run parallel to each other, dictating their overlap and mutual interaction.74 It is in parallel fashion that we would do well to remember how any such narration of our identity is also subject to the incompletions that prevent any single identity from totalizing, with the result that we are all always-already caught up in the ongoing processes of re- and de-totalization that define the construction of the self, as Ricoeur made abundantly clear in his exercise on Time and Narrative.75 From this angle, it is easy to see how Ricoeur’s analysis of the construction of the self that we all undergo time and again translates into our particular forms of memory, history, and forgetting so central to those acts of representation that are as applicable to the self as to our representations of history in general, a point which his last major work sought further to elucidate. As he demonstrated in this context, certain memories are retained as essential to any given narration of events; certain others are forgotten, repressed, blocked, abused, controlled, obligated, or otherwise manipulated. Discerning the significant differences among these types was the challenge that Ricoeur dutifully took up, for, as he put it, “It is along the path of critical history that memory encounters the sense of justice [mémoire rencontre le sens de la justice].”76 For him, this focus on history and its ever-present alternate histories was the very means by which to comprehend the possibility for justice to be brought into our world, as well as for a just memory or self to be established. The role of justice is likewise invoked in this context because the analysis of memory, which he presents us with accordingly opens unto the plain of politics, is in fact given over to considerations of peace. No “happy memory,”

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which he will seek to disclose more fully toward the end of his study, is possible without an adequate notion of peace to accompany it. The peaceful self, as with any hope for a peaceful community, must be one that practices justice in relation to its own memories, to its own history. It must enact a just memory in order to condemn the violence of an unjust exclusion or suppression of those particular memories (or historical events) that would otherwise run counter to its particular, framed narrative. Civil peace (and I would only add that any sense of personal or inner peace would have to be established here as well), he notes, is brought about through a denial of the violence necessary to found it.77 Ricoeur here concedes that politics, historically, has been defined as external to conflict, when in reality, it is completely interwoven with justifications for and legitimations of violence. Politics, if it is ever to strive for a truer practice of peace and an accompanying truer demonstration of justice, must exercise a “forgetful memory” in the “arena of power” as the very condition of all amnesty rather than amnesia. His formulation of the difference between them, as one might suspect, is that the practice of amnesty does indeed listen to the voice of the excluded other, the “unforgetting memory” that would otherwise threaten to constantly de-stabilize its, in Benjamin’s terms, violence-preserving political aims.78 In such a way, amnesty can become a conscious choice to move away from the amnesias of power and toward a more just politics. Ricoeur reminds us of how, as with all systems of distribution and signs, politics too “expresses revocable, chance choices, bound up with the struggles that mark the violent history of societies.”79 But politics is also, if it is willing, able to move beyond these inscribed, and often deemed insurmountable, (“political”) norms. By this reading, Ricoeur certainly seems to indicate a task for political thought to be rethought anew. What Ricoeur is attempting to isolate as operative in the sphere of cultural memory is something akin to the establishment of the foundations of all societal formations in relation to their violent origins, much as Hobbes had once done.80 On this “fundamental relation of history to violence,” Ricoeur is especially quick to acknowledge this lineage of political and social thought and to develop it in much the same terms. As he puts it, Hobbes was not wrong in making political philosophy arise out of an original situation in which the fear of violent death pushes man out of the “state of nature” into the bonds of a contractual pact that, first of all, guarantees him security; moreover, there exists no historical community that has not been born out of a relation that can, without hesitation, best be likened to war. What we celebrate

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under the title of founding events [événements fondateurs] are, essentially, acts of violence legitimated after the fact by a precarious state of right.81

A “state of right,” much like the construction of the self as subject, is a construct that can be undermined from within, by those forces of “otherness” that reside within any attempt at totalizing a particular historical structure (i.e., Benjamin’s “messianic” forces). And here is where Ricoeur’s understanding of the self takes on a deep political resonance. As with history, the self can be contested and undone by its humanity (or some form of “animality” or “creaturely being” outside of our humanity; Agamben’s “creation” would certainly apply) beyond the social narratives we have built for ourselves in order to identify ourselves.82 Hence, the formulation of oneself as another expresses its profundity and becomes a continuously self-renewing proposition within a political framework, as it is a reminder that we are constantly undermined from within by forces that would seek a more just representation of us similarly as all political forms must be rethought in order to become more just. In short, we are undone over and again by alternative versions of our selves disrupting us from the inside of our fabricated identifications. And this would serve to explain, in no small measure, why violence becomes utilized precisely at those junctures where we wish not to have to be undone, where we in fact try to hold firm to defending those boundaries (both personal and collective) that must necessarily become porous once again. In this sense, there is no “unfortunate history” for Ricoeur, for history is a privileged form of an expanded collective memory; it is the foundation of any particular sense of self, even if it is eventually undermined only to be rebuilt later on. As other to itself, there is also, he reminds us, another notion of history that develops throughout time in a critical fashion, refuting the memories of a community (or individual) that “folds back upon itself [se replie] and encloses itself [se referme] within its own sufferings to the point of rendering itself blind and deaf to the suffering of other communities.”83 Though this blindness to suffering is precisely what causes suffering and allows its accompanying violence to continue to take place in our world, there is always another (though not necessarily alternate) history to be presented before the constructed versions of history with which we deal, both individually and collectively. These “little histories,” we might call them, are what make justice possible and what demonstrate the impossibility of ever totalizing any claim to power. Perhaps things really are such that, as Benjamin (and Agamben) had already discerned, time itself interrupts history, providing us with those weak messianic

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forces that are always on the side of oppressed citizens or those mere human (“creaturely”) beings that live at the local, particular levels of history, counter to the established ideological scripts of national, cultural, or religious institutions.84 For his part, Benjamin had been concerned with establishing the proper relationship between history and a more natural, fluid sense of time. He had sought to determine the proportions that each could maintain in relation to the other, and thereby to determine how they could ever be said to coexist—if such a thing were truly possible. It would seem that just as history is interrupted by a time that moves on without any need for historical formulations, so too does the creaturely being that we are live without any need for those forms of (political) subjectivity that have so often accompanied it. Yet, we could certainly still ask: what are we to retain of a natural time outside of historical time, and what are we to remember of our “animality” (as the other within, the material creation within us) beyond our human, constructed selves? In like manner, Ricoeur inquires, what is the proper balance to be struck between forgetting and remembering, these two facets of history explicitly wedded to any historiographical operation, that is, to the very coordinates of what makes us “human?” Can a proper balance between them be conceived as the true locus of peace? In reformulated terms, such questions do more than simply summarize the stakes of Ricoeur’s line of thought; they also chart an inquiry into the balance necessary between representation and presentation, or between canonical forms and messianic forces, such as has been in desperate need throughout the entire length of this study.

How metaphor reigns politically In his collection of aphorisms, fables and maxims, Agamben develops a succinct series of remarks on “The Idea of Peace.” Starting with the awkward addition of the “sign of peace” to the Christian liturgy, something which eventually fell back upon the familiar gesture of shaking hands in the absence of any genuine sign, he speculates as to what the true nature of a sign of peace might possibly resemble. What he finds is that “. . . there is not, nor can there be, a sign of peace, since true peace would only be there where all the signs were fulfilled and exhausted.”85 Perhaps it is, as Ricoeur has suggested: our historical narratives, our very cultural and religious memories, are founded on a violence concealed from sight, one that continues to be as necessary for forming communal boundaries as our political, cultural and religious constructions. Our attempts to represent

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peace are therefore always, in a sense, futile. They are still completely caught up within these ongoing battles of representation that must first be “fulfilled” or “exhausted” before any true sense of peace could possibly be grasped—again, if such a thing is even possible. It would certainly seem that, as our contemporary forms of critical analysis would have it, we have reached an impasse concerning the contentious transitions between violence and peace. This much at least is attested through what Agamben declares when he states that: Every struggle among men is in fact a struggle for recognition and the peace that follows such a struggle is only a convention instituting the signs and conditions of mutual, precarious recognition. Such a peace is only and always a peace amongst states and of the law, a fiction of the recognition of an identity in language, which comes from war and will end in war.86

It is a fiction, yes, though what remains unclear is whether or not this is a fiction we can do without, the same as asking whether or not we are capable of being truly “nonviolent,” or whether a “less violent” violence is all we are ever able to produce. This interminable state of struggle for recognition that takes place on the terrain of memory, as Ricoeur puts it, is what, pace Hobbes, Agamben detects at work within any given notion of history. This is, of course, also an essentially Marxist reading implicitly embedded within all such political sentiments (to be beyond all struggle, all history). What Agamben appears to be pointing toward, as was Marx in his own way, is a place beyond political representation as we have come to know it—an idealism as utopian as communism or the Kingdom of God in many ways, I would add.87 It is an ultimately nonviolent hope for a space beyond boundaries and borders, as much as it could possibly be beyond classifications and languages, beyond any sense of signification then. Agamben often signals such a place beyond all signs as the only place in which to approximate a real and lasting peace beyond our violent inscription in a political realm founded on warfare.88 It is by seeing it as such that he can conjecture: Not the appeal to guaranteed signs, or images, but the fact that we cannot recognize ourselves in any sign or image: that is peace—or, if you like, that is the bliss more ancient than peace which a marvelous parable of St. Francis’s defines as sojourn—nocturnal, patient, homeless—in non-recognition. Peace is the perfect empty sky of humanity; it is the display of non-appearance as the only homeland of man.89

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Whether such a land of nonrecognition as peace is possible, perhaps as a realm of pure gestures profaned of their ontotheological content, is an open question, but certainly one in need of being posed over and again. In many ways, the core of many a religious and political sentiment lies in this. What I intend to demonstrate throughout the rest of this chapter, however, is that these same tensions motivate the heart of philosophical thought as well, and that, if viewed from this angle, might offer us some real solutions to the aporias of thought we have been facing this whole time. It is of course intriguing to consider these remarks juxtaposed with Ricoeur’s own speculations on the potential of the human being apart from its normal articulation as a being caught up in its work, or equally to frame these thoughts beside his remarks on recognition in general.90 What he considers, at the conclusion to his monumental study on the various ways of understanding history is the nature of a forgetting that would not be a form of “work,” but would rather provide a “liberation from care [liberation du souci],” with care being understood as the fundamental condition of the human being, similarly as it was for Heidegger.91 But, just as we might ask of Agamben, how are we to inhabit this world without our common shared preoccupation with work? Does Ricoeur not come across here as idealistic as Agamben in this regard, attempting to comprehend a space for the human being to exist outside the normal routine of our relation to our world that is made by our work? In short, and more closely aligning Agamben’s comments with Ricoeur’s formulations of the self (as another) than would most likely seem appropriate to many, Ricoeur’s words in this context would appear to remove the human being from the everyday realities we know altogether, forcing us to consider what lies beyond a world we consider as the only genuine possibility.92 We might conjecture, moreover, that this effort is one with his attempt to engage in a form of forgetfulness that would explain why “there is no politics of forgiveness” because it is likewise removed from our everyday forms of politics. Yet, if forgiveness is possible, for Ricoeur, it is possible only insofar as it is removed from a political realm. Perhaps then a nonpolitical (and so nonviolent) existence is possible for the creaturely-beings that we are, the threshold of what always expressed for Ricoeur the limits of the theological.93 Though Agamben’s work has indeed often been criticized for espousing a form of “political nihilism,” just such a reaching beyond the political as we know it might indeed lie latent within Ricoeur’s conjectures on this point as well.94 And perhaps such an apolitical sphere that expresses a realm beyond the purely political would serve to explain why the theological (as beyond the philosophical) was of great interest

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to Ricoeur, for it pointed toward a structural problem of thought inherent to the hermeneutical method, one that he needed to more fully uncover and which could be expressed as lying at the heart of the distinction between potentiality and actuality. Getting to the heart of this problematic, therefore, might actually serve to address the questions we have been lingering over for quite some time.

Potentiality versus actuality The essential tension between Ricoeur and Agamben can be sensed acutely in their varied renderings of Aristotle’s division between potentiality and actuality, a topic which both authors take up at central points within their writings.95 Their respective positions say as much about their divergent political (and perhaps religious) views as they do about their philosophical ones. As may be obvious already at this point, Ricoeur will find in Aristotle’s contrast a foundation for all hermeneutical understanding, from the philosophical to the political and very much in that order. For Agamben, however, Aristotle’s position, one that he claims is often misunderstood on this very point, leads many to take an ultimately indeterminate position (that of hermeneutics) rather than to the radical disjuncture with politics that he reads Aristotle as subtly advocating. It would not be an exaggeration to suggest that their varied readings of Aristotle, in fact, formulate the basis of their worldviews, as I intend to explain in what follows. To begin with, Ricoeur’s explication of Aristotle’s distinction between actuality (energeia) and potentiality (dunamis) provides the basic coordinates from which all of hermeneutics can be said to proceed. In this context, it is simply formulated in these terms: . . . if energeia-dunamis were simply another way of saying praxis . . . the lesson of ontology would have no bearing; it is instead to the extent [mesure] that energeiadunamis irrigates fields of application other than human action that its fecundity becomes manifest. In Aristotle’s text it matters little that sometimes dunamis is invoked on behalf of the physics of motion, and sometimes pure actuality on behalf of cosmotheology. What is essential is the decentering [décentrement] itself—both upward and downward in Aristotle—thanks to which energeiadunamis points toward a ground of being [un fond d’être], at once potentiality and actuality [à la fois puissant et effectif] against which human action stands out [se détache].96

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In such fashion, the tension between potentiality and actuality, mirrored in so many ways by those potential messianic forces working throughout any embodied, actual (canonical), and historical form, is played out as a permanent tension on the field of hermeneutics, the minimum measure of any given culturally-intelligible representation. Likewise, for Ricoeur, the self is founded on this circular tension between potentiality and actuality, a tension which can never be effaced in the realm of representations as such. What Ricoeur is after is a “ground at once actual and in potentiality [fond à la fois effectif et puissant],” that which never ceases to be both at the same time, and precisely because, as Aristotle had noted, these two conceptual limitations are themselves preceded by nothing—and thus, so often escape our attempts to define them.97 They are the inherent points of contrast embedded within any given definition, indeed as the tensional conditions that provide any sense of definition in the first place.98 Ricoeur admits that Aristotle had sought to grant potentiality an ontological status of its own, despite the apparent absurdity of such a claim, but that he had also been careful to define the potency of a thing always with respect to actuality.99 There is therefore a “circular definition” presented through the juxtaposition of terms, though it is one that is perhaps called into question by a fragment from Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Ricoeur notes, one that ostensibly links potentiality to a form of contemplation itself superior to actuality, though he does not address this possibility in Aristotle’s thought directly.100 Hence, the tension between energeia and dunamis remains for him a dynamic one, a tension involving both what is at the center of our representations (our actuality) and what could be said to de-center those very same representations (the potentiality latent within actuality). What we are approaching in the end, is a “ground of being, at once potentiality and actuality.”101 By viewing things as such, Ricoeur’s reading of Aristotle certainly coheres with his general hermeneutical framework through which he perceives the necessity for all acts of representation to conform to this scheme of a concrete actualized form and its potential for otherness lurking within that constantly threatens to undo it, no matter whether this concerns political, philosophical, cultural, or religious forms. It is consequently of great interest that Agamben’s attempt to locate a presentation beyond representation will drive straight back to the heart of Aristotle’s schema as well, marking a preference for potentiality as a pure presentation (of the “thing itself ”) beyond any conceived actuality as a general representation of something. This preference, I would add, is rehearsed in his thought on numerous occasions in his writing and is the cornerstone of his critique of established political, philosophical, cultural, and religious forms.

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Accordingly, as he reads the same section of Aristotle’s Metaphysics to which Ricoeur makes allusion though refrains from embracing, What Aristotle undertakes to consider in Book Theta of the Metaphysics is, in other words, not potentiality as a merely logical possibility but rather the effective modes of potentiality’s existence. This is why, if potentiality is to have its own consistency and not always disappear immediately into actuality, it is necessary that potentiality be able not to pass over into actuality, that potentiality constitutively be the potentiality not to (do or be), or, as Aristotle says, that potentiality be also im-potentiality (adynamia).102

That potentiality retains the possibility of being ontologically constituted as separate from actuality, and that this could in fact define a certain “state of existence” (a “form of life” beyond representation)103 is what Agamben detects at work in Aristotle’s formulations over and beyond what most commentators have considered. This possibility is latent, it would seem, within potentiality’s possibility to not pass over into actuality, to remain, as it were, forever ensconced within itself—potentiality as both its own potential and its own impotential, though without this impotentiality being or becoming an actualized form. As he clarifies, “What is potential can pass over into actuality only at the point at which it sets aside its own potential not to be (its adynamia). To set im-potentiality aside is not to destroy it but, on the contrary, to fulfill it, to turn potentiality back upon itself in order to give itself to itself.”104 This ability, he stresses, is what led Avicenna to label it as “the perfect potentiality,” typified by the scribe who does not write.105 Were this simply a minor (or even major!) philosophical point, perhaps its significance could be downplayed or brushed aside as inconsequential to our lived realities—a matter concerning theory alone. What Agamben conjectures next, however, is that it is precisely this distinction between a misunderstood potentiality and our lived actualities that founds and centers our understanding of western politics (and ultimately religion) as a whole. He even goes so far as to suggest that Aristotle was the one who bequeathed our western political forms to us through his comprehension of this distinction. Such a giving can be seen, he suggests, when one considers that “The potentiality that exists is precisely the potentiality that cannot pass over into actuality . . .. This potentiality maintains itself in relation to actuality in the form of its suspension; it is capable of the act in not realizing it, it is sovereignly capable of its own im-potentiality.”106 And with this entrance of the concept of “sovereignty,” Agamben forges the profound link that animates his political critique in its near entirety: potentiality

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reigns sovereign in a sense entirely severed from concrete forms of political (sovereign) power. Dwelling in a state of actuality, for Agamben, is the traditional sovereign gesture par excellence in both its ancient and modern conceptualizations. It is a realm given over entirely to proclaiming the necessity of things as they are (i.e., violence, statehood, etc) and as opposed to potentiality’s disclosure of our radical contingency (hence, the possibility of less violence, relations without statehood, etc). The forms of sovereignty that have reigned in actual political scenarios throughout history are so many attempts of humanity to establish itself as a “human” over the “animal,” to cloak our fragility with the guise of an always-already rational and political power, something that was subsequently codified by our western religious traditions as the ontotheological gesture par excellence.107 What Aristotle effectively does, in Agamben’s eyes, is to establish the coordinates of western political thought as they affect our entire structure of being in the world, dictating a horizon of political activity based on a model of sovereignty as actuality, therefore portraying our actual world, mired in its various contested representations, as a near-complete concession to sovereign power. As he will frame the discussion, Potentiality (in its double appearance as potentiality to and as potentiality not to) is that through which Being founds itself sovereignly, which is to say, without anything preceding or determining it (superiorem non recognoscens) other than its own ability not to be. And an act is sovereign when it realizes itself by simply taking away its own potentiality not to be, letting itself be, giving itself to itself.108

Like the human being that has trouble defining itself in relation to the animal world, often giving only circular definitions such as “the human is the animal that is capable of perceiving itself as human,”109 sovereign power is that which is sovereign simply because it declares itself to be sovereign, like the planting of a flag on foreign soil in order to claim that land as belonging to some distant nation-state. What we are dealing with, in fact, is the bare minimum gesture of signification as bound up with the basic coordinates of sovereign power, a relationship only further solidified by the flags, maps, boundaries, and walls which our world continues to construct over the surface of the entire planet. Consequently, if seen from this point of view, sovereignty is indissociable from the governing fields of representation active within any given cultural or political matrix, from nation-states to religious traditions. This is the case for Agamben because our understanding of the state of actuality, insofar as it

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is generally conceived of as necessary, allows representations to be signified as essential, and as therefore inextricable from the fields of power woven to them. Though his claims have drawn the recurring critique that he is politicallyspeaking a “nihilist,” Agamben’s challenge to politics given through the possibility of an existence apart from sovereign power does provide a tempting countercritique to those acceptances of political representation accounted for on a given hermeneutical plane. In this sense, Agamben’s divergence from Ricoeur and Ricoeur’s reading of Aristotle could not be more pronounced. This contrast between an acceptance of the necessity of representations, as found in Ricoeur’s position, and a rejection of sovereign forms of power in favor of the hope for a presentation beyond all representations, as championed by Agamben, is one that no doubt motivates their widely divergent readings of Spinoza as well. For Ricoeur, Spinoza’s Ethics points toward a notion of God as act (energeia), a truth emergent for him perhaps because he places Spinoza’s problematic conceptualization of God (as pantheistic, or possibly atheistic) to the side.110 For Agamben, however, it is precisely this facet of Spinoza’s thought that motivates his subversions of any representation of God, for if God could be conceived as already being everything that is, there is only the pure regression of the infinite into the finite, a constant disruption of all that is (actuality) in favor of that infinite force which could be said to always surpass it (its never-ceasing potential).111 For all of this, however, I yet want to ask: to what degree is their potential disagreement a complete divergence? For Agamben, our selves are little more than a “fiction of an identity in language,” yet capable of outlasting any signification placed upon them. For Ricoeur, his remarks on the nature of metaphor within language as being a simultaneous expression of the thing itself (its “being”) as well as its negation (its “being not”), such as we find in The Rule of Metaphor, might yet find a general structural affinity with Agamben, though not a complete alignment to be sure. For Ricoeur, there is a paradox of all representational acts that “. . . consists in the fact that there is no other way to do justice to the notion of metaphorical truth than to include the critical incision of the (literal) ‘is not [n’est pas]’ within the ontological vehemence of the (metaphorical) ‘is [est]’ ”.112 The subsequent question to ask, for Ricoeur, and the one that really matters (for multiple levels of society), is how this metaphorical truth unfolds in reality, that is, in our concrete political and cultural lives. In other words, if “being as” expresses both being and not being, how is the “implicit ontology of the metaphorical utterance” to be comprehended as a social and political reality?113 This would be, in many ways, the same question that Agamben so

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relentlessly pursues. And, traditionally speaking, as we have seen already, the only way to justify their connection has been the domain of ontotheology, that which Agamben contests and Ricoeur could be enlisted to defend. There has typically been great merit placed upon those efforts intended to construct an ontotheological bridge between metaphor and politics, to complete the journey from one to the other through the theological justifications given for sovereign and transcendent ontological forces, from God to the King, and from the King to Man (of course, as traditionally opposed to “woman”). In each transition, in each linkage of power between particular forms, there is a “movement beyond” the thing itself that carries the loaded charge of transcendence. As Ricoeur for one discerns, “And so, whether we speak of the metaphorical character of metaphysics or of the metaphysical character of metaphor, what must be grasped is the single movement that carries [emporte] words and things beyond [au-delà], meta.”114 By portraying the movement of transcendence as such, he is able to consider the act of signification as inextricably bound up with the creation of history itself.115 And it is from this basic platform that he is returned to something like Benjamin’s weak messianic force moving within history, disrupting its monolithic (totalitarian) tendencies, for whereas concepts attempt to pin a thing down, our creative imagination puts a demand to conceptual thought and attempts to present an idea beyond its inscription in our traditional networks of representation.116 What Ricoeur is driving toward is essentially the fact that our creative potential at times takes precedence over the actuality of our existing political and social forms—though the qualification “at times” must be further developed as possibly the distinctive difference between Ricoeur and Agamben. For example, and drawing on the same rich Aristotelian legacy in this regard as Agamben, Ricoeur determines how our potentiality, in reality, at times holds precedence over the actuality of those existing social and political forms before us in order to rejuvenate them and to re-determine their actual form. Moreover, he conjectures that seeing matters as such is the only possible way to access the thing in-itself beyond our collective, cultural representations of it. We may see the thing in itself but we are nevertheless returned to our representations in the end. For Agamben, this same realization, though with a certain one-sided emphasis upon the possibility of remaining entirely within one’s potentiality, has led him to seek to eradicate any guises of the ontotheological still lingering within our culture, and to attempt to behold the “thing itself ” beyond any representations of it—this, for him, is the task of profaning what was once held to be sacred and of a search for those “forms of life” lived beyond these prescribed boundaries

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of ontotheological sovereignty. By doing so, he hopes to dismantle the ontotheological bridge between metaphor (potentiality) and politics (actuality), perpetually favoring the former over the false premises of the latter. As I have tried to indicate in the above, albeit briefly, though Ricoeur’s work has appeared over the years as a justification for the necessity of representation, it is hard not to read his remarks on forgiveness and our possible existence apart from work as precariously balanced on the cusp of formulations similar to those of Agamben, albeit perhaps “balanced” with the necessity for representations remaining yet before him. His interest in, though reluctance to embrace, the theological may however, as he envisioned toward the end of his life, point to the difficulty he felt in stretching his philosophical claims to their limits—the very starting point of the theological, yet immersed in the tensions of the philosophical and the political.

Tentative conclusions to a perpetual debate What philosopher worthy of the name prior to Heidegger has not meditated on the metaphor of the way [métaphore du chemin] and considered himself to be the first to embark on a path that is language itself addressing him? Who among them has not sought the “ground” and the “foundation” [le “sol” et le “fond”], the “dwelling” and the “clearing” [la “demeure” et la “clairière”]? Who has not believed that truth was “near” and yet difficult to perceive and even more difficult to say, that it was hidden and yet manifest, open and yet veiled? Who has not, in one way or another, linked the forward movement of thought to its ability to “regress,” to take step “backward”? Who has not attempted to distinguish the “beginning of thinking [commencement de la pensée]” from any chronological starting point? Who has not conceptualized his own task essentially as a labour of thought [un travail de la pensée] directed toward itself and against itself?117

As I pointed out in the last chapter, it was at a certain point in composing his Arcades Project that Benjamin seems to have suddenly realized that his obsession with origins, with finding any origin at all, in fact, was the same guiding principle that had driven his early work on the German genre of Trauerspiel (or “tragic play”), as well as his regard for biblical narrative.118 As he was to indicate, the search for an origin was central to understanding our search for a presentation beyond our historical representations. The only thing that remained to be seen for Benjamin, and what Agamben pushes us ever closer toward, is the manner in which the very dichotomous structure of representation/presentation is

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one opened up to us by religious thought (specifically in the contrast between certain forms of Judaism and Christianity) which was itself an inherent part of our western philosophical tensions, tensions then of thought itself, as we saw in the first chapter. And so, we would do well to remember that, even if Agamben’s reading of Aristotle is correct on this score, we have yet to ascertain the truth (or potential) of what these claims suggest. Is a realm without representation, political sovereignty, or even language (as the ultimate signifying act) possible for human beings? What would such a realm resemble other than that ever-elusive “Kingdom of God” that seems to mirror so many of Agamben’s claims on this count? And in even more directly philosophical terms: Can ontotheology, the basis for so many claims made in order to justify our sovereign representations, truly ever be overcome?119 Ricoeur was certainly aware of the temptation of philosophers to believe themselves to have conceptualized thoughts that no one had previously thought, to theorize realms of political and religious existence beyond what we see before us. His emphasis on this desire within each philosopher to find the origins of all thought, all language, all politics, and truth does indeed give us pause for thought, especially as his awareness merges with Derrida’s critique of Agamben as the thinker who seeks to be the first to disclose such insights, the thinker who in fact attempts to be sovereign over all other philosophers. In the end, I find it helpful to juxtapose these reflections on the contrast between revolutions and political praxis, between Agamben and Ricoeur, with Derrida’s view on Benjamin’s relationship to violence, which serves as one possible interpretive key for the impasse explored here. For Derrida, there are only those representations before us that ultimately matter, and that solely provide meaning to our world. The distinction to note, it would seem, is only how in league our representations are with the violences done in this world. Which are more complicit with violence? Which less so? If a true state of nonviolence is possible—and as Agamben seems to suggest it is—perhaps it is only discernable after first progressing through a series of less violent (representational) forms. Whether this is something immediately achievable (as in Agamben), or should be sought out in increments (as in Ricoeur and Derrida) seems at times to matter very little. In this light, the fact that our religious, political, and philosophical speculations rest so firmly on the same foundation appears as almost negligible. Instead of gauging our global clashes in terms of these overly simplistic categorizations, what if, following this critique, we were to measure one’s relation to violence itself as an index of identifications?

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Instead of “Christians” and “Jews,” what if there were only those more or less willing to do violence to others and to themselves? And what if, instead of hiding behind particular religious labels as justifications for our actions, what if our actions spoke for themselves, and our representations formed according to such patterns of behavior? Perhaps becoming more aware of these structural resonances between identifications and violence might be a genuine first step toward lessening the violence perpetuated and sustained by those who would pretend they could identify themselves otherwise.

A Levinasian core: On an ethical affinity between Judith Butler and Paul Ricoeur Though it might sound a bit dismissive of Agamben’s most central claims to suggest that it matters little in practical terms what is or is not possible, it is my wager at this point that the formation of a radical hermeneutical position within a theological context, one that takes seriously the various positions we establish in relation to violent actions, can actually lessen our concern for what is possible and lead, more dramatically, toward a transformation of the world we live in. Would such a wager be that far off the mark from the truth our religious and philosophical reasonings seek to uncover? For all of his antagonism toward the realm of representations, Agamben yet says a curious thing in a genre-crossing work that, in many ways, comes closest to presenting the core of his own work. In Idea of Prose, Agamben states that “the only true representation is that which represents the gap between itself and truth.”120 Whether this statement represents a momentary lapse in his overall argumentation or is fully compatible with his stance on the division between presentation/representation could certainly be cause for further investigation. At any rate, it does seem to point toward the possibility for a genuine “presentation” to appear in the failures of representation, and not external to them. That is, perhaps our representations, by presenting their failures, are capable of actually achieving the desired success of a presentation. In other words, the existence of language itself may not be simply an obstacle to be overcome, but the very fabric through which any possible presentation becomes visible, whether or not such a “final” presentation issues in through one’s words or not. Taking up the failures of representation as a sort of presentation within representation is the task of a radical hermeneutics to be sure.121 It was also

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the task of the concept of “appresentation” or that which attempts to respect the failures of representation without yet acknowledging the possibility of an authentic presence, as Husserl had once conceived it.122 Formulating such a conception was Husserl’s explicit (phenomenological) intention and such was also what Derrida seized upon—albeit in a subtle manner throughout his career—in order to found his most critical deconstructive gestures.123 Through an examination of the work of Ricoeur alongside that of Judith Butler on the issue of representation, and even more precisely on their readings of Levinas’ contentions with the phenomenological project, I am here locating appresentation as that which takes place precisely at the site of our “failure” to represent both the self and the other. This is a failure that must be maintained if anything is to be faithfully re-presented to us, almost paradoxically then as the only way to guarantee that any trace of a presence be felt. With this insight, we are returned to our fundamental starting point for this study, the contrasts between representation and presentation, to be sure, but also between dialectics and antinomian impulses. As Theodor Adorno once eloquently put it, “The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy.”124 As such, he found, the contradiction inherent to dialectics “indicates the untruth of identity [Unwahrheit von Identität], the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived [des Aufgehens des Begriffenen im Begriff].”125 And though such remainders have generated a number of antinomian responses in order to adequately address their situatedness (Paul’s focus on the “remnant” would be one such example perhaps),126 there is yet another way possible to view the representations of history, one that invites our attention once again.

The dialectics of oneself as another For Ricoeur, mimesis is a process that is dialectical in structure, and this is the case even despite Ricoeur’s seeming dismissal of traditional (historical) dialectics.127 Yet, dialectics do matter for Ricoeur, and in contrast to those antinomian forces we have been speculating on since the first chapter. What is significant in his use of certain particular mimetic dialectics (i.e., his use of the processes of totalization, de-totalization, and re-totalization in Time and Narrative), I would assert, is the manner in which he is able to bring such methods to bear on our (narrative) constructions of the self in relation to an other, or that which comes

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to paramount importance in his analysis of the Levinasian attempt to mediate between these two polarities. It is here moreover that I would locate the specific uniqueness of Ricoeur’s thought within twentieth-century philosophy, not to mention why I find him to be a helpful partner at this late stage in an ongoing dialogue. For Levinas, of course, any notion of a “self ” could only be achieved as a form of presentation beyond representation, what he sought ultimately to disclose in its full phenomenological richness.128 For Ricoeur, however, this presentation is able to exist only insofar as we can speak of it, insofar, that is, as our narratives about it reshape the very presencing of our narratively constructed selves. For example, on the movement of (re)presentation between Husserl and Levinas, Ricoeur tries, in fact, to find a rapprochement between them, as well as a space for himself. As he introduces the dilemma: Husserl gave the name “appresentation” to this givenness [donation] in order to express, on the one hand, that unlike representations in signs or images [la difference de la représentation par signe ou par image], the givenness of the other is an authentic givenness and, on the other hand, that unlike the originary, immediate givenness of the flesh to itself, the givenness of the other never allows me to live the experiences of others and, in this sense, can never be converted into originary presentation. This has also been said elsewhere about memory: the series of memories of others can never find a place in the series of my own memories. In this sense, the gap can never be bridged between the presentation of my experience and the appresentation of your experience.129

The shift in understanding our ontological moorings occurs precisely at this juncture. It is furthermore upon this hinge that one could situate the entire deconstructive (spectral) procedure, as it was in Derrida’s reckoning with Husserlian phenomenology that he too found a way to maintain the contours of a logic of representation while yet maintaining the absolutely irreducible sense of difference (through avoiding a “metaphysics of presence”) that resonated throughout his work.130 Derrida’s reading of Husserl in this regard also makes sense when one stops to consider his profound indebtedness to and yet critique of Levinas.131 For Derrida, there will only always be these representations (or texts); for Levinas, however, such a maneuver appears akin to Husserl’s attempt to save representation, an effort Levinas labeled as being both “idealist and solipsistic,” according to Ricoeur.132 For Levinas, a respect for the other’s difference meant that the assimilation of the other into our own self-identity must be prevented. As Ricoeur reads this

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effect, “To represent something to oneself is to assimilate it to oneself [l’assimiler à soi], to include it in oneself, and hence to deny its otherness [nier l’altérite].”133 There is, in Levinas, a certain distaste for representation, as, in his philosophy, those myriad attempts to understand the other before us in reality involve a reduction of the other into a schematic, categorical representation. This is a move that must be avoided, even at the cost of losing our (representative) sense of self. The matter is brought to a decisive head by Levinas in terms of selfunderstanding, recognition and any sense of relationality with the other before us as the other will consistently and perpetually sever our attempts to incorporate them. Again following Ricoeur’s reading of this: Because the Same signifies totalization and separation, the exteriority of the Other can no longer be expressed in the language of relation. The Other absolves itself from relation [s’absout de la relation], in the same movement by which the Infinite draws free [soustrait] from Totality. But how are we to think the irrelation implied by this otherness in its movement of absolution?134

The major questions however remain: how are we to perceive the presentation of the other beyond our inscriptions of the other into our self-understanding (that is, our representations)? How are we to recognize them? How are we to relate? For Levinas, this break is facilitated by the use of hyperbole, the figure of “excess in philosophical argumentation.”135 Levinas’ use of hyperbole is invoked in order to destroy the “ruins of representation” by reaching back to that which is prior to any beginning (an an-archy beyond the origin).136 As one might suspect, and certainly insofar as all of this resonates quite deeply with Agamben’s formulations thus far, this refusal to concede ground to any presupposition of a sovereign self means that Levinas does not try to attest to the presence of a “self ” as such; he refuses any attempt to locate the origins (arche) of a sovereign subjectivity (an attempt Derrida diagnosed as “archive fever”). Instead, he aims for the ultimate hyperbolic statement: that of substitution, the Other for the I, the I only insofar as it is hostage to the other.137 What is of supreme interest is that this reading, for Ricoeur, does not place Levinas outside of the phenomenological project altogether. Rather, From this confrontation between Husserl and Levinas results the suggestion that there is no contradiction in holding the movement from the Same toward the Other and that from the Other toward the Same to be dialectically complementary. The two movements do not annihilate one another to the extent that one unfolds in the gnoseological dimension of sense, the other in the ethical dimension of injunction. The assignment of responsibility, in the second dimension, refers

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to the power of self-designation [autodésignation], transferred, in accordance with the first dimension, to every third person assumed to be capable of saying “I.” Was not this intersecting [croisée] dialectic of oneself and the other than self anticipated in the analysis of the promise? If another were not counting on me, would I be capable of keeping my word [parole], of maintaining myself?138

Here is where Ricoeur begins—albeit subtly—to instantiate his own claims. My word, it would seem, is to be situated, can only be situated, in relation to another, the other with whom I exist in a heteronymous relationship. In the end, there is the hyperbole of separation, on the one hand, and the hyperbole of the face that is before me, on the other hand, its epiphany with which I am confronted. The only way to bridge the gap between two forever separated faces, according to Ricoeur, is through language, through the narrative(s) we build in-between these fundamentally divided and yet intertwined entities we call self and other. As he puts it, “In short, is it not necessary that a dialogue superpose a relation on the supposedly absolute distance between the separate I and the teaching Other?”139 The true ontological role of metaphor arises as just such an effort to cross before the self and the other.140 This ongoing, historical dialogue becomes the very connection between the self and the other, what establishes our relation and what sustains it throughout time (and, in a religious sense, this is perhaps the function and significance of scripture, to hold us to the other whom we could not otherwise relate to, I might add). The centrality of narrative comes about as a linkage of the self and the other, an always fictive though essential relation between them. This fiction that is always encased in a realm of representations, yet affects (albeit in some distorted form) the presentation of each self that we all always-already are. This is Ricoeur’s answer to the phenomenological problem of what we are to do with the reality of appresentation and the failure to express a genuine presentation of the “thing itself ”. It thus appears that the affection of the self by the other than self finds in fiction a privileged milieu for thought experiments that cannot be eclipsed by the “real” relations of interlocution and interaction. Quite the opposite, the reception of works of fiction contributes to the imaginary and symbolic constitution of the actual exchanges [échanges effectifs] of words and actions. Being-affected in the fictive mode [le mode fictif] is therefore incorporated into the self ’s beingaffected [l’être-affecté du soi] in the “real” mode [le mode «réel»].141

For Ricoeur, such thoughts were the cornerstone for understanding our elusive sense of self constructed through the narratives that sustain us.

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In what follows, I wish to link such a formulation of the narrative self to the political tensions and realities that we continuously face through the shared Levinasian critique of Judith Butler, one of the leading social theorists of our age. My intention in doing so is to expand upon Ricoeur’s hermeneutical approach, bringing it into conversation with a critical theorist capable of utilizing a similar response to Levinas’ work. As such, I am hoping to show how Butler’s reflections on this score serve, not only to provide a linkage between Ricoeur’s hermeneutics and critical thought, but also to give a direct response to those challenges to representation that we have been following thus far.

Judith Butler on the dialectics of representation For those familiar with the work of Judith Butler, it was something of a surprise, subtle as it may have been presented by her, to witness a profound, and as yet unresolved shift in her thinking. Such a shift could be characterized as such: if her early work had sought to present an individual beyond any inscription in a given representational matrix of intelligibility, her later thoughts have gravitated more toward admitting the necessity for historical representational frameworks as markers of individual and collective identity. As she once put it in an interview, to liberate a representation “. . . from its prior moorings in an established ontology is not to say that it will not acquire a new one.”142 And she adds, “So, I guess I would be a little less optimistic about the possibility of a radical unmooring than I was in 1993.”143 Part of what pushed her somewhat beyond her radical critique against (gendered) representations in her earlier work Gender Trouble (1990) was the acknowledgment that certain forms of recognized subjectivity (such as when gay marriage is legalized, for example) are precisely what allow some people in specific societies to experience forms of social recognition as a type of liberation.144 This is to say, though there might be sufficient reasons to question the institution of marriage itself as a form of oppression, for many, there is yet  also a psychically liberating experience that takes place on the level of subjectivity that cannot be ignored. As such, Butler’s study of the “psychic life of power” proved instrumental in this regard, as our social structures of power do affect how we perceive and construct our very selves.145 Offering this recognition as a form of “universality,” she was able to effectuate a shift in her thinking, one that would come in the end to resemble the Derridean project of contesting and deconstructing particular canonical forms precisely so that they might be

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re-constructed in a more just form. “Universality, in that sense, would not be violent or totalizing; it would be an open-ended process, and the task of politics would be to keep it open, to keep it as a contested site of persistent crisis and not to let it be settled.”146 Hence, in very real and politically concrete terms, she is able to state elsewhere that: When we consider the ordinary ways that we think about humanization and dehumanization, we find the assumption that those who gain representation, especially self-representation, have a better chance of being humanized, and those who have no chance to represent themselves run a greater risk of being treated as less than human, regarded as less than human, or indeed, not regarded at all.147

In many ways, the real question becomes one that takes into consideration the form of dialectics Butler is proposing, situated as she often is in-between the hyperbolic statements of Levinas and Benjamin (perhaps more than simply akin to Agamben’s own hyperbolic language), on the one hand, and Derrida, on the other. For Benjamin and for Levinas, it could be argued, there is a certain pointing beyond representation, an excess that brings all representational dialectics “to a standstill” (to quote Benjamin). Yet, for Butler, there is a defense of representation on certain political levels that can moreover be a form of liberatory praxis. Realizing a sense of responsibility beyond the exclusionary norms of society,148 however, leads her to formulate a conception of “interdependency” that certainly is not wholly unfamiliar to Levinas’ thought.149 And this might serve to explain to some degree why Levinas is and remains a central dialogue partner in her work as of late. Her language and usage of admittedly Levinasian themes in her writing has drawn some attention, and not all of it positive.150 What is clear though is that she seeks in some fashion to define a sense of self that is dependent upon the other and therefore also upon the boundaries constructed between the other and myself: “If I have a boundary at all, or if a boundary can be said to belong to me, it is only because I have become separated from others, and it is only on condition of this separation that I can relate to them at all. So the boundary is a function of the relation, a brokering of difference, a negotiation in which I am bound to you in my separateness.”151 In the boundaries that exceed the self, we find ourselves. We find ourselves in relation to the other who lies on the other side of the boundary before me. “If I seek to preserve your life, it is not only because I seek to preserve my own, but because who ‘I’ am is nothing without your life, and life itself has to be rethought as this complex, passionate,

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antagonistic, and necessary set of relations to others.”152 Therefore what is true for her is “. . . that the subject that I am is bound to the subject I am not, that we each have the power to destroy and to be destroyed, and that we are bound to one another in this power and this precariousness. In this sense, we are all precarious lives.”153 In her efforts to move beyond a singular “human form” and toward an “unbound” bodily being (and therefore, I would claim, maintaining some sense of its “radicality”), Butler yet determines how dealing with the tensions of constructed subjects is a task well worth undertaking.154 She is not seeking to rehabilitate a notion of “the subject,” but rather to inspect how subjects are constructed within any particular grid of historical tensions, such as those between violence and nonviolence, and thus to push the boundaries of subjectivity to their very breaking point.155 As she puts it, “Violence and nonviolence are not only strategies or tactics, but form the subject and become its constitutive possibilities and, so, an ongoing struggle.”156 Hence, for her, “The critique of violence must begin with the question of the representability of life itself: what allows a life to become visible in its precariousness and its need for shelter, and what is it that keeps us from seeing or understanding certain lives in this way?”157 In other words, the representations that structure our world are very real indeed, and we neglect them at our own peril. Accordingly, in an essay on “The Claim of Non-Violence,” she pursues a consideration of nonviolence as an appeal or as an address to us that works against violence (as a counter-force, and therefore somewhat akin to Assmann’s use of the term), though it cannot ultimately ever hope to do away with its existence.158 What she considers is the chance that perhaps not all forms of normativity are violent in and of themselves; and to admit as much is indeed to reinforce a transcendental universal perspective.159 It is also to endorse something of the hermeneutical framework I have here been exploring, and even this from a somewhat “radicalized” perspective. Expressing a position akin to Derrida’s notion of a “bloodless violence” at the heart of all cultural inscriptions, Butler seeks to recognize the violence of all cultural identifications while yet respecting the claims of nonviolence as often favored (more “just”) tactical maneuvers. Indeed, as she puts it, . . . non-violence as an ethical “call” could not be understood if it were not for the violence involved in the making and sustaining of the subject. There would be no struggle, no obligation, and no difficulty. The point is not to eradicate the conditions of one’s own production, but only to assume responsibility for living

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a life that contests the determining power of that production; in other words, that makes good use of the iterability of the productive norms and, hence, of their fragility and transformability.160

The task, for Butler, is not to remove violence altogether, but to put forward a force of nonviolence within this cultural matrix of tensions in order to counter­ act the violences that unjustly act upon us. Nonviolence is, therefore, also not a universal principle to be applied everywhere the same. It is rather a force utilized in particular circumstances, as a particular instance of “pushing back” against particular (more or less) unjust violences. Again, as in the last chapter, we have a recognition that there are certain more or less violent (canonical) norms that must be dealt with, and as such on an individual basis. The dialectic that emerges from this tension continuously seeks to determine the fluxuating coordinates of our very subjectivity as they are immersed in these processes of binding and unbinding from relations of violence and nonviolence.161 There is only a functional practice of relationality, not some utopian dream, as she will put it.162 “In this sense, non-violence is not a peaceful state, but a social and political struggle to make rage articulate and effective . . .”163 Accordingly, her reference in this context is to Levinas, who sees the face as presenting us with an ethical ambivalence: “a desire to kill, an ethical necessity not to kill.”164 An ethical practice consequently emerges from this Levinasian thematic, one that cannot be made into a universalized “principle of non-violence” but rather exists as a force, “fully fallible, of trying to attend to the precariousness of life, checking the transmutation of life into non-life.”165 This is a one-sided reading of Levinas, to be sure, but one that seeks to recover from his hyperbolic language the very foundation of our ethical claims. What I find intriguing here is her portrayal of our personal narration of such tensions insofar as it presents itself as a sort of critique and supplementation to Ricoeur’s own insights. Seeing things as such, I would like to focus on the way in which Butler is able to envision how the account we give of ourselves is never complete, never fully realized, always interlaced with the multiple accounts of ourselves that we give, and all of which point toward the fictitious “origin” of an ever elusive “us.”166 And yet, this is an “us” that must be stated, in language, through the representations before us, through our numerous attempts to “present” ourselves beyond representation but which always fall back upon the more or less just or even unjust representations we have to work with. So, if representation is the social reality we must continuously face, why has there been such a longing for a presentation beyond representation? Why strive

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so hard for a glimpse of something so elusive and undistorted by our cultural significations? What Butler wagers, I believe, is that the “presentation” we are looking for is little more than a recognition (as a form of humility perhaps) that representation is and will always be short of our intentions, that there is always something beyond its hold, even if that something can never actually be obtained. This is the gap that even Agamben has spoken of on occasion, as we saw a moment ago. She reminds us, in this context, that, for Levinas, “. . . the human is not represented by the face.” As she renders the implications of this fact, Rather, the human is indirectly affirmed in that very disjunction that makes representation impossible, and this disjunction is conveyed in the impossible representation. For representation to convey the human, then, representation must not only fail, but it must show its failure. There is something unrepresentable that we nevertheless seek to represent, and that paradox must be retained in the representation we give.167

Our ability to disclose the failures of representation is what finally gives representation its force, and it likewise gives rise to some of our greatest artistic achievements, those expositions of our failings that we nevertheless pine for and transmit ceaselessly throughout history. As such, “. . . the human is not identified with what is represented but neither is it identified with the unrepresentable; it is, rather, that which limits the success of any representational practice. The face is not ‘effaced’ in this failure of representation, but is constituted in that very possibility”.168 Hence, this “failure” becomes in fact the only way to “successfully” present the other before us. We take up the other (artistic, cultural) expressions of the selves that litter our histories because they assist us in identifying ourselves just as strongly as the persons who live and breathe next to us. “The critical image . . . works this difference in the same way as the Levinasian image; it must not only fail to capture its referent, but show this failing..169 And when it is on display, as it were, we recognize ourselves in what is not ourselves, a reiteration then of seeing “oneself as another”—“The one with whom I identify is not me, and that ‘not being me’ is the condition of identification.”170 This is where, I would argue, the Levinasian themes that intrude upon both Ricoeur and Butler become most beneficial—though certainly shorn of their hyperbolic demands for presentation. It is the ethical nonviolent call to respect the face of the other, the other that lies even and always within us, which propels us forward beyond embracing dialectics as an instrument that simply perpetuates

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violent struggle. Indeed, what we are rather reminded of is the singular refusal to embrace dialectics as a forum for (and justification of) exclu­sion and violence. We are, in fact, to play witness to another form of dialectics that yet respects the other, and that moves forward in openness. The true dialectic of representations, I would suggest, is one of violence meeting nonviolence, or, since we inhabit a realm of representations that are more or less always prone to some act of reduction into order to ensure intelligibility, we are constantly pitting bids for more violence against bids for less of it. When these two opposing forces meet, and assuming that violence does not by definition respect nonviolence and that, as Lacan once suggested, love will always give its ground to hate,171 how are we to respect an other who is violent? By loving it, but also, I would suggest, by working tirelessly to leave it behind, even if it means leaving a part of oneself behind. We are again reminded, it would seem, of Ricoeur’s notion of a “happy memory” that needs to forget certain things precisely in order to thrive, to forget things then that could be recalled if need be, but typically need not be remembered. It is loving the blood enemy who just happens to be a part of your own family.172 This reformulation of dialectics posits no third term as a solution to its dynamics, and yet it also yields no “presentation” completely beyond its representational poles. Perhaps it is not even an appresentation, as Husserl had hoped to justify. It rather invites us to perceive dialectics as a constant refashioning of both polarized ends, a constant re-alignment of what we consider both justice and injustice alike to be. This is to say that perhaps hermeneutics has more to say about dialectics than people have long suspected. Such a hermeneutics does not strive for a utopian future, but perhaps it can share in Frederic Jameson’s belief that a utopian world does yet exist, parallel to the one we live in now, unseen most days, unaccessed as a whole, but momentarily, from time to time, brought into our world like a flash of lightening and hope, readjusting the coordinates of our cherished representations though not doing away with them altogether.173

Radical hermeneutics Viewing our current state of theology as a movement toward the atheological is a disconcerting transition for many to be sure. As a salient example, it was Walter Benjamin, Agamben’s inspiration in many contexts, for whom the act of remembrance, in contrast to the search for scientific-historical fact, was what guaranteed history could never be entirely “atheological.”174 There would always be some viewpoint external to history that would impart meaning to it. In this

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sense, the representations (“semblances”) which seem to solidify any sense of “cultural intelligibility” are given their meaning by viewpoints which appear as external to them, as then transcendent or “theological,” whether they are identified with a particular religious tradition or not.175 They are also, as Benjamin made clear toward the very end of his life, undone by those “weak messianic forces” moving through history that run counter to all theological–ideological readings of history, all myths of progress.176 His co-opting of a religious (“messianic”) terminology that seems to split or divide the theological from within can be established as a reading of history that attempts to grant power to those oppressed groups or persons who are otherwise muted within history, by any official historical record, that is, occluded by the strong narratives of progress and victory which dominate most historical accounts. Remembrance, by this count, will always appear to have two faces, that of the victor and that of the loser. This is more than a subtle reminder of the inherent contentiousness of any historiographical act.177 Indeed, acts of remembrance are often nationalistic, racist, colonialist, or patriarchal. They are possibly also, however, stories of liberation, survival, testimony, and truth, functioning often as, to borrow the theologian Johann Baptist Metz’s phrase, “dangerous memories” to those persons remaining in power.178 Insofar as all acts of remembrance are stories begging to be believed, they are certainly ideological, some more just in their fidelity to truth, others less so. Moreover, some are more violent to the precarious construction of identities today, some less so; for identities, no less than stories, are built upon these acts of remembrance passed along through time.179 It is in such a light that I would consider taking up Butler’s recent engagement with Benjamin’s work, and, more specifically, with the much discussed term “messianic.” Like Benjamin before her, Butler has striven to defend the excluded and marginalized figures of history whose very presence serves as a sort of messianic force undoing our normative cultural (and often legal) representations.180 Though her use of the term “messianic” has been somewhat limited, there lingers in it a profound connection to what has been stated above concerning Benjamin’s use of it, as well as a slight divergence from Agamben’s own use of the term.181 Illustrated by the context of her work on gender and its “undoing,” there is a specific way in which she attempts to undermine the “practices of repetition that constitute identity” which has, I would suggest, a strong resonance with Benjamin’s approach to history.182 As she has cleverly depicted it, in terms of human identity, there is no copy of an original ontological form that simply waits to be (re)produced in the present,

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but only copies of copies, carefully crafted representations of the (gendered) human being which change over time inasmuch as they are disseminated among particular social groupings. Early in her work, and as she explained in the context of creating “gender trouble”: “The subject is not determined by the rules through which it is generated because signification is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition that both conceals itself and enforces its rules precisely through the production of substantializing effects.”183 Her conclusion, that our identities are performed rather than “natural,” thus draws its strength from these acts of repetition which are easily deconstructed. This led her to conclude at the time that: “Ontology is, thus, not a foundation, but a normative injunction that operates insidiously by installing itself into political discourse as its necessary ground.”184 As we have seen, she has slightly culled some of this radicality from her later work, a culling which, I would argue, is directly related to her understanding of the messianic—her own particular evolution of the concept within this long series of reformulations. Ontology, in Butler’s eyes, as I see it, would seemingly be little more than a word utilized historically to mask the ruses of any attempt to “ground” a given social normativity through a particular (“theological,” in Benjamin’s words) reading of history. The messianic, then, is what “ungrounds” such constructions, much as it was for Derrida. The critique she utilizes can be seen in this light as one aligned against the western ontotheological (and decidedly canonical) project and opening, as Annika Thiem highlights, toward the ethical.185 And this is ultimately what unites her work, in a certain sense, with Benjamin’s (and Derrida’s) conceptualizations of history and theology, a proximity which she herself has recently acknowledged by making reference to Benjamin’s use of “messianic time” in order to formulate a “revolutionary” critique of state (representational) violence.186 In essence, the division of gender unveiled by Butler as creating an arbitrary binary representation is an ephemeral ontotheological line which says nothing about an alleged ontological essence of being-male or being-female (if there even were such states of being, which she of course claims there are not), but rather is constituted as a theological (hegemonic) bid for power on behalf of those who most strictly establish and guard the boundaries.187 Her deconstructive act, because it deals with an ontotheological platform, and much like Derrida’s work before her, has something of a messianic structure to it; that is, it exposes the fault lines of any normative ontotheological claims from within, and is, in like manner, a challenge to the sovereign powers that be.188 It is in this sense, I believe, that it maintains its radical nature, despite her nuanced later views.

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Butler has subsequently brought this unmasking of binary representations to the threshold of formulating an ethics, though pulling up short of a fuller critique of the ontotheology which pervades so much of western representational logic.189 It remains the case, as such, that there may be a space for making ontotheological claims in her work, though, again, the unmooring of a fixed (“natural”) ontological form from the created, creaturely beings that we are would still constitute her position as one that attempts to radicalize hermeneutics in general. Such a view, at least, is what I am trying to bring within a theological context as a (more) profitable way through which to read the complex, dynamic, and essential relations between canonical forms and messianic forces.

Conclusions formulated on the basis of Part Two A moment ago, I made reference to the Marxist literary critic Frederic Jameson, whose own work recently has been focused upon, among other things, reconciling Ricoeur’s hermeneutical principles with political dialectical thinking.190 His calls for a certain form of utopian thinking to enter into our imaginative discourses is not a call wholly unfamiliar to Ricoeur, for whom utopian thought represents a genuine moment within the collective imagination to provide an entrance into a reality that was not yet present or even conceivable.191 Such is also how the theologian and cultural philosopher (as well as good friend of Jameson’s) Cornel West reads the possibility of “utopian interruptions” as they are delivered to us from the horizons of certain “prophetic imaginations.”192 And though such an outlook might certainly account for a large portion of what Agamben has been actively advocating, I believe that more can be said on the matter. It is true that we cannot escape from the representations that lie before us. Linguistically, for example, we can only express the failures of representation in the hope that we can construct more just representations in the future (and despite the fact that there is no guarantee that things will get better). As I have been stating throughout, this would minimally represent the “Judaic” core of our experience, and would involve us in a hermeneutics (dialectics) of sorts to be sure. As I indicated at the conclusion of the last chapter, my reading of Benjamin’s project is one that, in the end, shares with Derrida’s interpretation of messianic forces acting in relation to canonical norms, and this despite the hyperbolic or excessive language that Agamben (as well as both Benjamin and Levinas before him) utilizes in order to stress the significance of the weak messianic forces that clamor for a presentation beyond representation. By holding to this reading,

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I am thereby holding to the truth that such an interpretation is the only way for one’s historical context (or even biography) to matter. Christianity, it could certainly be said, does repeat particular antinomian gestures that arise from within its own Judaic roots. Its reliance upon a logic and history of messianicity seems to indicate that it is perpetually attuned to those who suffer a great injustice at the hands of unjust representational structures. It was, after all, particular strands of Judaism that Jesus reacted against most pointedly. Agamben’s understanding of the messianic as that which affects not only our religious logic, but also the created matter before us likewise contains something of a radicalized (even incarnational) nature that Christians would do well to take seriously. There is a specific deepening of the implications for our understanding of theology’s most basic operations that still lies in store for us along these lines of thought. My intention at this point, however, is, and despite the many ways I have tried here to demonstrate the relevance of his claims for theology, yet to challenge Agamben’s final conclusions by pointing us toward a form of hermeneutics that could simultaneously incorporate Agamben’s most basic claims while also maintaining its reliance upon canonical forms. There is a form of dialectics yet at work here, though one that continuously seeks to do a greater justice to those forms of antinomian (messianic) thought released from time to time in order to “correct” our canonical sense of normativity. In short, I am claiming that this can be done by focusing on the manner in which a form of radical hermeneutics is concerned with the divisions that take place within and between canons themselves. This can be done, I will argue, by taking up Agamben’s fundamental Pauline intuition and returning it to the canonical form. That is, if Agamben is more loyal to the deconstructionist logic than Derrida (as Agamben himself asserts), then I am here suggesting a move that is more loyal to Agamben’s “division of division itself ” than Agamben himself is. And I believe that this can be done, not by abandoning canonical forms and procedures, which are an inevitable part of our world today—not a contamination, but its basic building blocks—but by making distinctions between differing canonical forms. This, I wager, can be done by distinguishing between those canons that conceal violence and those that reveal it, a distinction that cannot be made when all canonical procedures are simply discarded from the outset. Such is what I have tried to demonstrate in the second part of this work. From a theological position, the trick is not just to provide an apologia for a sacred canon as scripture, but to consider the necessity for constructing a cultural–canonical form in the first place. This must be an investigation that takes

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seriously both the processes of canonicity—the often elusive desires behind the formation of a canonical “text” or perspective—as well as a canon’s relationship to violence, the very grounds of society as well as of cultural transmission on the whole, certainly issues which impact theological discourse in no small measure. Theology has often been dominated by the profound (and quite problematic) juxtaposition of believers and culture, though it has not always given the same regard to the manner in which its canonical writings are in fact generative of a (western) culture (and tentatively, we might add in Agambenian fashion, politics as well) in particular and the implications this holds for a theological construal of such a relationship.193 This conclusion not only illustrates how a renewed vision of the canonical form and its relationship to canonicity paves the way for relations between canonical forms and any associated ethical paradigms to be further developed, but also demonstrates, through a statement of this study’s fundamental theses, how certain forms of the canonical, those which expose the deception of violence in founding our most basic cultural–canonical forms, can actually preserve the voices of the oppressed or “repressed” elements (often portrayed as being “non-canonical”) at their core. Such an understanding, of course, profoundly alters our normal conception of the canonical form as well as our perception of how different cultures might begin to evaluate each other’s canonical foundations in a manner which does not assume the dominance of one over the other (“supersessionism”). By examining the structures of canonicity, and their relation to the concrete work of the canonical form throughout time, I have tried to show how a more precise account of subject formation, a rich process of “re-writing oneself ” into the canonical narrative, becomes manifest as, in a certain sense, an act of re-creation, perhaps even in league with that sense of “rebirth” so central to a western theological setting. Any manner of constructing historical representation must take account of the various already present canonical representations given through time, as well as their impact upon forming cultures which spring from said canonical origins, for, as Jan Assmann has noted, it was not “the introduction of writing, but the process of canonization [Kanonisierung]” that “triggered a fundamental change [grundsätzliche Veränderung] in cultural continuity”.194 To focus upon historical representation and its relation to culture is, thus, explicitly to state the relation of a particular canonical tradition to the impulses for canonicity that generate subsequent (and multiple) canons—processes which can be said to produce culture itself. Making this relationship as transparent as possible allows us to

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reduce (though perhaps not eliminate) the violence caused by subject formation and to expose the violent origins of society as they intend to turn the necessary processes of creating cultural distinctions into a totalitarian practice (akin to forms of fundamentalism). If, then, the failures of representation are the only genuine way to present anything, it is by turning to those canonical forms that admit of their own failures, that side with the victims and oppressed of history, and that denounce other more violent canonical forms, that we might begin to reconceive the tasks that lie at the heart of our most basic philosophical and theological gestures in the present moment.

Conclusion

It was my intention to demonstrate that the relationship between the messianic and canonical forms permeates the historical structures of both theological and philosophical reflection, and has lately moved to the fore of their ongoing discussions. To do this, I traced the contours of their tension as it ran through certain Jewish antinomian thinkers as well as in the debate that has arisen between Derrida and Agamben. Though at times oversimplifying matters into a more or less “clean” distinction between dialectical (Derrida) and antinomian (Agamben) thought, such an oversimplification was made through reference to each thinker’s own gestures, as they sought over the years to evaluate and understand their own work. There is no doubt that such a reading of each of their work could be further problematized—especially as their thoughts evolved in less “clean” ways over the years—though, as the debate between them evidences, their varied positions often reflected the core dynamics of religious and philosophical tensions as I have sought to outline throughout this study. Quite simply, if they had not been adhering to certain core principles such as those that continue to divide our most basic religious, political, and cultural identities, then there would have been no debate between them to witness. Despite the published realities of their divergence, however, I yet continue to read each author as engaged in studies that continue to place the adjective radical prior to the word hermeneutics. Indeed, if Derrida could be identified as the first thinker to “radicalize” hermeneutics in an attempt to deconstruct the hermeneutical project itself, as John Caputo has put it, then Agamben’s work further radicalizes it, though, I would argue, he does not escape it altogether.1 As Thanos Zartaloudis has recently pointed out in his work on the limits of law and power, Agamben’s major insight is not necessarily one that seeks to do away with law altogether. Instead, Agamben seems to be seeking a space “outside” of the functioning of law that is yet responding to the actuality of law. By examining the relationship between law and Christianity in a western context specifically, Zartaloudis concludes that Agamben’s work is not, in the end, advocating a complete destruction of the law, but rather a re-evaluation of life (form-of-life) itself.2 As he words it,

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Perfect antinomianism is a force internal to the actuality of the law . . . though not internal to the law, which inverses the latter’s effectiveness; it does not preserve the law as it is nor destroy it, nor does it create a new law to replace the old law, but it instead restores law to the sphere of pure means, and renders it free to common use.3

This is a “perfect antinomianism,” then, because it is “contemporaneous” with the actuality (nomos) of the law, though it is created beside the law itself. Such an interpretation of law is conditioned of course by Agamben’s reading of Paul and messianic time, though, as both Zartaloudis and I separately read it, his conclusions are perhaps closer to the dynamics I have been defending throughout this study than Agamben himself has expressly admitted. That is, the ceaseless tension between canonical forms and messianic forces does not produce a complete (antinomian) rupture with tradition, but rather develops a hermeneutics, albeit a radicalized one, in response to the tension itself. As Zartaloudis puts it, The non-normative and the normative operations are not two entirely distinct domains that stand untampered in their integrity, but instead complex operations that in referring to a single object (the thing itself, it was suggested, is not other than the thing) must every time reckon with something like a residue or remnant of non-normativity in every consecrated thing and a remnant of normativity in every profaned object.4

This is what he moreover defines as a form of “pure criticism” that unflinchingly stares into the abyss of loss and ruin (“absolute profanation”), and yet finds a way to overcome it through the reorientation of our initial perspective on the “right use” of the “thing itself.” Indebted a great deal to what I have been calling the hyperbolic use of language, a sense of radicality is ushered in to this reading through Agamben’s refusal to accept one particular usage of any given thing. Again, in Zartaloudis’ words, “Every time the systems of spectacular religion, economy and law claim that something can be rightfully used only in this or that way, an act of profanation will endeavour to say that something is otherwise than it is, and that a different use of it is always possible aside from its rightful use.”5 As I was finishing this book, a new translation of one of Agamben’s texts appeared in print, and provides a perhaps clearer line of thought on the issue of a possible hermeneutics available in his thought. From a text he read in a Church in Paris, in front of bishops and priests in 2009, we find that he speaks of messianic forces, something he continues to juxtapose against the law, but, he here points toward the necessity for a dialectical tension that must be maintained

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between them. Here, he takes up this binary tension, which, one might expect he would seek to do away with in order to have a more “one-sided” antinomian position maintained. Yet, he says this: By placing origin and end in contact with one another, this force endlessly fulfils and ends time. Let us call this force Law or State, dedicated as it is to economy, which is to say, dedicated as it is to the indefinite—and indeed infinite— governance of the world. As for the second force, let us call it messiah, or Church; its economy is the economy of salvation, and by this token is essentially completed. The only way that a community can form and last is if these poles are present and a dialectical tension between them prevails.6

The tension, which he goes on to say has “disappeared” in our time, must prevail if a community is “to form and last.” The Church, he specifically singles out, will be lost if it abandons its original messianic vocation and becomes little more than another (political) institution of this world, caught up in the “infernal” character of the legalistic (and bureaucratic) mindset that permeates our world. It is this uncompromising tension between canonical forms and messianic forces that must be sustained, and, if maintained, that determines from the very outset the inherently radical nature of hermeneutics, as it refuses to allow anything (“whatever being”) to be settled into one proper usage (much as Butler’s work points toward no single “natural” ontological form that we should adhere to, though, as she puts it, we must adhere to some form in the end). It is for this reason that I have sought to utilize Agamben’s work not simply as an obstacle to be overcome en route to a more hermeneutical position, but rather, again and again, to problematize (or “divide”) the very positions I have been working with (including my own) in order to maintain something of a (self-reflexive) “pure critical” approach. If a radical hermeneutics is to present itself as a genuine methodology, it must realize accordingly that even its own methods are in need of problematizing from time to time. It has also been one of the major points of this study to inspect the way in which a theology of immanence—if understood from a political–theological perspective—constitutes one side of the historical and political tensions that comprise the domain of the theological—an insight given to us from more recent philosophical traditions of thinking immanence apart from transcendence. Immanence, in this light, constitutes a “pure” form of (the ultimately “unformable”) messianism. Such a theological development could be seen in some early forms of Judaic messianism, though it has subsequently extended far beyond this historical context, as we have seen already.

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Despite this isolation of the phenomenon, there are a great many thinkers of philosophical immanence today, I would argue, who owe a certain debt to the original religious struggle to conceive a form of immanent theology as a response to the failures of their own hopes, and which were first posited as a response to the legalistic mindsets internal to a particular religious framework. Such “failures of representation” have often turned away from the “transcendent” grounding of our most basic representational claims, though they have not necessarily deviated too far from our inscriptions in language and culture. As I hope by now is clear, I have tried to situate such a debate between immanence and transcendence within a series of historical and philosophical tensions that make up a somewhat larger hermeneutical field. If Agamben’s focus upon immanence could be said to issue forth from his similar approach to law and sovereign forms, as I believe it can, then we must see such calls for an immanent position as not yet indicating a complete rupture with more traditional transcendent (religious) frameworks. Rather, we must respect the deconstruction of such frameworks (as well as their often very real hierarchical structures and institutions) in order to reread and even redefine those frameworks that govern our day-to-day realities. As Agamben himself has noted, even the Church today—in the face of so much decline and distress—is capable of grasping this fundamental truth and redefining itself accordingly. As such, I have argued that it is a form of radical hermeneutics made available for theology that is capable of incorporating such claims as those that arise from the various corners of theology calling for an immanent theological vision of the world. The hermeneutics I am describing is capable of establishing itself upon a subsequent “hermeneutics of violence” that distinguishes between the various canonical forms before us in terms of their propensity and proximity to violence. Making an essential (Pauline) “division of division itself ” as a division of signifying canonical forms, allows us to “de-activitate” the violences of canonical impositions and to find a possible “presentation” available to us through the failures of representation, which certain less violent canonical forms are capable of demonstrating. Just such a hermeneutics was what I have here sought to develop using the various critical writings of Assmann and Benjamin. I subsequently expanded upon such a project by confirming this form of hermeneutics (as well as radicalizing it) through the work of Ricoeur and Butler. Perhaps the direction I am most inclined to head in at this point, and after such analysis, is one that I believe is opened up through these reflections—a return to the historical contexts that first birthed the dynamics I have been

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studying. In many ways, of course, such a return has been evident from the outset. We can glimpse, for example, how those theologians and biblical scholars who have engaged with the various philosophical returns to Saint Paul have taken the opportunity to caution such a universalizing reading of his work as one that often neglects the complex realities of exegetical and historical study, a point we would likewise do well not to neglect.7 We can also understand how a more complete picture of the “origins” of the canonical scriptures, such as I have only begun with the study of Assmann’s work, would provide a unique perspective from which to view the rise of messianic desires and literatures. Likewise, a number of doctrines, teachings, and traditions within both Jewish and Christian lineages could be re-examined from a radical hermeneutical point of view, demonstrating not only the necessity of a political–theological approach (which respects even its most antinomian, heretical counterparts as part of a larger ongoing dialogue), but also providing ample opportunity for the “development of doctrine” to continue in our own age.8 These are only some of the more major and pressing areas of future research that the present study points us toward in a very explicit manner. A good many more, it is hoped, will be created through such openings. The hermeneutics that I am here really just beginning to articulate is not radical in the sense that it need be conceived without God.9 It is radical only insofar as it does not subscribe to a predetermined set of ontological forms, leaving such matters to be played out on the fluctuating field of historical– canonical forms, whether these be religious, cultural, or political. God, it could be said, would be free of any such ontological categorizations, and would perhaps fittingly be beyond the scope of what I am proposing. (Hence, what I have been proposing has been mainly a philosophical analysis, even if conducted on the terrain of historical theologies.) I am also certainly ascribing a great deal of merit to so-called non-essentialist positions, a position, no doubt, that often grades against the rigidity of more “canonized” (or even ecclesiastical) positions. The recognition of the dynamics between canonical forms and messianic forces, however, admits that such a hermeneutics be honest about the state of such oscillations, evolutions, and reformulations as do (and will continue to) take place throughout history.

Notes Introduction 1 Mark Lewis Taylor, The Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2011). 2 Ibid., 9. 3 Ibid., 95. 4 John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993) 295. 5 Ibid., 295. 6 Ibid., 299. 7 To take but one albeit primary example, the direct influence of Benjamin’s thought upon each of the authors analyzed here is monumental and certainly a guiding thread throughout the length of this study. 8 The allusion here is to Clayton Crockett’s recent study, Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011) with which the present work shares certain affinities, most notably in the focus on a certain Spinozistic form of immanence as a response to the history of transcendence within theological discourse.

Chapter 1 1 Günther Bornkamm, Paul (trans. D. M. G. Stalker, New York: Harper, 1971) 229/Paulus (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1969) 235. 2 Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom (trans. J. T. Swann, New York: Herder & Herder, 1972)/Atheismus im Christentum: Zur Religion des Exodus und des Reichs (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1968). 3 Bornkamm, Paul, 232–3/Paulus, 238. 4 Ibid., 237/243. 5 Ibid., 238–9/244. 6 Ibid., 237/243.

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7 See Bloch, Atheism, 267–73/Atheismus, 294–9. 8 Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (trans. Ray Brassier, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003) 3/Saint Paul: La fondation de l’universalisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997) 3. 9 Ibid., 5/6. 10 Ibid., 7/8. 11 Ibid., 5/6. 12 Ibid., 57/61. 13 Ibid., 66/70. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 69/73. 17 Ibid., 54/56. 18 See Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1941) 315. 19 Ibid., 317. 20 Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judeo-Christianity (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). 21 Jacob Taubes, “The Issue Between Judaism and Christianity: Facing Up to the Unresolvable Difference” in Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel, eds, From Cult to Culture: Fragments Toward a Critique of Historical Reason (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010) 45–58/“Die Steitfrage zwischen Judentum und Christentum: Ein Blick auf ihre unauflösliche Differenz”, Vom Kult zur Kultur: Bausteine zu einer Kritik der historischen Vernunft (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1996) 85–98. 22 See, for example, Gershom Scholem, Major Trends, 287–324, as well as his more in-depth historical study, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973). 23 Taubes died a few weeks after delivering these lectures in the spring of 1987. 24 Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul (trans. Dana Hollander, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004) 8/Die Politische Theologie des Paulus (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1993) 18–9. A number of these “factual” observances made here by Taubes are in fact disputed characterizations of Sabbati Zevi. See, for example, the contested reconstructions of this historical figure as presented in Moshe Idel, Messianic Mystics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998) 187ff. 25 Taubes, Political Theology, 8/Politische Theologie, 19. 26 Ibid., 9/19–20.

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27 See Matt Goldish, The Sabbatean Prophets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 28 Taubes, Political Theology, 9/Politische Theologie, 20. 29 Ibid., 10/21. 30 Ibid., 24–5/38. 31 Ibid., 49–50/70. 32 Scholem, Major Trends, 296. 33 Taubes, Political Theology, 39–40/Politische Theologie, 57. 34 Scholem, Major Trends, 299. 35 Scholem’s own writings on Sabbatianism occasionally put him at odds with certain members of the Orthodox community who refused to see particular, historical Rabbis as followers of Sabbatai Zevi, as in the case of Rabbi Jonathan Eibschtz, an eighteenth-century Rabbi from Prague whose affiliation with Sabbatianism is still hotly contested. See Joseph Dan, Gershom Scholem and the Mystical Dimension of Jewish History (New York: New York University Press, 1987) 306–9. 36 Scholem, Major Trends, 305. 37 Ibid., 306. 38 Ibid., 307. 39 As for their comparison, Scholem maintains that “In both cases the ancient Jewish paradox of the sufferings of God’s servant is pushed to extremes. In both cases, too, a certain mystical attitude of belief crystallizes around an historical event which in turn draws its strength from the very fact of its paradoxality. Both movements begin by adopting an attitude of intense expectation toward the Parousia, the advent or return of the Savior, be it from Heaven, be it from the realm of impurity. In both cases the destruction of the old values in the cataclysm of redemption leads to an outburst of antinomian tendencies, partly moderate and veiled and partly radical and violent; in both cases you get a new conception of ‘belief ’ as the realization of the new world of Salvation, and in both this ‘belief ’ involves that latent polarity of even more startling paradoxes. In both cases, finally, you get in the end a theology of some kind of Trinity and of God’s incarnation in the person of the Savior”. Scholem, Major Trends, 307. Idel, however, will claim that Scholem neglected at points to identify the explicit incorporation of various Christological influences adapted into Sabbatian teaching. Idel, Messianic Mystics, 206. 40 Romans, 8. 41 David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979) 148.

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214 42 Ibid., 150. 43 Ibid., 155. 44 Ibid., 211.

45 Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken, 1971) 35. 46 See Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within: The Marranos: Split Identity and Emerging Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 47 Scholem, Major Trends, 309. 48 Ibid., 310. 49 Ibid., 315. 50 Scholem historically locates this progression toward the “holiness of sin” in the later messianic teachings of Jacob Frank. Ibid., 315. 51 1 Corinthians 10.23. 52 Scholem, Major Trends, 317. “Here the external world, the value of which was denied by the inner and secret rites, was that of rabbinical Jewry, for which the Messianic Judaism of Antinomianism, the secret annihilation of the Torah as its true fulfilment, became the secret substitute. But this external world could also be Mohammedanism, if one followed the example of Sabbatai Zevi, or Catholicism if one followed that of Frank” (319). 53 Ibid., 318. 54 Ibid., 319. 55 Scholem also reads Sabbatianism as the “. . . key to the development of Jewish society, culture, and beliefs in modern times”, as Joseph Dan has noted. Dan, Gershom Scholem, 288 and 324. 56 Biale, Gershom Scholem, 161. 57 Scholem, Major Trends, 320. 58 Engelhard Weigl, “Theodicy Between Messianism and Apocalypse in German Philosophy”, Messianism, Apocalypse and Redemption in 20th Century German Thought (eds Wayne Cristaudo and Wendy Baker, Adelaide: ATF Press, 2006) 13–31. 59 Ibid., 31. 60 Taubes, “The Price of Messianism”, From Cult to Culture, 4/“Der Messianismus und sein Preis”, Vom Kult zur Kultur, 44. 61 Ibid., 4/44. 62 Ibid., 5/44–5. 63 Ibid., 5/45. 64 Ibid.

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65 Ibid., 6/46. 66 Ibid., 7/47. 67 Ibid., 5–6/45–6. 68 Ibid., 8/48–9. 69 Ibid., 9/49. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid. 72 Taubes, “Judaism and Christianity”, 45/“Judentum und Christentum”, 85. 73 Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption (trans. Barbara E. Galli, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005)/Der Stern der Erlösung (Frankfurt: Kauffman, 1921). 74 Taubes, “Judaism and Christianity”, 53/“Judentum und Christentum”, 92–3. 75 Ibid., 53/93. 76 Ibid., 53–4/93. 77 Ibid., 54/94. 78 Ibid., 54–5/94. 79 Ibid., 58/98. 80 Ibid., 56–7/96. 81 Ibid., 58/98. 82 Paul Fletcher, Disciplining the Divine: Toward an (Im)political Theology (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 83 See Marin Terpstra and Theo de Wit, “No Spiritual Investment in the World As It Is: Jacob Taubes’s Negative Political Theology” in Ilse Bulhof and Laurens ten Kate, eds, Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000) 321; as well as David Ratmoko’s introduction to Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology (trans. David Ratmoko, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009) xvi. 84 Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, 192/Abendländische Eschatologie (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 1991) 255. 85 See Jacob Taubes, Ad Carl Schmitt: Reflexive Harmony (trans. Keith Tribe, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011)/Ad Carl Schmitt: Gegenstrebige Fügung (Berlin: Merve, 1987). 86 Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, 191/Abendländische Eschatologie, 255. 87 Ibid., 6/15. 88 For more on the relationship between pantheism and Judaic thought, see David Biale, Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011) 15–58.

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89 See Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, 7/Abendländische Eschatologie, 15–6. 90 Ibid., 15/26. 91 Ibid., 16/27. 92 Ibid., 17–8/29. 93 Ibid., 17/29. 94 Ibid., 19/31. 95 Aviezer Ravitzky, “The Messianism of Success in Contemporary Judaism” in Bernard McGinn, John J. Collins and Stephen J. Stein, eds, The Continuum History of Apocalypticism (London: Continuum, 2003) 563–81. These pantheistic accounts are present in the writings of both Rabbi Z. Y. Kook, on the Zionist side, and the Rebbe of Lubbavitch, M. M. Schneerson, on the other. See Benjamin Ish-Shalom, Rav Avraham Itzhak HaCohen Kook: Between Rationalism and Mysticism (trans. Ora Wiskind-Elper, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), as well as Elliot R. Wolfson, Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 96 Ravitzky, “Messianism of Success”, 566. 97 Ibid., 575–7. 98 Ibid., 576. 99 Ibid., 577. 100 Ibid. 101 Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, 21 and 24/Abendländische Eschatologie, 34 and 37. 102 Ibid., 25–6/39–40. 103 Ibid., 31/46. 104 Taubes, “Messianism”, 7/“Messianismus”, 47. 105 Yovel, Other Within. 106 “Both Lurianic kabbalah as the ‘matrix’ of the Sabbatian movement that developed the cosmogonic myth of “exile,” and Sabbatian messianism as a consequence of Lurianic kabbalah, were successful mythic responses of the Jewish community to the Marranic crisis”. Taubes, “Messianism”, 7/“Messianismus”, 47.

Chapter 2 1 See the detailed and highly influential analysis of Michel Foucault on sovereignty in the modern world. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the

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Collège de France, 1975–1976 (trans. David Macey, New York: Picador, 2003)/“Il faut defender la société”: Cours au Collège de France (1975–1976) (Paris: Seuil, 1997). 2 Judith Butler, “The Claim of Non-violence”, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009) 165–84. 3 See Carl Schmitt’s development of the relationship between sovereign power and theology in his Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (trans. George Schwab, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005)/Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1996 (1922)). See also how the link between the divine and sovereignty is explored in Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, Volume III: Sovereignty (trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Zone, 1993)/La Souveraineté, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 8 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). 4 See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (3 vols., trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985)/Temps et récit (Paris: Seuil, 1985); and, Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and AvantGarde (London: Verso, 1995) 53ff. 5 See Paul Ricoeur, “The ‘Sacred’ Text and the Community”, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (ed. Mark I. Wallace, trans. David Pellauer, Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1995a) 68–72/“Le texte « sacré » et la communauté”, L’herméneutique biblique (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2001) 320–5. 6 Paul Ricoeur, “The Canon between the Text and the Community” in P. Pokorný and J. Roskovec, eds, Philosophical Hermeneutics and Biblical Exegesis (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002) 23. 7 For a brilliant deconstructivist account of how individual subjects are determined in relation to the governing norms of society, see Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). 8 See Walter Benjamin, “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy”, Selected Writings, vol. 1 (eds. Howard Eiland et al., Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2006) 100–110/“Über das Programm der kommenden Philosophie”, Gesammelte Schriften II:1 (ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974) 157–71. 9 See Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 10 See the wealth of contentious material on Derrida’s alleged (non)religious affiliation(s), including Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly, eds, Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida (trans. Bettina Bergo and Michael

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B. Smith, New York: Fordham University Press, 2007)/Joseph Cohen et Raphael Zagury-Orly, eds, Judéités: Questions pour Jacques Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 2003); Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart, eds, Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments (London: Routledge, 2005); Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); and, Gideon Ofrat, The Jewish Derrida (trans. Peretz Kidron, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001). 11 Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) 312. 12 Ibid., 334. 13 Ibid., 358. 14 See Phil Rothfield, ed., Kant after Derrida (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2002). 15 Jacques Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve”, Writing and Difference (trans. Alan Bass, London: Routledge, 1978) 251–77/“De l’économie restreinte à l’économie générale: Un hegelianisme sans réserve”, L’écriture et la difference (Paris: Seuil, 1967) 369–407. 16 Andrea Hurst, Derrida Vis-à-vis Lacan: Interweaving Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008) 75. 17 Ibid., 84. See also Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969)/Totalité et Infini: Essais sur l’Extériorité (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961). 18 Hurst, Derrida Vis-à-vis Lacan, 11. 19 Ibid., 86. 20 Ibid., 98. 21 See comments on violence and non-violence in regard to identity formation from a deconstructivist perspective in Butler, Frames of War, 165ff. 22 Hurst, Derrida Vis-à-vis Lacan, 107. See Jacques Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis (trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998b) 36/Résistances de la psychanalyse (Paris: Galilée, 1996) 51. 23 Hurst, Derrida Vis-à-vis Lacan, 146. Hurst immediately afterward elaborates upon this relationship by stating that

. . . without the economic prospect of proper repetition (formulated in terms of the death drive as conservation), there can be no psyche/archive as a record of original events to which a proper return is possible. But because what happens “originally” is in principle traumatic, such an “event” lacks sense and cannot be properly repeated and recorded in the archive.

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Therefore, as soon as there is archivization (under the pressure of the death drive to return to a pretraumatic state), it is certain that the “event” only appears in the guise of an economizing, appropriating fabrication. Just as originally and necessarily, then, the death drive always already incorporates a moment of aneconomic, anarchiving destruction, for the moment of archiving appropriation in which phenomena are constituted is automatically an interpretative violation of the intrinsically impossible “event itself,” or what Lacan calls the Real. For Derrida’s take on the Freudian death drive, see the comments in his Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (trans. Eric Prenowitz, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996)/Mal d’Archive: Une impression freudienne (Paris: Galilée, 1995). 24 Jacques Derrida, “Mochlos, or, the Conflict of the Faculties” in Richard Rand, ed., Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties Today (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1992). See also, “Mochlos – ou le conflit des facultés”, Du droit à la phillosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1990) 397–438. 25 See Derrida, Archive Fever/Mal d’Archive. 26 Jacques Derrida, “Canons and Metonymies” in Rand, Logomachia, 197–8. 27 Ibid., 198. 28 Ibid. 29 Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions (trans A. Hurley, New York: Penguin, 1998). See also the comments on Borges’ story in Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006) 400/La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris: Seuil, 2000) 522. 30 Derrida, “Canons and Metonymies”, 198. 31 See Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 32 See Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Riverhead, 1994), which yet strives to protect the integrity of the literary canon. See also, James E. Brenneman, Canons in Conflict: Negotiating Texts in True and False Prophecy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 33 Derrida, “Canons and Metonymies”, 198. 34 Ibid., 198–9. 35 Ibid., 211. 36 Ibid., 199. 37 See Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 417ff/La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, 542ff.

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38 See the conclusions drawn in regard to the “least violence” in Leonard Lawlor, This Is Not Sufficient: An Essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 39 See Shane Cudney, ‘ “Religion without religion’: Caputo, Derrida, and the violence of particularity” in James H. Olthuis, ed., Religion with/out Religion: The Prayers and Tears of John D. Caputo (London: Routledge, 2002). 40 See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (trans. Peggy Kamuf, London: Routledge, 1994) 74ff/Spectres de Marx: L’État de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale (Paris: Galilée, 1993) 102ff. 41 Matthias Fritsch, The Promise of Memory: History and Politics in Marx, Benjamin, and Derrida (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005) 17–8. 42 See Derrida, Specters of Marx, 202ff/Spectres de Marx, 255ff. 43 See Fritsch, Promise of Memory, 55. 44 See Jacques Derrida, Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas (trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999)/Adieu: à Emmanuel Lévinas (Paris: Galilée, 1997). The formulaic “X without X” structure itself originates in Levinas, Totality and Infinity/Totalité et Infini. 45 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 94/Spectres de Marx, 126. 46 Ibid., 74/102. 47 Derrida, Adieu, 66–7/Adieu, 119. 48 See Derrida, Specters of Marx, 101/Spectres de Marx, 135. 49 See John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006) 8ff. 50 Derrida, “Force of Law” in Gil Anidjar, ed., Acts of Religion (trans. Mary Quaintance, London: Routledge, 2002a) 242/Force de loi: Le «Fondement mystique de l’autorité» (Paris: Galilée, 1994) 34. 51 Ibid., 242/33. Omitted from the English translation is the manner in which Derrida arrives at this understanding of the mystical: “en déplaçant un peu et en généralisant la structure”. 52 Ibid., 241/32–3. 53 Ibid., 270/89–90. 54 Ibid., 243/35–6. 55 Ibid., 244–5/38–9. 56 Ibid., 247/42–3. 57 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (trans. Steven Rendall, Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1984) 139/L’invention du quotidien:

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Arts de faire (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1980). Though de Certeau’s analysis of writing the law upon the body is far more extensive than we shall elaborate here, this conception of inscribing the law on its subjects has far reaching consequences for understanding the formation of the “canonical subject”. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990) is a paramount example of such a reading, illustrating how gender, as that which manifests itself as both common and concrete, is precisely such an inscription. For Butler, as for Foucault, power functions as the site of juridical reproduction and an excessive internal production of the law. In what might appear as ironic, it is the realm of power relations, containing both the juridical and productive aspects of “differential relations”, which allows the law to replicate itself, but not only to replicate; the relations of power also generate new possibilities of subjectivities, including those which push the established boundaries of what is intelligible. The law generates its own excess which comes to displace the law itself, not from outside it, but from within. This “subversion” of the law of gender from within is present in the appearance of “heterosexual norms” within the homosexual sphere (e.g. the “butch” and the “femme”, etc) which serve to reveal the inaccuracy of positing any “origin” to gender norms: these performances are a “copy of a copy” so to speak. Rather than construct an ontology of gender, Butler seeks to disclose gender as a “repeated stylization of the body” (as performance) which, over time, gives the appearance of substance (39–43). The overlap between Butler’s analysis and Derrida’s should be clear from this extended example, perhaps also paving the way for a further genealogical study of the manner in which the canonical forms its subjects. 58 Derrida, “Force of Law”, 248/Force de loi, 45. 59 Ibid., 257/61. 60 Ibid., 291–2/132. 61 Ibid., 268/86–7. 62 This point on the legacy of Derrida’s thought on tradition is made by Michael Naas in Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of Deconstruction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003) 188. 63 Rodolphe Gasché, Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) 81. 64 This is similar in nature to what Lieven Boeve describes as the always “unrepresentable” Tradition being represented through the many contextualized traditions that compose it. In this fashion, a Tradition can keep its status as an “open narrative”, allowing for the representation of particular traditions, while maintaining its ties to a closed canon and thus avoiding any issue of

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decanonization. See Lieven Boeve, “Tradition, (De)canonization, and the Challenge of Plurality” in A. Van Der Kooij and K. Van Der Toorn, eds, Canonization and Decanonization: Paper Presented to the International Conference of the Leiden Institute for the Study of Religions (Leiden: Brill, 1998) 379. 65 David Lyle Jeffrey, People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996) 12. 66 See his recent fourth volume to the Homo Sacer series, devoted to developing this notion of a “form-of-life”, De la très haute pauvreté (trad. Joël Gayraud, Paris: Rivages, 2011b). 67 See the account of “de-creation” given in Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze, Bartleby, la formula della creazione (Macerata: Quodlibet, 1993). 68 For Derrida, of course, there was an aporia at the heart of representation that seemed to signal its necessity, our indebtedness to the existence of language as well as the Kantian regulative ideal. See Jacques Derrida, Aporias (trans. Thomas Dutoit, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993)/Apories: Mourir – s’attendre aux «limites de la vérité» (Paris: Galilée, 1996). On the Kantian influence in Derrida’s work, see Rothfield, ed., Kant After Derrida. 69 See Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (trans. Patricia Dailey, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005b) 103ff; his essay on Derrida entitled “Pardes: The Writing of Potentiality” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (ed. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000b); and, his Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998) 54ff. On Agamben’s work in general, see, among others, Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli, eds, Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty & Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008a); Alex Murray, Giorgio Agamben (London: Routledge, 2010); Justin Clemens, Nicholas Heron and Alex Murray, eds, The Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008); Andrew Norris, ed., Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Thomas Carl Wall, Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot and Agamben (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1999); William Watkin, The Literary Agamben: Adventures in Logopoiesis (London: Continuum, 2010); and, Thanos Zartaloudis, Giorgio Agamben: Power, Law and the Uses of Criticism (London: Routledge, 2010).

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70 See Adam Thurschwell, “Cutting the Branches for Akiba: Agamben’s Critique of Derrida” in Norris, ed., Politics, Metaphysics, and Death. 71 See also Agamben’s comments on the condition of “undecidability” opened up by the “state of exception” in his State of Exception, Homo sacer II, 1 (trans. Kevin Attell, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005a) 29ff. 72 See the comments on Derrida’s theories of subjectivity not being able to cross from the philosophical (ontological) to the political (ontic), a failure that marks his Heideggerian/Kierkegaardian influences, in Kenneth Surin, Freedom Not Yet: Liberation and the Next World Order (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 73 See Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (trans. Michael Hardt, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993a) 80; Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience (trans. Liz Heron, London: Verso, 1993b) 37. 74 See also his essay on the concept of nudity in Giorgio Agamben, Nudities (trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010a). 75 Giorgio Agamben, Means without Ends: Notes on Politics (trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000a) 93. See his general thesis on the borders between humanity and animality explored in The Open: Man and Animal (trans. Kevin Attell, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). 76 See Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies in Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke (ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell, New York: Modern Library, 1995) 331–407. See also, the essays gathered in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (trans. Albert Hofstadter, New York: Harper, 1971). 77 Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (trans. Ronald L. Martinez, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993c) 156. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974)/De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967). 78 See Agamben, Stanzas, 156. 79 “The metaphysics of writing and of the signifier is but the reverse face of the metaphysics of the signified and the voice, and not, surely, its transcendence. Even if it were possible to reveal the metaphysical inheritance of modern semiology, it would still be impossible for us to conceive of a presence that, finally freed from difference, was only a pure and undivided station in the open. What we can do is recognize the originary situation of language, this ‘plexus of eternally negative

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differences’ in the barrier resistant to signification (that Oedipal repression has made inaccessible). The originary nucleus of signification is neither in the signifier nor in the signified, neither in writing nor in the voice, but in the fold of the presence on which they are established: the logos, which characterizes the human as zoon logon echon (living thing using language) is this fold that gathers and divides all things in the ‘putting together’ of presence. And the human is precisely this fracture of presence, which opens a world and over which language holds itself ”. Ibid., 156. 80 See Colby Dickinson, Agamben and Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2011). 81 See the parallel thesis on gestures, in a Benjaminian context, in David Michael Kleinberg-Levin, Gestures of Ethical Life: Reading Hölderin’s Question of Measure After Heidegger (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). 82 Agamben, Stanzas, 156. 83 Ibid., 156. 84 On his proximity to this early critique of Agamben’s, see, for example, Derrida’s work on the poetry of Paul Celan where he seems at once to critique Celan’s quest for presence while simultaneously conceding that the poem reveals (only) the fact that it conceals a presence, hence a sort of negative exposure “appears”. This formulation, however, resists being a form of “negative theology”, however, according to Derrida, precisely because it reveals a truth about the structure of revelation (it’s revealability) and does not attempt to present the content of revelation itself. See Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan (eds. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen, New York: Fordham University Press, 2005)/Shibboleth: pour Paul Celan (Paris: Galilée, 1986). Jacques Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials” in Harold Coward and Toby Foshay, eds, Derrida and Negative Theology (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992) 166. 85 Agamben, Time that Remains, 102. 86 Ibid., 102–3. 87 See John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997) 58ff. 88 Agamben, Means without Ends, 97–9. 89 Agamben, Time that Remains, 103. 90 See François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (trans. Jeff Fort, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008) 112–3.

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91 “In order for deconstruction to function, what must be excluded is not the fact that that presence and origin are lacking but that they are purely insignificant”. Agamben, Time that Remains, 103. 92 Ibid., 103. 93 See Ibid., 103–4. 94 See Watkin’s description of “infancy” as an ongoing process within our being rather than a quasioriginary state of being in his Literary Agamben, 13. 95 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 54. “Our age does indeed stand in front of language just as the man from the country in the parable stands in front of the door of the Law. What threatens thinking here is the possibility that thinking might find itself condemned to infinite negotiations with the doorkeeper or, even worse, that it might end by itself assuming the role of the doorkeeper who, without really blocking the entry, shelters the Nothing onto which the door opens. As the evangelical warning cited by Origen concerning the interpretation of Scripture has it: ‘Woe to you, men of the Law, for you have taken away the key to knowledge: you yourselves have not entered, and you have not let the others who approached enter either’ (which ought to be reformulated as follows: ‘Woe to you, who have not wanted to enter into the door of the Law but have not permitted it to be closed either’)” (54). 96 Agamben, “The Messiah and the Sovereign”, Potentialities, 171. See also his State of Exception, as well as his brief essay “What Is a Paradigm?”, The Signature of All Things: On Method (trans. Luca D’Isanto with Kevin Attell, New York: Zone, 2009a). 97 Simon Morgan Wortham, “Law of Friendship: Agamben and Derrida”, New Formations 62 (2007) 89–105, 90. 98 See Dickinson, Agamben and Theology. 99 See Giorgio Agamben, The Man without Content (trans. Georgia Albert, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999) 82. 100 Ibid., 113. 101 Agamben, Time that Remains, 126. 102 See Agamben, Profanations (trans. Jeff Fort, New York: Zone, 2007). 103 Agamben, Time that Remains, 136. 104 Ibid., 137. 105 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 57–8. 106 Ibid., 111. 107 See a parallel formulation of this thought in Caputo, Weakness of God, 32.

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108 This same maneuver can be found in Benjamin’s essay “On Language as such and on the Language of Man” where he speaks of the absence of content in language, something which Agamben seems to have appropriated on the whole. 109 Agamben, Time that Remains, 136. 110 See Agamben, Coming Community. 111 See Agamben, “Bartleby, or On Contingency” in Potentialities. 112 See Vassilis Lambropoulous, The Rise of Eurocentrism: Anatomy of Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 113 I would suggest that this reading bears a certain affinity with the work of Boyarin, Border Lines. 114 See Agamben, Coming Community. 115 See Agamben, Profanations, 59. 116 Agamben, Coming Community, 85ff. 117 See John Caputo, On Religion (London: Routledge, 2001). 118 See Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004) 34ff/Voyous: Deux essays sur la raison (Paris: Galilée, 2003) 53ff. See also how the theme of “autoimmunity” becomes a guiding principle in recent commentaries on his work, such as J. Hillis Miller, For Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009) and Lawlor, This Is Not Sufficient. 119 See Derrida, “Force of Law”/Force de loi. 120 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1 (ed. Michel Lisse, MarieLouise Mallet and Ginette Michaud, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009)/Séminaire: La bête et le souverain, vol. I (2001–2002) (ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet et Ginette Michaud, Paris: Galilée, 2008). 121 Ibid., 92/134. 122 See Giorgio Agamben, “The Friend”, What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays (trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009b) 26–8. See also, Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship (trans. George Collins, London: Verso, 1997)/Politiques de l’amitié, suivi de L’oreille de Heidegger (Paris: Galilée, 1994). 123 Derrida, Beast and the Sovereign, 92/La bête et le souverain, 134. See Derrida, Rogues, 69/Voyous, 102. 124 Derrida, Beast and the Sovereign, 92/La bête et le souverain, 134. 125 See Ibid., 93/135. 126 See the claims made throughout Agamben’s Homo Sacer.

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127 Derrida, Beast and the Sovereign, 316/La bête et le souverain, 420. See Derrida, Rogues, 24/Voyous, 46. 128 Derrida, Beast and the Sovereign, 316–7/La bête et le souverain, 421. 129 Ibid., 317/421. Derrida’s critique of Agamben on this point, of course, mirrors his earlier critique of Foucault’s archaeological method, something which should be kept close in mind whenever Derrida speaks of Agamben. See Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness”, Writing and Difference, 31–63/“Cogito et histoire de la folie”, L’écriture et la difference, 51–97. 130 Derrida, Beast and the Sovereign, 324/La bête et le souverain, 431. 131 Agamben, in Derrida’s eyes, doesn’t want to admit that Aristotle had perhaps already foreseen “what Foucault and Agamben attribute to modern specificity”. Ibid., 327/435. 132 Ibid., 330/438–9. 133 See an essay dedicated to Jacques Derrida entitled “Idea of Thought” in which Agamben concerns himself with Derrida’s use of quotation marks. Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose (trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995) 103–4. See also an essay dedicated to Derrida entitled “The Thing Itself ” in Potentialities, 27–38. 134 See the central thesis surrounding Agamben’s only article devoted to Derrida’s work entitled “Pardes: The Writing of Potentiality” in Potentialities, 205–19. 135 See the conclusions drawn with regard to Derrida, subjectivity and its relation to sovereignty in Nick Mansfield, The God Who Deconstructs Himself: Sovereignty and Subjectivity Between Freud, Bataille, and Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). 136 See Agamben, Time That Remains, 50; and Derrida, Beast and the Sovereign, 260/La bête et le souverain, 349. 137 See Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, 122–3. It is in this context that Heidegger’s lectures on the animal-human divide are situated (125ff). See also, his remarks on animality in general in Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am (ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills, New York: Fordham University Press, 2008)/L’animal que donc je suis (Paris: Galilée, 2006). 138 The question of presentation versus representation, as taken up in this section, could be said, for example, to rest at the center of western philosophical thought. See this demonstrable thesis in the work of Alison Ross, The Aesthetic Paths of Philosophy: Presentation in Kant, Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2007).

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139 Of the numerous comments to appear on the Agamben/Derrida debate, see Adam Thurschwell, “Cutting the Branches for Akiba: Agamben’s Critique of Derrida” in Norris, ed., Politics, Metaphysics, and Death, 173–97; David E. Johnson, “As If the Time Were Now: Deconstructing Agamben”, South Atlantic Quarterly 106:2 (2007) 265–90; Wortham, “Law of Friendship”; Jeffrey S. Librett, “From the Sacrifice of the Letter to the Voice of Testimony: Giorgio Agamben’s Fulfillment of Metaphysics”, Diacritics 37:2–3 (2007) 11–33; Vernon Cisney, “Categories of Life: The Status of the Camp in Derrida and Agamben”, The Southern Journal of Philosophy 46 (2008) 161–79; Catherine Mills, “Playing with Law: Agamben and Derrida on Postjuridical Justice”, South Atlantic Quarterly 107:1 (2008b) 17–35; and Kevin Attell, “An Esoteric Dossier: Agamben and Derrida Read Saussure”, ELH 76:4 (2009) 821–46. A substantial review of the tensions between Derrida and Agamben can also be found in Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 184–91, and receives some mention in Sean Gaston, Derrida, Literature and War: Absence and the Chance of Meaning (London: Continuum, 2009) 40ff. 140 See among others, see in particular, Agamben, Coming Community, 80; Infancy and History, 37; Stanzas, 156; Homo Sacer, 54; “The Messiah and the Sovereign”, Potentialities, 171; and, Time that Remains, 102–3. 141 On Agamben’s incorporation of Foucault’s methodology, see his essay “Philosophical Archaeology” in Signature of All Things. 142 See Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness”, Writing and Difference, 37 and 61/“Cogito et histoire de la folie”, 60 and 94. 143 Ibid., 38/62. 144 Ibid., 40/65. 145 See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith, London: Routledge, 1972)/La Archéologie du Savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). 146 Derrida, Beast and the Sovereign, 330/La bête et le souverain, 438. 147 See Derrida, Archive Fever, 92–3/Mal d’Archive, 144. Derrida also engages Freud, albeit with more nuance, in his The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (trans. Alan Bass, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987)/La Carte Postale: de Socrate à Freud et au-delà (Paris: Flammarion, 1980). 148 Note Derrida’s comment in The Beast and the Sovereign where he points out how Agamben would perhaps be “discouraged” to deal with texts that had already been read, because he would presumably not be the first to find them (324/431). See also the comments on being “first” with regard to the archive in Derrida, Archive Fever, 37, 55–6/Mal d’Archive 62, 89–90. 149 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 296/De la grammatologie, 418.

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150 Ibid., 296/418. 151 Ibid., 314/442. 152 Derrida, Archive Fever, 92–5/Mal d’Archive, 144–8. 153 See Derrida’s remarks on the destruction of the archive in the nuclear age in “No Apocalypse, Not Now: Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives”, Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. I (eds. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007) 400/Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987) 376–7. 154 See Agamben, Infancy and History. 155 This juxtaposition of messianicity and messianism is dealt with at length in Derrida’s Specters of Marx/Spectres de Marx. 156 Derrida, Archive Fever, 36/Mal d’Archive, 60. 157 See his comments on this tension within religious identity in Derrida, “Abraham, the Other” in Bergo, Cohen and Zagury-Orly, eds, Judeities, 1–35/“Abraham, l’autre” in Cohen et Zagury-Orly, Judéités, 11–42. 158 Derrida, Archive Fever, 100/Mal d’Archive, 154. 159 Philip R. Davies, Scribes and Schools: The Canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures (London: SPCK, 1998). 160 See Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 117ff. 161 The phrase “structural state of emergency” is found in Eric L. Santner, “Freud’s Moses and the Ethics of Nomotropic Desire” in Renata Salecl, ed., Sexuation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 162 See the implicit defense of canons and their historical role in Derrida, “Canons and Metonymies”. For the mischaracterizations of his work, see the intellectual history unfolded in Cusset, French Theory. 163 Surin, Freedom Not Yet, 187–8. 164 See the account of Heidegger’s political difficulties given in Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999) 7ff. 165 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, Homo sacer III (trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, New York: Zone, 2002). See concerning the critical responses to this work, Philippe Mesnard and Claudine Kahan, Giorgio Agamben: à l’épreuve d’Auschwitz: témoignages/interpretations (Paris: Kimé, 2001); Nicholas Chare, “The Gap in Context: Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz”, Cultural Critique 64 (2006) 40–68; and Ruth Leys, From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007) 157–79. Substantial engagements concerning these matters can also be found in Catherine Mills, “Linguistic Survival and Ethicality: Biopolitics, Subjectification, and Testimony in

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Remnants of Auschwitz” in Norris, ed., Politics, Metaphysics, and Death, 198–221, as well as in Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 261ff. 166 See Agamben, Idea of Prose, 32. 167 “The archive is thus the mass of the non-semantic inscribed in every meaningful discourse as a function of its enunciation; it is the dark margin encircling and limiting every concrete act of speech. Between the obsessive memory of tradition, which knows only what has been said, and the exaggerated thoughtlessness of oblivion, which cares only for what was never said, the archive is the unsaid or sayable inscribed in everything said by virtue of being enunciated; it is the fragment of memory that is always forgotten in the act of saying ‘I’. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 144. 168 Ibid., 145. 169 The use of “creaturely being” results from Santner’s use of the phrase with regard to Agamben’s formulations in order to distinguish a prelinguistic sense of our creatureliness beyond the construction of the human being which is fabricated in the “anthropological machinery” which works in the margins between the “said” and “unsaid”, at the limits of discernability. Eric L. Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 170 For a critique of Agamben’s conceptualization of testimony, see Leys, From Guilt to Shame, 157–79. 171 See Agamben’s reflections on animality and species in his The Open. 172 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 145. 173 See, for example, his engagement with Hussserl in Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs (trans. David B. Allison, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973)/La Voix et le Phénomène: Introduction au problem du signe dans la phenomenology de Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967). 174 See the collection of essay focused around this central theme in Agamben’s work found in his Potentialities. See also, Santner, On Creaturely Life. 175 “Testimony is a potentiality that becomes actual through an impotentiality of speech; it is, moreover, an impossibility that gives itself existence through a possibility of speaking. These two movements cannot be identified either with a subject or with a consciousness; yet they cannot be divided into two incommunicable substances. Their inseparable intimacy is testimony”. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 146. 176 Ibid., 148. 177 See Agamben’s essay on revelation and language, “The Idea of Language”, Potentialities, 39–47.

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178 See “Kommerell, or On Gesture”, in Ibid., 77–85. 179 See the running thesis throughout his essay on “Philosophical Archaeology”. 180 This emphasis is clearly his Spinoza–Deleuzian strain of immanent thought. See, for example, his essay in Potentialities on “Absolute Immanence”. 181 See on the concept of a “form of life” as situated within his Homo Sacer series, see Ulrich Raulff, “An Interview with Giorgio Agamben”, German Law Journal 5:5 (2004) 609–13. 182 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 161. 183 See Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (trans. Katherine Jones, New York: Vintage, 1939)/Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion (Amsterdam: De Lange, 1939). 184 Agamben, “Philosophical Archaeology”, 102. 185 Ibid., 103. 186 Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 191. 187 Agamben cites Franz Overbeck’s use of the term “canonization” in this regard. Agamben, “Philosophical Archaeology”, 88. Franz Overbeck, Kirchenlexicon Materialen: Christentum und Kultur, ed. Barbara von Reibnitz, Werke und Nachlass (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1996). 188 See among others, the critique levied by Mills in her Philosophy of Agamben. 189 Agamben, “Philosophical Archaeology”, 103. 190 See the contrast of economic and aneconomic forces in Hurst, Derrida Vis-à-vis Lacan, and Giorgio Agamben’s critique of the western notion of oikonomia in his The Kingdom and the Glory: Homo Sacer II, 2 (trans. Lorenzo Chiesa, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011a). 191 See Jacques Derrida, “Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul: The Impossible Beyond of a Sovereign Cruelty” in Peggy Kamuf, ed., Without Alibi (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002b) 275–76/États d’âme de la psychanalyse (Paris: Galilée, 2000) 80–2. 192 Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 190. 193 See Derrida, “Abraham, the Other”/“Abraham, l’autre”, as well as his “A Testimony Given. . .” in Elizabeth Weber, Questioning Judaism (trans. Rachel Bowlby, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). This is, of course, not an uncontested issue. 194 One can simply note the increasingly theological slant of his more recent writings, including his The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath (trans. Adam Kotsko, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010b), The Kingdom and the Glory, and some of the essays in his Nudities.

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195 Again, see Ross, Aesthetic Paths of Philosophy, especially 76ff, where she maintains that the tensions between representation and any possible presentation are what motivate the central problematic of “ontotheology” in Heidegger’s work, as well as in more recent philosophical endeavors. 196 See Derrida, “Abraham, the Other”/“Abraham, l’autre”, for example. 197 Derrida, Archive Fever, 80/Mal d’Archive, 127. 198 Ibid., 94/147. 199 See Agamben, De la très haute pauvreté. 200 See Mills, Philosophy of Agamben. 201 Agamben, Sacrament of Language. 202 Agamben, Potentialities. 203 Agamben, Coming Community, 48. 204 Ibid., 47–8. 205 Ibid., 48. 206 See Agamben, Idea of Prose, 95, as well as the central argument behind The Open. 207 Agamben, “Philosophical Archaeology”, 108. 208 Ibid., 108. 209 Ibid. 210 This reading of the theological as external to history bears a strong affinity with Benjamin’s remarks on the place of theology in his own work. See, for example, Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999) 570–611/Passagen-Werk, Gesammelte Schriften V:1, 589. 211 See Agamben, Coming Community as well as his Means Without Ends. 212 See Agamben, “What Is a Paradigm?”, Signature of All Things. 213 Agamben, Nudities, 1–2. 214 Agamben, Time that Remains, 60–1. 215 Agamben, Sacrament of Language. 216 Sarah Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010) 19. 217 The former attempt is recognizable in the work of Paul Ricoeur, the latter in someone such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for example. 218 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language (trans. Robert Czerny, Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, London: Routledge, 1977) 362/La métaphore vive (Paris: Seuil, 1975) 388. 219 Ibid., 302/321. 220 Ibid., 307/326.

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221 Ibid., 355/380. 222 Ibid., 371/399. 223 See Dickinson, Agamben and Theology for more on this topic. 224 See Agamben, Means without Ends, 135. 225 See Derrida, Archive Fever/Mal d’Archive. 226 As Derrida continues in the interview in question on the nature of responsibility,

This surplus of responsibility – for me, the very experience of deconstruction – leads to interrogating, suspecting and displacing those tranquil assurances in whose name so many moralisms, today more than ever, organize their courts, their trials and their censures. So long as those assurances are not interrogated or put to the test of a vigilant deconstruction, these moralisms will signify above all else a repressive violence, dogmatism and irresponsibility: the very irresponsibility that claims to speak in the name of responsibility, the well-known immorality of edifying moralism. (202) 227 Eric L. Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011) 138n. 63.

Chapter 3 1 Taubes, Political Theology, 94–5/Politische Theologie, 130. 2 Freud, Moses/Der Mann Moses. 3 See Sarah Winter, Freud and the Institution of Psychoanalytic Knowledge (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). The general responses include, but are not limited to, the following interventions: Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (trans. Tom Conley, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988)/L’écriture de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975); Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever; Richard J. Bernstein, Freud and the Legacy of Moses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); James J. DiCensio, The Other Freud: Religion, Culture and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1999); Santner, “Freud’s Moses”; Taubes, Political Theology/Die Politische Theologie, as well as Assmann’s many writings on the subject, as we will see in what follows. 4 Jan Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies (trans. Rodney Livingstone, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006) 51–2/Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis: Zehn Studien (München: CH. Beck, 2000) 68.

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5 Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) 14. 6 Assmann, Moses, 9–10, 16–7. 7 Assmann, Religion, 53/Religion, 69. 8 Ibid., 53/70. 9 This transitional phase toward an “extraterritorial nature” of the Law is also able to underscore a qualitative difference between revelation and canonization, two events now essentially forever intertwined. As David Weiss Halivni articulates it: though “Moses received the Torah at Sinai; the people of Israel received a canon in Jerusalem.” See his Revelation Restored: Divine Writ and Critical Responses (London: SCM Press, 2001) 85. This pivotal difference serves as well to highlight their intended relationship as an ideological interpretation of the Mosaic event, forever (re)construed for political purposes—“The covenant of Sinai was realized by means of Ezra’s canonical Torah; thus Ezra’s canon received retroactively a Sinaitic imprimatur” (85). The legitimacy of the canon was fabricated upon an original revelatory event mired in Mosaic tradition and now intricately interlaced with it. This is to say that even though this historical difference is sufficient to produce a gap of some considerable significance, it is the mutual intertwining of the two concepts, and the fabricated proximity between them, which was to dissolve any conceptual difference, and instead establish a unified scripture. 10 Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, 170. 11 Ibid., 33. See Gerdien Jonker, The Topography of Remembrance: The Dead, Tradition and Collective Memory in Mesopotamia (Leiden: Brill, 1995) 26. 12 Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, 14. 13 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (rev. ed., London: Verso, 2006). 14 Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, 3, 147. See the comments on orality in Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1982). 15 Assmann, Religion, 54/Religion, 71. 16 Ibid., 58–9/76. For Assmann, one of the greatest historical “truths” to emerge from this Freudian reading of religious origins is how the Jews themselves were, at the point just before the Exodus, a profound example of the “return of the repressed,” a version of Amarna (King Akhenaten’s) monotheism which was censored and erased from Egyptian cultural memory by force shortly before Moses’ era: “What could be more obvious than to declare Moses the disciple of Akhenaten? We might almost imagine that the two are identical” (59). Moses, in turn, came to

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represent a repressed memory of the Egyptians, one which met with their “violent defense mechanisms” captured in the biblical account (61). 17 Ibid., 62/80. 18 Petra Bahr, “Canon/Canonization” in Kocku von Stuckrad, ed., The Brill Dictionary of Religion, vol. 1 (trans. Robert R. Barr, Leiden: Brill, 2006) 252. 19 Jan Assmann, Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008). 20 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions (trans. Henry Taylor, San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2004) 210–30. 21 Assmann, Of God, 30ff. 22 Ibid., 59 and 62ff. 23 Ibid., 75 and 22. 24 Ibid., 111. 25 Ibid., 145. On Benjamin’s working of the relationship between messianism and violence, see his “Critique of Violence” read against the backdrop of his “On the Concept of History,” Selected Writings/‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’, Gesammelte Schriften II:1, 179–203, and “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” Gesammelte Schriften, 693–704. Assmann himself alludes to Benjamin, though only in the brief context of his remarks concerning the different forms of violence experienced in our world (Assmann, Of God, 142ff). On Benjamin’s famous “weak messianic force” being co-opted theologically, see Caputo, Weakness of God. 26 See the parallel interpretations of Regina M. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), as well as the astute commentary on Assmann’s work by Mark S. Smith, The Memoirs of God: History, Memory, and the Experience of the Divine in Ancient Israel (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2004), as well as his God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008). 27 Assmann, Of God, 145. 28 Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism (trans. Robert Savage, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010) 48. 29 Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”/“Zur Kritik der Gewalt.”. 30 Assmann, Of God, 142ff. 31 Ibid., 145, the previous quote can be found on 144. He subsequently adds the following: “Religious violence is nothing original, nothing necessarily implied in the idea of monotheism. Monotheism originally meant the liberation of man

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from the omnipotence of political power. This was at first conceivable only as counterviolence, religious violence against political violence. Essentially this is a question not of violence against violence but of power against power. The basic idea behind biblical monotheism is to erect a counterpower against the allencompassing power of the political. Religion can exert its counterpower against the political only if it has recourse to totally different means and values” (145). 32 Ibid., 143. One could perhaps note the difficulty of this separation if viewed through the lens of Carl Schmitt’s formulation of a political theology, one wherein the nation-state is determined upon the friend/enemy distinction. Assmann himself establishes his brief definition of political violence in relation to Schmitt, but does not develop it beyond a few terse lines. See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (trans. George Schwab, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996)/Der Begriff des Politischen (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991 (1932)). This insight is made even more fortuitous considering Benjamin’s acknowledgment of Schmitt’s influence upon his own work in the Trauerspiel book. See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama/Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. 33 See Derrida, ‘Before the Law’/Force de loi. 34 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”/“Über den Begriff der Geschichte.” 35 Brian Britt, Walter Benjamin and the Bible (New York: Continuum, 1996). 36 Joseph Blenkinsopp, Prophecy and Canon: A Contribution to the Study of Jewish Origins (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986) 151. 37 Santner, “Freud’s Moses.” 38 Stéphane Mosès, The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem (trans. Barbara Harshar, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009) 20ff/L’ange de l’histoire: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem (Paris: Seuil, 1992) 35ff. See Mosès’ comments on Franz Rosenzweig’s attempt to do just this in the face of his particular cultural–historical context, one which Benjamin shared in to no small extent (20ff/35ff). 39 Assmann, Of God, 22. 40 Ibid., 27. 41 Ibid., 26–7. 42 Britt, Walter Benjamin. 43 Susan A. Handelmann, Fragments of Redemption: Jewish Thought and Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem, and Levinas (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991); and, Eric Jacobson, Metaphysics of the Profane: The Political Theology of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem (New York: Columbia

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University Press, 2003). In at least one case, his use of the messianic has also been explicitly linked to the (Christian) writings of Paul. See Agamben, Time that Remains. 44 See the use of the messianic throughout his work, including its sporadic, but essential references in Walter Benjamin, Selected Works. See “The Life of Students,” vol. 1, 41; “Trauerspiel and Tragedy,” vol. 1, 55–6; “The Currently Effective Messianic Elements,” vol. 1, 213ff; “The Idea of a Mystery,” vol. 2, 68; “Franz Kafka,” vol. 2, 497; “Theological-Political Fragment,” vol. 3, 305–6; and, “On the Concept of History,” vol. 4, 389ff. 45 Benjamin, “Theological-Political Fragment,” Selected Writings, vol. 3, 305/“Theologisch-Politisches Fragment,” Gesammelte Schriften II:1, 203. 46 See Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”/“Über den Begriff der Geschichte.” 47 See the prominence given to his personal tragedy in Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York: Harper, 2007) 127ff. 48 See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology/Politische Theologie. 49 See Fritsch, Promise of Memory. 50 On the Jewish indebtedness of Benjamin, among others see Mosès, Angel of History/L’ange de l’histoire; Jacobson, Metaphysics; and, Handelman, Fragments. On the suggestion of a Pauline lineage, see Agamben, Time That Remains. 51 See Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, After the Death of God (ed. Jeffrey W. Robbins, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2009) 6; and Santner, On Creaturely Life. 52 Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”/“Zur Kritik der Gewalt.” 53 See the remarks on methodology in Benjamin, Arcades Project, 456–88/Passagen-Werk, 570–611. 54 See Britt, Walter Benjamin. 55 Benjamin, “Concept of History,” 390/Gesammelte Schriften I:2, 694. 56 Ibid., 391/695. 57 Ibid., 396/703. 58 Ibid., 397/704. 59 Ibid. 60 Fritsch, Promise of Memory. 61 See the Pauline reading of Benjamin’s use of the messianic in Taubes, Political Theology, 70ff/Politische Theologie, 97ff.

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62 Walter Benjamin, “School Reform: A Cultural Movement,” Early Writings: 1910–1917 (trans. Howard Eiland et al., Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2011) 59/“Die Schulreform, eine Kulturbewegung,” Gesammelte Schriften II:1, 14. 63 Walter Benjamin, “The Rainbow: A Conversation about Imagination,” Early Writings, 214–23/“Der Regenbogen: Gespräch über die Phantasie,” Gesammelte Schriften VII:1, 19–26. 64 Ibid., 219/24. 65 See the translator’s note in Ibid., 221n. 3/126. 66 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften VI, 126. 67 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 917/Gesammelte Schriften V:2, 1251. 68 Ibid., 462–4/576–80. 69 Peter Fenves, The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). 70 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 471/Gesammelte Schriften V:1, 589. 71 Ibid., 471/588. 72 Benjamin, “Concept of History,” 389/Gesammelte Schriften I:2, 693. 73 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 917/Gesammelte Schriften V:2, 1251. 74 Ibid., 917–8/1251. 75 Ibid., 918/1251. 76 See the conclusion to Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator,” Selected Writings, vol. 1, 263/“Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” Gesammelte Schriften IV:1, 9–21. 77 Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” Selected Writings, vol. 1, 67/“Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen,” Gesammelte Schriften II:1, 147. 78 Ibid., 66/146. 79 See this theme in the Benjaminian inspired work of Agamben, “The Idea of Language” in Potentialities, 41. See also the centrality of Benjamin’s views on language in Agamben, Infancy and History. 80 For Assmann, this step toward marking the space of both the believer and the (subsequently formed) idolater, the step taken to distance the people of God from the world, was historically “reversed by Christianity with its theology of incarnation [Inkarnationstheologie], thus clearing the way for a return to images, to the world, the book of nature, and ultimately . . . to natural science” (Assmann, Religion, 78/Religion, 98). In this manner, Assmann’s insight is not obscured by the disjunction offered here between Judaism and Christianity; indeed, the principle of incarnation presents itself as the pivotal distinction between the two

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religions and is that which is yet also still bound to the canonical form. Christian scripture, for its part, was likewise born in the face of an immanent catastrophe to its culture and tradition. And the forces which could be said to guide the Judaic canon are no less relevant (from a structural level) for Christian practice and self-understanding. What should not be overlooked at this stage (as this will serve to unite Assmann’s claims most directly with those of Benjamin’s as we shall soon see) are the primary (dynamic) elements of the Judaic canon which, yet, still inform the basic definition of Christianity and which are not necessarily surpassed by any doctrine of incarnation—that is, its messianic impulse which can be derived directly from the formation and function of a monotheistic canon. 81 See the eschatological motifs in Benjamin, Origin, 66ff/Ursprung, 246ff. 82 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 462/Gesammelte Schriften V:1, 577. 83 Ibid., 473/591. 84 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2005) 8. 85 Ibid., 16. 86 Ibid., 23. 87 Ibid., 42. 88 Friedländer, Years of Extermination, 127ff. 89 This insight was perhaps what inscribed itself in later twentieth century discourse under the name of deconstructionism. See the oeuvre of Derrida as the prime example of how messianicity operates at the limits of what can be represented “in the text.” Derrida, Specters of Marx/Spectres de Marx. 90 Mosès, Angel of History, 66ff/L’ange de l’histoire, 97ff. 91 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (3rd version), Selected Writings, vol. 4, 254, de-emphasized from the original/“Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”  Dritte Fassung  , Gesammelte Schriften I:2, 477. 92 Ibid., 254/477–8. 93 Ibid., 254/478. 94 Ibid., 256–7/481–2. 95 Mosès, Angel of History, 66ff/L’ange de l’histoire, 97ff. 96 Benjamin, “Work of Art” (3rd version), 262/“Das Kunstwerk”  Dritte Fassung  , 497. 97 See this criticism in Roland Boer, Criticism of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology (Leiden: Brill, 2007) 101ff.

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98 Benjamin, “Work of Art” (3rd edition), 269/“Das Kunstwerk”  Dritte Fassung , 506. 99 Benjamin’s citation of Marinetti directs us only toward La Stampa Torino, an Italilan periodical, though the exact citation is disputed. See Ibid., 282 n. 48. 100 Ibid., 270/507–8. 101 Fritsch, Promise of Memory. 102 Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 248/“Zur Kritik der Gewalt,” 198. 103 See Derrida, “Force of Law”/Force de loi.

Chapter 4 1 See the premises behind one of his major works, Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, 2 vols (trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 2 See Schmitt, Political Theology, 15/Politische Theologie, 21. This connection is made lucid in Taubes, Political Theology, 65–6/Politische Theologie, 91. 3 See Søren Kierkegaard, Attack Upon “Christendom” (trans. Walter Lowrie, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968). 4 See Creston Davis, John Milbank and Slavoj Žižek, eds, Theology and the Political: The New Debate (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Hent de Vries, ed., Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006b); and, Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward, eds, Religion and Political Thought (London: Continuum, 2006). 5 See Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 389–400. On Benjamin’s messianic themes, see also Fritsch, Promise of Memory. For how this unfolds in relation to scripture, see Britt, Walter Benjamin. 6 See Benjamin, Arcades Project, 471/Gesammelte Schriften V:1, 589. 7 See the characterization of Benjamin given in Fritsch, Promise of Memory. 8 See Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”. 9 See Benjamin, Arcades Project, 471/Gesammelte Schriften V:1, 589. 10 See Derrida, Specters of Marx/Spectres de Marx; Agamben, State of Exception; Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 1ff; and the almost enigmatic remarks on the messianic in Butler, “Afterward”; see also the intersection of thought in Slavoj Žižek, Eric Santner and Kenneth Reinhard, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

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11 Santner, “Freud’s Moses.” Santner’s own indebtedness to the work of Carl Schmitt, for developing, and Walter Benjamin, for further developing, the concept of a “state of emergency” is central to this essay and his work as a whole. See, for example, his On Creaturely Life. 12 Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (trans. Emerson Buchanan, Boston, MA: Beacon, 1967)/Finitude et culpabilité II, La symbolique du mal (Paris: Aubier, 1960). 13 See the essays by Ricoeur in Paul Ricoeur and André LaCocque, Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies (trans. David Pellauer, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998)/Penser la bible (Paris: Seuil, 1998). 14 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (trans. Kathleen Blamey, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995b)/Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1990). 15 See Paul Ricoeur, On Translation (trans. Eileen Brennan, London: Routledge, 2006)/Sur la traduction (Paris: Bayard, 2004). See also Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” Selected Works, vol. 1; and, Jacques Derrida, Monolinguism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin (trans. Patrick Mensah, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998a)/Le monolinguisme de l’autre, ou la prothèse d’origine (Paris: Galilée, 1996). On the relationship between Ricoeur and Derrida, see Eftichis Pirovolakis, Reading Derrida and Ricoeur: Improbable Encounters Between Deconstruction and Hermeneutics (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2010). 16 Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 58–9/La symbolique du mal, 61–2. 17 Ibid., 118/115. 18 See Ibid., 122/119. 19 Ibid., 119/116. 20 Ibid., 120/117. 21 Ibid., 62/65. 22 Ibid., 59/63. 23 Ibid., 125–6/122. 24 Just such a characterization of halachah is present in Taubes’ description of the essence of Judaic faith. See his essay “Judaism and Christianity”/“Judentum und Christentum.” 25 Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 131/La symbolique du mal, 127. 26 Ibid., 135/131. 27 Ibid., 137–8/133. 28 Ibid., 143/138. 29 Ibid., 134–5/130.

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30 See Paul Ricoeur, “Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation” in Lewis S. Midge, ed., Essays on Biblical Interpretation (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1985a) 75. See also the comments on Ricoeur in Richard R. Topping, Revelation, Scripture and Church: Theological Hermeneutic Thought of James Barr, Paul Ricoeur and Hans Frei (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 31 See Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 400/La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, 522. 32 See Ricoeur, Time and Narrative/Temps et récit; and Osborne, Politics of Time, 53. On the biblical parallel, see Paul Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction: Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay (trans. Kathleen Blamey, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) 148/La critique et la conviction: Entretien ave François Azouvi et Marc de Launay (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1995) 223–4. 33 See Ricoeur, “The Canon.” 34 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 399/La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, 521. See Yerushalmi, Zakhor. 35 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 588, n. 81/La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, 520, n. 86. 36 Ibid., 400/521. 37 Ibid., 401/522. 38 Ricoeur, “The ‘Sacred’ Text,” 72/“Le texte « sacré » et la communauté,” 39 See Th.M. van Leeuwen, “Texts, Canon, and Revelation in Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics” in Van Der Kooij and Van Der Toorn, eds, Canonization and Decanonization, 399, 401. 40 As Fodor continues:

It assumes a view of truth as that which is ultimately removed from and alien to the historical process of its manifestation and appropriation. In short, it promotes a vulgar form of heteronomy, where authorization simply amounts to an appeal to an unchallengeable, elusive, and inaccessible authority that purportedly grounds and legitimizes our discourse but which is in no way present in our discourse. Of course, Christians rightly wish to make the claim that prior to all our speech is God’s originative, generative Word. But unless theology attends to how and under what conditions it actually learns and acquires and reflectively corrects its own language, it is in danger of advancing an ideology in the guise of truth.

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James Fodor, Christian Hermeneutics: Paul Ricoeur and the Refiguring of Theology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) 37–8. 41 See Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 11/Temps et récit, tome 3, 17. 42 Ricoeur, “The Canon,” 23. 43 See Ibid. 44 Ricoeur, On Translation, 35. 45 See Ricoeur, Oneself as Another/Soi-même comme un autre, as well as Levinas, Totality and Infinity/Totalité et Infini. 46 See Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 400/La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, 522. 47 Yerushalmi makes such a remark on the potential for finding more material on Freud’s life upon which to advance his portrayal of Freud in his Freud’s Moses. This discussion of the obsessive nature of the archive is, of course, indebted another Freudian inspired text, that of Derrida, Archive Fever/Mal d’Archive. 48 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 456/La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, 589. 49 Ibid., 457/593. 50 This is obviously relevant to those (literary) canonical formations attacked precisely for being composed entirely of “dead white males.” This characterization of a canon’s ability to forgive, however, would allow some of those same “dead white males” to subsist within the western literary canon while simultaneously perhaps offering severe critiques of others. On the literary debates surrounding the western canon, See Charles Altieri, Canons and Consequences: Reflections on the Ethical Force of Imaginative Ideals (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991); as well as the comments made in the “Introduction” to Bloom, Western Canon. 51 This point is made in Wilfred Cantwell Smith, What Is Scripture? (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2000). 52 Ricoeur, “The Canon,” 16. 53 Ricoeur, “The ‘Sacred’ Text,” 70/“Le texte « sacré » et la communauté”, 323. 54 Just such a project was declared in one of his final works on recognition. See Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition (trans. D. Pellauer, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005) 262–3/Parcours de la reconnaissance: Trois etudes (Paris: Stock, 2004) 376–7. 55 Ibid., 137/202. 56 Natalie Melas, All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007) 227. 57 Ricoeur, “Toward a Hermeneutic,” 117. 58 Ibid., 117.

Notes

244 59 Ibid., 115.

60 See Ricoeur’s comments on Luther’s “canon within a canon” in Critique and Conviction, 143–4/La critique et la conviction, 216–9. 61 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 494/La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, 643. 62 It is no surprise that Ricoeur saw the closure of the sacred canon and its consequent authoritative position in a community as one of the issues which separates the philosophical from the theological. See Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 143–4/La critique et la conviction, 216–9. On the separation of these strands in Ricoeur’s work in general, see, among other places, Dan R. Stiver, Theology after Ricoeur: New Directions in Hermeneutical Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001) 229ff. 63 This “modern dilemma” of the canon in relation to the community is echoed in Luc Zaman, Bible and Canon: A Modern Historical Inquiry (Leiden: Brill, 2008) 538–41. 64 See Jan Gorak, Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea (London: Athlone, 1991), as well as Davies, Scribes and Schools. 65 See the project of constructing a “democratic canon” in the work of Brenneman, Canons in Conflict and the “anti-hegemonic” understanding of canons as found in Delwin Brown, Boundaries of Our Habitations: Tradition and Theological Construction (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994). 66 See the central thesis behind Agamben’s State of Exception. 67 Jean Genet, “Interview with Rüdiger Wischenbart and Layla Shahid Barrada,” The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews (ed. Albert Dichy, trans. Jeff Fort, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004) 244. 68 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 392. 69 Fenves, Messianic Reduction. 70 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 499/La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, 649. 71 Ibid., 500/650. 72 On Ricoeur’s “little ethics,” see his Oneself as Another, 169–296/Soi-même comme un autre, 199–344. 73 See Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 140–68/Soi-même comme un autre, 167–98. 74 See Ricoeur, “The Canon”. 75 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 160–1/Soi-même comme un autre, 189–91. See also Ricoeur, Time and Narrative. 76 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 500/La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, 650. 77 Ibid., 500/650. 78 Ibid., 501/651. On the relationship between “violence-preservation” and the state, see Benjamin’s much celebrated essay “Critique of Violence”.

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79 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 284/Soi-même comme un autre, 330. 80 See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (ed. J. C. A. Gaskin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 81 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 79/La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, 96. 82 See the central argument concerning the borders between animal and human in Agamben, The Open. 83 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 500/La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, 650. 84 On the use of the term “creaturely” in this context, see Santner, On Creaturely Life. 85 Agamben, Idea of Prose, 81. 86 Ibid., 81–2. 87 See the conclusions drawn in Dickinson, Agamben and Theology. 88 See the collected essays by Agamben entitled Potentialities. 89 Agamben, Idea of Prose, 82. 90 See Ricoeur, Course of Recognition/Parcours de la reconnaissance. 91 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 505/La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, 656. 92 See also Brian Treanor and Henry Isaac Venema, eds, “How Much More Than the Possible”, A Passion for the Possible: Thinking with Paul Ricoeur (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). 93 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 488/La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, 630–1. 94 See Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben. 95 See Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book Theta (ed. and trans. Stephen Makin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 96 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 308/Soi-même comme un autre, 357. 97 Ibid., 315/364. 98 See also his remarks on metaphor and definition in his Rule of Metaphor/La métaphore vive. 99 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 304–5/Soi-même comme un autre, 353–4. 100 Ibid., 306–7, specifically 307n. 10/356n. 2. 101 Ibid., 308/357. 102 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 44–5. 103 See Raulff, “An Interview”. 104 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 46. 105 Ibid., 45. 106 Ibid. 107 See Agamben, The Open. 108 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 46. 109 See Agamben, The Open. 110 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 315–7/Soi-même comme un autre, 365–7.

Notes

246 111 Agamben, Coming Community.

112 Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 302/La métaphore vive, 321. 113 Ibid., 351/376. 114 Ibid., 341/366. 115 Ibid., 352/377–8. 116 Ibid., 358/383–4. 117 Ibid., 368/396. 118 See Benjamin, Arcades Project/Passagen-Werk, as well as his earlier work Origin of German Tragic Drama. 119 See Joeri Schrijvers, Ontotheological Turnings? The Decentering of the Modern Subject in Recent French Phenomenology (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2011). 120 Agamben, Idea of Prose, 107. 121 See the development of such a radical hermeneutics within a theological context in Lieven Boeve, “Theological Truth, Particularity and Incarnation: Engaging Religious Plurality and Radical Hermeneutics” in Matthias Lamberigts, Lieven Boeve and Terrence Merrigan, eds, Orthodoxy, Process and Product (Leuven: Peeters, 2009) 323–48, as well as his “Naming God in Open Narratives: Theology Between Deconstruction and Hermeneutics” in J. Verheyden, T. L. Hettema and P. Vandecasteele, eds, Paul Ricoeur: Poetics and Religion (Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium 240, Leuven: Peeters, 2011) 81–100. 122 See Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology (trans. Dorion Cairns, Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977) 108ff. 123 See the early influence of Husserl upon Derrida in Derrida, Speech and Phenomena. 124 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (trans. E. B. Ashton, London: Continuum, 1973) 5/Negative Dialektik, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 6 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1973) 16–7. 125 Ibid., 5/17. 126 See Agamben, Time that Remains. 127 Frederic Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2010) 544n. 52. 128 See the account in Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being: Or Beyond Essence (trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998) 109–118/Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974) 139–51. 129 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 333/Soi-même comme un autre, 384–5. 130 See Derrida, “Envoi” in Psyche, vol. 1.

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131 See Derrida, Adieu/Adieu. 132 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 336/Soi-même comme un autre, 387. 133 Ibid., 336/388–9. 134 Ibid., 336–7/388. 135 Ibid., 337/388–9. 136 Ibid., 338/390. 137 Ibid., 340/392. 138 Ibid., 340–1/393. 139 Ibid., 339/391. 140 See Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor/La métaphore vive. 141 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 330/Soi-même comme un autre, 381. 142 Judith Butler, “Changing the Subject” in Sara Salih, ed., The Judith Butler Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004b) 331. 143 Ibid., 331. 144 See Butler, Gender Trouble. 145 See Butler, The Psychic Life of Power. 146 Butler, “Changing the Subject,” 339. 147 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006) 141. 148 Butler, Frames of War, 36. 149 Ibid., 43. 150 See, for example, Diana Coole, “Butler’s phenomenological existentialism” in Terrell Carver and Samuel A. Chambers, eds, Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters (London: Routledge, 2008) 11–27. 151 Butler, Frames of War, 44. 152 Ibid., 44. 153 Ibid., 43. 154 Ibid., 52. 155 Ibid., 49. 156 Ibid., 165. 157 Ibid., 51. 158 Ibid., 165. 159 Ibid., 169. 160 Ibid., 170–1. 161 Ibid., 182–3. 162 Ibid., 184. 163 Ibid., 182. 164 Ibid., 172–3. For more on Levinas, see Precarious Life, 131–46.

Notes

248 165 Butler, Frames of War, 177.

166 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005) 36–8. 167 Butler, Precarious Life, 144. 168 Ibid., 144. 169 Ibid., 146. 170 Ibid., 45. See also her Giving an Account of Oneself, 40. 171 Jacques Lacan, Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973 (ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink, New York: W. W. Norton, 1998) 146/Encore: Le Seminaire, Livre XX (Paris: Seuil, 1975) 133. 172 See Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 509. 173 Ibid., 612. See also Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2007). 174 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 471/Gesammelte Schriften V:1, 589. Something of his lifelong “theological” viewpoint can also be seen in something like his relation to scripture, for example, as witnessed in Britt, Walter Benjamin. Benjamin’s bringing of the theological into relation with the historical is also discussed at length in Mosès, The Angel of History/L’ange de l’histoire. See also, Handelman, Fragments of Redemption and Jacobson, Metaphysics of the Profane. 175 Benjamin’s juxtaposition of historical “semblances” or representations against his version of dialectical materialism, which focused rather on the singularities of history brought forward in “messianic time” is testified to throughout Arcades Project, see especially, his notes sketched toward the end of his life, gathered under the title “Materials for the Exposé of 1935”, no. 25, 918/Gesammelte Schriften V:2, 1251. 176 See Benjamin, “Concept of History.” 177 See the development of this notion in relation to Benjamin’s conception of history in Fritsch, Promise of Memory. 178 See Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology (trans. J. Matthew Ashley, New York: Crossroad, 2007)/Glaube in Geschichte und Gesellschaft: Studien zu einer praktischen Fundamentaltheologie (Mainz: Grünewald, 1977). This idea is developed further in relation to Metz’s theology in Bruce T. Morrill, Anamnesis as Dangerous Memory (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000). 179 This is nothing less than the reality of the contentious (political) realm of representations which can be said to shape our sense of self (subjecthood). See an account of self-narration, and as will be subsequently implicit in what follows, Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself.

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180 From the outset, Butler’s work has been aimed at “undoing” the normative (gendered, racial) divisions within our world. See Butler, Gender Trouble; Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge, 1993); Undoing Gender (London: Routledge, 2004). 181 See her stated interest in the “messianic” which she puts forth in the “Afterward” to Armour and St. Ville, eds, Bodily Citations. She has subsequently developed this thematic more explicitly in her lecture on religion given at Utrecht University in January 2010. 182 Butler, Gender Trouble, 188. 183 Ibid., 185. 184 Ibid., 189. 185 Annika Thiem, Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy, and Critical Responsibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008) 9ff. 186 See her taking up of Benjamin’s theses on history, his use of “messianic time” and the messianic potential for the disruption of state power, in Butler, Frames of War, 134–5. See also her related essay on Benjamin’s notion of violence entitled “Critique, Coercion, and Sacred Life in Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ ” in Hent de Vries and Lawrence Sullivan, eds, Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006b). 187 She later extends this arbitrary signification of gender to include the divisions of race which could be said to “found” the intelligibility of society in some sense. See Butler, “Changing the Subject,” 333–34. 188 The concept of a “messianic without messianism” runs as a theme throughout Derrida’s later work, as previously explored in chapter two. In essence, Derrida sought to develop an open-ended conceptualization of time that cannot be foreclosed upon in history, thus distancing him from any concrete, historical messianism within any particular religious tradition. See his Specters of Marx, 74ff/Spectres de Marx, 102ff. See also the elaboration of the concept in Caputo, Prayers and Tears. 189 Though Butler has engaged more recently with some theological motifs, including Joseph Ratzinger’s (Pope Benedict XVI’s) views on homosexuality, she advocates within the same pages that religion is only one of many fields attempting to deal with the multiple historical tensions that constitute the subject under state rule. Butler, Frames of War, 117–21 and 149ff. 190 Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic. 191 For more on this element in Ricoeur’s thought, see Richard Kearney, On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004) 75–90.

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192 Cornel West, “Prophetic Religion and the Future of Capitalist Civiliation” in Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan Van Antwerpen, eds, The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011) 99. See also, his essay on Jameson’s work, “Frederic Jameson’s American Marxism,” The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas, 2000) 231–50. 193 The seminal study of H. Richard Niebuhr seems to cement this relationship in a modern context. See his Christ and Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1951). Reactions to this original study have run a wide gamut, but one of particular relevance to this study, especially as regards its position concerning violence and theology, is Glen Stassen, Dianne Yeager and John Howard Yoder, Authentic Transformation: A New Vision of Christ and Culture (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1995). For a more recent construal of Christ and culture in light of more contemporary theological developments, see Graham Ward’s Christ and Culture (Challenges in Contemporary Theology, Oxford: Wiley, 2005). 194 Assmann, Religion, 39/Religion, 54.

Conclusion 1 John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutical Project (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987) 5. 2 Zartaloudis, Giorgio Agamben, 306. 3 Ibid., 300. 4 Ibid., 307. 5 Ibid., 308. 6 Giorgio Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom (trans. Leland de la Durantaye, London: Seagull, 2012) 34–5. 7 See the contributions to John D. Caputo and Linda Martín Alcoff, eds, St. Paul among the Philosophers (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009). 8 See how such formulations are already present in Peter Scott and William T. Cavanaugh, eds, The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). 9 This is the sense in which Clayton Crockett, for example, has recently used it in his work Radical Political Theology, 12.

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Index Adorno, Theodor  190 Agamben, Giorgio  4–6, 8–11, 18, 20–1, 28, 30–1, 36, 39, 41, 44–6, 63–88, 91–112, 119, 131, 134, 137–8, 141–2, 147–50, 153, 155, 158, 166, 171, 173, 177 Anderson, Benedict  122 Aneconomic  48–50, 61, 88, 109, 111, 218n. 23, 231n. 190 anti-semitic  23, 140 archivization  49–50, 88–9, 98, 109, 218n. 23 Aristotle  11, 80, 151, 173, 181–6, 188, 227n. 131 Assmann, Jan  9–10, 26, 65, 118, 120–30, 136–8, 140, 144–8, 169, 171, 196, 204, 209–10, 234n. 16, 235n. 25, 236n. 32, 238n. 80 Badiou, Alain  17–18, 21, 26, 31–2, 71 Bar Kokhba  38 Benjamin, Walter  4–6, 10, 24, 30, 39, 44, 54–5, 58, 61, 65, 72–3, 75, 103, 112, 118–19, 124–47, 149, 151, 153, 155–6, 169, 171, 174, 176, 178, 186–8, 195, 199–202, 209 Biale, David  26, 29 Bloch, Ernst  16 Borges, Jorge Luis  51, 166 Bornkamm, Günther  16–18 Boyarin, Daniel  19–20 Breton, Stanislas  17 Britt, Brian  127, 248n. 174 Butler, Judith  10, 44, 150–1, 153, 190, 194–8, 200–2, 208–9, 220n. 57, 249nn. 180, 189 canonicity  47, 50, 53–4, 61–3, 66, 89–91, 99, 105, 109–11, 121, 123, 149–50, 154–5, 157, 160–1, 163, 170–1, 204 hermeneutics of canonicity  150, 154–5, 169

process of canonicity  47, 53, 62, 105, 111, 155, 157, 161–2, 164, 169, 204 Caputo, John  131, 206, 235n. 25, 249n. 188 Cardozo, Abraham Miguel  27, 40 communism  55, 147, 172, 179 cultural memory  9–10, 52, 95, 118, 121, 141, 176, 234n. 16 de la Durantaye, Leland  96, 238n. 139 de Vries, Hent  47–8, 131 de-creation  73–4, 95, 99–100, 113, 222n. 67 Deleuze, Gilles  112 Derrida, Jacques  4–5, 8, 10, 43–114, 119, 138, 150, 153, 155–6, 163, 171, 188, 190–2, 195–6, 201–3, 206, 220n. 57, 222n. 68, 224n. 84, 227n. 129, 233n. 226, 249n. 188 Diogenes Laertius  79 divine law (halakha/halacha)  31, 34–5, 158, 241n. 24 eschatology/eschatological  16, 30–1, 36, 39, 54, 99, 108, 124 non-eschatological  55 Fletcher, Paul  36 Fodor, James  163, 242n. 40 Foucault, Michel  81, 86, 95, 97, 216n. 1, 221n. 57, 227nn. 129, 131, 228n. 141 Frank, Jacob  18, 214n. 52 Freud, Sigmund  49, 51, 65, 86–8, 95, 97–8, 119–22, 219n. 23, 228n. 147, 234nn. 16, 47 Girard, René  61 Hammerschlag, Sarah  106 Hegel, Friedrich  49, 131, 152–3 Heidegger, Martin 67–8, 81, 91, 173, 180, 187, 223n. 72, 227n. 137, 229n. 164, 232n. 195

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heretical  1, 8, 19–21, 24–7, 29, 33–4, 36, 123, 210 Herodotus  139 heteronomy  155, 158, 163, 168, 242n. 40 hierarchy  1, 51, 113–14, 209 Hobbes, Thomas  176, 179 Hurst, Andrea  48–9, 218n. 23 Husserl, Edmund  68, 93, 190–2, 199 immanence/immanent  1, 9, 18, 25, 31, 38–41, 45, 58–9, 72–4, 94, 97, 100, 102–3, 105, 107, 110, 113, 134, 141, 152–3, 208–9 divine immanence  39 immenence and transcendence  41, 106–7, 114, 148, 208–9 immanent ontotheology  41, 45 pantheisitic-immanent  37, 113 theology of immanence  9, 36–7, 41, 98, 100, 107, 113–14, 148, 208–9 incarnation  31, 56, 71–2, 74, 111–12, 203, 213n. 39, 238n. 80 Islam  22–3, 27–8, 38–40, 61 Jameson, Frederic  199, 202 Kabbalah  22–4, 34 Lurianic Kabbalah  34, 40 Kant, Immanuel  6, 35, 46–8, 51, 56, 65, 75, 85 Kierkegaard, Søren  36–7, 152 Kingdom of God  7, 16, 99, 105, 108, 112, 179, 188 Levinas, Emmanuel  49, 56, 69, 151–2, 165, 168, 171, 190–2, 194–5, 197–8, 202 Luther, Martin  15, 17–18, 138, 143, 169 McCole, John  6 Marinetti, F. T.  145 Marrano/marranic  22, 27–9, 40, 55 Marx, Karl  17, 36–7, 55, 133, 179 Marxist  5, 7, 16–18, 54, 130, 147, 179, 202 Melas, Natalie  167 messianic cessation/arrest  131–2, 146 Messianic Judaism  18, 214n. 52 Metz, Johann Baptist  200, 248n. 178

Montaigne, Michel de  58 Muselmann  93–5 Nathan of Gaza  22, 24, 32 natural law  31 Nazi  102, 119, 147 Nietzsche, Friedrich  79 nihilism  28–9, 53, 62, 77, 94, 99, 180, 185 normativity  47, 49, 118, 132, 148, 154, 196, 201, 203, 207 ontotheology  41, 67–8, 70, 94, 107, 110, 150–1, 173, 180, 184, 186–8, 201–2 original sin  66, 77, 105 orthodox and heretical  1, 8, 19, 27, 39 pantheism  9, 37–9, 112–13, 185, 215n. 88, 216n. 95 Pascal, Blaise  58 Paul the Apostle/of Tarsus  8, 15–39, 68, 72–3, 75, 100, 103, 108, 119, 148, 159, 190, 207, 210 Plato  43–4 political theology  9, 11, 24, 36–7, 113–14, 130, 153, 208, 236n. 32 praxis  75, 181, 188, 195 profanation  9, 18, 101, 207 profane  38, 73–5, 94, 98, 108, 180, 186, 207 radical (theological) hermeneutics  9–10, 100–1, 105, 114, 117, 119, 141, 148, 152, 171, 189, 203, 208–10 Ratzinger, Joseph  123–4 Ravitzky, Aviezer  38–9 Reformation  142–4 representation and presentation  3, 8–9, 35–6, 41, 173, 178, 190 revelation  1, 9, 38–9, 56, 61–2, 71, 73–4, 97–9, 101, 108, 120–38, 162, 168, 224n. 84 revolutionary  5, 16, 29, 39, 119, 132, 134, 146, 149, 171–2, 188, 201 Ricoeur, Paul  4, 10–11, 46, 107, 110, 119, 148–52, 154–94, 197–9, 202, 209, 244n. 62 Rilke, Rainer Maria  67 Rosenzweig, Franz  33, 112 Rousseau, René  87

Index Sabbatianism  7, 20–41, 108 Santner, Eric  112, 131, 150, 153–5 Schmitt, Carl  37, 56, 67, 77, 126, 130, 152–3, 236n. 32, 241n. 11 Scholem, Gershom  7, 18–32, 40–1, 45, 108, 131, 213nn. 35, 39, 214nn. 52, 55 Spinoza, Baruch  9, 40, 106, 185 Surin, Kenneth  91 Taubes, Jacob  7–9, 19–26, 29–41, 45, 64, 83, 97, 105, 108, 112, 119, 131, 212n. 23, 241n. 24 Taylor, Mark Lewis  1–2 theistic-transcendental  36–7 theological hermeneutics  104, 107 theology of creation  99, 101, 103–4, 110, 138 theology of immanence  9, 36–7, 41, 107, 113–14, 208 Thiem, Annika  201 transcendent  1, 9, 36, 38–9, 41, 45, 49, 58–9, 68, 72–4, 94–5, 98, 107, 110, 113–14, 147, 186, 196, 200, 209 undecidability  56, 65–6, 70, 73, 223n. 71 utopia  7, 11, 37, 55, 108, 130, 152, 179, 197, 199, 202 Vattimo, Gianni  131 violence  7–9, 44–5, 49, 52, 54, 57–63, 71, 78, 99, 104, 120, 123–6, 128, 131, 133, 141, 145–8, 151,

267 164, 167, 169–71, 173, 176–9, 184, 188–9, 196–7, 199, 201, 203–5, 233n. 226, 235nn. 25, 31, 250n. 193 bloodless violence  54, 124, 126, 169, 196 counterviolence  60, 235n. 31 cultural violence  148 divine violence  44, 61, 108, 131, 146 hermeneutics of violence  147, 170, 209 intrasystemic and extrasystemic violence  123–4 necessary violence  52, 54, 59, 151, 171, 173 non-violence  44, 124, 126, 140, 188, 196–7, 199 political violence  235n. 31, 236n. 32 religious violence  118, 123, 125–6, 235n. 31

Weigl, Engehard  29–30 West, Cornel  202 Wortham, Simon Morgan  71 Yerushalmi, Yosef  139–40, 162, 243n. 47 Zartaloudis, Thanos  206–7 Zevi, Sabbatai  18, 20, 22–5, 32–4, 39, 108, 212n. 24, 213n. 35, 214n. 52 Zionism  38 Žižek, Slavoj  18, 21, 131, 150, 153

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