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Articles

Is Man a “Sabbatical Animal”? Agamben, Rosenzweig, Heschel, Arendt

Pages 1-23 | Published online: 21 Sep 2018
 

ABSTRACT

Giorgio Agamben lists the Jewish Sabbath as an example of “inoperatvity.” This essay explores both how Sabbath fits into and puts pressure on Agamben’s account, by working through readings of the Sabbath given by Agamben, A.J. Heschel, and Rosenzweig, who associate Sabbath, respectively, with Inoperativity, Eternity, and Creation. To these, I add another, called the Sabbath of Equality, building on connections among the weekly Sabbath, the septannual land Sabbatical and the Sabbath of Sabbaths, the Jubilee. The reading of Rosenzweig, in particular, opens the way to a queering of Sabbath, also explored here. The essay concludes with the suggestion that Hannah Arendt’s political thought is “sabbatarian” and asks whether this is an effective way to respond to earlier critiques of her work for promoting an “aestheticized” politics not adequately oriented to use. Is Agamben vulnerable to the same critique now?

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Bonnie Honig is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor in the departments of Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science at Brown University. She is author of Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Cornell, 1993), Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, 2001), Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton, 2009), Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair, (Fordham University Press, 2017). She is currently at work on two projects: revising her Flexner lectures, to be published by Harvard University Press, and a collection of essays titled The Lost Sabbath.

Notes

1 Kingdom and the Glory, 246; Why “animal?” Perhaps to counter Nietzsche’s figure of the promise-keeping creature, the animal with the power to bind itself into a future. Nietzsche’s creature that can make promises is also one who can incur and repay debts. A sabbatical animal, though Agamben does not mention it, is not just one who can suspend work but also one who can forgive, release, or emancipate debts. Thus, like Nietzsche’s creature capable of promising, the sabbatical animal calculates into the future. I presented early versions of this paper at the 2016 APSA, Cornell’s Political Theory Colloquium, Brown's Religion and Critical Thought Colloquium, and Penn’s Katz Center for Jewish Studies at Penn, as the Meyerhoff Lecture, in 2017. Thanks to the organizers, participants, and some readers, especially Cornel West, William Connolly, Jill Frank, Jason Frank, Susan Buck Morss, Anne Norton, and Susanna Heschel. For comments on early drafts, I thank Jeffrey Bernstein, Jess Whyte, and especially George Shulman and James Martel in whose company I feel fortunate to be writing. Thanks also to two readers for Political Theology; and to my Brown colleagues, Jacques Khalip, with whom I co-taught a seminar on inoperativity, and Paul Nahme, who commented on an early draft. Rachel Nusbaum helped prepare the MS for publication.

2 Sabbath World, 59 (emphasis in original).

3 In his recent The Just Market: Torah’s Response to the Crisis of the Modern Economy, Jonathan Brandow focuses more narrowly but in a complementary way on the economic role of the sabbaticals in the ancient law in protecting the Israelites against entrenched, permanent inequality.

4 Davina Cooper (personal communication) reminds me that Slow Food (which I discuss in Emergency Politics) can be said to render inoperative industrial agriculture’s machinery of food by way of pleasure, play, and taste. Slow Food offers a peek into a festive, joyous, and playful life that replaces old use not with no use but with new use. Key here is Slow Food’s commensurative infrastructure – awarding prizes, offering support, building communities – which eschews the an-archy of inoperativity to build something new.

5 On Arendt as a Jewish thinker and not just a thinker who sometimes addressed Jewish topics, see also “What Kind of a Thing is Land?” Political Theory, June 2016.

6 Agamben, Nudities, 112.

7 Bulimia is “the unusable residue of a purifying ceremony, the meaning of which has been lost to contemporary society.” For the bulimic, eating goes from “melacha, an activity directed toward an aim” (though Agamben knows eating is NOT one of the activities prohibited on Sabbath) “to menucha, a Sabbath of nourishment” (Nudities, 107–8).

8 Agamben earlier enlisted other terms to do similar work, like infancy and latency (de la Durantaye, 167). Once he moves to inoperativity, each of his diverse list of its instances makes its own contribution to a critique of use, but the use that Sabbath suspends is not necessarily the recent utilitarianization of use singled out by Agamben for particular criticism. Also notable is the capaciousness of Agamben’s inoperativity. When Agamben claims that man is a Sabbatical animal, when he affiliates the weekly Sabbath with inoperativity and then finds inoperativity everywhere, in every time and every culture, he universalizes the rites and rituals whose particularity he goes out of his way to document, often by using textual sources in their original languages (Hebrew, Greek, Latin) to specify their unique, peculiar traits. With this compelling stew of universal (inoperativity) and particular (weekly Sabbath, but also glory, leisure, feast, General Strike, and more), however, Agamben risks undermining the power of the particulars to render problematic everyday practices and open new alternatives. If inoperativity’s power is enhanced by Agamben’s collection of its particular, highly specified instances, its power is also diminished by his homogenization of all those particulars into exemplary instances of one thing – inoperativity. Thus, it is not clear what is gained when Agamben distinguishes his project from his interlocutors’, warning that democratic and conservative thinkers will find themselves “side by side” and that “this is precisely the price that must be paid each time by theoretical elaborations that think they can do without archaeological precautions” (Kingdom and Glory, 258).

9 “As with any feast day,” there are “at least three festive meals to which we give a very special attention and care” (Nudities, 105). On the meals as instances of not just festivity but equality and mutuality, see my account of Rosenzweig’s Star below.

10 Agamben, Nudities, 112.

11 Agamben, Nudities, 105; emphasis added.

12 Agamben, Nudities, 110–11. Agamben also cites “The rabbinical tradition [which] describes this future life in opposition to the present life and, at the same time, in singular contiguity with it; that is, as a deactivation of biological functions and bad instincts” (Kingdom and the Glory, 247, citing the Talmud, b Berakhot, 17 a).

In the world to come there will be no eating and drinking, nor any generation and reproduction. There will be no commerce and trade, quarrels, envy, or hostility; the just will sit with their crowns on their heads and will be refreshed by the splendor of the shekinah.

Arendt offers a more this-worldly phenomenology of old use (Labor and Work) and new use (Action), noting what is, in effect, Action’s own “deactivation of biological functions and bad instincts.”

13 When Agamben elsewhere says one day we will “play” with the law, he again imports festiveness to an unusual domain.

One day humanity will play with the law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it. (Agamben, State of Exception, 64; emphasis added; see also Jeffrey Bernstein’s excellent “The Paradoxical Transmission of Tradition and Agamben’s Potential Reading of the Rishonim” and Matthew Sharpe, who notes the problem of passivity in Agamben, but not his investment in “new use” in “Only Agamben Can Save Us? Against The Messianic Turn Recently Adopted In Critical Theory” n.19)

14 This applies, too, to the inglorious body, for example, Deleuze and Guattari’s “body without organs,” from which Agamben’s inoperativity surely borrows. Ingloriously inoperative is a fair description of Polynices’ body, after Creon orders it left, exposed, unburied, outside the city, in Sophocles’ Antigone. The body illustrates the power and glory of the Theban ruler, as the bodies of lynched African Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries U.S. were used to re-mark the terrain of white supremacy. But, from the city’s outside, Polynices’ body now without organs keeps returning, in bits and pieces, to the city, courtesy of dogs and birds. In the new National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama, dirt from the many scenes of the crime of lynching, gathered in jars for display, may contain lost remains, thus symbolically marking and returning to the city the ingloriously inoperative remains of those murdered to mark the color line.

15 Agamben, Nudities, 98. Agamben then describes a perfect performativity (whose formalism guarantees its success), in which the “empty repetition[s] of [the body’s] function have no aim other than the glorification of God’s work, exactly as the arms and insignia exhibited by the victorious general in the Roman triumph are the signs and, at the same time, the effectuation of his glory” (Nudities, 100). He goes on:

The sexual organs and the intestines of the blessed are only the hieroglyphs or the arabesques that divine glory inscribes onto its own coat of arms. The earthly liturgy, like the celestial one, does nothing other than incessantly capture inoperativity and displace it onto the sphere of worship ad maiorem Dei gloriam (for the greater glory of God) … There is a glorious defecation, which takes place only in order to show the perfection of natural functions. But as far as its possible use is concerned, the theologians remain silent. (Nudities, 100–1, italics added)

16 Nudities, 103 (italics added).

17 Agamben’s first tries to get to new use via the “Philosophy of the Broken,” discussed below.

18 Agamben, Nudities, 100.

19 Alison Weir points out, “evolutionary biologists and psychologists argue that dance preceded speech in human development.” On dance and/as religion see Durkheim and Turner, cited in Weir, “Collective Love as Public Freedom.” Agamben’s effort to take practices like dance out of their sacralized locations and put them into more profane contexts, recalls Thoreau tracing the saunter back to three possible origins, one profane and two sacred. Does Agamben, who never mentions Thoreau, follow in Thoreau’s foot- or dance steps? For more on Thoreau, see my Flexner Lectures (f/c Harvard University Press, 2020).

20 Nudities, 102–3.

21 Walter Brueggemann notes the egalitarian Sabbath in his fine book, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying NO to the CULTURE OF NOW. Given his reading of Sabbath, he might have added: Saying YES to the Neighbor. For him, Sabbath “breaks the pattern of coercion” and on this one day, he says: “all are like you, equal – equal worth, equal value, equal access, equal rest” (41). Although his focus remains on the weekly Sabbath, he notes that the land sabbatical is an “enactment of ‘the sabbatic principle’” to counter the “coercive patterns whereby the poor are targeted as objects of economic abuse rather than seen as Sabbath neighbors” (Sabbath as Resistance, 44). Important, too, given my discussion below of inoperativity’s heteronormativity, is Brueggemann’s mention (citing Deuteronomy) of how “eunuchs,” almost everywhere excluded from this religion of reproduction, are specifically included if they respect Sabbath and are offered a non-genetic futurity: “Do not let the eunuch say ‘I am just a dry tree’ … To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose the things that please me, … I will give them an everlasting name … ” (Sabbath as Resistance, 53).

22 Agamben refers to the biblical Sabbath, via Genesis and Rashi, and he draws on the Talmudic rabbis who are not the defenders but rather the dismantlers of the Sabbath of Equality.

23 Similarly, regarding Devin Singh’s critique of debt cancellation in favor of debt abolition, the former may be, as he says, a technique of “sovereign crisis management,” in its current form. But the opposition between the two prevents us from thinking about how debt cancellation might operate differently, as part of a practice of non-sovereignty (Singh, “Debt Cancellation as Sovereign Crisis Management”).

24 Leviticus (25:8–24) says that in the fiftieth year there was to be no agricultural work, all landed property was to revert to its original owner, and slaves were to be set free. And Leviticus 25:1–7 and Deuteronomy 15:1–11 say that every 7 years debts are to be and fields left fallow for gleaners. “Similar ‘clean slate’ decrees ‘were widely known in the ancient world,’ going back to the rulers of Sumeria, Babylonia, Assyria, and Egypt. Hammurabi proclaimed clean slates at least four times, beginning in the year of his accession to the throne of Babylon in 1792 BCE, and six of his successors also proclaimed clean slates. The Rosetta Stone ‘is actually a clean slate proclamation, recording debt cancellation by Ptolemy V of Egypt in 196 BCE’” (argue Ross and Gloria Kinsler, citing Michael Hudson [“Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land”], who “explains why laws such as the Sabbath and Jubilee mandates were not only possible but necessary in ancient Mesopotamia.” For a contemporary appropriation of the idea, see Parent, “Clean Slate Act”:

Dubbed the Clean Slate Act, Senate Bill 529 builds on a 2016 amendment to the state’s Act 5 that allows people with certain types of misdemeanors to ask the courts to seal their records, after which they would be available to law enforcement but not the general public.

25 Agamben notes this solution without linking it to this particular exegetical problem: instead, he enlists it as evidence for his claim that:

the Sabbath – that every feast – is not simply a day of repose that is added to the workweek (as our calendars would have it) [here he could be saying with Heschel that this is a limitation of our secular sequential time paradigm], but signifies a special time and a special activity, [and this] is implicit in the very narration of Genesis, where repose and completion of work coincide on the seventh day (‘on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and on the seventh day he ceased from all work’).

For Agamben, there is no difficulty to solve, but rather a solution to be appreciated:

Precisely in order to underline the immediate continuity – and at the same time the heterogeneity – between work and repose, the author of the commentary known as Genesis Rabbah writes: ‘Man of flesh and blood, who knows not his times, his moments, and his hours, takes something from profane time and adds it to sacred time; but the Holy One, blessed be his name, who knows his time, his moments, and his hours, entered the Sabbath by a hair’s breadth’. (Nudities, 109–10)

26 Agamben takes from Rashi an idea of Sabbath as menucha, casting rest as inoperativity. As I have noted, Agamben’s translation of Rashi’s account of menuchah (rest) as inoperativity is problematic because it lapses easily back into suspension. In addition, Jeffrey Bernstein argues, “Agamben presumptively reads into menuchah something Rashi does not license and Agamben does not justify” (Bernstein, 236–7).

27 Nudities, 109.

28 Rosenzweig too focuses on use, noting that the Sabbath prayers do not ask for things, hence his distinction between prescribed and spontaneous prayer, preferring the former, which is non-instrumental (Star, 333; see also Honig, Emergency Politics, 98).

29 The Sabbath World, xv.

30 On prefiguration, see the work of Davina Cooper, who sees “prefiguration as an activity that enacts in the present a future which is desired or, alternatively, that develops new forms of sociality to prefigure or support the emergence of not yet knowable ‘better’ ways of living” (Cooper, “Enacting Counter-States Through Play”). See also Cooper, “Prefiguring the State.” On the sabbaticals and Jubilee, it is unclear whether they were ever really practiced.

31 Such diminution, subtraction, perhaps even amputation, is part of the modern (Christian? Jewish?) secularization, culturalization, theologization, domestication, and depoliticization of Judaism.

32 Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 333.

33 Creation, Revelation, and Redemption are obviously sacred. But the contrast between Sabbath and the profane is not stark in Rosenzweig, who treats the weekly Sabbath as liminal: “The Sabbath itself is not at all exclusively a holiday, but at least as much a mere day of the week. It is set in relief in a different way than the actual holidays of the year.” Positioned “against the week,” the Sabbath “also plunges back again into the week” (The Star of Redemption, 332). Thus, Sabbath’s egalitarianism pervades the everyday.

34 The Star of Redemption, 333. However, one reason for this is that in the absence of such a household-wide requirement, the peace of Sabbath would be interrupted by servants’ chatter: “if rest has reached them also, then in truth the whole house will be freed for its rest from the noisy chatter of the workdays.”

35 Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 334.

36 Ibid., 337.

37 Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 337.

38 Ibid.

39 See note 37 above.

40 The Star of Redemption, 336.

41 Rabbi Fox, “Yovel and Omer.”

42 Of course, we may see gleaning as a conservative practice that buys off the indigent and protects the system of private landholding from revolutionary actions (this is how it seems to operate, in a way, in The Gleaners and I, dir. Agnes Varda). But we can also see it as a daily and septannual reminder of an alternative whose very memory can be revolutionary.

43 Agamben nods to commoning. For example, as Jessica Whyte reminds me (personal communication), “in Means without Ends, he defines the common as a point of indifference between the proper and the improper, and suggests that the key political question then becomes: ‘How does one use a common?’” Moreover, “he includes ‘equality’ in a list of ‘the new categories of political thought’ that remain to be invented, alongside inoperative community, compearance, loyalty, mass intellectuality, the coming people, and whatever singularity.” But, Whyte concedes, Agamben

has subsequently devoted far less attention to equality than to inoperativity. Perhaps part of the problem is Agamben’s constant drive to ontologize, such that ‘the common’ is understood as a shared linguistic potentiality or being in language, rather than as a political relation. I imagine that he would characterize equality as a relation of equivalence and therefore insufficiently attentive to singularity.

44 Shulevitz, The Sabbath World, 8–9. Thus, when Robinson Crusoe named his found companion “Friday,” Crusoe allied himself not with God but with Adam, whose world began on a Friday, whose existence began with naming, and whose task he thought it was to recreate a world (though there was one already, as Friday attests).

45 Heschel, The Sabbath, 18.

46 Ibid, 13. Other holidays are space-oriented and feature components that can be entered and exited (e.g., the sukkah on Sukkot), but the Sabbath, Heschel argues, is entirely made of time, which just comes and goes.

47 Evental clash may be missing also from Rosenzweig’s Sabbath of Creation, which is not as distinctly different from the profane week as is Heschel’s Sabbath of Eternity. This lack of distinct difference is a strength, since it highlights how Sabbath equality bleeds into everything, and also a weakness, since it undoes the clash required for event to take place. For Heschel, “Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time” (The Sabbath, 8). Sabbath is a distinctive “day on which hours do not oust one another” and we experience “Spirit in the form of time” (20; 75, italics original). It is important for him (for reasons that separate him from Rosenzweig but will be familiar to Hegelians and Arendtians) that “While the festivals [of the year] celebrate events that happened in time,” and each one’s fixed date “is determined by life in nature,” Sabbath is uniquely connected to the eternal because it “is entirely independent of the month and unrelated to the moon” (this last point is noted too by Judith Shulevitz) The fact that the device of the seventh day is totally artificial enhances the sanctifying powers of Sabbath, as well as its dependence on our sanctification. Here Heschel channels Arendt’s famous response to Scholem’s castigation of her for lacking Ahavath Israel (love of the Jewish people): Heschel, says, “What would the world be without Sabbath? It would be a world that knew only itself or God distorted as a thing or the abyss separating him from the world” (16). For Arendt, this is what happens when Israel loves itself rather than being joined together with each other in love of god. God, in this view, is a kind of object-relation that positions people as a community of individuals, like the table cited by Arendt that joins and separates.

48 Though, it is worth noting, sacred time underwrites everything sacred and profane, on his account. And time, which in its distinctive otherness, eternal and divine, “is almost holy,” provides us with intimations of divinity: time “is the presence of God in the world of space” (The Sabbath, 99; Between God and Man, 229). We may domesticate it or we may sanctify it. Sanctification is an “act” and, indeed, for Heschel the move from sacred things to ACTS of sanctification is Judaism’s innovation (The Sabbath, 80).

49 NPR, “Judith Shulevitz, Making Room.”

50 Heschel, The Sabbath, 5 (emphasis added).

51 The other Sabbaths, mentioned by Heschel (8), are not explored, and the dependence of the weekly Sabbath’s eternity, ensoulment, and freedom on the other 2 Sabbaths of equality and freedom, is not noted except by way of the telling appearance of the word “jubilee.” But Heschel is aware that even the weekly Sabbath is not just for the soul but also for the body: “comfort and pleasure are an integral part of Sabbath observance” (The Sabbath, 19). Philo, cited admiringly by Agamben on other points, saw the Sabbath’s bodily rest and renewal as needed for people to be able to return to work renewed for the week ahead. Heschel, like Rosenzweig, rejects the idea of Sabbath as a kind of reinvestment in labor or work: “the Sabbath is not created for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of the Sabbath. It is not an interlude but a climax of living” (14). Rosenzweig: “Redemption should mean rest, not the composure for new work” (The Star of Redemption, 333). Work must be kept in its place, lest it take all our time.

52 Heschel’s term, “eternity,” is Arendt’s adjective for the temporality of nature, connoting what she takes to be its ceaseless, repetitive qualities, insulated from anything new. But Heschel sees eternity in relation to divinity not nature and so for him its traits are actually beginning, novelty, spontaneity, the very traits Arendt attributes to Action, where we taste not eternity but immortality – a kind of secular overlife.

53 Heschel, The Sabbath, 100.

54 The Sabbath, 101.

55 Between God and Man, 229.

56 Heschel, The Sabbath, 101.

57 Arendt, The Human Condition. Glory is the Christian theological term that fits Heschel’s “ultimate realizations” and is borrowed by Agamben for “inoperativity.” In Arendt’s account of Action in The Human Condition she emphasizes not the power to build a thing (like Heschel’s maligned “pyramids”), not the power to undo everything or generate a new use (Agamben’s inoperativity), but rather the power to create and care for a world. Those who engage in this activity are deserving of glory, she says.

58 Rosenzweig assumes he is insulated from others by his newspaper. But the man’s silent reading of the written text is not so unlike the silent listening to oral address that forms the multitude on Rosenzweig’s Sabbath. And we know from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities the power of the newspaper to constitute communities across space and time. But if Rosenzweig prefers the oral address to mass circulated print, that is because his model of mutuality is premised on the live encounter. Rosenzweig also affiliates the lonely diner of modernity with “the savage” who, he says, also eats alone. The savage, he says, is required to eat alone by “his tribal laws” and he lacks the wherewithal to seek out the mutuality of the meal instead (The Star of Redemption, 335). Rosenzweig casts these two examples as not yet ripe (the savage, “still green and sour”) and overripe (the bachelor, “already overripe and half-rotten”): both, he says, share a preference for rule-following over freedom and for solitariness over mutuality (The Star of Redemption, 335).

59 Rosenzweig is in good company: Benjamin, too, saw the solitary public eater as a sign of modern alienation or disaffection. In One-Way Street, he says “Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse” (Reflections, 86). For calling my attention to this, I thank Jonathan Boyarin.

60 Rosenzweig opposes the observant Jew (“sweet fully ripe fruit of humanity”) to the “tribal savage” so-called (“still green and sour”): one follows the rule that eating is to be done alone, while the other eats with others in the mutuality of the meal, he says. But, I note, both live according to the rules of their tribes. (Rosenzweig would reject this equivalence, but I reject his rejection.)

61 Agamben, Nudities, 99.

62 Ibid., 99–100.

63 Goldberg, Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility.

64 Nor does he attend to the possible orientalism – “open sesame” – it occasions (and, later in the same text, arabesques: “The sexual organs and the intestines of the blessed are only the hieroglyphs or the arabesques that divine glory inscribes onto its own coat of arms” [100]). The queer dis-connect between sex and reproduction (NO future) could be a great instance of inoperativity’s refusal of use and the turn to new use, better than Agamben’s rather chaste imagining of the “kiss” that is about to happen; but hasn’t. But that would move inoperativity off the register of potentiality to actuality.

65 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.

66 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 4. While in the case of Foucault the problem is said to be the reverse: all biopolitics, no sovereignty, also an exaggeration.

67 Honig, “What Kind of Thing is Land?” Albeit avant la lettre, and therefore not named as “biopolitics.” And his account of Sabbath, in which we talk differently on Sabbath, not instrumentally, reprises Arendt’s analysis of the varieties of talk: the muteness of labor, the instrumental communications of Work, and the inaugural speech acts that characterize Action and the Sabbath of Creation whose prayers, Rosenzweig insists, are prescriptively performative (rituals of fidelity to God) not communicative (of needs seeking satisfaction).

68 I hesitate to make the suggestion, since I am fighting in this paper to resist the absorptiveness of this concept, which, blob-like, takes in everything. But if we consider the possibility for a moment, something interesting, I think, results for readers of Arendt familiar with the last 30 years of debate about her work.

69 Pitkin, “Justice: On Relating Public and Private.”

70 Negri parallels Pitkin’s critique of Arendt when he criticizes Agamben on the same point, asking “who is the subject” of inoperativity?

We wait for Agamben at an important critical crossing: let him say finally who is the subject that suffers, lives, dies, resurrects, is the winner in this struggle for liberation and where (if it still there) this subject of the theological-political is. There is room for hope: the renewal of the theological-political in the Spinozian way. Agamben could do it. (quoted by MacPhail, “Of the Power,” 267)

James Martel suggests (personal communication) “maybe it’s not a matter of waiting, maybe Agamben already accidentally/on purpose stumbled on this and it is already done.” It is a productive suggestion, but may credit Agamben too much and requires an Arendtian engagement with Agamben who has certainly stumbled on something.

71 Judith Butler has recently commented on her own early work on performativity that it was too much about agency; too much doing. Her Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly moves from speaking to embodiment, from claim-making to taking [up] space.

72 That it has a name does not mean Arendt’s project does not have the weakness with which it was charged. But the naming helps makes sense of what seemed to so many like a mysterious, even Romantic inattention to the operativities of ordinary politics.

73 Heschel, The Sabbath, 14.

74 Ferguson, “Creating a City to Resist the State.”

75 Moral Mondays is not without its critics. In “Why I Will Not Submit to Arrest, Or, the Problem With Moral Mondays”; Amy Laura Hall details the problems: e.g., the focus on arrest, the centrality to the movement of an inspirational leader, who is really inspiring!

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