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Abstract
The article discusses the paradoxical status of messianism in Giorgio Agamben’s political philosophy. This status conveys most of all in the specific location that messianism assumes with regard to religion. Agamben himself, as well as main interpretations, conceive messianism as a “limit point” in which “religious experience passes beyond itself”, and therefore as a non-religious phenomenon. After briefly summing up the main conceptual line that led Agamben towards such a conclusion, the article shows how Agamben’s concept of the messianic must be read having as its background his reading of Freud’s fetishist disavowal from his early work Stanzas, where Agamben argues in favour of the latter insofar as he understands fetishism as a privileged weapon against the metaphysics under which he subsumes modern semiology as well as the psychoanalytic concept of interpretation of the repressed unconscious content. Although Agamben’s reading of Freud may seem convincing, he nevertheless misreads a rather crucial moment in Freud’s theory, represented by the concept of primal repression. Considering this concept, fetishist disavowal appears rather as an operation that holds the subject within metaphysics and interpretation at the point in which the subject may encounter its limit, represented exactly by the primal repression, which marks the moment of incompleteness or non-totalisability of interpretation as such. In this sense, according to Lacan’s reading of Freud, fetishism, by fixing the image and projecting it on the veil, rather constitutes the phallic realm “beyond” the veil, which makes interpretation infinite. With this as its basis, the article finally turns back to the initial question and claims that messianism is neither a religious nor a non-religious concept, but rather the interval in which religion overcomes itself – yet this overcoming, insofar as it is traversed by eternal postponement, cannot accomplish itself.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The extimate position of bare life proceeds precisely from its structural symmetry with the position of the sovereign exception: “Here the structural analogy between the sovereign exception and sacratio shows its full sense. At the two extreme limits of the order, the sovereign and homo sacer present two symmetrical figures that have the same structure and are correlative: the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns” (Agamben, Citation1998, p. 84).
2. This formulation is based on a simultaneous reading of two of Agamben’s seemingly contradictory theses. Referring to Heidegger, Agamben says: “Being is nothing other than the ban of the being” (Agamben, Citation1998, p. 59). But it is precisely this ban that equalises Being and nothing; in the ban, life lives as nothing that is Being. For only with this presupposition can Agamben insist that Benjamin’s nihilism precisely is the nullification of nothing: “Confronted with the imperfect nihilism that would let the Nothing subsist indefinitely in the form of a being in force without significance, Benjamin proposes a messianic nihilism that nullifies even the Nothing and lets no form of law remain in force beyond its own content” (p. 53). The question that we leave open here and only suggest a possible answer for is whether the basis of Agamben’s deduction is not precisely Hegel’s main thesis from the second volume of The Science of Logic that says precisely this: Being is nothing.
3. It seems that this interpretation finds its explicit confirmation on the last page of Agamben’s “Absolute Immanence”, dedicated to Deleuze’s last essay “Immanence: A Life”: “In this dimension, there will be little sense in distinguishing between organic life and animal life or even between biological life and contemplative life and between bare life and the life of the mind. Life as contemplation without knowledge will have a precise correlate in thought that has freed itself of all cognition and intentionality. Theōria and the contemplative life, which the philosophical tradition has identified as its highest goal for centuries, will have to be dislocated onto a new plane of immanence. It is not certain that, in the process, political philosophy and epistemology will be able to maintain their present physiognomy and difference with respect to ontology. Today, blessed life lies on the same terrain as the biological body of the West” (Agamben, Citation1999a, p. 239).
4. For a more precise and in-depth analysis of the entire distinction and its consequences, see Agamben, Citation2010.
5. “Melville will never cease to elaborate on the radical opposition between fraternity and Christian “charity” or paternal “philanthropy”. To liberate man from the father function, to give birth to the new man or the man without particularities, to reunite the original and humanity by constituting a society of brothers as a new universality. In the society of brothers, alliance replaces filiation and the blood pact replaces consanguinity. Man is indeed the blood brother of his fellow man, and woman, his blood sister: according to Melville, this is the community of celibates, drawing its members into an unlimited becoming” (Deleuze, Citation1997, p. 84).
6. In his canonical essay “Coldness and Cruelty”, Deleuze (Citation1991) writes: “The masochist thus liberates himself in preparation for a rebirth in which the father will have no part” (p. 66); and: “In the case of masochism the totality of the law is invested upon the mother, who expels the father from the symbolic realm” (p. 90).
7. “Exactly insofar as it [the phallus] is there or is not there, and only insofar as it is there or is not there, is the symbolic differentiation between the sexes established” (Lacan, Citation1994, p. 153; my translation).
8. “A new technical term is justified when it describes a new fact or emphasizes it. This is not the case here. The oldest word in our psycho-analytic terminology, “repression”, already relates to this pathological process. If we wanted to differentiate more sharply between the vicissitude of the idea as distinct from that of the affect, and reserve the word Verdrängung [‘repression’] for the affect, then the correct German word for the vicissitude of the idea would be Verleugnung [‘disavowal’]” (Freud, Citation2001, p. 153).
9. Note how this suspension of time echoes also in Deleuze’s interpretation of Masoch: “What becomes essential is waiting or suspense as a plenitude, as a physical and spiritual intensity. The rituals of suspension become the novelistic figures par excellence, with regard to both the woman-torturer who suspends her gesture, and the hero-victim whose suspended body awaits the whip. Masoch is the writer who makes suspense, in its pure and almost unbearable state, the motivating force of the novel” (Deleuze, Citation1997, p. 53–54).
10. I again draw on Esposito (Citation2011, p. 60): “Secularization, in the literal sense of relationship with the secolo or “century”, is entirely intrinsic to the Christian reality, unless we drastically bend Christianity toward some kind of Gnostic view”. Agamben’s messianism as a post-secular new politics is precisely Christianity in the Gnostic sense mentioned by Esposito.