specic functions of the living inoperative, open them to possibility (251).

It was Heidegger
who paved this yellow brick road, ceaselessly circling the nothing at the heart of all that
matters, and the archeological depth does not add a great deal to its abyssal content. It is
hardly surprising then that a model of this operation that consists in making all human and
divine works inoperative is the poem, for the poem is the point at which language, which
has deactivated its communicative and informative functions, rests within itself, contemplates
its power of saying (251). Optimistically attributing this messianic aestheticismto Spinoza, it
is clearly Heidegger, read with the spectacles of Walter Benjamin, who brought the messianic
age into Agambens view. Having faulted Balthasar for depoliticizing and aestheticizing glory,
there is no small irony in Agambens aestheticization of the messianic age, which manifests its
soteriological deactivation amid a political economy that cannot be stopped (246).
Agambens secular messianism abandons everything to the politics of sovereignty and
economy save aesthetic transcendence. Messianic action takes place in the archive; its
footsteps are criticism of the work of art. In light of their experience of Christian political
theology, some ancient rabbis came to the same conclusion: the messiah occupies himself
with Torah.
5
Agamben and other quietistic rabbis notwithstanding, is Levinas not right in
arguing that the messianic should not be aestheticized? For the possibility of a sabbatical
existence, where existence suspends the necessities of existence, opens onto the order of the
Good and not simply the inoperative.
6
Taken together, Kahn and Agamben suggest that both in politics and economics we have
not left the Christian epoch and indeed that we are far from doing so. Peterson, however,
thought we had not yet entered it. The Theological Tractates contains his famous essay,
Monotheism as a Theological Problem, in which he argues that Orthodox Trinitarian
theology (he has in mind the Cappadocians, especially Gregory of Nazianzus) is
characterized by a notion of the Monarchy of the Triune God which is a conception
of unity [which] had no correspondence in the created order. With such arguments,
Peterson announced, monotheism is laid to rest as a political problem (Peterson, 103),
for the truth of Trinitarian Monotheism has no political form in this world. The famous
nal note of this essay (dis)credits his colleague Carl Schmitt for introducing the notion of
political theology into scholarly literature before calling such a concept a theological
impossibility (23334, n. 168). Agamben interprets this as Petersons attempt to divide
eschatological time from historical time and goes so far as to insinuate that this separation
facilitated Petersons Catholic anti-Semitism and even complicity with Nazism
(Agamben, 8). This is a fatuous insinuation. Petersons theology was an explicit
contestation of the sacralization of politics in the Fu hrerstaat; his conception of the
public character of Christian martyrology provides a theological alternative to the
aestheticization of the theological, and his eschatology, rather that severing Christian life
from politics, points to the public and historical sanctication of a Kingdom of Christ that
exceeds the politics of nation-states without neutralizing the political contribution of
Catholic theology.
7
The only question is whether we are worshipping the legitimate
power of the Almighty or the usurped power of the one who makes himself like God
(167). Leading German liberation theologians, both Protestant and Catholic, such as
Ju rgen Moltmann and Johann Baptist Metz, drew directly on Peterson in reckoning
Christianitys role in modern political struggle. Accordingly, if Kahn helps us fathom the
mysterious sacrality of the popular sovereign and Agamben uncovers the theological force
5
Midrash Psalms, ed. S. Buber, 2
.
9.
6
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alfonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne
University Press, 1969), 104.
7
For a critique of Agambens reading of Peterson and an illuminating account of Petersons theology of the Jews, see
Christoph Schmitt, The Return of the Katechon, Journal of Religion, forthcoming.
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