JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH

VOLUME 13

NUMBERS 34

(JULYOCTOBER 2009)

Redemptive Remnants: Agambens Human Messianism

Patrick OConnor
pdmoconnor@gmail.com PatrickOConnor 000000July-October 3/4 13 2009 Originalfor Francis 2009 1479-7585 Cultural Research Journal&Article Ltd 10.1080/14797580903101276 RCUV_A_410300.sgm Taylor and (print)/1740-1666 (online) Francis

This article charts the role of the redemptive and messianic in Giorgio Agamben. In this way, Agamben takes up Heideggers response to nihilism. Here, the author argues that the philosophical novelty of Agambens work rests on his attempt to formulate a human form of messianism. On the surface, Agambens work could be said to be pessimistic; continually emphasizing the normality of states of exception, the prevalence of zones of indetermination and the correlative perpetuation of biopolitical sovereignty. However, scattered throughout his work are fragments of messianic remnants. The success and novelty of Agambens philosophy rests on conceptualizing these fragments. Agamben hangs this on a conceptualization of an experience of messianic time between chronological or profane time and eternal time. A further consequence of this is Agambens desire to assert a core of human being that resists either region. This redemption rests on a special relationship to temporality, one that transcends profane time and sacred eternal time. This exceptional temporal disjunction calls for an articulation of what Agamben calls in The Coming Community the loss of the lost. It is a call for an articulation of a core or part of us that is most human which transcends delimitation. It is a core that is whole and exempt from transgression. In this article, the author analyzes the consistency of Agambens claims and asserts that Agamben does not provide a satisfactory description of human temporality. This, in part, is due to Agambens reluctance to define what precisely the messianic region is, but also his desire to offer a philosophy that transcends the vicissitudes of temporal life. Agamben ends up defining a metaphysical description of life. The author concludes by describing the potential ethical and political range of Agambens position.

The messianic in general signifies a dramatization of the move from bondage to liberation, from sin and fallenness to salvation, as well as divine intervention to rescue a flawed world. It revolves around philosophical and theological tropes of absence and hope, temporal delay and reward. If we look to eighteenthcentury disputes of the nature of the afterlife, we find a fascinating debate between Catholic and Protestant theology on what exactly salvation was composed of. In Catholic heaven, the afterlife was considered as rest, inactivity, contemplation, eternal repose and passive beatification. In contrast, the

ISSN 14797585 print/17401666 online/09/03-4033518 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14797580903101276

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Protestant afterlife reflected notions of virtuous work and energy. Since fatigue is impossible in heaven, the trauma of being sedentary and idle is forever negated. Protestant heaven provides infinite energy to infinitely perform Gods work (see Porter 2003, pp. 104105). This contrast is important because it alerts us to both necessary and sufficient conditions of messianic life. While, on the one hand, we can think of multiple qualities of salvation, necessary to all accounts of redemption is the postulation of the existence of infinite survival, impervious to the activity of temporal life. All redemption must, by necessity, subscribe to a form of infinite life, immortal and invulnerable to fatigue, finitude and expiration. Neither eternal rest nor infinite energy may be diminished. Moreover, in the face of temporal life, messianism is configured as a transformation that ends transformation. Time, finitude and mortality are vanquished in favour of immune forms of atemporal and ahistorical immortality. Agambens philosophical output, I will here argue, repeats this metaphysical urge in his configuration of the messianic. I argue that Agamben desires to establish a core or kernel of human redemption. This kernel desires to isolate a form of life impervious to transformation and temporality. Most importantly, this allows explanation of Agambens messianism as a response to the possibility of nihilism. His scholarship continuously attempts to rescue, in a Benjaminian fashion, the remnants of redemption from the history of thought. Explaining this requires delineation of the place of temporality for Agamben. After this, I delineate the ethical and political consequences of Agambens messianism of human life in opposition to what he perceives as nihilistic negations of humans messianic core, manifested in the state of exception, difference and demarcation and the concentration camp. My task is thus analytical and exegetical. I demonstrate a key interpretative optic for coming to understand Agambens work, as well as evaluating the accomplishment of Agambens radicalization of messianic temporality. *** A good place to begin investigation is Agambens early essay entitled Critique of the Instant and Continuum in Infancy and History. Agamben presents an alternative history of various conceptions of temporality from the Greek circular understanding of time, to Christian sequential and chronological time, on to meditations on Hegel and Marx. Typical of this lineage is the cosmological Aristotelian account. According to Agamben, Greek cosmological time is one without beginning, middle or end. What happens or occurs does so insofar as it is a circular motion continually returning to itself (Agamben 1993a, p. 101). Agamben sees this repeated in Augustine. While Christianity certainly introduced a teleological notion of time, or time as a straight line with course and aim, Augustine, Agamben claims, with all his anguished interrogations of passing and the ephemeral in the Confessions, does not wholly overturn Greek cosmological time. Instead, it simply becomes internalized as interior duration (Agamben 1993a, p. 104). Transformation remains anchored in the same. The significant difference is that Christian temporality instantiated the history of

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humanity as a history of salvation or progressive realization of redemption (Agamben 1993a, p. 103). However, much as Augustine attempted to overcome a specifically classical conception of temporality, his notion of time, for Agamben, also made use of the circular representation of Greek metaphysics,
through Neoplatonizing patristics, and later through scholastic theology. Eternity, the regime of divinity, with its static circle, tends to negate the human experience of time. The discrete, fleeting instant becomes the point where time intercepts the wheel of eternity. (Agamben 1993a, p. 105)

While philosophers such as Aristotle and Augustine predominately represent time from the view of a point, Agamben returns to the Stoic conception of time. This reveals an alternative conception of authentic temporality, retrievable from the dominance of the classical intersection of the eternal and the chronological. Agamben remains fully in the hermeneutic tradition, resisting the metaphysical and onto-theological presuppositions of Western thought. In the Stoic conception of time, Agamben attempts to retrieve an alternative conception of authentic temporality. Agamben claims that in Gnosticism and Stoicism we find an alternate lineage of temporal experience. In opposition to the Greek concept of the circle and the Christian concept of the line, Stoicism offers a concept of time that is disjointed and inhomogeneous, the truth of which is an abrupt moment of singular interruption. This singularity implies a delimiting of human history as both a return to itself as well as continuous progress. This provides a vista from which to appreciate Agambens place within the philosophical tradition. Developing a concept of singularity in opposition to eternal and chronological time becomes Agambens philosophical task. Stoicism in opposition to the astronomical time of Platos Timaeus, as well as Aristotles idea of the mathematical instant, provides an alternative view of time, one which Agamben claims saw Greek notions of temporality as a form of sickness to be overcome. Notions of time which subscribe to concepts of homogeneity, duration, infinity and time as discrete instance foster a fundamental subservience and servility. The sickness of this understanding of temporality undermines messianic and authentic human experience and replaces it with a shallowly constructed temporal life as deferral; thereby impoverishing the actuality of human life. For Agamben (1993a, p. 111): Subservience to this elusive time constitutes a fundamental sickness, which, with its infinite postponement, hinders human existence from taking possession of itself as something full and singular. In contrast, the Stoic conception of human experience considers time as holding a fundamental emancipatory experience. This hinges on the question of the kairos. The kairos, in this context, appears as an abrupt and sudden conjunction where decision grasps opportunity and life is fulfilled in the moment (Agamben 1993a, p. 111). The ethical and political stakes of this configuration are that our most authentic experience is always already present. It is, in fact, the messianic now. This is the origin of Agambens attempt to define the good of human life in opposition to nihilism. The kairos represents a point where

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[i]nfinite, quantified time is at once delimited and made present: within itself the cairs distils different times (omnium temporum in unum collatio) and within it the sage is the master of himself and at his ease, like a God in eternity. (Agamben 1993a, p. 111)

The simile is important here like a God in eternity shows Agambens desire to place the messianic on the side of the human. This provides a glimpse of Agambens ambitious project. He wants to conceptually reconfigure the conceptual coordinates of human redemption, retrieved from a lost destiny in Greek and Christian thought. That this centres on an idea of singularity, as opposed to chronology and eternal immanence, gives us a pivotal insight into the conceptual architecture of how this might be thought. Singularity implies sufficiency, mastery and happiness, free from both the turmoil of fleeting time and the relentless, intransigent duration of eternity. The radicalization of the messianism Agamben configures requires two explicit conditions. If human messianism is not subject to transience and passing, it must therefore resist temporal differentiation and change. Therefore, human messianism must correspond to some form of commonality which keeps from passing. Secondly, if this type of messianism resists eternal duration, it must, by definition, be constructed as not corresponding to how eternity is traditionally understood, namely as without temporal beginning and end, infinite without finite passing and limitless duration immune to temporal life. Agamben must thus negotiate one of the oldest philosophical paradoxes: the opposition of temporal change and eternal duration. This is taken up through the idea of messianic singularity. Singularity implies an existent that requires no further definition other than its own specific qualities or behaviours. In negotiating this difficulty, he attempts to enrich the notion of singularity, conceptually traversing characteristics of metaphysical understandings of chronological time and eternity. This is particularly sharp in his understanding of whatever singularity. The notion of the whatever delimits the idea of common experience as something that should be understood under the rubric of just belonging, or of having similar traits and characteristics to others, or between beings in general. This form of commonality would be founded on particular differences rather than opening up what is generic to all human life. What is generic transcends both determining and discriminating elements of belonging, i.e. as that which belongs to particular commonalities. On the other hand, whatever singularity is implicit to all living beings and nullifies the determining power of identity, distinction and hierarchy (Agamben 2000, p. 85).1
1. Michael Hardt notes in his translators notes to The Coming Community (Agamben 1993b, translators notes 106.5107.5) that, in Italian, qualunque refers to neither what is singular nor general and neither what is individual nor generic. This is true for Agamben (1993b, p. 66), as he clearly states that his understanding of singularity must be freed from both the ineffability of the individual and the intelligibility of the universal. Instead, it is a singularity as a whatever singularity or as a being-such. It is as Thomas Wall describes the moment where there is a liquidation of the notion of essential stability in favour of an attempt to think the most common. As Wall (1999, p. 123) succinctly notes: The commonality Agamben repeatedly approaches in his fragments both involves us in belonging and also deprives us of any representable condition of belonging. For the Whatever is just that-whatever!

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This represents an effort to isolate most common forms of human life that are indifferent and detached, unbendingly resistant to both difference and identity formation. This defines a generic and resilient core of existence and life immune from the tribulations and anxieties of becoming and transformation; exempt from reduction and further determination. If determination and demarcation imply difference, Agamben attempts to think a zone of life irreducible, sufficient, sovereign and free from such determination. To quote Agamben in The Coming Community: Redemption is not an event in which what was profane becomes sacred and what was lost becomes found again; instead, Redemption is, on the contrary, the irreparable loss of the lost, the definitive profanity of the profane (Agamben 1993b, p. 101). The loss of the lost is significant. Agambens messianism requires the loss of that part of us which does not belong. In typical messianic fashion, it is a demand to return to that part of us that transcends demarcation; or the distinction of that part of us which belongs and does not belong. This is the ontological kernel that for Agamben is ever present, namely a core of human life that remains without end and mortalization. The scale of this is illuminating. It is in relation to the most small that Agamben finds redemption, rather than in any grandiose dramatization of existence. Following Walter Benjamin, he argues that it is the smallest difference or most tiny displacement that makes redemption possible (Agamben 1993b, p. 53). This micrological thrust explains why Agamben offers a radical departure from onto-theological conceptions of metaphysics. Messianic experience opens the possibility of what he calls whatever being or whatever singularity. This is configured as a resilient remnant. In The Time That Remains, it is an excess of the part in relation to the all and the all in relation to the part (Agamben 2005b, p. 56). The redemptive remnant is resistant to temporality and alteration. Human messianism orders itself as a static cameo or vignette, where parts and the whole are reconciled or put together just once in singular and mutual unity. *** It becomes easier to place Agambens messianic thrust in opposition to what Agamben sees as historical delimitations of its power. We see clear application of this in State of Exception, where Agamben (2005a) applies his insight to juridical and legal issues. The thesis of State of Exception rests on the premise that a limit case in the foundation of political sovereignty exceptional or emergency power has now become the norm pervading contemporary structures of governmentality. For Agamben, the more sinister consequence of this, to a greater or lesser degree, is a fortification of a culture of death which pervades all aspects of power. This requires some explanation. To further enrich this analysis, Agamben provides an example through the Ancient Roman notion of the iustium and the sensatus consultum ultimum. The latter was a decree pronounced during periods of mourning a sovereign, or of threat to the Republic. An element of the sensatus consultum ultimum was the iustium. This was also a suspension of law and was thereby, to a degree, devoid of law. Agambens investigation of this non-site designates the point where legality may exist without

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designation or classification. In a sense, law exists without application to finite and specific juridical instances. Every exceptional action does not attain the status of legal compliance or transgression but is, instead, reduced to a sphere of pure undecidability. The anomic is a zone where law may be applied willynilly. This serves to demonstrate a lacuna of legality, or an extra-legal state of affairs within the normalcy of law, executable as neither external nor internal to a juridical order. The state of exception consolidates sovereign power by virtue of the suspension of legal normality. The exception should only take place in the case of emergency. However, since it exists outside of the normal legal order, at the same time it gives definition to the entire legal edifice; both belonging and not-belonging to the life of the polis. Sovereign power is thus ultimately founded on the ability to decide the exception. Those who hold this power can therefore demarcate those who belong and do not belong. Once an exception has been decided, it has the ability to perpetuate undecidability and anomie. This is because it is in itself founded on being at once internal and external, an inclusive exclusion to political community. This inclusive exclusions most severe consequence is the unrestricted application of sovereign power. The most intense consequence of this power is the production of bare life rather than human life. Bare life is life stripped of potentiality and possibility. The state of exception is coefficient with deciding on those who deserve the life of the polis and those who do not. The more evidence we see of exceptionalism, the more nihilism takes hold, and the more it enacts a stranglehold on global life. Furthermore, the state of exception, as well as deciding on what belongs and does not belong, has the capacity to create a skewed normalcy of division and differentiation. The new normal is a state in which divisions of belonging and not belonging, saved and not saved, are taken for granted. This is symptomatic of a much wider malaise for Agamben, which has the concentration camp as its ultimate end; the nadir of modern nihilism. The formation of belonging and non-belonging is precisely what Agamben wishes to combat. The state of exception resides in violence that is founded on an indifferent and indeterminate creation of inside and outside, the outcome of which is the creation of divisions, differences and hierarchies, since the possibility of distinction is always held in suspension and always invokable. This undermines the possibility of coherent commonality or human solidarity which transcends these differences. Thus, the expression of sovereign power is founded on the creation of difference, borders, and the perpetuation of inside and outside. This analysis is reflected in Agambens (1998) Homo Sacer. If there is difference, this implies an outside, since an outside can only define itself in opposition to an inside. This logic presupposes the power of death, since death necessarily implies transformation and is intimate with difference. Lack of transformation conversely implies a life without decay. This is the great loss of modern biopolitics the forgetting of the true meaning of human generic and untransformed life ever since Aristotle separated zoe , the actuality of living common to all living
ea m [r ]c

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beings, and bios, which signifies the particular manner of living peculiar to humans or groups. The exception has the capacity to produce the concentration camp. The link between the exception and the camp is the power to perform absolute separation. In the camp, it is no longer only a question of separating belonging and not belonging; the camp intensifies the process of division and separation, separating life from death through the production of bare life. To control and demarcate this generic core of humanity, of that which transcends belonging and not belonging, is to have the capacity of performing the most absolute form of domination, enacted through the mechanization and proliferation of death. The power to put to death, and the mechanization of this power, is the lowest point of modern nihilism, defining the systematic destruction of humanitys most resilient and revolutionary being. To overcome this trajectory is the most urgent task of contemporary politics and philosophy. What Agamben tries to remind us of is the significance of human life after the possibility of the concentration camp. If the power of the sovereign is the power of life over death, or the power to put to death, what is valuable for Agamben are forms of thought which mitigate against these catastrophic consequences. Agamben sheds light on this overcoming in the notion of forms of life. The notion of forms of life reveals the fundamental good, for Agamben, of human life. Problematically, however, this is defined negatively. It is everything that the production of bare life is not. It is a life that is immune to separation, since forms of life are not subject to something, namely sovereign power. It is a life that is not susceptible to death. Agamben does not, of course, suggest that death does not happen or is not possible indeed, the camp testifies to the consolidation of this possibility but what he does attempt is isolating that aspect of the human which is most common to life, that which is most human. Agamben denotes forms of life as follows:
A life that cannot be separated from its form is a life for which what is at stake in its way of living is living itself. What does this formulation mean? It defines a life human life in which the single ways, acts, and processes of living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of life, always and above all power. (Agamben 2000, p. 3)

To be fair, Agamben attempts to lay this out more positively in terms of possibility and potentiality. The form of life, and concomitantly the form of the good of life, must be that which allows singular life to exist in the sway of whatever possibilities and potentialities human life falls upon. The point is that human living always retains the character of possibility, of having the ability to be and not be simultaneously. If this is the case, human life is always in itself open to opportunity and chance. It is not dictated by sovereign power. This is not a prescriptive claim. Instead, it should be considered in an ontological sense. Humans cannot be ethical or political if they do not have the capacity or power to be or not be, to be able to or not be able to, to try or not try, and to succeed or fail in the first place. This is why the question of potentiality is central for

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Agamben.2 The key to human happiness and living well rests on the fact that happiness is always a concern for human beings. Humans always hold the potential to be on the way to being happy; happiness is always at stake and is a possibility among others, irrespective of how it is executed (Agamben 2000, p. 3). Conversely, instantiation of modern nihilism in the guise of the camp attempts to capture or make static not just potential events and occurrences in life, but possibility itself. One could further elaborate this in political terms. If politics is to be about life, and the good of life, then it must enact itself in opposition to death and the death of possibility. This is why in the various legal texts Agamben examines, life is always only a counterpart to the threat of death. This is symptomatic of the metaphysical domination of our political paradigms. The exposition of life to death can only ever be geared towards the materialization of borders and margins. Bare life is the outcome of the exposure of life to death. We must, in opposition to this trend, always surpass the distinction between human life and bare life. The normalization of this distinction, to varying degrees, is symptomatic of exceptionalism. His point is that there is no essential difference between the production of the camp and political systems that are founded on the exposure of life and death and which have the apparatus in place where the exception can be decided. This is a question of degree. A line is always possible between political systems that utilize exceptions and those that create borders between inside and outside. This is why the examples that Agamben recounts are culturally specific: for example, Guantnamo; the stadium in Bari where illegal Albanian immigrants were herded in 1991; the zones dattentes in French international airports in which foreigners asking for refugee status are kept (Agamben 1998, p. 174). These signify, to a

2. This is further developed in Agambens articulation of Aristotelian potentiality. Potentiality is effectively that which both is and is not. For potentiality to be, it must also contain the thought of that which it is not. Agamben takes very seriously two of Aristotles propositions from the Metaphysics which state that: impotence and impotent stand for the privation which is contrary to potency of this sort, so that every potency belongs to the same subject and refers to the same process as a corresponding impotence (Aristotle 2001, Book IX, 1046a 2532, p. 821) and also, everything that is capable of being may possibly not be actual. That which is capable of being may either be or not be, the same thing then, is capable of being and not-being (Aristotle 2001, Book IX, 1050b, p. 830). The significance of this is that there must always reside, in the relation of potentiality and actuality, an impotentiality that elides the split between potentiality and actuality. Thus, actuality and potentiality reside beside themselves, eliding the split between potentiality and actuality. Thus, all actuality contains the potentiality not to be (adynamia). Agamben concludes that for Aristotle, there is thus truly potentiality only where the potentiality to not be does not lag behind actuality, but passes fully into it as such. For Agamben, following Aristotle, a thing is said to be potential if, when the act of which it said to be potential is realized, there will be nothing impotential (Agamben 1999, p. 183). See Aristotle (2001, Book IX, 1047a 24-26, p. 821). This valorization of impotentiality, which can be considered both actively and passively, signifies the central singularity which guides much of Agambens thought. The core of messianism belongs and does not belong, it is and is not. It is a generic region of being not affiliated with the actualization of particular commonalities. The messianic core of existential life salves the metaphysical distinction between being and not being, human and non-human, time and eternity, and activity and passivity.

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greater or lesser degree, centres of a wider malaise, i.e. the becoming planetary of the camp. While it is understandable that one may baulk at such a conclusion, the increasing prevalence of such a phenomenon is what Agamben challenges. If political value rests on biopolitics that is, the brute fact of maintaining biological existence or bare life the question of what true value politics has is eroded and hollowed out. The global outcome of this nihilism is the creation of a world that is increasingly fragmented and unhinged. Agamben thus adopts an exceedingly apocalyptic tone. The more we enact a politics whose modus operandi is the creation of borders and margins, the more we live in a world where life is just usable and expendable, and the more we commit ourselves to the depths of nihilism. What, therefore, does Agamben propose? What ethical and political coordinates should we engage in to delimit this possibility? Agambens thought is sundered between two possibilities. We thus have two Agambens. We have the apocalyptic Agamben, where the camp is the paradigmatic expression of our current political situation, and the Agamben who is enchanted with the messianic thrust and possibility of an alternative politics. In many ways, Agamben performs a hermeneutics of the worst. This is his Benjaminian side. This side attempts to find and recuperate traces of human life in the detritus of modern nihilism, constructing an alternative idea of politics out of the remnants of human waste. In resistance to such a potentiality lies much of the philosophical and political insight of Agambens work. Evoking a redemptive rhetoric, he alternatively posits a revolutionary violence as opposed to the perpetual possibility of violence enacted by sovereign power. The state of exception has the capacity to reduce any external beings which threaten the security and orbit of the polis, and produce life that is usable and expendable. Agamben instead turns to Benjamins messianic or revolutionary postulation of a pure violence, which dissolves the fictional lacunae between anomie and law. Such a space denotes a thought of law which is not justifiable by recourse to sovereign or violent political ends that make or preserve laws. It thus avoids the risk of designation and demarcation. For Agamben, this revolutionary messianism strictly does not refer to a deferral of law but only to the deactivation and inactivity of law, opening the space where one can think how and where law and justice can be thought of in an unmediated non-relation. This is the thought of how law becomes inoperative. Here, law no longer has to be enacted or constituted but simply is a means only to itself. This endorses a law that protects without sovereignty, where law is pure and only a means to itself, not constituted or mediated (Agamben 2005b, p. 33). In a sense, every law to a greater or lesser degree involves the creation of an inside and an outside. The function of a revolutionary messianism is to make the cut between these different divisions and demarcations; it is to actualize the most generic form of human life possible. That the exception exists means the juridical and legal procedures are implicitly tied to the possibility of the exception. Even if the general practice of law on a

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case-by-case basis wards off and protects against the possibility of a state of exception, this only serves to illuminate their mutual, if obscured, complicity. As Agamben states:
It is not the exception that gets subtracted from the rule, but the rule that, suspending itself, gives raise to the exception and only in this way can constitute itself as rule, by constantly maintaining a relation to it The situation that is created by exception can neither be defined as a factual situation, nor as a situation of right, but institutes between the two a paradoxical threshold of indifference. (Agamben 2005b, p. 26)

The words indifference is important here. One of the most difficult things in coming to understand Agamben is how the indifference of the state of exception differs to the messianic singularity and revolutionary redemption he is positing. This indifference nominates an indiscriminate and aspecific sovereign capacity. Sovereign power is indifferent to whatever differences it creates. It creates differences indiscriminately without care. The singularity and specificity of human life is superfluous and unessential. What Agamben tries to retrieve is a division and separation, but one that is an absolute removal. It is an attempt to isolate the most human form of separation from difference and division in the first place. Agambens messianic singularity thus divides division itself. It demarcates and separates a boundary between all other divisions and alterations, designating a pure space that is defined only unto itself which does not risk the possibility of separating human life from itself. Here, Agambens Heideggerian lineage is evident. What is most ubiquitous to life is its own singular mode of being in the world. Insofar as humans exist as humans, they must have a pure context of involvement, an indissoluble and unique agglomeration that holds its own possibility, potentiality and temporal specificity. In his text The Coming Community, Agamben (1993b, p. 44) calls this the infinite omnivalence of whatever being. That which is ethics proper, the true condition of what is good for humanity, must correspond to the non-dictated, non-mediated and non-constituted nature of human possibility. Instead of the point where human life is considered usable and dispensable, dependent and reliant, ethics and politics must be founded on the free use of human potentiality. This must mirror ones own amorphousness, i.e. the singularity of the self exposed to different possibilities exempt from change and differentiation. This may seem paradoxical, but if possibility is to exist qua possibility, then it must remain resistant to change. This is why Agamben endorses the preservation of impotentiality in the unity of that which is and is not rather than the separation of belonging and not belonging. For Agamben (1993b, p. 44): [T]he only ethical experience (which, as such, cannot be a task or a subjective decision) is the experience of being (ones own) potentiality, of being (ones own) possibility-exposing, that is, in every form ones own amorphousness and in every act ones own inactuality. The proper ethical experience requires us to think a state of lawlessness where law is deactivated and not necessary. It is wholly contingent and immune from strife and insecurity, and thus from segregation and demarcation. If we concentrate on the fact that we are all

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potential homo sacers, as well as all having our human specificity, then we can begin to think an ethics of common human solidarity which transcends difference. If humans are human, they must surpass the difference between that which is legal and non-legal. This is why the state of exception is law without law. It requires the perpetual suspension of justice for human life. If we are to safeguard ourselves from this actuality, to avoid the ever-present intensification of nihilism, we must reconsider what justice is. Justice is that which is most human and which no longer requires law. This is not to suggest that law is without its place, or that Agamben endorses a state of illegality, but, instead, something more subtle. The most revolutionary break human ethical and political life can attain is the point where law no longer has to be implemented. A useful way of thinking about this is to think of the whole edifice of laws and law-making, culture and nature, history and thought as scaffolding which renounces their own necessity when the job is complete. This is a point where the need to implement law has passed and law is simply enacted. In such a situation, justice just is; without prohibition, command or dictation. While some may argue that this is removed and teleological, it is, for Agamben, the ever-present messianic core of human life. Far from considering the significance of human affairs as abstract and wholly theoretical, or removed towards a zone of primary peace or future to come, for Agamben, the redemptive and messianic core of being human is wholly devoted and realized in praxis. It is, in short, the zone of politics proper which is the messianic now:
To show law in its nonrelation to life and life in its nonrelation to law means to open a space between them for human action, which once claimed for itself the name of politics. Politics has suffered a lasting eclipse because it has been contaminated by law, seeing itself, at best, as constituent power (that is, violence that makes law), when it is not reduced to merely the power to negotiate with the law. The only truly political action, however, is that which severs the nexus between violence and law. And only beginning from the space thus opened will it be possible to pose the question of a possible use of law after the deactivation of the device that, in the state of exception, tied it to life. (Agamben 2005a, p. 88)

To sever the nexus illuminates Agambens idiosyncratic messianic impulse. A revolutionary cut is required to separate law and its reality. This is a definitive cut which, paradoxically, has to be instantiated again and again between the purgatorial and torrid reality of the dialectic of law and lawlessness. This revolutionary messianism nominates a sphere of being without need for accusation and segregation, removed from the process of subjection and election. The messianic must always be now and present and not of the future or of the past. This designates the sphere of praxis. True political action necessitates the dissolution of the relation between violence and law (Agamben 2005a, p. 88). Divine violence is a revolutionary form of violence which violates the formation of separations, hierarchy and distinction. It violates the very possibility of violation and overcomes the circuitous and unsatisfactory relation between laws as means to ends. The ethical and political stakes become clear. For Agamben, to think this prospect is to think of law strictly after law and as a means without end. This is to

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think an existence that is purely and freely itself without transgression, damage and destruction. All forms of human ethics must begin with respect for this actuality. Messianic life, which is the core of Agambens revolutionary project, requires that questions of justice cannot, as such, wait or be thought of purely prescriptively. Messianic singularity and whatever being are always the case and every ethical dignity rests on holding potentiality and possibility in place. We must orientate ourselves as if every day was redeemed as such. Ethical praxis, thus, is directed towards an enunciation of human messianism at every moment. It is not only sovereign power that has the ability to enact this being. If humans are willing to apply themselves to the resilient gap between all instances of difference, they, too, can create a state of emancipatory transformation and being. Agamben (1993b, pp. 712) notes in The Coming Community that the proper messianic experience resembles the life that begins on earth after the last day simply human life. To be succinct, Agambens project is a quest for our humanity, which he claims is always already redeemed. Because of this, as he points out, all our individual and collective political will ought to be motivated by the enactment of the messianic at all times, thereby breaking the willy-nilly and indeterminate application of law in the state of exception. The cut or transgression that must be enacted is a suspension of the perpetual suspension that the state of exception creates.3 This indicates the wider philosophical trajectory Agamben charts. It signifies a move beyond philosophers of temporality and finitude in order to suspend suspension. Redemption, on Agambens account, must be governed by what is essentially enough, sufficient unto itself, i.e. what is the most sufficient and immune from further potential needs, desire and mortal impoverishments.4
3. This indicates why Agamben pursues an ongoing polemic with Derrida. Derrida is cast as the philosopher who cannot exceed limitations, demarcations and differentiations. Derridas deconstruction exhibits a direct solidarity with the state of exception. Deconstruction is founded on the false conception that reality is irreducibly structured around being and non-being. Agamben is unlike Derrida, who separates justice and law whilst negotiating the interminable case-by-case application of juridical principles. The community to come cannot correspond to the democracy to come which Derrida speaks about. For Agamben, at least this would only ever amount to reformist demagogy that is in secret solidarity with the state and its potential to enact the exception. 4. The subject subjected to such capricious law is typified by Agambens (1999, p. 234) reading of Melvilles Bartleby the Scrivener. Bartleby poignantly refuses to relinquish his potentiality to not be. Bartleby is a figure of impotentiality, of our not being. His perpetual refrain, I would prefer not to, is irreducible nothing further can be made of it or him. He transcends the limits and coordinates of his world by remaining the most resilient thing of all, namely the preservation of an irreducible state of human singularity. Bartleby refuses to compromise his status, which is why the narrator of the story has such an inability to place his existence. Bartleby remains placeless, and cannot instantiate a region of belonging, since every effort to designate a sphere of belonging only ever creates a further demarcation. Indeed, one can surmise that Bartleby signifies the tragedy of this false dichotomy. He is directly opposed to the sovereign biopolitical decision. His refusal exhibits a resilient survival that remains always beneath the sovereign decision, almost generated by the detritus of the exception. The paltry, frail and pathetic Bartleby opens a resilient and illuminated world outside merciless calculation and compromise. He militantly exhibits the subversive power of the powerless in the face of power, capacity and ability. Bartleby typifies Agambens figure of homo sacer: the homo sacer, a product of the sovereign ban and decision, both inside and outside community, forced into a perpetual state of both belonging and non-belonging.

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Since much European philosophy, from Adorno to Levinas and Derrida, is a response to the Holocaust, it is not surprising that Agamben is compelled to work out the notion of the homo sacer in the context of the Holocaust. Remnants of Auschwitz (Agamben 2002) refigures the concept of redemption in the face of what is usually cast as the worst. This analysis peculiarly concentrates on the strangely immortal and living-dead figure of the Musselman. The Musselman marks the most extreme and intense concentration of the sovereign ban, i.e. the production of bare life without cultural and biological life. In this zone of indistinction, a zone of the relentless negativity of death, Agamben strangely finds a resilient messianism. Pursuing his desire to establish the redemptive core of the human, Agambens Remnants of Auschwitz is founded on a paradox (Agamben 2002, p. 38). While he asserts the impossibility of wholly giving testament to the experience of those in the camp, who suffered the fate of Musselmanhood, he concludes with testimonies of those who survived this fate. These are quoted accounts, found at the end of his text, remaining outside of the main body as if wholly uncontaminated and of a beatific stature. If the Musselman is the worst state of what it is to be human, then, for Agamben, the testimony of those who have survived this state of living death are accorded a special privilege. This survival in the face of the worst demonstrates Agambens desire to endorse that which transcends a life exposed or put to the negativity of death, circumventing and demarcating any demarcation between life and death. What the Holocaust survivors testify to, according to Agamben, is the impossibility of the absolutization and mechanization of death (Agamben 2002, p. 38). The thrust of this work is to show that evil is not resident, that there always remains something that survives. This must be the axiomatic foundation of any political messianism it lives on and surpasses brute or bare life. However, this arises only from the perspective of an absolute and blessed life. An absolute and unconditional life is a life without limitations, without condition, wholly devoid of corruption and fallenness. Following Benjamin, humanitys saved being is within this context a form of ruination, one that reveals the messianic in the smallest and most banal as if it were eternal. It is, like Deleuzean life, sufficient, pure, immanent and exempt from the negativity of death. Agamben endorses the preservation of a singularity where being and not being are held in suspension, exempt from further alteration and transformation in a state of virtual eternity. This alerts us to the significance of the messianic remnant it is that part of us that is invulnerable or, more accurately, the most invulnerable. For Agamben (1998, p. 153), this unambiguously means it is an indissoluble cohesion in which it is impossible to isolate something like bare life. This provides Agamben with, as I have mentioned, the relevant forms of life which contain the presence of happiness. As he states, the happy life should be an absolutely profane sufficient life that has reached the perfection of its own power and its own communicability a life over which

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sovereignty and right no longer have any hold (Agamben 1998, pp. 114 115). *** However, if we ask ourselves what this amounts to, we see problems arising that rest on falling back on metaphysical and traditional concepts of redemption. Agamben, to be fair, does situate his work outside of onto-theological concepts of redemption; and his work provides no guarantee of the avoidance of the exception. Nevertheless, we must ask ourselves if human messianism is at all possible. If the kernel of human life rests on happiness a happiness that is based on the preservation of possibility or virtual eternity this begs the question as to how such an event can be maintained over time, or if it is or is not subject to time. As I noted earlier, Agamben endorses the preservation of impotentiality in the unity of that which is and is not, over and against the separation of belonging and not belonging. But the preservation of such a thought must rest on a resistance to change, transformation and difference; in a sense, the actualization of the possible and the coming into being of belonging and not belonging. If possibility is actualized, something happens. How is such an event possible if humans exist with temporality? If Agambens messianic singularity must retain possibility in suspension, it must remain immune from variation. More radically, temporality and finitude must no longer play a constitutive role in describing the generation of what it means to be human. This is where Agamben departs from his Heideggerian lineage. The meaning of human life, if it is to live outside of exceptionalism, needs to undermine the affectivity of temporal constitution. We find evidence of this logic in The Time That Remains. Here, Agamben attempts to think of the kairos or kairological time as distinct from chronological time and eternity (Agamben 2005b, p. 63). The Pauline kairos is exceptionally apt for Agamben since it conceptualizes the messianic within a singular moment. Agamben performs a Hegelian Aufhebung, negotiating the difference between transitory temporality and an eternity immanent to specific moments (Johnson 2007, pp. 273274). The kairos, as it is traditionally understood, marks a decisive and exceptional moment of decision. It is the opportune time where appropriateness crystallizes in response to an uncertain future and a novelized present. Messianic or kairological time resists representation, categorization and demarcation. It is unified and resistant to disjunction. It is neither chronological nor successive, but the time of the end of time or the time of the suspension of time. It is the becoming eternal of chronological time. As Agamben (2005b, p. 68) suggests, it is the time we need to make time end. Thus, the messianic thrust relies upon jettisoning temporality. Kairological temporality is immanent to chronological temporality. Thus, time or chronos becomes a contracted and abridged chronos (Agamben 2005b, p. 69). The kairos presents the disjunctive aspects of chronos as united or held together. The time of the messianic is formed out of a unified field. The kairos names a facet of temporality that is, at least, different and, at most, a becoming immune to temporality. At stake for Agamben is a form of temporal purification and decontamination. The only time

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for the actualization of redemption is the present, which is, in itself, wholly immanent, sufficient unto itself and invulnerable to prior or anterior divisions. The time of the messianic as if is thus a putting to death of time. Therefore, Agambens radical conclusion is, as David E. Johnson (2007, p. 274) asserts, a time of no time at all, but a now which is ever present, absolving the effects of time. If this is to play out in terms of the ethical and political stakes of Agambens work, we see that messianic ethics and politics thus easily map onto questions of happiness. If messianic time is without the anxieties and vicissitudes generated by temporal life and passing, then the conceptual architectonics of a congealing of the eternal and transient allows him to conceive of permanent and resilient forms of human happiness. With the suspension of the suspension of time we have an endorsement of an absolute blessed and abundant life exempt from needs, mortal desires and the potential diminishment of appetites. Messianic time involves thinking at our core of a without end, or the immortality of that part of us which is without end. In Agamben, we find an unavoidable assertion of a form of divine spark or immortality as essential to human existence. While it is clear that Agamben wants to give us a non-onto-theological account of this, it is difficult to see how this is possible without resorting to the language of theology. While he wishes to define an absolutely profane and sufficient life, how can this nominate itself as a sufficiency without actualization or temporal passing? If human messianism is to be sufficient, then to be consistent it must be conceived as an absolute auto-affection or self-generation, i.e. of a life without mediation and occurrence, wholly immune from all forms of death and succession and, by extension, from the possibility of happening or event to begin with. This reveals the theological prejudice in Agamben, one which desires the overcoming of the essential finitude of the human. This is problematic given that his messianism wants to remain wholly human. If, as for Heidegger, finitude and finite historicity are essential in the constitution of human Dasein, it is difficult to see how Agamben can try to build on this and think an ethical and political constellation that remains pure possibility without temporal constitution. Indeed, the problem remains in the question of constitution. For Heidegger, human Dasein is constituted on the way to itself, actualizing its specific and historical possibilities. Agamben, on the other hand, wants to think a state of aconstitutionality, where humans exist in a state of passive possibility without actualization. This is to forgo, at least on Heideggerian terms, the very possibility of historicity, and the possibility of actualization itself. If we are to vanquish the temporality of the human, then we are to suggest that the human is without mediation and event. This implies a form of deathlessness. Deathlessness implies immortality and absolute life. Absolute life is without mediation, since nothing can happen which compromises its own actualization. It is present, wholly sufficient and healthy within its own orbit. While Agamben wishes to avoid the consequences of the capricious sovereign decision, he reaffirms the place of sovereignty, wholly removed from all happenings in the

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world; a sovereignty which excuses itself from mediation by other actualizations. Thus, the whatever-being or the messianic singularity returns us to the form of absolute sovereignty of metaphysics, i.e. of thought thinking itself. This is why Agamben (2000, p. x) stresses the importance of pure means. This is very telling. What is pure is that which cannot be contaminated, which is not susceptible to contagion and mediation. A pure means must denote a means only on the way towards itself. It is a being wholly in itself, affected only by its own self-presence and self-generation; devoid of transcendence. Human messianism, the virtual as if, holds a measure of the eternal without the transience of time. Redemption, even if infinitely small and human, still vanquishes temporal life in favour of infinite and immanent survival. This reflects a sphere of human being without violence, resistant to the vagaries and vicissitudes of historicity. In order to mitigate this possibility, Agamben wholly rethinks the messianic as a self-generating instance without reference to lost origins or hoped-for futures. This involves rethinking the dichotomy of the sacred and profane in order to, as he puts it, profane the profane or enact profanations (Agamben 2007, p. 89). What does he mean by this? If, for Agamben, religion is defined as that which separates, then sacrality must be inviolable, that which is most separate. Profanation renders neutral that which is separated, returning it to common usage, thereby suspending not belonging and separation in favour of a generic being. As Agamben (2007, p. 77) suggests: The thing that is returned to common use of men is pure, profane and free of sacred names. However, is this not another metaphysical sacralization? Purity or pure means defines separation, even though, for Agamben, pure means represents the deactivation and rupture of all separation, which, in turn, separates into a special sphere (Agamben 2007, p. 73). But if we ask ourselves in more detail what this sphere is comprised of, we see that Agambens profanations are tantamount to absolute sacralization since they designate a preference for an exceptional way of being human. Agamben sees this configuration as resulting in a purification of religious separation (absolution from absolution). This falls back on the conceptual apparatus he wishes to overcome, since what Agamben most desires is the separation of separation and division itself. Also, if one attempts to think a demarcation between the gods and the humans, why would this region of special being be devoid of the vagaries of transience? If what defines the human is mortality, and thus its ability to cease, why is time not more relevant to the kernel of human life? If time exists, it requires succession, and if succession is the case, this rules out from its inception the possibility of Agambens messianic special being. The eternally messianic singularity cannot exist unto itself, even if it is conceived in terms of possibility. If there is a separation from separation, why must this new sphere of special being be exempt from affectivity? To suggest so is inconsistent, especially since to approach mortal existence, thought must demand a minimal actualization or eventuation of itself. To think human life, something must happen. Time designates that which passes. That which ceases is finite and mortal, therefore time cannot be eternal. If something is to happen, this implies relationality between one entity and another. On an ontological level, this implies

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proximity of entities. If there is proximity or contact, there cannot be the assertion of a purely common state of being. In essence, the possibility of a sphere of pure possibility cannot be actualized. Consequently, Agambens assertion of a beatific and absolutely sufficient life is devoid of finitude and mortality. This is tantamount to expressing a desire for absolute death, since only the gods can be absolutely alive without the possibility of demise. As Martin Hgglund (2008, p. 8) puts it: If to be alive is to be mortal, it follows that to not be mortal to be immortal is to be dead. This is the dilemma Agamben faces. Either the messianic remnant is of the temporal world, in which case it must resort to the possibility of alteration and change, or it is of the eternal realm and remains immutable and not subject to change. While Agamben would possibly challenge this as a false metaphysical dichotomy between the eternal and the temporal, at the most basic level, a decision must be made on either one or the other even if this is only to enrich the conceptual coordinates he has invoked. Furthermore, if there is a messianic politics, the possibility of change and transformation cannot be discounted so easily. Agamben does not attend to the place of change in alleviating the struggles of both those who belong and who do not belong. If emancipatory politics is to proceed, it cannot originate in absolute abundance, since here there is no need of contestation or politicization in the first place. It is only where there is a lack of abundant life that serious politics may begin. That abundant life is limited makes all the more palpable the site of basic needs and requirements for human flourishing. If there remains the ever-present possibility of becoming homo sacer, it is not necessarily remedied by the expulsion of violence. This does not glorify scapegoathood obviously, it is not good to be a scapegoat for the sake of it but it demands realization of the essential importance of not being and mortality for politicization. It is only from the perspective of change and a common mortality that we may at least see constructive glimpses of a new social order, whatever their limitations may be. In conclusion, Agamben is exciting and gives the impression that previous work is to pave the way for a bold redefinition of the coordinates of ontology, ethics and politics. While Agamben presents a rich and novel response to nihilism, the promise of a singular and messianic eternal community is slow in materializing. This may happen but, for now, Agamben is as culpable of deferring promises as Derrida. Profane politics still waits.

References
Agamben, G. (1993a) Infancy and History, trans. Heron, L., Verso, London.. Agamben, G. (1993b) The Coming Community, trans. Hardt, M., University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Heller-Roazen, D., Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Agamben,, G. (1999) Potentialities, trans. Heller-Roazen, D., Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.

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Agamben, G. (2000) Means without End, trans. Binetti, V. & Casarino, C., University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. Agamben, G. (2002) Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. HellerRoazen, D., Zone Books, New York. Agamben, G. (2005a) State of Exception, trans. Atell, K., University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Agamben,, G. (2005b) The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Daily, P., Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Agamben, G. (2007) In Praise of Profanations, trans. Fort, J., Zone Books, New York. Aristotle (2001) Metaphysics, in Mackeon, R. (ed.) The Basic Work of Aristotle, trans. Ross, W. D., Modern Library Press, New York. Hgglund, M. (2008) Radical Atheism, Derrida and the Time of Life, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Johnson, D. E. (2007) As If the Time Were Now: Deconstructing Agamben, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 106, no. 2, pp. 263290. Porter, R. (2003) Flesh in the Age of Reason, Allen Lane, London. Wall, T. (1999) Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY.