Giorgio Agamben and the End of Judaism I

Introduction; The End of Judaism and a Requiem for the Occident

Hi All, the following is very much an experiment, trying something new, but something that has been on my mind for quite some time. I have enormous, exhaustively cited research documents spanning into the 10s of thousands of words. The broader plan covers in pretty exhaustive detail much of Walter Benjamin’s thought, Agamben’s (mis-)appropriations of it and more traditional Jewish thought, Heidegger, and more, through permutations of the concept of redemption (and its migration across multiple languages and original contexts), and the place of “divine violence” in the apocalyptic mode before returning to the horrors of the 20th and 21st centuries. I will almost certainly not be posting all of that, as this may end up being some kind of dissertation, if my very poor health and rather tenuous, impoverished social situation allows for such, but we will see what happens, or what could happen, G-d willing.

My current health and housing situation are fairly bad (I have been close to house-bound due to my neurological condition since COVID), and this kind of work keeps me sane, but only to a point. G-d willing things will get better. Thus, this work is offered with the best of faith. I am not a philosopher (though I am a budding philologist), if anyone has a critique of this I would ask them to share it in the faith with which this work is offered. I am, largely, an autodidact in this field. As it stands there will be two more parts to follow, and after that I will see.

image: library of congress.

Late last year, just before the High Holidays, I stumbled upon the translation of a blogpost by political theorist Giorgio Agamben, announcing “The End of Judaism.” I later found that the genesis of this post is in an untranslated prior post titled “Requiem per l’Occidente.” The contents of both these blogposts deeply concerns me, and, to my eyes, reflect a seriously concerning strand that runs through much of Agamben’s thought that has been largely under-acknowledged.

Background

For those who move in scholastic circles, Giorgio Agamben is best known for his political theory as expressed in the volumes Homo Sacer and The State of Exception, which were widely regarded as near-prophetic in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Their analysis of sovereign power, law, and the dangers of its over-extension, were eerily reflected in real-time in the PATRIOT Act, the War on Terror and the egregious abuses committed in the name of freedom, apparently licensed by their occurrence within what Agamben would call a juridical “zone of indistinction.” The prescience of Agamben’s work during this period launched him to a level of popularity seldom gained by a philosopher, and quickly gained him a large following, both within and without the academy, alongside a significant body of scholarship on his work (of predictably mixed quality), something few philosophers gain during their lifetimes.

Agamben’s thought of this period takes its cues from events of the turn of the 21^st century, tying our current political moment back to the totalitarian disasters of the 20^th century. At the beginning of the book that propelled him to international recognition, he positions himself as trying to complete the work that Michel Foucault did in his outlining of a theory of biopower – the political regulation and control of bodies. However, in Foucault’s elaboration of this, he “never dwelt on the exemplary places of modern biopolitics: the concentration camp and the structure of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century.”¹ While Foucault provided keen insight into the modern development of incarceration, Agamben asserts that “The camp—and not the prison—is the space that corresponds to this originary structure of the nomos” and thus “it is not possible to inscribe the analysis of the camp in the trail opened by the works of Foucault, from Madness and Civilization to Discipline and Punish.”² From here emerges a theory of sovereignty, extrapolated from Nazi Jurist Carl Schmitt’s juridical justification of dictatorship in which the ability to decide and impose ones will as law is the condition of possibility for all sovereign power – not just totalitarian (alongside Schmitt’s thesis on Political Theology).³ This is pointed toward by the transition from the Weimar Republic into Nazi dictatorship via the suspension of the constitution under emergency powers licensed by the same constitution as they are used to suspend. In the wake of the September 11 attacks and the emergency measures that followed this analysis was widely seen as prophetic. Yet, for Agamben there is yet another step, into the realm of metaphysics. The relationality implicit in the identification between sovereignty and the exception, in which the exceptional case is the means by which the function of law is defined, is further connected both to language and to metaphysics. Biopolitics bifurcates life into the political subject and the politicized object, this being the grammar of sovereignty, analogous to the split between subject and object in language itself. And as sovereignty is, for Agamben, fundamentally linked to the assertion of power that constitutes it, and these concepts are inextricably linked to potentiality and actuality, he announces that “until a new and coherent ontology of potentiality […] has replaced the ontology founded on the primacy of actuality and its relation to potentiality, a political theory freed from the aporias of sovereignty remains unthinkable.”⁴

However others may primarily be familiar with him for his more recent comments during the COVID19 pandemic, most notoriously comparing the vaccine “green pass” to the yellow Star of David used to identify Jews by the Nazis.⁵ While this statement was partially walked back and the blogpost containing it was not included in the volume collecting his pandemic “interventions,” that book still describes pandemic measures via direct comparison to European fascism. The preface declares that pandemic measures present “similarities with what happened in Germany in 1933” but which may even be worse, as “in Nazi Germany it was necessary to deploy an explicitly totalitarian ideological apparatus in order to achieve this end, the transformation we are witnessing today operates through the introduction of a sanitation terror and a religion of health.”⁶ This is pushed still further later, where Agamben declares:

Never before, not even under Fascism and during the two world wars, has the limitation of freedom been taken to such extremes […] Is it really necessary to remind ourselves that the only other place where human beings were kept in a state of pure vegetative life was the Nazi camp?⁷

For many readers, this turn largely torpedoed Agamben’s reputation, exhibiting a paranoia enabled by the failure to address that under fascism such measures included the destruction of said life in the liquidation of ghettos.

But, for a scholar who had developed such a devoted following and had such influence on the humanities and social sciences a quiet abandonment was not necessarily the only option. There have, essentially, been four types of reaction to Agamben’s pandemic commentary. The rare first is doubling down, that Agamben is absolutely right on this issue, as he was on everything else. The second is predictably the inverse: this proves that Agamben was always wrong about everything. The third, more moderate position is to assert that this has been a misstep, but does nothing to mar his previous work, all of which is still prescient in its analysis. The fourth, and I think best, is to ask the question of what went wrong, and how – to work out what the source of these failings are, how they arise, and what requires re-thinking – a position which grows more compelling given the tendency of many to downplay is failings and uncritically recuperate his work, and the contents of the blogposts, recapitulating many themes of his project’s foray into the territory of religion, that initially compelled me to write this essay.

The End of Judaism

“The End of Judaism” renders the current, secular State of Israel ethically coterminous with Judaism as such by way of the presenting “the negation of exile” as a fait accompli, leading to the announcement of its imminent “end.”⁸ Beyond the secular nature of the state, this is only possible by collapsing all possible Judaisms into one, ignoring the still-existing diaspora and various manifestations of opposition to Zionism among some Jews, from Haredim both within Israel and without, all the way through to radical diasporism which is such a point of contention in broad intra-Jewish discourse at present. “Requiem per l’Occidente” gives us the origin of this purported end of Judaism, in the late 19^th century pronouncement of its impending death by the assimilated, proto-Zionist scholar of Wissenschaft des Judentums, Moritz Steinschneider, who opines that all that remains of his ancestral faith is to “ensure it has a worthy funeral.”⁹ This, Agamben suggests, can be generalized to the West as a whole. He achieves this generalization by repeating his earlier position that the fate of the West has been determined by Christianity’s abrogation of its eschatological roots in favour of a regime of oikonomia.¹⁰ Thus, Agamben condemns “the West” by way of a funerary dirge (perhaps premature), eliding the deeply eschatological strand of Christianity rising to political prominence right now, particularly in the United States, and the messianic, eschatological Judaism embodied by the religious ethno-nationalist far right in Israel.

A stark contradiction emerges: between on the one hand condemnation of the realization of a particular flavour of Jewish eschatology, and on the other a condemnation of the failure to realise Christian eschatology, when the reality of eschatological extremism, both Christian and Jewish populates the news – eschatological ideology which shows clear exegetical and social parallels to the “messianic idea” that Agamben has, in the past, championed in the abstract. This is evident in one of the most telling lapses in “The End of Judaism,” where he writes that “According to some Kabbalists, including Luria, exile defines the very situation of divinity, which created the world by exiling itself from itself, and this exile will last until the advent of Tiqqun, that is, the restoration of the original order.” Absent from this is the acknowledgement that those who still hold to this teaching can be found on each side of the dispute over the nature of Judaism in Israel currently, and its relationship to the secular state: on one hand, many of the Haredim who represent the largest and most effective activist bloc in the country, who have engaged in protracted stand-offs with riot police over the Knesset’s attempt to remove their exemption from the draft, and on the other, religious Zionists in the settler movement who follow the teachings of Rav Avraham Yitzchak Hakohen Kook as interpreted by his son Tzvi Yehudah and the latter’s various radical students, along with other, more extreme religious leaders for whom the settler project itself has been interpreted as the very process of Tikkun invoked by Agamben.¹¹ Israel Knohl connects this very system to the founding of Gush Emunim itself, directly expressed in Lurianic language, in which settlement in the occupied territories was cast as “arousal from below” (אתערותא דלתתא) in order to stimulate “arousal from above” (אתערותא דלעילא), the process by which the redemption of the world is brought closer.¹² Further complicating this situation is the ambivalent relationship both sides of this dispute display to the secular state and its claims to legitimacy. That Agamben appears unaware that these Kabbalistic ideas have been and are utilized both in favour of and in opposition to the actions of the Israeli state (be the favour conditional or instrumental) shows not only a lack of understanding but betrays a lack of interest in how the ideas he employs in the abstract manifest concretely in the Jewish tradition both historically and as it exists today.¹³ This disinterest could also have been very easily corrected had Agamben read more of the source from whom he cites the vast majority of the Kabbalah and Rabbinic literature he discusses, Gershom Scholem, who presents as, in his estimation, the only two major works of contemporary Kabbalah Rav Kook’s Orot Hakodesh and R Arele Roth’s Shomer Emunim, the latter being one of the foundations for the highly traditionalist and anti-Zionist community of the same name.¹⁴

While the most lucid objection to such an observation would be the obvious fact that Agamben doesn’t mean what settler extremists mean when he invokes eschatology, that doesn’t so much solve the problem but rather raises further questions about the disconnection between the abstract and the concrete – and how both the judgements in these two blogposts and the rejection of particular manifestations of messianic thought can gain purchase given his that much of his work is a thoroughgoing critique of the very architecture of judgement and command that such unequivocal pronouncements require in order to be effective. To put it simply, the great critic of the conflation of ethics with ontology in “having-to-be” here appears to be insisting on both Judaism and Christianity having-to-be a certain way; a judgement made worse by this insistence being grounded in a flattening of their own internal diversity into a singular, homogenous whole – Judaism as such has rejected exile and thus condemned itself, Christianity as such has abandoned its eschatological promise and thus damned the world. Many on both sides of this binary would beg to differ in a myriad of ways disallowed by Agamben’s framing.

As may be obvious from the delay between the publication of these blogposts and this essay, I have tried writing about this material multiple times, in multiple different ways, all of which I have realized were variously insufficient. While in all iterations I wished to emphasize the problem of the focus on the death of the West, conspicuously eliding that what is in view is happening outside the West, and that it is non-westerners who continue to die very non-metaphorical deaths in near-incomprehensible numbers, all others descended into the correction of errors, pitting particular against particular. While the following will, admittedly contain some of this, this reproduction of the same rhetorical forms was merely an explication of function. The trivial correction of an error is less important than explication of the way the error manifests, the reason for its emergence and its consequences. The root of this problem is, I think, at least partially that while Agamben often cites Michel Foucault and Walter Benjamin, his primary philosophical influence is Martin Heidegger, and a Heideggerian Weltanschauung – not so much in terms of ideology as in terms of means of perceiving – undergirds and thus conditions Agamben’s thought. As this is a question of epistemology, Agamben’s acceptance of the Heideggerian priority of ontology cuts him off from the means by which this error could be corrected.

This should be contextualized in terms of Agamben’s philosophical development. While his early work largely avoids explicit political content, it is deeply conditioned by both Heidegger and Benjamin (in particular a reading of Benjamin largely cemented prior to the publication of the Arcades). These two continue to be major interlocutors in his ‘political turn’ in the 1990s, but initially, at least on a surface level, Benjamin often takes priority. However, in the 2000s, as his work moves toward a concerted engagement with late-antique and medieval Christianity, Benjamin drops into the background, and Heidegger reemerges. This does at least superficially manifest as a critique of Heidegger, but this is largely on Heidegger’s terms, and thus manifests as a revision – as an attempt to fix the problems and inconsistencies within Heidegger’s thought. However these errors are, for Agamben, primarily philosophical, and abstracted from the political environment in which Heidegger participated. Thus Agamben’s criticism of Heidegger manifests as a revision on two levels simultaneously, both the philosophical and the level of concrete politics. This revisionism – be it conscious or unconscious – is clearly visible in the final engagement with Heidegger of the Homo Sacer project, in which Agamben diagnoses Heidegger’s political failure as a result of “the aporia that assigns humanity to the human being as a task that, as such, can always be mistaken for a political task.”¹⁵ Here the Dasein with which Heidegger is concerned is read as human, and thus implicitly universal. The type of subject, however, for whom Heidegger envisions this task is particular and to whom this task falls and does not fall is explicit, at least in the period in which Heidegger fails in such a manner as to render necessary critique of the implicit politics of his project:

What is now happening is the ending of the history of the great beginning of Western humanity […] The “victor” in this “struggle,” which contests goallessness pure and simple and which can therefore only be the caricature of a “struggle,” is perhaps the greater groundlessness that, not being bound to anything, avails itself of everything (Judaism).¹⁶

By an exegetical sleight of hand the problem of Heidegger’s politics is elided by the assumption that the problem does not really exist and nothing really happened on a philosophical level – that, for Heidegger, Dasein was always somehow universal, and not particularly Occidental, threatened by an Oriental enemy, “world-Judaism,” whose task was the “uprooting of all beings from being.”¹⁷ This is pushed even further in a post-Homo Sacer project interview, where in response to being asked about the Black Notebooks, he argues that Heidegger should not be condemned as antisemitic, as “this word designates something that has to do with the persecution and the extermination of the Jews,” and “If every critical discourse on Judaism, even if reserved as in the diary notes, is condemned as anti-Semitic, it is equivalent to the exclusion of Judaism by language.”¹⁸ That the black notebooks explicitly position “world-Judaism” as an existential threat to Occidental Dasein (and thus, if Occidental Dasein is to be preserved, something that needs to be opposed) cannot be acknowledged, as it fundamentally contradicts Agamben’s affectionate memory of his teacher at Le Thor, and renders him unable to confront the reality of history.¹⁹

In this way Agamben can salvage and re-politicize Heidegger’s preoccupation with first philosophy without interrogating its implications, or the presuppositions that underly the motion from the thought of the West to the world. Agamben can himself find the root of humanity’s problems in this particular, Western tradition rather than in the frame of reference that privileges it above all others.

I will argue that this lack of criticality is what both conditions his recent reaction to the COVID pandemic, and what leads to his continual self-limitation to a purely hermeneutical position analogous to the asocial solipsism of Dasein and his delimitation of analysis near-exclusively to the history and tradition of the West – thus tacitly reproducing Heidegger’s preoccupation with specifically Occidental Dasein.²⁰

Part two follows here:

Giorgio Agamben and the End of Judaism II

1. Homo Sacer, in Giorgio Agamben, The Omnibus Homo Sacer, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen et al., Meridian Crossing Aesthetics, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017)., 7. All citations of the Homo Sacer project are from this edition, apologies for the inconvenience but it is what I have access to.

2. Ibid. 20-1. Cf. Jessica Whyte, Catastrophe and redemption : the political thought of Giorgio Agamben (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013)., 29.

3. Homo Sacer, in Agamben, Omnibus., 17-18.

4. Ibid. 40.

5. Giorgio Agamben, "Cittadini di seconda classe," Una voce. Rubrica di Giorgio Agamben., 16 July, 2021, https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-cittadini-di-seconda-classe.

6. Giorgio Agamben, Where are we now? : the epidemic as politics, trans. Valeria Dani (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), 9.

7. Ibid. 38-40.

8. Giorgio Agamben, "The End of Judaism," [La fine del Giudaismo.] Ill Will (2024), https://illwill.com/the-end-of-judaism.

9. “…assicurargli un degno funerale.“ Giorgio Agamben, "Requiem per l’Occidente," Una voce. Rubrica di Giorgio Agamben., 11 July, 2024, https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-requiem-per-l-u2019occidente. As will become a pattern, the context of this statement complicates Agamben’s use of it without any kind of citation. The original statement is from an article on Steinschneider by his student, Gotthold Weil, quoting him in the context of his optimism about the state of Jews and Wissenschaft following the 1848 revolution, completing the unification of Germany and the piecemeal emancipation of the Jews. Weil is criticizing Steinschneider for his uncautious optimism, that the history of the Jews ended at that point, and from there, what was previously Jewish could be incorporated into a universalist, humanistic vision. Weil condemns this as an error, and, in its place, offers the Zionism that did not, at that time, exist in any kind of mature form. I doubt that Agamben would be particularly fond of either side of this debate. Gotthold Weil, "Moritz Steinschneider," Jüdische Rundschau 7, no. 6 (February 8 1907), https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/periodical/titleinfo/2651507. 54.

10. This being primarily elaborated across the volumes The Kingdom and the Glory, The Church and the Kingdom, and The Time That Remains.

11. See the account of varying responses to the disengagement in Motti Inbari, Messianic Religious Zionism Confronts Israeli Territorial Compromises (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/A1FC48A119163ABA460D4DDA037E8081. 118-150. Much of the landscape has changed since Oct 7, though I would posit that this has in some ways vindicated the non- or post-Statist side of this dispute, moving the secular state’s position in their worldview to one of contingency – but a contingency that is useful. The secular state was never going to be, in itself, the fulfilment of the goals of this camp. Where this goes from here is far from clear, but nevertheless very concerning.

12. Seekers of Unity, "The Messiah before Jesus | Israel Knohl," (40:30, Jerusalem, Accessed 15 January 2024 28 Jul 2023 ), Youtube Video.

For a precis of this Lurianic schema see Lawrence Fine, Physician of the soul, healer of the cosmos : Isaac Luria and his kabbalistic fellowship, Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture, (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003)., 191-2; 196-205; 239-58; 281-2. See also Yehudah Mirsky, Towards the Mystical Experience of Modernity : The Making of Rav Kook, 1865-1904 (Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2021)., 293-8; 313-323, Moshe Hellinger, Isaac Hershkowitz, and Bernard Susser, Religious Zionism and the settlement project : ideology, politics, and civil disobedience (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018)., 32-57; cf. 248-59, 261ff. Tikkun is explicitly invoked by Jewish Underground ideologue Yehudah Eitzion, quoted in Shlomo Fischer, Expressivist religious Zionism : modernity and the sacred in a nationalist movement, Routledge Jewish Studies Series, (Abingdon, England: Routledge, 2025)., 136, implicitly ascribing a theurgic role to terrorism, albeit through a brutally pragmatic lens. See also Shaul Magid, Meir Kahane : The Public Life and Political thought of an American Jewish radical (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021). 145-158. The Israeli religious right is diverse but these ideas are still very current in some strands.

13. For the uneasy relationship between even nominally pro-state Religious Zionism and the secular authorities, see for example Fischer, Expressivist religious Zionism : modernity and the sacred in a nationalist movement., 127-165.

14. Gershom Scholem, On the possibility of Jewish mysticism in our time & other essays, trans. Jonathan Chipman, 1st ed., ed. Avraham Shapira (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1997). 12.

15. The Use of Bodies, in Agamben, Omnibus., 1197. Emphasis mine. Cf. Benjamin, Walter Benjamin, "Paralipomena to 'On the Concept of History'," in Selected writings, ed. Marcus Paul Bullock et al. (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 1996). XVIIa, 4:402.

16. Martin Heidegger, Ponderings : black notebooks, trans. Richard Jojcewicz, 3 vols., Studies in Continental thought, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016)., VIII.4, 2:75. Emphasis original.

17. Ibid. XIV.121, 3.191.

18. Giorgio Agamben, "Philosophy As Interdisciplinary Intensity – An Interview With Giorgio Agamben," interview by Antonio Gnolio, Religious Theory: E-suppliment to the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 2017, https://jcrt.org/religioustheory/2017/02/06/philosophy-as-interdisciplinary-intensity-an-interview-with-giorgio-agamben-antonio-gnolioido-govrin/.

19. Heidegger, Ponderings., XIV.121, 3:191; Use of Bodies, in Agamben, Omnibus., 1196-7.

20. Agamben veers into this territory frequently, see throughout The Sacrament of Language, and Giorgio Agamben, What is philosophy?, Meridian: crossing aesthetics, (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2018)., 12, describing:

An epochal mutation in the historical destiny of the West. The West, which realized and brought to completion the potentiality it had inscribed in its language [lingua], must now open itself to a globalization that simultaneously marks its triumph and its end.

This at the very least, in tandem with his previous work on the ontology implicit in language itself via the Indo-European language group, appears to mirror an idea of Europe as the seat of history into which the rest of the world is only brought via contact with the West.