Giorgio Agamben and the End of Judaism IV
The Messiah and the Law
Hi Again - for those who have, thank you deeply for sticking with me through this. For those who haven’t, I completely understand. Particularly with how the last installment ended, I assume many are asking the question that this installment opens with: how did this happen, and why haven’t these particular issues been aired previously, and the patterns behind them identified? Some have, but they have often been ignored. It unnerves me that even monographs written on Agamben largely do not address these points, hence me writing what I have so far. I encourage anyone interested to dig into my citations, and a full bibliography will follow at the end (which will be where I decide that I’ve said enough, probably preserving some stuff for later, largely that dealing explicitly with the thought of Walter Benjamin).
Earlier parts are here:
How did it get to this point? Surprisingly, Agamben’s position is not (at least as far as I can ascertain) the result of religious belief, which would make it more understandable, and far more explicable.1 It is, rather, a motion from the political to the religious, assuming the origins of the former lie in the latter, and, as such, so too the solutions to the problems of the present. However, the political position is formerly a primarily aesthetic one, with the “messianic” found in sublime art, and in a particular attitude toward time Agamben finds embodied in both Benjamin and Heidegger.2 This attitude is only partially transformed in its translation into the sphere of politics. Near the end of Homo Sacer Agamben gestures toward themes which will be definitive of his later work, extrapolating from the exchange between Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem on Kafka that:
the Messiah is the figure in which the great monotheistic religions sought to master the problem of law, and […] the Messiah’s arrival signifies the fulfillment and the complete consummation of the Law. In monotheism, messianism thus constitutes […] the point in which religious experience passes beyond itself and calls itself into question insofar as it is law (hence the messianic aporias concerning the Law that are expressed in both Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and the Sabbatian doctrine according to which the fulfillment of the Torah is its transgression).3
While Agamben asserts this is the case in “Judaism, as in Christianity or Shiite Islam” this is only true if one takes minority traditions as representative and asserts that everything else (including that which is internal to Christianity itself) is somehow wrong – or cites mainstream sources in such a way as to obscure their actual position. Representative of this is the citation of Vayikra Rabbah that closes the volume Stasis. The midrash reads, as Agamben cites it:
The Sages said: And is this a valid method of slaughter? Have we not learnt this in a Mishnah: ‘All may slaughter, and one may slaughter at all times, and with any instrument except with a scythe, or with a saw, or with teeth, because they cause pain as if by choking, or with a nail’? R. Abin b. Kahana said: The Holy One, blessed be He, said: ‘A new Torah shall go forth from Me’.4
This is cited as an ideal, in which, in the Messianic age “the righteous [will] be seated at their messianic banquet, freed forever from the bonds of the law.”5 What is not, however, quoted is the continuation of R Abin’s statement, which reads in full:
אמר רבי אבין בר כהנא אמר הקדוש ברוך הוא תורה חדשה מאתי תצא חדוש תורה מאתי תצא
R Abin bar Kahana says that The Holy One, Blessed be He says: A new Torah will go out from me; a Chidush Torah will go out from me (Vayikra Rabbah, 13.3, translation mine).
This explanation is not antinomian, but rather an invocation of Chidush, a novel or extraordinary halachic interpretation – a widely established Rabbinic principle allowing for new interpretations of the law, often due to particular historical or communal circumstances.6 Even long-established Rabbinic interpretations regarding kashrut, dietary restrictions, are considered part of this category, which limits the ability to rule on other issues from them by analogy.7 Only by cutting off the quoted rabbi mid-sentence can this passage have the appearance of the antinomian ideal that Agamben claims is a fundamental principle of all three major Abrahamic faiths.
In the essay which acts as a first draft of the introduction of messianism in Homo Sacer, he presents this same antinomian messianism by way of highly selective quotation from various essays by Gershom Scholem and a single decontextualized sentence from the study on the topic by Joseph Klausner.8 This Messianic idea is then attributed to Walter Benjamin, and is further developed in The Time That Remains, the conclusion to which makes a startling claim, reflecting the parallels presented earlier in Homo Sacer: the messianism of Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” is Pauline by way of veiled citation. In the typescript of the second thesis, Benjamin has emphasised the “weak” messianic power with which his generation has been endowed, and thus Agamben writes:
to my knowledge, only one text explicitly theorizes on the weakness of messianic power. […] the text is 2 Corinthians 12:9-10, […] wherein Paul, having asked the Messiah to free him from that thorn in his flesh, hears the answer, he gar dynamis en astheneia teleitai, “power fulfills itself in weakness.”9
Based on the fact that Luther’s translation includes the words “Kraft” (power) and “schwache,” (weak) both used by Benjamin – two of fifteen words quoted, though only the latter of these is emphasized – Agamben sees a direct citation of Paul in Luther’s translation, and thus Benjamin’s messianism is distinctly and self-consciously Pauline.10 Brian Britt has shown the tenuousness of this linguistic argument, showing that by the same standard of shared vocabulary, there is more connection between a section of Benjamin’s One Way Street and chapter 13 of Luther’s translation of the gospel of Luke. Britt further points out that Agamben appears to have forgotten that the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 (cited relative to Jesus in Acts 8:26-38) also presents “the weakness of messianic power,” but further counter-examples can be proffered, the most conspicuous of which being the messiah who Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi meets in BT Sanh 98a, outside the gates of Rome, changing the bandages of the poor and ill while waiting to be called by Elijah.11
The chain of reasoning here is not particularly hard to understand: from the assumption that there is a common “messianic idea” to the three major Abrahamic traditions that expresses itself in both a particular interpretation of Paul and the radically antinomian parts of the Sabbatian movement, this being read back into earlier Kabbalistic and Rabbinic texts, Agamben can assert that Paul’s letters are “the fundamental messianic text for the Western tradition” and present a secular reading of such toward a purportedly liberatory, anarchist end.12 What is harder to understand is why the pre-Christian texts on which messianic hope is built and the numerous texts from Qumran that feature messianic expectation are excluded from this judgement. However, there is one feature that both Paul and the Sabbatian movement have that the texts from the Bible, Qumran, and the Rabbinic literature do not: A messiah who has already arrived, and whose coming has nullified the law.13 This is of absolute importance for Agamben, whose messianism is existential and phenomenological, given it follows from a Heideggerian model as much as a Benjaminian one: the messianic is something one can inhabit in the present.14 While the immediate consequences of assertion that the messianism of all three major Abrahamic faiths are, at root, the same are most explicitly manifest in Remnants of Auschwitz, this also sets the stage for the next major phase of Agamben’s career which dives into the texts of late antique and medieval Christianity.
There is much to say about both The Time That Remains and the books of this later period, particularly The Kingdom and the Glory, The Highest Poverty, and Opus Dei, however for the sake of brevity I will limit myself to a very brief summary of select issues. The first is the key theses presented in Agamben’s reading of Paul in The Time That Remains. Paul’s letters, as the foundational text of messianism, in contrast to the overwhelming majority of scholarship published over the last 40-odd years, show “The Mosaic law of obligations and works, which is defined in 2 Corinthians 3:14 as ‘the old covenant’ (palai diatheke), is […] rendered inoperative by the Messiah.”15 While recent scholarship on Paul has largely focused on the complex but not inherently antagonistic relationship between Paul and Torah/Nomos and religious obligation, for Agamben “in Paul's setting pistis and nomos [faith and law] against each other, he does not merely oppose two heterogeneous elements” but rather brings forth the concepts of “promise” or “pact” and “commandment” in order to “play them against each other” and in doing so:
messianism appears as a struggle, within the law, whereby the element of the pact and constituent power leans toward setting itself against and emancipating itself from the element of the entolē [commandment], the norm in the strict sense. The messianic is therefore the historical process whereby the archaic link between law and religion […] reaches a crises [sic] and the element of pistis, of faith in the pact, tends paradoxically to emancipate itself from any obligatory conduct and from positive law.16
This description of a struggle reveals the implicit model for Agamben’s study, in Heidegger who gave a series of seminars of Paul 79 years earlier, describing something very similar:
Paul is struggling with the Jews and the Jewish Christians. Thus we find the phenomenological situation of religious struggle and of struggle itself. Paul must be seen in struggle with his religious passion in his existence as an apostle, the struggle between “law” and “faith.”17
However, for Agamben this is not where things end, as he writes:
If we were to translate the Pauline antitheses into the language of modern law, we could say that Paul plays the constitution against positive law. Or even more precisely, […] he plays the level of constitutive power against the level of established law […] In so doing, the Schmittian thesis on political theology ("the most meaningful concepts of the modern doctrine of the State are secularized theological concepts") receives further confirmation.18
Agamben’s primary goal is not an explication of Paul but rather the application of a certain kind of Pauline framework to “the framework of modern law,” following Schmitt’s thesis that the political realm is intrinsically linked to the theological. However, in doing so he cannot escape religiously loaded language. He asserts that in 1 Cor 7:19 the messianic “vocation” annuls “the law” of identity, according to which one is a Jew and one is not, eliding the end of the verse which affirms that what Paul is arguing for is “nothing but keeping the commandments of G-d.”19 The chapter which this verse is drawn from, likewise, makes it difficult to assert that Paul’s position is one of emancipation “from any obligatory conduct” given that it is an elaboration of household ethics, including a command given by “not I but the Lord” forbidding divorce (7:10-11).
There is more to say on this issue, but what is more important than a catalogue of details is the broader framework: In aid of a secular and political goal, Agamben is reproducing a particularly severe antinomian reading of Paul which was primarily popular in Germany in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and which was thoroughly repudiated (for reasons such as those given above) in the 1970s. This antinomian messianism is explicitly described as the “neutralization” of “That which, according to the law, made one man a Jew and the other a goy [sic]” and “any obligatory conduct,” the preconditions for any kind of religious Jewish identity.20 Much of this is shaped by Heidegger, and selectively inflected through Jacob Taubes.21 Thus, Agamben presents the argument that the messianic neutralization of the Jewish Torah is analogous to political emancipation from modern civil law, even though Jewish Halacha, as formulated in the Rabbinic literature, has never been the civil law of a state.22 Unfortunately, the promotion of an exclusively antinomian messianism as a political allegory implies that even for the atheist, Christian supersessionism is not only liberatory in itself, but baked into the Jewish tradition, being “its telos as both end and fulfilment.”23 This is the framework that Agamben takes into The Kingdom and the Glory and Opus Dei.
Next part:
At least to my mind this is clear from the primary thesis of The Kingdom and the Glory, which will be explicated in the next post.
The aesthetic position is found in Giorgio Agamben, "Fable and History," in Infancy and history : the destruction of experience (London ; New York: Verso, 1993). 125-132. The Heidegger-Benjamin synthesis, in which the “now-time” of Benjamin’s messianic is related to Heideggerian Ereignis is in Agamben, "Time and History." 102-5. Cf. the rejection of an “aesthetic” messianism while affirming a Heideggerian “comportment” in Agamben, Time that Remains. 33-9.
Homo Sacer, in Agamben, Omnibus., 49.
Vayikra Rabbah 13.3, cited in Stasis, in ibid. 290.
Ibid. 290.
See senses 3-4 in Jastrow, specifying that this halachic category is valid, but analogical rulings from it are invalid. Even established halachot can fall under this class, like laws of witnesses and elements of Kashrut.
BT Pesachim 44b: מבשר בחלב לא גמרינן דחידוש הוא and following.
Agamben, "Messiah." 163-8. Cf. the Scholem essays cited in these passages, which include the statements that:
Messianic utopianism presents itself as the completion and perfection of Halakhah […] only in Messianic times will all those parts of the law which are not realizable under the conditions of the exile become capable of fufillment.[…] The conception of a “Torah of the Messiah,” […] drew in its wake yet another conception: that of a more complete development of the reasons for the commandments, which only the Messiah will be able to explain. Both understanding of the Torah and its fulfillment will thus be infinitely richer than they are now.
Scholem, "Toward an Understanding of the Messianic idea." 19-20. And “it would be a mistake to term these passages antinomistic or anti-Talmudic.” Scholem, "Meaning." 70. Likewise, Agamben abridges his quotation of R’ Eliyahu Kohen Ittamari of Smyrna from Scholem, removing the concluding statement: “Does this mean that the Torah is not eternally valid? No, it means that the scroll of the Torah will be as it is now, but that G-d will teach us to read it in accordance with another arrangement of the letters,” cited in ibid. 75.
Agamben, Time that Remains., 140.
A relationship between Benjamin and Paul had already been suggested by Jacob Taubes, however with significantly more qualification, Jacob Taubes, The political theology of Paul, ed. Aleida Assmann, Cultural memory in the present, (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004). 72-4.
Brian Britt, "The Schmittian Messiah in Agamben's The Time That Remains," Critical Inquiry 36, no. 2 (2010), https://doi.org/10.1086/648526. 268-272.
Agamben, Time that Remains. 1.
At least in the particular understanding of Agamben, the latter part is not so clear in either case.
See Agamben, Time that Remains. 62-78, 142-3. Cf. the rejection of Adorno’s “standpoint of redemption” in ibid. 35-9, however this “as if” is simply replaced by an “as not” in 23-6, insisting on the “present” tense of this, which “is a movement of immanence, or, if one prefers, a zone of absolute indiscernability between immanence and transcendence, between this world and the future world.” In this way it cannot be anything other than a position which is being inhabited in the now, rejecting any idea of deference or hope for something which has not yet arrived. Agamben’s messianism is a messianism of certain immediacy.
Ibid. 121. Cf. basically all academic scholarship on Paul since Krister Stendhal’s Paul among Jews and Gentiles and EP Sanders’ Paul and Palestinian Judaism, published in 1976 and 1977 respectively, cementing what would become known as the “New Perspective on Paul.” This has now been followed by a “Newer Perspective” represented by scholars such as Paula Fredriksen and Matthew Thiessen.
Ibid.118-9. Cf. Jennifer A. Glancy, "On Agamben's Slave without Slavery," Diacritics 48, no. 4 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2020.0027. 12-9.
Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004)., 48.
Agamben, Time that Remains., 118.
The NRSVUE adds the explanatory gloss “is everything” to the end of this verse, absent from the Greek, leaving the reading of the circumcision/non-circumcision as opposed to each other open, however the Greek appears not to support this. As per Paula Fredriksen, "“Circumcision is Nothing”: A Non-Reformation Reading of the Letters of Paul," in Protestant Bible Scholarship: Antisemitism, Philosemitism and Anti-Judaism, ed. Paula Fredriksen et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2022). 89-90.
Agamben, Time that Remains. 23, 119. While this is obviously true of any kind of orthodoxy, it also applies to those non-orthodox branches in which halacha is still valued but does not have determinative power over one’s actions, and the heavy focus on “Jewish ethics” which is integral to the Reform movement.
It is worth comparing both how much of Agamben’s argumentation reproduces and simultaneously strips qualifications from that which is presented in Taubes, The political theology of Paul. 13-54.
The only possible exceptions would be the conversion of the nobility of the Khazar Khaganate (probably a move to remain politically neutral between competing Christian and Muslim empires), from their supposed conversion around the 8th C until their destruction by the Rus in the 10th C; and the roughly 150 years that the Himyarite kingdom of Yemen was ruled by Jewish Kings prior to its conquest by Aksum. In both cases there are no clear records of any extensive application of Rabbinic Halacha as civil law. Indeed, the simple fact that Rabbinic law cannot operate as civil law due to its limited scope (it is anything but comprehensive) and limited application (it applies only to Jews, and most positive obgliation applies only to men and not to women) and explicitly makes partial concessions and/or delegation of power and decision-making to non-Jewish civil law: דינא דמלכותא דינא: “the law of the [non-Jewish] kingdom is the law.” This has been a problem for those extremists who imagine a Jewish theocracy in Israel. The problem can be summarized thus:
Halakha was a legal project that developed long after the loss of Jewish sovereignty, and it was limited in two fundamental respects. First, it did not cover vast areas of legislation, especially those relating to criminal and public law. Second, it was limited in reach: it was a code intended for Jews only, regardless of civil status. The modern political order, based on the idea of sovereignty, requires a fundamentally different configuration. First, it requires a system that covers most aspects of life, and not just a portion of it. Second, it seeks to encompass all citizens living within its sovereign territory, positing their formal equality, regardless of religious (Jewish or not) or personal differences (such as gender).
Itamar Ben Ami, "Orthodox Judaism in the twentieth century: an alternative modernity," Intellectual History Review 33, no. 4 (2023/10/02 2023), https://doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2022.2058766. 753-4. In tandem with this, that the extremist ethnonatialist conception of the Zionist project requires a distinctly modernist and highly revisionist approach to religious law, borrowing from romantic revolutionary-conservative thought, and veering toward both antinomianism and anarchism relative to civil law adds significant nuance missing from Agamben’s analogy.
Agamben, Time that Remains., 98. Cf. the implications to this end in the conclusion to Ng, "Gershom Scholem." 289-90.