Giorgio Agamben and the End of Judaism II
Methodology, and Theory of Citation
Good morning, everyone, I am very tired. But I thought I might as well just get this out here. I think last time I said there would be three parts to this, but that will not be the case. At least two parts are to come, and maybe more, each of which is pretty long, but they deal with the Shoah and the “Messianic,” both very important and fraught (to say the least). In the meantime I will be moving, which will G-d willing be good, but also very, very difficult in my current state - so there may be delays, another reason to get as much of this out there as quickly as I can I guess.
Part I is here, and should be read prior to this one:
Method
In order to identify and correct this error, I want to turn to Agamben’s own elaboration of his methodology and assess his work on the terms he has set for himself. To do so, I will investigate Agamben’s theory of the Paradigm. For Agamben the paradigm is what links phenomena together as manifestations of the same meta-concept. This method is paradigmatic as these phenomena manifest as “exemplars,” via the mechanism of analogy. In this way diachronic elements are strung together synchronically by a series of conceptual links, in what Agamben considers to be an expression of the methodology shared by both Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault. The significant differences between Agamben’s methodology and that of Foucault have already been treated in detail by Marie-Christine Leps, so I will not rehash these here.1 I will deal in more detail with the differences with Benjamin below. Agamben’s method, however, is unique.
Agamben’s elaboration of this method contains a significant ambivalence, in that it aims to render phenomena “intelligible,” yet is transformative – in his own words, the paradigm “constitutes” the “homogeneity” of an ensemble of phenomena.2 Implicit in this description is that the deployment of the paradigm modifies the phenomena to which is refers – the homogeneity does not precede the paradigm – it is constituted by the paradigm, rather than the reverse. However, this homogeneity is precisely what Agamben attempts to “recognize,” and claims “could elude the historian’s gaze,” and which, further, has an “ontological character.”3 Thus, something which was not there prior to the work of the philosopher, in its genesis takes on both a naturalized and metaphysical significance. While he is not claiming to offer “merely historiographical theses or reconstructions” in any conventional manner, nor engaging in the regular, purely-diachronic investigation of the past that is the domain of conventional history (at least as crudely understood), he is claiming reference to particulars – “actual historical phenomena” – and making claims to truth, in a motion that entails a “paradoxical type of movement, which goes from the particular to the particular.”4 A claim to maintenance of the particular is not the same as the actualization of such – saying you’re doing something is not the same as doing it – and it is via this method with its constitutive ambivalences, and with a focus on the political and philosophical tradition of a “West” which is homogenous enough to be determined primarily by Aristotle and Christianity, that “the camp” can become “the biopolitical paradigm” or even the “nomos” of “the modern” – exemplary of the entirety of modernity, including the experience of all modern humanity.5
While this mid-project, retrospective statement of methodology is published in The Signature of All Things: On Method, there is an earlier version of the elaboration of the paradigm given as a lecture at the European Graduate School. Absent from the printed version, here Agamben provides a means to test his own application of this method. Firstly, he provides a definition of philosophical work:
Feuerbach once wrote that the philosophical element in each work is its Entvicklungsfahigkeit, literally, its capability to be developed. […] It is something which remains unsaid within the work but which demands to be unfolded and worked out. […] Philosophy has no specificity, no proper territory, it is within literature, within art or science or theology or whatever, it is this element which contains [an Entvicklungsfahigkeit], a capability to be developed.6
This gives us reason to pay attention to the gaps in Agamben’s thought as much as the connections, and to evaluate the latter. Agamben likewise suggests:
you must never forget the hermeneutic principle that Coleridge states in chapter twelve of his “Biographia Litteraria”: until you understand a writer’s ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding. Ignorance stands here as what the author had to leave unsaid, undeveloped, or as a potential.7
This provides the opportunity for a moment of honesty. I am fascinated by Agamben, and have spent a lot of time reading him over the past several years – his poetic and arresting thought continually piqued my curiosity, as did his many bold claims (“all critics have failed to notice so-and-so important and revealing fact”) and so I started reading what he cited, which was at times intoxicating, thrusting me into the unknown, but at other times infuriating, discovering selective and abridged quotations, or even places where what was cited and what was written failed to align at all. While this may be retrospectively exactly to be expected, given his self-conscious theory of citation, many of his statements are uncritically repeated as fact by other scholars, without even checking to see if they are, in fact, true.8
Citation
This theory of citation is summarized in a concise manner in the “Threshold or Tornada” to The Time That Remains, but more fully in “The Melancholy Angel”, collected in The Man Without Content. In the former, Agamben writes that:
Just as through citation a secret meeting takes place between past generations and ours, so too between the writing of the past and the present a similar kind of meeting transpires…This work consists not so much in conserving, but in destroying something.9
Similarly, in a passage that is one large “citation without quotation marks” of Hannah Arendt’s essay on Benjamin, Agamben writes:
Alienating by force a fragment of the past from its historical context, the quotation at once makes it lose its character of authentic testimony and invests it with an alienating power that constitutes its unmistakable aggressive force.10
Vivian Liska has traced this essay’s dialogue with Arendt, from the near-identical placement of the same quotations and subtly-mirrored phraseology and conceptual vocabulary across this piece, emphasising Agamben’s formal reversal of Arendt’s argument that Benjamin’s attitude was one of rescue or recuperation into an assertion of quotation as soteriological destruction, arguing that “the new can appear only in the destruction of the old, indeed, that it arises from this destruction.”11 This can be contrasted to Arendt’s position, that:
the discoverers and lovers of this destructive power originally were inspired by an entirely different intention, the intention to preserve; and only because they did not let themselves be fooled by the professional ‘preservers’ all around them did they finally discover that the destructive power of quotations was ‘the only one which still contains the hope that something from this period will survive – for no other reason than that it was torn out of it.’12
However while Liska’s identification of these parallels sheds light on Agamben’s intention in writing this piece, they do not themselves demonstrate what Benjamin actually means. While I would argue that Arendt is closer to right here (and, in any event what is destroyed matters a great deal to him), that Benjamin is so preoccupied with building an explicitly Marxist historiography, a fact antithetical to both Agamben and Arendt’s readings, means neither writer can fully embrace Benjamin’s method.13 What this does show however is the unique method of Agamben in which citation is destructive, aesthetic and creative:
If man could appropriate his historical condition, and if, seeing through the illusion of the storm that perennially pushes him along the infinite rail of linear time, he could exit his paradoxical situation, he would at the same time gain access to the total knowledge capable of giving life to a new cosmogony and to turn history into myth.14
This is directly opposed to the goals of Benjamin’s project: conventional history is already constituted as an “undergrowth of delusion and myth” in which “horror … beckons from deep in the primeval forest” of the bourgeois subconscious, expressed as culture, exhibiting determinative power over culture’s expression in the present. This determinative cultural function is not transhistorical but the product of a specific historical and cultural moment: the birth of modernity in Europe. This is what requires a new historiographical method, to awaken from the dream of modern myth, via the “shock” that will “blast open” the continuum of time, the mechanism for which is remembrance.15
Likewise, while Agamben’s method may be considered “a specific strategy of disruption,” that does not disarm the non-alignment between citation and source, but rather makes it all the more significant, indeed makes it part of the meaning of his texts – a meaning particularly pregnant regarding his treatment of traditional Jewish sources, by means of which he constructs his own largely fictional version of the Kabbalah and Jewish messianism, which he then maps onto his own equally fictional and ideologically laden version of Pauline, Christian messianism. This is mirrored in his reading of Walter Benjamin, which will be addressed at length below. The realization of this explicit fiction and the means to which it is deployed may well be its “true content,” which does indeed come “precisely from this violent alienation,” but what is alienated, and from whom is equally significant.16 In my reading of Agamben I have constantly found myself encountering limits – both the limits of what Agamben himself writes, embodied in what he doesn’t; and the limits of thought constituted by these failings. In order to think certain things, and follow ideas to their conclusions, one ends up in a position that requires thinking beyond him, often by way of those he appears to cite faithfully, with the gaps produced being themselves an Entvicklungsfahigkeit.
To this end, as Agamben speaks often of caesurae and aporias, I will investigate those he himself creates, in a manner which I hope is not entirely negative but rather points to something beyond him – as Carlo Salzani writes, Agamben’s thought has “helped create a space for inquiries he never pursued himself.”17
Part III is here:
Marie-Christine Leps, "Thought of the outside: Foucault contra Agamben," Radical philosophy, no. 175 (2012), https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/thought-of-the-outside. 22-32
Giorgio Agamben, "What is a Paradigm?," in The signature of all things : on method (New York: Zone Books, 2009)., 18, my emphasis.
Ibid. 31-2.
Ibid. 9; Cf. Homo Sacer, in Agamben, Omnibus., 95-6, 137.
Homo Sacer, in Agamben, Omnibus., 99-147.
Giorgio Agamben, "What is a Paradigm?," in European Graduate School Video Lectures (Youtube, 2002), European Graduate School Video Lectures.
transcript: https://16beavergroup.org/articles/2004/08/02/paige-agamben-what-is-a-paradigm/.Bracketed text absent from the transcript.
Ibid.
The most pressing of these is the characterization of the entire Sabbatian movement as antinomian, repeated at multiple times across his career, and specifically attributing the quotation that “violation of the Torah is its fulfillment” to Shabbatai Tzvi. This was never said by Zvi, but is rather attached to specific, radical later communities, particularly the Dönmeh from whom Frankism arises. To my knowledge its first appearance is in a 1726 pamphlet, c50 years after Zevi’s death, as given by Gershom Scholem, "Redemption Through Sin," in The Messianic idea in Judaism : and other essays on Jewish spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1971). 349n34 (the source text, in the Hebrew edition of this essay, is given as לחישת שרף, 1726, fol 2). It may have later been taken up by Frank himself. Agamben’s presentation of this as a quote from Shabbatai Tzvi has unfortunately spread, see Piotr Sawczyński, "Giorgio Agamben—A Modern Sabbatian? Marranic Messianism and the Problem of Law," Religions 10, no. 1 (2019), https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10010024. 5-6. Sawczyński reproduces both this error (despite citing Scholem’s Major Trends, also containing the correct attribution Gershom Scholem, Major trends in Jewish mysticism (New York,: Schocken Books, 1961)., 421n65, noting it is possibly a corruption from BT Menachot 99b) and several of the other errors of attribution and selective citation from Agamben’s essay. Note also the reproduction of a thesis relying entirely on the abridgement of citations, without reference to the original sources in Julia Ng, "Gershom Scholem," in Agamben's Philosophical Lineage, ed. Adam Kotsko and Carlo Salzani (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017). 287-8 (of said sources, as Scholem observes, “it would be a mistake to term these passages antinomistic or anti-Talmudic”, Gershom Scholem, "The Meaning of Torah in Jewish Mysticism," in On the Kabbalah and its symbolism (New York: Schocken Books, 1965). 37). I could go on, but these examples are not picked for their being particularly egregious, but rather because they are representative.
Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: a Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey, Meridian Crossing Aesthetics, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005)., 139.
Giorgio Agamben, "The Melancholy Angel," in The man without content, ed. Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery, Meridian crossing aesthetics (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999)., 104. Both Benjamin citations on this page are directly pulled from Hannah Arendt, "Walter Benjamin," in Men in dark times (New York: Harcourt, 1968)., 193. This is indicated by the footnote for the second quotation.
Vivian Liska, German-Jewish thought and its afterlife : a tenuous legacy, Jewish literature and culture, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017)., 29.
Arendt, "Walter Benjamin." 193.
See the explicitly Marxist epigram to Benjamin’s outline of his historiographic goals in convolute N of The arcades project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLoughlin, Tiedemann, Rolf ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999)., 456.
Agamben, "The Melancholy Angel." 114.
Benjamin, Arcades., N1,4; Benjamin, "[Theses] On the Concept of History.", 396. This will be elaborated in detail below.
Quotations from Adam Kotsko and Carlo Salzani, "Introduction: Agamben as Reader," in Agamben's Philosophical Lineage, ed. Adam Kotsko and Carlo Salzani (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017)., 7-8, in turn citing Man Without Content. That this Agambenian Paul resembles that of the Radical Lutherans of 19th and early 20th C Germany is likewise highly significant. See also Ibid. 10: “Each completed work - including the author's own - contains within itself something left 'unsaid' which demands to be further elaborated and taken up, perhaps by someone else.”
Carlo Salzani, Agamben and the Animal, Electronic ed. (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022). https://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=6962051. xii-xiii.