Paul a servant of Jesus Christ called to be an apostle separated unto the gospel of God
Outside of Homo Sacer, but integral to its understanding, is Giorgio Agamben's The Time That Remains. A commentary on St. Paul's Letter to the Romans, it was given during a week long conference on the text in light of current political crises and continental philosophy. The essay is structured along the Creation week (six days with the last day as an extension, a significant decision as will be later shown) and focuses on the first verse of the Epistle. Thus, in no sense, is this work a traditional commentary or operating along the lines of strictly biblical scholarship (though this fact makes the work more profound). On the contrary, Agamben participates in the larger retrieval of St. Paul within continental philosophy, and in so doing aids in recognizing the potency of the New Testament to be the true revelation of any political or ethical assessment to both damn and save Western civilization from itself.
Agamben's primary focus is to retrieve the messianic logic of St. Paul from many commentators (Christian or otherwise) who misunderstand his mission. St. Paul was not creating a new religion, a supercession of Judaism (itself a false claim), which simply added another phase to an economy of salvation. This point is not, necessarily, a depreciation of Christian cult or rite (to the contrary in many ways!), but a certain conceptualization that became normative in Christendom. Whether it's the Augustinian theory of seven ages (which may not be loyal to Augustine, but certainly not to Augustine's influence, Tyconius) or modern Protestantism, Christianity is not a/the step to perfection. In other words, the New Testament is not the "Second" Testament (or the Old Testament the "First"). Such would be to entirely misunderstand the Messianic as a fulfillment of the Torah, not its replacement. As a servant of Jesus Christ (which Saul-Paul playfully recapitulates in his renaming), Paul is not the bearer of another. He's not even the bearer of the end. But, as an Apostle, Paul is unveiling and proclaiming the time of the end.
If we can call this a religion (and I don't think it's out of place, as long as it's clear what we mean), what marks out Christianity is the religion of the Messiah (an obvious fact, sometimes obscured through the Latinization of christos as a mere cognate). And what is that? A key element is in what it meant for St Paul to be "called" and to exist in a calling. Within German, the call (klesis) is translated as a term similar for class (beruf), which reflects the English vernacular of discussing a profession. A misinterpretation, which we will return to several times, is to read this in the crude form of classical Marxism, where the proletariat *is* the industrial wage labor force. But in the messianic logic of St Paul, the call is a disrupter manifest in his use of "as not" (hos me). The call is not to create a new category which will inherit the future, or restore the past. It is to live "as not" whatever the particular offices and roles we have. The servant lives "as not" a servant, and a master lives "as not" a master. Instead the pure formalism of the call is the freedom to live:
"Vocation calls for nothing and to no place. For this reason it may coincide with the tactical condition in which each person finds himself called, but for this very reason, it also revokes the condition from top to bottom. The messianic vocation is the revocation of every vocation." (23)
What this effectively means is that the Christian (the one living in this Messianic call) has no particular task. There is no call to be a Christian that means a separate, or additional, task added on to, or superseding, other tasks, callings, and classes. Rather to be a Christian is the suspension of all other professions, so that they may be made use of. This disjunctive logic is why many Christians (or not) have puzzled over why St Paul himself does not take a clear position on the slavery question. St. Paul speaks of freedom and yet offers ethical formulae for masters and slaves. Which one is it? This question, wondering whether Christianity creates, modifies, or abolishes particular classes in society, is the wrong one. Rather the "as not" is the self-negation that allows the Christian to act freely no matter his station. The technical term, for both Agamben himself and his St. Paul as an ancient trained within a Hellenic world, is "use" (chresis). The messianic vocation is to make use of whatever class, standing, or profession one finds oneself in. In Agamben's terms:
"The messianic vocation is not a right, nor does it furnish an identity; rather, it is a generic potentiality [potenza] that can be used without ever being owned. To be messianic, to live in the Messiah, signifies the expropriation of each and every juridical-tactical property (circumcised/uncircumcised; free/slave; man/woman) under the form of the as not. This expropriation does not, however found a new identity; the 'new creature' is none other than the use and messianic vocation of the old" (26)
This focus on property/ownership and use took up a section of Agamben's messianic genealogy of the Fransicans in The Highest Poverty. The vision of St. Francis and his order of small brothers was not to institute a new religious way of life, but to deactivate the increasing intermixture (and indeterminate confusion) of the Empire and the Church. Francis was not seeking to offer an alternative, but to make use of the structures of the Church. The Spiritual Franciscans (who Agamben sees as truly loyal to their founder) sought to "create a space that escaped the grasp of power and its laws, without entering into conflict with them yet rendering them inoperative", which followed the same messianic logic in St. Paul. The goal is not found yet another order, or restore an old one, but to escape from the misuse of the Law into the killing machine which will unleash total destruction.
The above is why most Marxist movements, especially the Soviet Union, would find themselves the very beasts they sought to overthrow. "Class" is an operative divider, distinguishing the individual from the factual vocation of his social standing. In classical Hegelian-Marxian thought (though Agamben sees precisely this as its betrayal), it is this process where this historic class gains its self-awareness to act. The mere social standing of proletariat is revolutionized through this new consciousness of itself as the revolutionary vanguard, not the mere wage labor subject. Yet it was this process which then easily became shipwrecked. If considered an inevitable force of economic factors, it seemed to easily collapse before the factual reality that the proletariat were often opposed to revolution. An alternative, offered by Leninists like Lukacs, was to posit the party as the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat class. Yet this often created the constant, but failed effort, to bring the proletariat and the party into indistinguishable overlap, yet always creating disjuncture. Thus, the effort at coinherence with remainder provoked the violence of conformity, as the Party and the People (which were identical) were anything but in practice. Hence one finds party officials acting as a new clerical class over the people. And like them, they either lazily use an ideological apparatus to line their own pockets or sincerely pursue this mutual identification through increasingly ruthless indoctrination.
The third option, perhaps the worst in the long run, is the democratic socialist idea of infinite deferment, a negative identification of perfection and time. The reality is that the deferment is a fiction, that Progress is a myth. Yet the intellectual party-leader may live "as if" the perfection is coming and on the horizon. While doctrinaire Marxism or vanguard Leninism may represent a form of naive clericalization of the revolution, the democratic socialism of "as if" infinite progress is an inversion of the messiah. Rather than to come to terms with the given by self-negation, thus allowing the free use of all things, the "as if" enshrines a fiction as the operative ideology. Things are never what they seem, but must be interpreted within the progressive vision, even if the sober theorist (like Adorno) knows they never will be. Aestheticization of politics, society, and all cultural products, glossed with this hope, is this self-enchantment of Progress:
"This is why aesthetic beauty cannot be anything more than the spell over spells. There is no satisfaction in it, for the as if is the condemnation that the philosopher has already inflicted on himself" (37)
This point is increasingly necessary, as this philosophical idol is quite common. The "as if" of Progress is what fuels the complete confusion between fantasy and reality, to constantly be transfixed with history as it could be otherwise or a history infused with the fantastical (the M.O. of Disney). For the negative dialectics of the truly pessimists (the sorcerers of Progressivism who know its secret), there is a contempt for reality. Rather than its turn to the imaginary of "what if", the messianic logic lodged in a marxist like Walter Benjamin defends exigency. The mere facticity of things is the source of the imagination and the sed contra to a certain regime. In a reversal of the Leibnizian "every possibility demands existence", Agamben advanced that "every existent demands possibility". Thus the task of the philosopher (or the Christian more broadly) to remember. If something can be remembered, it was and could be. Thus it may exist once more since its existence never ceases. Its existence, even in its smallest and most insignificant form, demands its imaginative possibility. It will never be forgotten. And so the Messianic logic brings about the redemption of the unredeemable, that trash heap and train wreck of historical time. Benjamin's dialectic of time, where the angel of history remains suspended between the winds of the future and the gaze upon the past, opens up possibility, the small gate of every moment through which the Messiah may enter. It is precisely in what is unredeemable is there redemption:
"He who upholds himself in the messianic vocation no longer knows the as if, he no longer has similitudes at his disposal. He knows that in messianic time the saved world coincides with the world that is irretrievably lost, and that, to use Bonhoeffer's words, he must now really live in a world without God. This means that he may not disguise this world's being-without-God in any way. The saving God is the God who abandons him, and the fact of representations (the fact of the as if) cannot pretend to save the appearance of salvation. The messianic subject does not contemplate the world as though it were saved. In Benjamin's words, he contemplates salvation only to the extent that he loses himself in what cannot be saved" (42)
In other words, salvation comes not to those whose imagination is invigorated to think of his life *as if* it were sinless. Such is manifest not only in the bad substitutionary theology of Evangelicals with fictitious bank account exchanges, but also average Progressives who obscure the carnage of their world with the *as if* it were being saved. Yet this doom does not darken the world. It is precisely as a sinner that the unredeemed is redeemed, and salvation comes to the sinner who lives *as not*, freed from his past at the same moment he commits to it. Forgiveness is not erasure, but deactivation and disownership. Like the Apostle in Romans 7, the ascription of guilt results in this schizophrenic placement between flesh and spirit, law of faith and law of sin, and so on. The salvation of this world is precisely in its godlessness. There's no taking back the wreckage, but it's in re-use, that its having happened becomes the opening to its being done a different way. In this way, the Messiah frees the saint up for the very nightmare he lives in, a seed cast into the dirt and shit of the world, yielding a crop.
This redemption takes places through separation. But what kind? Agamben notes St. Paul's playful/rueful use of this concept in relationship to his own life. For St. Paul truly was separate, for this meaning is the etymological root of the "Pharisees". And yet now, as an Apostle, St. Paul is again separated. But this cut is not an additional division into a smaller group, since this cut happens universally. Thus the Jew is set apart from the Gentiles, the People from the sea of the Nations. Yet the Jew was, prophetically, redivided into the remnant. Again, the remnant is not merely a smaller group, a subdivision of the division. Rather, it's the negation. Thus, the Jew is set apart from himself to fulfill the very task of being set apart. If the Jew does not become the remnant, he cease to be the Jew. And the Gentile, in fulfilling this vocation, cease to be a Gentile. The messianic vocation operates at this point of suspension for the not-not-Jew and the not-not-Gentile. And it's as such that the Christ's people are the not-not-people. They neither represent the All nor the Part, but reveal the disjuncture between the two. And as such, the remnant become the instrument of redemption, that the world is only savable in its revelation as unsavable:
"The only possible meaning of Kafka's aphorism, in which there is salvation, but 'not for us' is found here. As remnant, we, the living who remain en to nyn kairo [in the now time -cal], make salvation possible, we are its 'premise' (aparche; Rom. 11:16). We are already saved, so to speak, but for this reason, it is not as a remnant that we will be saved. The messianic remnant exceeds the eschatological all, and irremediably so; it is the unredeemable that make salvation possible" (57)
Applied politically, it's this inappropriable distinction between All and Part that can break the back of democratic government's march towards totalitarian expansion. For the people is neither a majority nor a minority, but it is the remnant, the unrepresentable which represent themselves to force this disjuncture. Democratic government does not rule for the people as a mere representation of a majority or a minority, and it is the remnant (those left out, yet refuse to be silenced) which force the government's hand. Only in this way can the people have a voice to summon justice against the worst excesses of a democratic government.
It's this present oriented focus, the "now time" (nyn kairo) of the Messiah, that makes St. Paul an Apostle, not a prophet. The Christ's coming, for this reason, is not an apocalypse (a future oriented catastrophe and realignment), which holds little interest for Paul. Rather. The Messiah effects the beginning of the end, or the time in which the end makes its coming about. The messianic time is a transformation of our relation to the present:
"messianic time, as operational time, implies an actual transformation of the experience of time that may even interrupt secular time here and now. The kingdom does not coincide with any chronological instant but is between them, stretching them into parousia. This is the reason for its particular 'nearness,'" (73)
It's worth stating here my objection to Agamben on this point. Agamben is concerned to understand the separateness of St. Paul's vocation in relation to the messianic cut into time. Just as St. Paul is separated from separation, that he is a not-not-Jew and thus free to minister to the Gentiles, so too is time now made available to serve a new means to relate to the phenomena of the here and now. Thus the call is neither to primitive man nor to cybernetic man, but man as such. Thus St. Francis goes and preaches to the birds, wears his sandals, and finds himself in an entirely new relationship to all of creation as his brothers and sisters. But that's precisely the notion of the apocalyptic in Scripture. It is not a vision of the future, and its catastrophe. "Apocalyptic" is a genre created by academics joining together many texts that resemble the biblical book. And the Revelation of Jesus Christ to St. John is, as the title suggests, an unveiling of the present. Yes it is things yet to come, but these things are themselves contained in the pages of the Scripture (which is why Revelation can only be read with a firm knowledge of the Old Testament). It is not merely a Revelation of what is to come, but a Revelation of Jesus Christ. It is the very display of the shape of time, where past and future coinhere within the present, though with remainder. Beware! Look! Watch! These are key phrases throughout the New Testament, as the Present becomes a site of conflict as the symbols of what was and the potentiality of their reappearance (both holy and evil) is certainly uncertain. Agamben gives too much away by accepting the misrepresentation of the apocalyptic and then denying St. Paul follows it. This sense of the apocalyptic is what St. Paul, indeed, represents:
"And just as the past frees itself only in memory from the distant strangeness of what has been lived - thereby becoming my past for the very first time - so too, in the 'economy of the plenitude of times,' men appropriate their history, and what once happened to the Jews is recognized as a figure and reality for the messianic community. And just as the past becomes possible again in some fashion through memory - that which was fulfilled becomes unfulfilled and the unfulfilled becomes fulfilled - so too in messianic recapitulation do men ready themselves to forever take leave of the past in eternity, which knows neither past nor repetition" (77)
What was destroyed now may live, and what had won may now be ended. The arrogant are cast down and the poor lifted up.
It's precisely through this messianic appearance and calling that marks out the good news, the gospel, Paul was commissioned to preach. A fact that has bedeviled many commentators of Paul is his seemingly contradictory approach to the Law. At the very moment the Apostle has leveled severe criticisms against it, that it is the bearer of sin and is overthrown, that Paul exuberantly bursts out that he has defended the Law. And what is the gospel that he brings? Is it a new law? Agamben highlights Paul's distinction between the Law as law of sin and the Law as law of faith. The distinction, and antagonism, has not two laws in view, but the Torah's normativity. The Law of the Messiah is not a replacement or overthrow of the Torah, but it's deactivation. Hence Paul's emphasis on the deactivation (katargeo) of the Torah in the crucifixion of the Christ. This deactivation is not the destruction or removal of the Law, but its fulfillment through inoperativity, where is no longer effective in its normative authority. Agamben highlights that, in German, the fulfillment of the law in Luther is aufheben, the same concept used for the Hegelian aufhebung. Such does not implement a kind of non-law ethics of the post-historical society. Such was what Kojeve misunderstood, conflating the above with the messianic time, seen as the appendage of a seventh day, a negative infinity of chronos. If the Messianic is seen as such, which results in the *as if* of infinite deferment, Kojeve (and other Hegelians as well) is right to find Christianity to be both boring and repulsive. But the Messianic is the operation of the Remnant to rupture all chronos with the appearance of the kairotic "as not", the imagination of what was as what could be.
It's worth quoting Agamben at length:
"This remnant - the non-non-Jews - is neither properly inside nor outside, neither ennomos nor anomos (according to the way Paul defines himself in I For. 9:21); it is the cipher of messianic deactivation of the law, the cipher of its katargesis. The remnant is an exception taken to its extreme, pushed to its paradoxical formulation. In his reading of the messianic condition of the believer, Paul radicalizes the condition of the state of exception, whereby law is applied in misapplying itself, no longer having an inside or an outside. With regard to this law that applies itself in misapplying itself, a corresponding gesture of faith ensues, applying itself in disapplying itself, rendering law inoperative while carrying it to its fulfillment.
Paul calls this paradoxical figure of the law in the state of messianic exception nomos pisteos, 'the law of faith"'(Rom. 3:27), as it can no longer be defined through works, the execution of the miswoth, but as a manifestation of "justice without law" (dikaiosyne choris nomou; Rom. 3:21). This amounts, more or less, to "observing the law without law," especially if one takes into consideration the fact that in Judaism, justice is, par excellence, with him who observes the law. This is why Paul says that the law of faith is the suspension - literally, the 'exclusion' - (exekleisthe; Rom. 3:27) of the law of works. Paul's formulation of this dialectical aporia, which affirms that faith is both deactivation (katargein) and preservation (histanein) of the law, is nothing more than the coherent expression of this paradox. Justice without law is not the negation of the law, but the realization and fulfillment, the pleroma, of the law" (106-107)
The Messianic dispossession of the Law frees it for its use to frame a life of justice outside of the law (or as usually translated "righteousness outside the law"). This suspension of the law is its fulfillment, the Torah's proper end. Such destroys the alternative, the Nightmare Apparatus under which we live, which sees the "as if" ab-use of the Law through its full norming operativity. Such is where All and Part are forcibly made to coinhere. The logic of the Nazi camp was, truly, the full unleashing of the logic of nationalism, that the People and the Leader/Government were one and the same. The Camp became the exception, the ex-ceptio, where what was outside the Law was captured within it at the same moment it's placed outside. The Camp is the construction of Hell, the effecting of paradise where the angelic bureaucrats guide the songs of the saints-people, as this heavenly triumph (signaling nothing) sits upon fires of Hell. It's precisely here, where the Law becomes completely blurred, unable to be followed or disobeyed, that it maximizes its power. The law's transgression becomes its proper use, even as its obedience becomes guilt for disobedience. In our time, such was the criminalization of unmasked or unvaccinated breathing (outside or inside), yet simultaneous unconstitutional (yet legal) use of police powers to surveil, harass, and arrest. Agamben's Italy was often ground-zero for unrolling this unleashed Nomos of the Earth, but its potency was clear throughout Western Europe and Israel.
The result is manifest in schizophrenic split in Paul's conscience (Romans 7). The law ceases to offer any clear norm or framework, but merely produces guilt. The Law merely destroys, without law or reason, but wrapped all under sin. The Messiah came to use the Law to end this regime, rather than produce the Kafka-esque Trial where man stands damned as judged criminal, pure guilt without any particular law or precept violated. God's intent was to unveil the Law's impotency, that it cannot constitute righteousness which it expects. It's precisely in failure to recognize the Law's limitation, or its inability to norm, only to be used, that marks out the reign of the antichrist. The Messiah's reign ends the Nightmare:
"Once he divides the law into a law of works and a law of faith, a law of sin and a law of God (Rom. 7:22-23) - and thus renders it inoperative and unobservable - Paul can then fulfill and recapitulate the law in the figure of love. The messianic pleroma of the law is an Aufhebung of the state of exception, an absolutizing of katargesis."(108)
It is faith which is the proper use of the Law, allowing a righteousness without norm. The Scripture becomes a mosaic to draw from so as to appropriate the spirit of justice, that is the Spirit of Christ. Faith, which Agamben recognizes as fidelity, or loyalty and allegiance, is precisely the operative use of an inoperative Law, and part of its origin. The Covenant (berit) is a pre-law arrangement that should not be fetishized as unique to divine relations (the term, equally translatable as pact or contract, refers to agreements between humans). Agamben could appreciate the scholarship of Meredith Kline, where the structure of the Mosaic covenant reflects suzerainty treaties between a superior and his vassal. Nevertheless, this pre-law arrangement between God and his friends required a disposition of fidelity between partners. And this element is what grounds the historical transition from pre-law (which is more akin to magic) into Law, reified the borders and boundaries of a particular people (rather than the loose knit personal arrangements of a tribe). But it's at the moment of Law that Faith becomes locked in a paradoxical antagonism. For Paul, this juxtaposition is revealed in the promise-covenant to Abraham and the Law to Moses. Translated into modern law, it's the constitution against positive law, or constitutive power against a written constitution. This distinction - between what constitutes a government and the government thus constituted - has constantly moved towards a greater state of crisis. And it's this rupture that the Messianic fulfill through inoperativity:
"The messianic is therefore the historical process whereby the archaic link between law and religion (which finds its magical paradigm in horkos, oath) 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 (from works fulfilled in carrying out the pact" (119)
The energy that mobilizes faith, remaining true to the constitutive covenant against a collapse into nomos, is charis (grace). Rather than operating within the framework of law through carrot and stick, grace reflects the pre-law state of gratuitous action within the dynamics of gift exchange. It's not this-that, or a system that establishes meritorious equivalence (or, negatively demeritorious penalties). The lack of qualification for every act according to this pact do not allow any pure coincidence; one is never square and thus the life between all parties continues. This marks out, fundamentally, a form-of-life, where the emergence of Law is suspended, and its form preserved for use. The very messianic community, in whatever form it takes, is the law's fulfillment. The lived church, as St. Paul says, is "our letter" (II Cor. 3:2). And this grace through faith is placed upon the crucified and risen Messiah. Agamben is somewhat ambiguous over the historical question of Jesus of Nazareth, but this disposition emerges from following St. Paul. It's not that the Apostle does not believe in the historicity of Christ, only that he has no interest of a "historical" Jesus against the Christ of his faith. Such is not from ancient naivety (there was already a well developed historical genre and hermeneutic in antiquity), but love. There is no Jesus, who happened to become or who (eternally even) has the predicate of Christ. Love collapses subject and predicate, as Jesus the Christ is - to those of faith - Jesus Christ:
"what then is the world of faith? Not a world of substance and qualities, not a world in which the grass is green, the sun is warm, and the snow is white. No, it is not a world of predicates, of existences and essences, but a world of indivisible events, in which I do not judge, nor do I believe that the snow is white and the sun is warm, but I am transported and displaced in the snow's-being-white and in the sun's-being-warm. In the end, it is a world in which I do not believe Jesus, such-and-such a man, is the Messiah, only-begotten son of God, begotten and not created, consubstantial in the Father. I only believe in Jesus Messiah; I am carried away and enraptured in him, in such a way that 'I do not live, but the Messiah lives in me' (Gal. 2:20)." (129)
The point here is not to shutdown all theological questions (or to crudely toss away doctrinal history as so much wrangling). Rather, it's the same way one must rebuke scientism out of love for practiced science. The ascension of faith to grace leads finally to love. At the end, the commitment to the Messianic logic of justice/righteousness outside the law emerges from love. It is to taste and see that the Lord is good. It is the joy of a world, not its stripping and vivisection. The love of Christ is the love of his person, where subject and predicate merge. That is who he is. On this point, Agamben could easily sound like a fideistic Evangelical. And so much the better for Agamben! It is easy to lose the fundamental love of God behind a wall of dogmatic debate and distinction, so much so that one loses fidelity, fails to understand grace, falls out of love. Such is to reenter the realm of the original cut, that separation where one rapidly seeks to carry out the Law no matter the cost. It becomes a covenant without God, Law without Justice. Such is the conflict throughout all ages and the alternative (Law without Justice) is bleak:
"As the history of the Church clearly demonstrates - as does that of societas humana in its entirety - the dialectic between these two experiences of the word is essential. If, as it inevitably happens and seems to be happening again today, the second falls to the wayside leaving only the word of nomos in absolute force, and if the performativum fidei is completely covered by the performativum sacramenti, then the law itself stiffens and atrophies and relations between men lose all sense of grace and vitality. The juridicizing of all human relations in their entirety, the confusion between what we may believe, hope, and love, and what we are supposed to do and not supposed to do, what we are supposed to know, not only signal the crisis of religion but also, and above all, the crisis of law." (135)
This crossroads is not (necessarily) an attack on all sacraments. Rather it's the sacramental theology, demonstrated elsewhere, of act without agent, and potency without power. It's the sacramental theology of the priest who acts persona ecclesiae/persona christi, yet God, who is thus acting, can only act through the person. Thus the priest's authority to give grace or condemn is not his own, yet this constituting authority is impotent without this governing act. It would be interesting to see what Agamben would make of early modern and modern Orthodox theology on this point. Nevertheless, it's an interest in a eucharistic meal sans sacramental canonicity. Again, it's an interest in righteousness without law.
Agamben concludes with a philological investigation of Benjamin's ideas as drawn (at least in part) from St. Paul (revealed through spaced terms that reflect Luther's translation - the standard in German). The importance of this discovery was the interrelation of these two texts, whose urgency appears simultaneously for the current moment. The messianic never ages, it appears at the right time, even if it's not evident that it has, in fact, appeared. Thus must we - people of the Christ - return again and again to the present solution to the present crisis. Justice without law must reign.
Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.
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