No Jew Nor Gentile: Contemplation, Form-of-Life, and Escaping the Machine in Part III of Giorgio Agamben's "The Use of Bodies"

 The core reason for an emphasis on form-of-life is to deactivate the bio-political apparatus which has dominated modern democracies and rapidly consumes the world. This machine (as Agamben calls it) originates from the original fracture in politics, reflected in Aristotle's commentary, between mere biological life  [zoe] and a particular vocation and qualitative life [bios]. This division is what ultimately founds the bio political order as the gap between these two realities becomes increasingly blurred. For even as physical life had been relegated to the home (ordered by oikonomia, law of the house), this distinction itself is a product of the political. It is precisely a political act to determine what is, in fact, political and what is not. But in this exclusion, the city claims a hidden jurisdiction, for as this aspect of life is excepted it is captured (the literal sense of ex-ceptio: captured out). This problem is not serious throughout most of Western history where this distinction is maintained. However, with the advent of the nation-state, and the rapid collapse of the ancien regime, these problems came to a fore. With the advance of representative democracy, popular sovereignty, and nationalism, bio-politics became increasingly normative through police. As the blur between political and economic, public and private, bare-life and political-life evaporates, the ex-ceptio becomes more important to control even as politics formally has nothing to do with it. Think of the fact that sexual identity politics moved, in a blink, between the bedroom is not political (thus decriminalizing all kinds of behaviors) to growth of sex education in public schools. This long predates the recent "Don't Say Gay" controversy, dating back to the mid-twentieth century where sodomy laws were repealed at the same time sex education was introduced to public schools.

The alternative to this increasingly erratic and destructive caesura is through form-of-life. Rather than the split, physical life becomes its own political life. A form-of-life is "a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate and keep distinct something like a bare life" (The Use of Bodies, 207). However, modernity's growth in statism inverts this relationship. The bare-life becomes distanced increasingly as the site of crisis, even as its own regulation becomes the foundation for the state. The founding myth derives from the Hobbesian "state of nature", where the naked barbaric existence of a short and brutish life is locked away through the constituting act of polity. The incoherent and formless masses establish themselves as The People to enact a constitutional settlement (Hobbes' preference was hereditary monarchy). This constituted government then maintains this distinction, even as the ex-ceptio is precisely the heart of the city. Killing is outlawed precisely through the sovereign's ability to determine what is murder (unlawful killing) and what is execution (lawful killing; the sovereign's self-exception). Bare life, the source and threat of the modern state, becomes the secret center of all government. And as modernity has expanded, developed, and intensified, the crisis has only become more pertinent. The norm has become entirely blurred through its exercise. The state of exception is the norm. This confused intensification is nowhere clearer than in the realm of the biomedical:

"the very drawing out of bare life, which sovereign power in certain circumstances could work on forms of life, is now achieved massively and on a daily basis by pseudo-scientific representations of the body, of sickness and health, and by the 'medicalization' of ever wider spheres of life and of the individual imagination. Biological life, a secularized form of bare life, which has in common with the latter unspeakability and impenetrability, thus constitutes the real forms of life literally into forms of survival, remaining intact in them as the obscure threat that can be suddenly actualized in violence, in extraneousness, in sickness, in an accident. It is the invisible sovereign that watches us behind the idiotic masks of the powerful who, whether they realize it or not, govern us in its names." (210)

In other words, the crisis of modernity is the increasing emphasis on medicalizing all problems as matters of survival. It's no wonder then (as Agamben notes elsewhere) that popular media fixates on the apocalyptic. Whether it's aliens, environmental catastrophe, nuclear holocaust, pandemics, or a Malthusian population collapse from resource wars, all of these frame the imagination to expect imminent destruction. And thus politics simply becomes the task of staving off oblivion without concern for precisely *how* one would live a life. It's no surprise that the epidemiologists of Corona World shrugged their shoulders at concerns of living standards. Survival, measured in functioning lungs and hearts, was the only calculus to measure success. Siege mentality was the norm in a "war" against a virus.

The alternative towards this medicalized politics of bare-life is thought:

"Thought is form-of-life, life unsegregatable from its form, and wherever there appears the intimacy of this inseparable life, in the materiality of corporeal processes and habitual modes of life not less than in theory, there and there alone is there thought. And it is this thought, this form-of-life that, abandoning bare life to 'man' and the 'citizen,' who provisionally served as clothing for it and represented it with their 'rights,' must become the guiding concept and the unitary center of coming politics"  (213)

However thought, in this definition, is no longer according to the classical definition as a kind of self-imposed exile. Contemplation, where one must self-impose

Agamben traces this philosophical concept through Plotinus, who revolutionized Plato's works against Aristotelian ontology. Life was not the activity of the solitary, a particular vocation. Rather thought, in its modern form since Averroism, has the multitude inhere within itself. Intellect is not something one exercises, but belongs within. The world of thought is something one belongs within and subsists in. The promise of modernity is, as G.K. Chesterton noted in Orthodoxy, is the poet poking his head into the heavens; the threat is the lunatic trying to fit the heavens into his small and fragile noggin. And belonging to the intellectual world of forms, a countryman wandering the starry heavens, the mere life coincides completely with a particular vocation. Every particular zoe is its own bios, with thought providing the creative means. Thus, it's not the issue that a biological entity can be abstracted from purposive living (the disgusting proposition from many illiterate libidinal atheists), but purposive living appears in and only through the thinking through as a biological life. In other words, life itself provides its own forms. Like God in scholastic theology, being does not have existence, but being is a mode of existence. Life does not have living, living is the expression of life. Every particular expression of life is something inherent to it, not an alien trait it participates in. There's no way to separate the dignity of a particular form of life, from the mere form of life. Therefore, it's not insane to wonder why someone who choose the joy of living his life over mere survival. The medicalized politics of the actuary have no bearing on a freeman who chooses his life as such.

The hope is that form-of-life, as tertium quid, deactivates the distinction between physical and political life, a threshold that ascends beyond. Agamben sketches out a philosophical tradition that attempts to move beyond these shackles, ranging from Plotinus to Scotus to Averroists like Dante. The means to exit in the midst of the given of zoe and bios. Imagination is one expression of the threshold that links, separates, and reunites the philosophic problem between the one and many, between spirit and matter. The intellect gathers up the plethora of material ideas in the mind, stripping them of their characteristics, rendered strictly as an image. Between the mind thinking and the idea contemplated, both fall in together, lost in mutual gazing. For an Averroist like Dante, the result is love: where the intellect contemplating finds itself in the image contemplated, thus deactivating any subject/object dichotomy. It's this indistinction, and mutual cancellation (as intellect and idea cannot but be conjoined), which forms an "ontology of style". There is no abstract intellect that can hold itself apart from the ideas that it contemplates. Form-of-life is that the particular mind has wedded itself, without remainder, to a particular way. It's in this moment, where one imagines or falls in love with not life-itself (as in mere biological life, some dissolved down essence of bare life), that escape is possible. The purpose is not distinction towards dialectical reunion, but freedom:

"Intimacy as a political concept, which is here in question for us, is situated beyond the Heideggerian perspective. It is not a question of having an experience of difference as such by holding firm and yet negating the opposition but of deactivating the opposites and rendering them inoperative. Archaeological regression must neither express nor negate, neither say nor un-say: rather, it reaches a threshold of indiscernibility, in which the dichotomy diminishes and the opposites coincide - which is to say, fall together. What then appears is not a chronologically more originary unity, nor a new and superior unity, but something like a way out. The threshold of indiscernibility is the center of the ontological-political machine: if on reaches it and holds oneself there in it, the machine can no longer function" (239)

To the jaded, the appeal to a metaphysics of love may seem quaint. However, the Christian must not fail to recognize that God is love and love is the highest virtue to dwell in. And this love is manifest through art, through poeisis, through the intelligible creation. Such is the task of the Logos and such is the same for man as imago Dei. And like God, the purpose of art is life: the work is a life, a life is the work. The ancients had maintained a distinction, where the work was the living proof of an artist (ie an artist was such because he made a work). The moderns, in complete reversal, had made the work of an art an embarrassing residue, a product of the genius. The result of modernity, resembling the increasing frenzy of confusion for the political-ontological machine. Thus the artist must manically manufacture his own life, sovereignly imposed upon the plastic lump of his flesh a vision that takes the form of particular acts, antics, and gestures. It's the seemingly schizophrenic life of someone like Madonna, who crafts her life as the image of the party-girl, but in reality a workaholic, obsessively choreographing all her movements. She is condemned to confuse art with her own life, and vice versa, till she's made a dumb and deaf idol. The modern artist is Pygmalion, whose art is not the beautiful woman but himself (a tale now -- in its modern form -- of masturbation, not love). 

In contrast, art through inoperativity becomes free for contemplation:

"in contemplation the work is deactivated and rendered inoperative, and in this way, restored to possibility, opened to a new possible use. That form of life is truly poetic that, in its own work, contemplates its own potential to do and not do and finds peace in it. The truth that contemporary art never manages to bring to expression is inoperativity, which it seeks at all costs to make into a work. If artistic practice is the place where one is made to feel most forcefully the urgency and, at the same time, the difficult of the constitution of a form-of-life, that is because in it there has been preserved the experience of a relation to something that exceeds work and operation and yet remains inseparable from it. A living being can never be defined by its work but only by its inoperativity, which is to say, by the mode in which it maintains itself in relation with a pure potential in a work and constitutes-itself as form-of-life, in which zoe and bios, life and form, private and public enter into a threshold of indifference and what is in question is no longer life or work but happiness. And the painter, the poet, the thinker - and in general, anyone who practices a poiesis and an activity - are not the sovereign subjects of a creative operation and of a work. Rather, they are anonymous living beings who, by always rendering inoperative the works of language, of vision, of bodies, seek to have an experience of themselves and to constitute their life as form-of-life" (247)

The purpose of this dense passage is to escape from polarization between a conceptual dichotomy, not to heal the cut but set these concepts aside. The purpose is not to invent a third out of the rift, or simply piece them together. In other words, it's not trying to find a more adept reconciliation between public and private life, or between the home and the city. Rather, it's the ability to make both of these concepts inactive from their original categorical purpose. Man, the individual soul & mind created to be as God, is not made for the city, the family, or the many works that exist. Rather all of these are to be cease in their function in order for their use. The form-of-life is dissociating with the particular givens, so as to learn to love what they precisely are. Thus Agamben extensively replicates, with little commentary, Plato's "Myth of Er" from The Republic. In it, Plato imagines a post-mortem scenario where the souls of the departed witness all kinds of lives that they then choose to reincarnate as. The soul may choose to live the life of a hero like Orpheus or Hercules, or perhaps he chooses reincarnation as a swan or bee. The end is ultimately justice, blessed existence of divine harmony. The choice is not a naked subject, but the living life making sense of itself, a life divided against itself [mesos bios; a lifestyle split in the midst of things] so as to make use of itself towards righteousness. Such is, ultimately, the soul:

"The soul, just like form-of-life, is what in my zoe, in my bodily life does not coincide with my bios, with my political and social existence, and yet has 'chosen' both, practices them both in this certain, unmistakable mode. It is itself, in this sense, the mesos bios that, in every bios and every zoe, adventurously severs, revokes, and realizes the choice that unites them by necessity in this certain life. Form-of-life, the soul, is the infinite complement between life and mode of life, what appears when they mutually neutralize one another and show the void that united them. Zoe and bios - this is perhaps the lesson of the myth - are neither separate nor coincident: between them, as a void of representation of which it is not possible to say anything except that it is 'immortal' and 'ungenerated' (Phaedrus, 246a), stands the soul, which holds them indissolubly in contact and testifies for them" (262)

Thus the only hope of salvation is to stop the quantification of life, in the frantic movement between biological subsistence and a particular identity or vocation. Rather both kinds of life, biological and vocational, are set aside to reveal the logoi of Humanity. Man's ability to think, contemplate, imagine, and fall in love with the images set forth in the swirl of energetic movement, frees man to stop. Neither mere biological subsistence (as if being on a ventilator - survival - is living) nor some identity (whether of class, wealth, race, cult, etc.) determines you. Rather, the soul (life living, the rational breath) is the end. The freedom of the Christ - the conversion to being a Christian - is not a third thing, as if it's simply one more identity. Even worse, it's not a conjunctive movement through an ecumenical hyper-sacralization. Such is our world-order, why Ivan Illich referred to the current era as the most explicitly Christian, where everyone is a Child of God, every identity is an equal demonstration of a sacred calling. Of course, per the ex-ceptio this is manifest in the legislative protection of particular groups (gender, sexuality, religious, racial identities, among others), which implies un-protection for whatever is not an identity. Thus Islam is a religion as long as it's not fundamentalist, which is banished as pernicious politics (similar to Locke's ecumenical tolerance which excluded papists). 

Instead Christian is the divine "as not" to our several vocations. The Christian life is to make use of whatever is true, either biologically or vocationally, towards the ends of the Kingdom of Heaven. As St Paul argues: circumcision or uncircumcision doesn't matter. The Jew lives "as not" a Jew; the Gentile lives "as not" a Gentile. Rather, all of these positions (class, wealth, race, etc.) serve the reign of justice. For freedom has man been set free. Such is the vocation to end all vocations, the call of eternity, the life of Christ lived through. The manic effort to square the circle of divisions is not overcome, it ceases.

Fiat: Modal Ontology and the Threat of Nihilism in Part II of Giorgio Agamben's "The Use of Bodies"

A key to understanding the intensifying crisis of western politics begins with ontology - the logic of being. This claim may sound ridiculous on its face, a fever dream of academic philosophers and theologians who seek to explain why de-industrialization, global financialization, and managerial neoliberal NGO political economy has dominated the West. But the interest in ontology is not a quest for a magical essence that lay hidden beneath the acts of men. Rather, an exploration of ontology reveals a mechanism - a machine - which crisscrosses the threshold between potential and act, between the world and language. For Agamben, it is precisely the space between the non-linguistic world of beasts or bodies and the linguistic world of the mind that ontology straddles. The Human being is not a stable category, but a project. Ontology explains the process by which Humans are made, and consequently unmade. An archaeology of Ontology - an exploration of how the relation between world and language has been assessed - is necessary to properly address the fundamental source of the above woes. Again, the excavation will not produce an immediate solution to the future wars of drone strikes, spec ops, and social media hyper-reality. It will not have clear significance for understanding rainbow flag plasticity or the bestial mixed economy of Dollar hegemony. Rather, it will unveil the core questions addressed in the process by which a man becomes dehumanized - or fails to fully humanize - that justify black bag renditions as much as partial birth abortions. If these questions are brought to light, an alternative answer may emerge and offer escape from a machine that seems only to become more destructive and decayed.

Pre-modern ontology established distinctions of duality, unresolved contradictions which afflicted Aristotle's first articulation of it. While The Philosopher, in Categories, sought to disaggregate words and the concepts to which they refer. However, this criss-crossing of how a word and a concept meet, in any meaningful way, remains obscure in the distinction of being and saying. A simple denotative sentence of identity - such as I am Cal - presupposes something beneath these identities. The 'I' receives the predication of a name (Cal), or perhaps sometimes an adjectival description ('Cal is good', 'Cal is tall'). But behind both the subject and the predication is pure subsistence of Being. For Being (ousia) is the presupposed, the unsaid, within every statement. Behind or beneath the 'I' and 'Cal' stands Being, which acts through the conjunctive relationship of the 'is'. Being is what is presupposed in every language and language is what summons Being through an accusation (the original meaning of kategorein). All language and philosophy depends on Being as its floor, and this is recognized in the Latin cognate 'subject' [sub-jectum], as well as 'substance' [sub-stantia]. Similarly in Greek, what undergirds the reality of the speaking subject is its hypo-stasis, the hypokeimenon which actualizes the only potentiality implicit in a category. We may speak of Human, but it's only cognizable in light of the human being, the 'subject' which actualizes or unveils this categorical reality. But here the gap between essence (Being as such) and existence (Being actualized in a subject) appears. How is it that what is exists, and what exists is? How does form combine with matter (pure potentiality)? Is it possible for a non-existent essence? Is it possible for an inessential existent?

Here Agamben takes up the philological question of what Aristotle meant when he defined Being: to ti en einai. Drawing on the work of other philologists, Agamben concludes that this statement means "what it was for [X] to be", with the empty signifier standing for any particular person (e.g. Cal, Socrates, John Smith). But why does this formula use the past tense? The problem takes its form:

"why must Aristotle introduce into the definition of essence a past tense, why 'what it was' instead of 'what it is'? This turns out to be the decisive problem that defines the ontological apparatus that Aristotle has left as an inheritance to Western philosophy." (124)

The framework introduced, which has marked out all efforts to analyze the relation of Being (and form) to subject, is temporalizing. History defines thus the Human being:

"If, insofar, as it has been presupposed, the individual can be grasped only as something past, the only way to catch hold of the singularity in its truth is in time. The past tense 'was' in the formula ti en einai certainly expresses the identity and continuity of being, but its fundamental achievement, whether or not Aristotle was fully aware of it, is introduction of time into being. The 'something more profound' that 'is hidden' in the past tense 'was' is time: the identity of the being that language has divided, if one attempts to think it, necessarily entails time. In the very gesture with which it divides being, language produces time." (125) 

Time becomes the organizing means by which the mind organizes the world through language. The time is not chronological, in the sense of trying to capture something's essence through its sequential past. Rather the time introduced is the event of the mind's unfolding, its recognition of the thing as distinct amidst its many parts. It is the connection between a thing and its meaning, between humanity and this subject, this individuated thing. However, if the substance is still what is in question, the quest becomes unending. For every time the Being that founds the individuation appears, it immediately subdivides. For what is before me in the 'now' duplicates in the mind between what is and what was. And every attempt to single out what was only subdivides further backwards in time to what becomes impossible to ever fully grasp, the Beginning. Therefore a historical (if not political) task rapidly assumes mythological discursive marks as Being is ascertained. 

While premodern philosophy maintained these distinctions and disaggregations within a mutual harmony, modern philosophy has exacerbated the tensions into complete collapse. Thus, even as this schema seems to determine the reality of the existent through its actualization of essence, the result can flow back the other way. The existent is mere ephemera of the essential, which always lies behind and before. It's not unlike the odd and unexplained comment from the Devil (disguised as a little girl angel) to Christ in The Last Temptation of Christ: "There is only one woman in the world. One woman, with many faces." Within the dream world of his last temptation, and confronted with the death of his beloved Mary Magdalene, the essence of woman is something infinite and constantly becoming. The death of one gives birth to the life of another. It's a perfect circle that only makes sense in a time that seems to collapse beginning and end. The end-result is Bare Life, pure Being, that remains completely confused and completely separated out from existent human beings. The Aristotelian machine, the means to distinguish between form and essence, has collapsed through its misuse and exacerbations. 

The discursive markers of "Human Rights" and "All Lives Matter" represents incoherence. What does it mean to be "alive"? Both rightists and leftists participate in this complete collapse. Life becomes completely separated out from any particular how of life, with identity politics as a stick residue of this process internalized. It's not a question of how one is, but what one is. Radical Feminism with its ontologizing of womanless through biology is only a mirror of the process that refers this process to psychological subjectivity. A woman is simply a genetic pattern or an emotively willed disposition. As technological ability increases, the blur will only continue. Outside the fictional possibility of gene splicing or gene recoding for the human being, the technologies of artificial wombs, genital reconstruction, and hormonal therapy only exacerbate the zone of indistinction. Is a woman an XX chromosome? Is a woman a certain chemical cocktail of estrogen and testosterone? The abortion debate runs similarly about trying to demarcate *the* moment a fetus moves from organic material into life. And when politicians, like Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, announced their war on corona virus, it was a refusal of death. None should die! No needless deaths! But this presupposes a needful death. What is a statistical aberration and what is a statistical norm? And how does one cross between all of these thresholds? The result is the intensified importance of law. What is alive or dead? What is culpable or not? What is a woman? Legislation steps in to mark out these caesurae and resolve the problem, but its flimsiness breeds its own ferocity. Questions of being dissolve into the epistemic scaffold of the command. We will return to this problem.

The problem of the existent, from the other side, appears in the technical terminology of the 'subject' [hypostasis; subjectum]. The origins of the term are odd given its importance for Christian theology. A 'sediment' or a 'remainder', hypostasis refers to this concrete instance, the existent as what remains after the appearance of Being. As a radical shift within classical ontology, the gap between essence and existence receives greater strain. The Neo-Platonic philosophers struggled to ever arrive at the Being-beyond-being, and the gap only continued to be populated with hypostatic manifestations of Being. As if a reversal of hunting, the fresher the tracks results in greater disappointment, for Being seems to be farther away from when the quest began. Neo Platonists, like Plotinus, resented Gnostic cultists like Valentinian or Ptolemey, who seemed to mock philosophy through their absurd cosmologies. The chaste hypostatic emanation (a shift from existence as original to existence as given or produced) of Being in Nous or Good is replaced with the obscenity of the Ogdoad or the Duodecad, mythologized through copulative celestial regimes. Whether Gnosticism was sincere nitwits or opportunistic hucksters, it reveals the problem that Neo-Platonists (in combining Stoic and Aristotelian thought) had expanded. In the quest to find The One, it becomes entirely unclear how Being-beyond-being can ever be found. If Stoics imagined hypostasis as the result of a process of hypostatization between essence and existence, then Neo-Platonists made this entire operation unreal. How could what lies behind all beings ever make those beings if the threshold back, the movement of reditus, can never conclude?

This philosophical problem transferred to Christianity through the trinitarian debates. The creedal formula - three persons, one substance - depended on the question of divine hypostatization to explain how the one God could exist (eternally) as Father, Son, and Spirit. Yet this process included a "personalization" of each hypostasis, apparent in the Latin terminology of one substantia in three personae. While the clearest translation of hypostasis would have been substantia, the use of persona reflected a conflation of terms that better solved Christian ends. The hypostasis of the Father, for example, was not simply an individuation of divine nature, but had something more of a "personal" character. These terms themselves the confluence, for the subject moved towards subjectivity (though not in any psychological sense). And while Latin and Greek triadology developed major differences, a luminary like St Gregory Nazianzen recognized the Latin persona as equivalent in meaning. 

This shift of emphasis opened the possibility (though one that would only be realized in time through particular thinkers acting in response to particular questions) that existence would take priority over essence. The hypostases of Father, Son, and Spirit were not simply masks or characters that existed for a time (which the word persona might imply). The trinitarian persons were not merely avatars for Being behind, but were themselves key in constituting essentially what God is, even if this what-ness was worked out through apophatic negative theology. While Agamben on this point does not fully exegete different approaches within Christian theology (especially differences over the Father's relation to the essence of divinity), the result is a modern emphasis on the existent and the increasing tension over the relation between essence and existence. Augustine becomes decisive for the West in adumbrating this problem through the relation of the divine persons. To prevent a tri-theistic fracture, the persons constitute a relation of the divine essence to itself. Analogously of a master and a slave - where the master is only such in relation to the existence of the slave - the Father is the Father as the Father is not-Son (ungenerate) and not-Spirit (unspirated). However if this relation is understood in the sense of an ex-ceptio, where what is excluded (the Son) through inclusion (Father and Son are both divine), than this raises the specter of a gap. How is the Father and Son different outside of increasingly technical and at times vague and unclear categorizations? These tensions would form the trinitarian debates that would continue to rock Christian theology (Latin most of all) throughout the Middle Ages.

Again, this problem may sound radically abstract, but it's the fracture which spawns the intellectual justification (or confusion) behind the modern crisis of ontology. Straddling between complete separation and collapse - where Being simply becomes what's existent - results in the efforts at total identification. In political ontology, the caesura between constitutive and constituted powers, between sovereignty and government, between The People and The People's representatives becomes entirely meaningless. The modern drive to resolve these disjunctures may result in radical displacement and collapse. Between The People and the mass of people, a revolutionary movement may seek to exterminate the difference. A Robespierre exterminating counterrevolutionaries or a Hitler exterminating Slavs are simply coherent applications of revolutionary logic. The People must remove those who've unpeopled themselves, and the difference must be established through an act of will. And this act of radical identification results in the production of the pure undifferentiated opposite. The decapitated body of the royalist or the Jew is the remainder, as fully actualized essence is existent in the will of the citizen or fuhrer that commands it to be. The fracture between world and language, which threatens into complete incoherence, is resolved through the verbal mechanism of the command. Yet every use to cross between the essence that stands beneath all existent phenomena strains at its use. What is a Corona virus death, but the legal determination of medical professionals? What is this crisis besides the manufacturing of a will to mandate whichever manner of resolution? If every policy is to prevent a needless death, what produces the alternative? This chaos emerges from this inability to rectify with the fundamental ontological division that justifies all the subsequent divisions, which have only become more confused through modern efforts to rectify them.

But is there a solution outside of this ontological collapse, whose resolution is only The Will? Is there a way of language that does not produce the presuppositions, subjects, and predication that unleash the bottomless quest towards the Being upon which all rests? Agamben believes Western philosophy has unveiled a way out, as much as intensification of the problem. One of the first major figure that saw through this ontological puzzle was Plato. The use of language which attempted to convert essence into existence, the principle [arche] into hypostases, must be abandoned. And this process is only possible through language's self-disclosure through an anaphoric reference. Thus while the presuppositional language game ("this is the circle") must be deactivated through an indirect gesture, saying the unsayable ("the circle itself"). The itself only points back at the Circle, but with a distinction that looks away from itself. Rather than the world-building powers of Logos, which moves out from essence to existence, which marked the presuppositional projects of Aristotle, Hegel, and Heidegger (perhaps the last true Aristotelian great), the Logos must suspend itself through self-disclosure. Language cannot absorb the World - the purpose of dialectical separation and reunion - but only "touch" it,  the thing which mediates itself (the way the 'itself' is both the Circle and its mediation as an unsayable word). In other words, the Logos unveils the darkness of Nature, the ungraspable essence of it, which exists through radical distinction. The Christ reveals the fullness of Humanity at the precise moments his humanity is stripped (e.g. Pilate's "ecce Homo" at Christ's trial or the Centurion at the Cross who proclaims "This truly was son of God" at the moment of Christ's death). It was this truth of the Logos - the inoperativity of language at rest - which Plato understood, the moment where language leads to the revelation of the mystery (and its implied silence). The light of reason shows the opacity of Nature, and it is precisely at that moment something new may emerge.

Ontologically, the hope of escape is through a modal ontology - the medium identical with the thing it touches. A major pioneer to stress this way out was Leibniz, who had brought scholastic metaphysics to a point of disjuncture. Rather than the classic Aristotelian concepts of form and matter, what united all the monads (the essential principles) was their substantial bond, a relation that was indissoluble and more real than the monads themselves (thus giving a sense that this substantial bond was the absolute subject). And while this bond demands the monads, it does not imply them or require them to exist. The result of this relation would be like an echo without an original sound, for how could a bond between the monads be substantial (meaning it is inherent and necessary, not an accident of existence) without the monads? Leibniz postulated an originary echo or an echo as a source of modification. Thus it's the existent which then opens up the possibility of what originally was, that hearing the echo is what opens the mind to think what the source in fact was. It's in this way that the echo is substantive, an aftershock that redefines the original, a relationship that is more primary than two poles. The notion is absurd in the abstract, but it's a way of framing how precisely the relationship between the essential and existent may reach a stand-still. Rather than working down from essence, which must explain manifest in the variety of existents, what happens when a singular uncategorized existent reveals an unsaid (or unsayable) essence? What if all that exists does not have a name as a discrete hypostasis of Being, but rather it is all Being in its various modes? There is no finding a way to this Being because all things are - mediated through their solitary existences - Being itself. The subject is swallowed up for an anaphoric revelation. The 'I' in the 'I am Cal' deactivates, and instead 'Cal himself' appears without this temporal predication.

Leibniz developed his thought from the richness of Scholastic theology, which had absorbed the Neo-Platonic metaphysical categories. In a quest to work down from Being - the fundament beneath all - scholastics struggled to avoid shipwreck into pantheistic nihilism. Thomas had advanced Aristotelian categories to discuss mode as the mechanism by which the forms mixed with matter, actuality with potentiality, to form the composite existent beings. But this composition was itself an addition to form, manifest in the many accidents attributable to existent beings. The bond between them lack reality, in the sense that existence did add something to an essence. It was this other which defined the potentiality of matter, which was the means by which essence made itself existent. While the mode was nothing, it revealed something about how Being makes itself known. Scotus, in contrast, advanced beyond this to make mode a quality of a substance, its haecceity, its here-ness. Existence was contained within every Being, otherwise it would be hard to justify how essence could be thinkable in relation to the essence of the existent and its material defects and accidents. In Leibnizian terms, existence is the demand of an essence. Thus in Leibniz is a transformation of scholasticism on the cusp. What exactly moved from essence to existence in its modal relation - which had begun as "non-repugnance" (Scotus) and "aptitude" (Suarez) - had become a requirement.

An alternative to this paradigmatic crossing was emanation. Essence does not will existence, but cannot help but express itself. The modal relation is simply the unfolding of Being, like a flower flowering. However, these emanations are not themselves coincident with Being, but become, through space and time separated. Again, we return to the Neo-Platonic schema mutating into the cosmology of Gnosticism, with the drama of salvation as the shipwrecked emanations attempting to overcome their birth and return. Kabbalah also reflected this Neo-Platonic emanation, with the En-Sof (the Being-beyond-being) emanates finally into the hypostatic sephirah. However, unlike Neo-Platonism's elaborate chain-of-being, an ontological novum appears in the "nothing" that is the gap between the emanator and emanation. Kabbalah, in its apophatic mysticism, made being out of this nothing. This complete collapse is a simultaneous occurrence of both pantheism and nihilism: everything is everything and everything is nothing. However here is where modal ontology could rescue this eminational schema that threatened to dissolve into absolute simultaneity and difference:

"Between being and modes the relationship is neither of identity nor of difference, because the mode is at once identical and different - or, rather, it entails the coincidence, which is to say the falling together, of the two terms. In this sense, the problem of the pantheistic risk is poorly posed. The Spinozan syntagma Deus sive nature [sic] does not mean 'God = nature': the sive (whether it derives from the conditional and concessive si or the anaphoric sic) expresses the modalizaion, which is to say, the neutralization and disappearance of identity as much as difference. What is divine is not being in itself but its sive, its always already modifying itself and 'naturing itself' - being born - in the modes.

At this point, the problem is that of finding the concepts that allow us to correctly think modality. We are accustomed to think in a substantival mode, while mode has a constitutively adverbial nature, it expresses not 'what' but 'how' being is." (164).

A figure, which had been lurking in the shadows, emerges in full. Spinoza, the arch-heretic and atheistic pantheist, finds redemption as a scholastic saint. Spinoza's project was not to fully unravel the caesura through which he gleefully destroys metaphysics. Rather it is a radical reframing of the entire metaphysical project. God is not identical to the various existent individuals of the world - disturbingly expressed (per Bayle) as God modified in the Germans killed God modified in ten thousand Turks. Rather, the mode of existent beings is how God acts in the world. God - as anaphoric and non-presuppositional Logos - is not a question of what, as if God is Being or the Being-beyond-being. Rather God is the unsayable name (manifest in God's self-referential revelation as "I AM WHAT I AM" in Exodus). It's not that God is the Germans, God is the bullets, God is the dead Turks, and so on. Rather, God is all and in all precisely through the making use of the Germans, guns, and the Turks. Spinoza, in this way, is not the arch-heretic, but a supremely Christian theologian. It is not the abandonment of Scholastic ontology, but its redemption.

Reframed, the modal ontology changes a conceptualization of language and identity. Language is not to label the presupposed, substantive, and hypostatized Being which lay behind and beneath. Rather, Language is the unveiling of Being, Being is always already said. Thus, Cal is not a falling-down of an individuated Human nature, not a mere instance of a primal category. Rather Cal is a mode of Human being, it is the unveiling of a fully Human way of being. Modal ontology thus revises the Leibnizian formula. The substantial bond is not the monads that requires existence, but existents that require being. This is reminiscent of the Franciscan metaphysicians who "affirmed that the living body is already given in the embryo in its unity and perfection, even before the soul is united to it" as a form-of-body (148). Justice is the requirement of all that exists to have a name, that there is fundamentally no such thing as an accident, an existent that will simply melt away. As the Franciscan examples signifies, every human form requires its own naming. Scotus had made the Augustinian error of theologizing from essence to existent hypostases (even to the point of believing the Divine nature could be contemplated outside the persons). A modal ontology would, in reverse, mean that the Godhead is only intellgible in its revelation. God exists because Jesus Christ exists. The descent described in the Scripture has spatial imagery precisely because the sayability of the unsayable comes down to us. The revelation of the Word in an unjust world - a world that refuses the essence of the existent - is a humiliation of the Word. The act of naming is the fulfillment of justice, to answer the requirement of the existent to be.

A modal ontology - the primacy of 'as' in a form-of-life - thus liberates. It allows the mutant and strange to exist as they are, yet at the same time refuses the bio-medical attempt to essentially conform the existent through an exercise of the will. Agamben's work has often found resonance with non-Marxist leftists, which has rejected the repressive moral regime of bourgeois progress. However, this condemnation easily flows the other way. What is gender assignment surgery, but the application of the will to command what should not be into what should be. Agamben was, for this reason, opposed to a friend's heart transplant surgery when doctors counseled it. Why? Because it refused the existent body for a substantive modification through the surgeon's knife. It scooped out his supposedly rotten flesh for what functioned. It is the claim of crisis, the medical necessity, that supposedly transforms an insane act of mutilation into the life-saving procedure. The same logic is often applied at the destructive cutting and gutting of otherwise functional genatalia to be resculpted into the essence of either masculinity or femininity. The psychological dissonance of the modern subject must command the object of his will into conjuncture, a moment that expresses both extreme disjuncture (this body is not me) and extreme confluence (this body must be me). The 'I' becomes a ravenous tyrant. But salvation occurs not in an invasion or a conquest (misunderstandings many Jews attributed to their coming Christ). Rather it is unveiling of what exists, including the God who is none other than Language Himself.

What this means is either the redemption or destruction of humanity:

"Only a conception of the human that not only does not add anything to animality but does not supervene upon anything at all will be truly emancipated from the metaphysical definition of the human being. Such a humanity nonetheless could never be thought as a task to be 'taken on' or as the response to a call" (183)

It is not that any particular human being could be disqualified as a human being, whether the elderly, the terminally ill, or the fetus. Humanity is not something that comes upon the animal body of man (treated as an ugly remainder), or a task taken up. Humanity in these terms, as a particular set of capabilities or functions (whether Man as rational, political, or economical animal), must be put aside. Rather, the command of the modern subject of the I is deactivated for a different form of linguistic formulation. Though Agamben does not mention it, the biblical subjunctive (beneath the command, the weak bond) is what frames the world in all of its existent modes. Fiat Lux is the same impotent potency of Fiat Iustitia. It does not involve an invasion from a higher metaphysical dimension, but rather the recognition of God's creation. Benjamin's Messianic redemption as Nature's Night would be better served as the illumined opacity, the enlightened darkness, of Pascal's cruciform cosmos:

"If the world existed to instruct man of God, His divinity would shine through every part
in it in an indisputable manner; but as it exists only by Jesus Christ, and for Jesus Christ,
and to teach men both their corruption and their redemption, all displays the proofs of these
two truths. All appearance indicates neither a total exclusion nor a manifest presence of divinity, but the presence of a God who hides himself. Everything bears this character."

The God who hides himself makes appear through his humiliation. It is not a question of conformity or obedience, but faith. Let the righteous be righteous still, let the unrighteous be unrighteous still. This forms the basis of the proper crisis of forgiveness, between those who will name the existent world and those who command their essential fantasies to exist, whatever the cost. If there is to be a new politics, let mercy triumph over judgement.

Forgive Them Their Debts: Christology, Crisis Capitalism, and the End of Fiat Money

The decisive moment for the American Empire and the initiation for whatever era we live in (post-post-modern?) happened on August, 15th, 1971. On that day, Richard M Nixon took the US off the gold standard. It was a decision bred from obvious pressures. The US industrial economy shuddered before the growing potency of Europe (mainly west Germany) and Japan. The process of dollarization (which had hooked both zones on American supremacy) threatened to unravel US power. While the Bretton-Woods accord had created a strong dollar at $35 for an ounce of gold (allowing other currencies to devalue to rebound, while buying up US dollars as a reserve), it had also pegged the US as a global backstop. This phenomenon made the US foundational for the "world economy", but it could also result in a pummeling. If reserve banks were unsure of future US growth, they may cash out their reserves for gold. Additionally, there are fair reasons to suspect US gold holdings were themselves mist, with theories of an empty Fort Knox not entirely off the mark. To save the US as the global reserve currency and defend the tentacles of the dollar, Nixon made a "temporary" measure to uncouple gold and the dollar. And, following the predominant crisis pattern of the twentieth century, this exceptional state has never ceased. Thus US finance entered a radically new stage, a phenomenon that had been growing for the better part of a century.

This fits Agamben's Benjaminian criticism of "capitalism" as the nihilistic ouroboros of self-reference. The dollar had become pure capital through its dematerialization. The dollar was simply a dollar, an entirely empty and meaningless signifier. Per Benjamin's retooling of the Weberian thesis, capitalism was not the secularization of the Protestant faith, but an entirely parallel phenomenon. Capitalism was a parasite that utilized Christian doctrine and practice, and emerged later as the churches became weak. I would qualify the Benjaminian thesis by disaggregating concepts. As a mystical Marxian anarchist, it's obvious Benjamin (and Agamben along with him) disparage capitalism simpliciter. However, it's clear one can distinguish between different forms of capitalism, especially in relation to different modes of production. 

Weber's thesis was always an analysis of the "spirit" of capitalism, which was mainly in reference to the industrial manufacturing of England, the United States, and Germany. In this sense, one can see how the very particular "worldly asceticism" of post-puritan Protestants formed the ideological matrix of the petit bourgeois shopkeepers and artisanal craftsmen. Thus one can see genealogical ties between Richard Baxter and Benjamin Franklin, but more importantly "robber barons" like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. It was the self-possession, frugality, and work-ethic which motivated both the small weaver as well as the major steel producer. Working out salvation with fear and trembling meant fulfilling one's worldly "vocation"coram Deo. The Biblical sense of "calling" and its medieval canonization as monasticism defined worldly labors. Industry and progress were divine as the postmillennialism became a jubilant mood of expectation.

However, Benjamin's thesis examines the concept more in light of finance and financialization. Unlike England's "gentlemanly capitalists" which emerged from aristocratic intermingling with finance and the service economy, America and Germany saw the development of a financial class out of its major industrial forces. And as it's happened in the American world, this virtual and dematerialized financial capitalism has simply burst out of industrial manufacturing's corpse like a xenomorph. The two theories dovetail if this capitalism is understood as a discrete phenomenon, a religion of credit depending on a religion of worldly asceticism. The former befits the mass democracy of contemporary share-holder capitalism, citizenship as entitlement to scraps. The mixed-economy of post-war Europe and America realized this economic mode, reflected in infinite plasticity. The need for free movement of capital began to butt against static regimes of private property, the old bourgeoisie pushed into a reactionary stance. It's in this sense that even a conservative or a libertarian could countenance certain critiques of capitalism. It has become a handmaiden to the welfare state, which sees its purpose as management of resources for maximum investment. The Marxian prophecy - that capitalism will melt all that's solid into air - gains credence here. The drive towards greater development and greater access of financialization (where all things are given a quantified value) can run against claims of property. The forces of progress becomes a revolutionary force that turned the old left into the old right.

This financial capitalism (in no way averse to statism or regulatory management) is what produces this empty sign. Capitalism is a permanent cult, a liturgy that never comes to an end. In a way, this makes capitalist liturgy of acquisitions and sales as an anti-mass, since there is never a dismissal, never a fulfillment. It is radically ecumenical, since there's no dogma (thus the use and discarding of the secular puritanism of industrial capitalism). And most importantly, befitting pure cult without end, there's not salvation. Capitalism only produces debt/guilt [Schuld], which should not (and often cannot) be paid. Unlike the older notions of thrift to end debt, this form of capitalism can only thrive on debt. While early America rejected the importation of this form of mercantile capitalism in the Hamiltonian system - which depended entirely on incurring national debts - such became the norm in the creation of the Federal Reserve. In fact, debt becomes wealth, and many become powerful through the buying and selling of debt. Instead of old monetarist theory - where the materiality of gold signaled money was, in some sense, a positive phenomenon - debt-based fiat money creates a zone of indistinction. Debt and credit, works and faith, blend entirely into each other.

For Benjamin, it was not only the bankers and their backers who oversee this religion. If the financier is a priest of capitalism, the hermeneuticians of suspicion are its prophets. Benjamin saw Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche as complicit in this destructive world-order. Nietzsche had proclaimed the death of god and the superman, which was none other than the beginning of this new era. God had died, but his potency had passed to his killers. This pantheism (or panentheism) was now the endless dance of capital. Freud had transformed the world through his charismatic cult of psychotherapy, but this new pastoral practice presupposed the regime of debt. One never found forgiveness or atonement, but simply became Homo vulnus, that must always pay interest on the debt-wounds of his self conscious. And Marx hoped to wield this phenomenon into socialism, not recognizing socialism always would be another vehicle to house it. A financialized economy leaps out of industrialization, whether mustached bourgeoisie or the rugged proletariat vanguard run the show. 

Thus the incisive monologue from demiurgic corporate officer from the movie Network. After stirring up viewers with his enraged rant about the corruption of America, George Beale, an otherwise colorless news commentator, electrifies the station. Rather than lose his job, Beale threatens suicide and harasses the slumbering masses. This theatrics is permitted until Beale makes known an otherwise unknown business deal involving his news network. A Saudi conglomerate sought to buy the American conglomerate which owned Beale's network. Having howled about it, viewers phoned their congressmen to complain about foreign money buying out American media. Invited to the heavens of corporate headquarters, Beale is given a "sales pitch" from Chairman Arthur Jensen. The speech is worth quoting extensively:

"You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale! And I won't have it! Is that clear?! You think you've merely stopped a business deal? That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations, there are no peoples, there are no Russians, there are no Arabs, there are no third worlds, there is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and sub-atomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature! AND YOU WILL ATONE! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state? Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel."

Aptly titled both a sales pitch and an evangel, such is the liturgy of financialization. 

However, Agamben wants to develop Benjamin's thesis further. What if there was a kind of dogma at its root? What was the "faith" of this new religion? Capitalism indeed was a parasite on Christianity, precisely out of the importance of faith. On the streets of Greece, Agamben was stunned by the name of a bank: Trapeza tes pisteos. It was a bank of credit, of faith. In this way Capitalism was the religion of faith par excellence. Indeed, it was faith alone taken to the extreme, a faith in faith, a pure credit that was entirely self-referential. It was this fact that defined the religion of capitalism:

"And just as, according to Benjamin, capitalism is a religion in which the cult has been emancipated from every object and guilt from every sin, thus from every possible redemption, so too, from the point of view of faith, does capitalism have no object: it believes in the pure fact of believing, in pure credit, which is to say, in money. Capitalism, then, is a religion in which faith - credit - has been substituted for God. Said differently, since the pure form of credit is money, it is a religion whose God is money." (69-70)

This relates to Nixon's permanent state-of-exception because now, untethered from gold, dollars become a perfect manifestation of money. It is entirely self-referential, which will only be more so as Bitcoin (likely a NatSec op) has cleared the ground for the creation of Dollar coins. The USD has now "emancipated itself from every external referent, cancels its idolatrous connection with gold, and affirms itself in absoluteness" (70).  Unlike the old Christian faith, out of which this radicalized sola fide in fidem has grown, this credit has no end. There is no hope, for the "substance of things hoped for" (Hebrews 11:1) which had constituted faith is no more. As its own referent, faith has completely collapse all ontological distinctions. There is no sign and thing signified, they've become one and the same, indistinct and constantly confused. The revelation that money is not real forms its own hyper-reality. The unreality of capital thus allows it complete domination, since it is nowhere and everywhere. This omnipresence (or drive towards it) leads to ever greater financializaiton. Having completely gutted and eaten out native industry, finance must infest more and more business. Firms must increasingly mortgage themselves to banks, based on future productivity which has little to do with market cues. Say's Law becomes sublimated, as production and growth become increasingly empty signifiers. Rather the shrewd suspicion that kept Henry Ford away from banks for as long as he was able, debt linked to future production becomes the only meaningful metric. Even as economies become increasingly zombified, with the putrid flesh of rusted factories falling off as it lumbers along, finance will continue. The liturgy will go on as investors will push the logic of quantified and rationalized commodification to further open up markets. Whether it's child pornography, the organ market (legal and illegal), web-camera prostitution (a commodification of a virtual body), all of these things represent the restless and endless anti-mass. There is no dismissal, there's no atonement. Sin must reign.

It's not a coincidence that this form of anti-material capitalism flowers with and within mass democracy. Rather than the ordered liberty of the old bourgeois order, a government formed around the infinitely plastic masses. Accompanied with procedurals and managerialism, where government is a neutral machine institution to be used to whatever end along the lines of formal rules to manage and allocate resources, democracy becomes an empty signifier. In no way like ancient Athens, there is polis or politics, only economization. It's no wonder that masturbatory philosophy of Jacques Derrida, along with other post-moderns, finds democracy interesting (and venerable). Capitalism and democracy flow naturally with a theory of semiotics that ends in babble. Drawing on Debord's analysis of the spectacle as complete abstraction of art and money as entirely self-referential, so too has language ceased to signify anything but itself. Transformed through advertising (thus language simply as a tool of commodification), speech no longer needed any particular referent. The denotative function of language - a reference to an extra-linguistic world - ceased in the same moment as money ceasing to refer to any extra-monetary world. Gold may have been an increasingly universal standard of money, but gold still existed outside the world of market relations. Its value was alien to market relations of labor and production (hence the invalidity of all labor theories of value), and was a gesture towards a world outside of humanity. But what is language if it only signifies itself?

The old universal standards of quality control - such as the gold exchange - was an institution of safe-guarding the caesura between gold as thing and gold as commodity. Similarly, logic protected the gap between language's signifying and the real it signified. With the nullification of materiality and reality, the self-referential gap becomes indistinguishable. Logic breaks down as language is freed from all restraints. The void at the heart of all these relations becomes all-consuming. Money becomes the only commodity, revealing the emptiness of all commodities; Language becomes mere communication, revealing the emptiness at the heart of the world. This zone of indistinction between sign and signified results in the apparatus of the will. Just as the power of money remains through belief (money as accredited, credible, and credit), so too does language continue to exist through the imperative. Today's social democrats are too mealy mouthed to speak as clearly as their national socialist cousins. They will not command, but offer ominous obligations. Black lives matter is neither an argument nor a denotative statement of fact (since the statement is a moral judgement). What does it mean? It's a vague threat to conform. Nevertheless, ronaworld has created a greater sense of crisis and threat. Wear a Mask! Social Distance! Get Vaccinated! Of course, Conservative Inc. has produced its own slate of imperatives. Make America Great Again! Back the Blue! These are vague, somewhat universal, commands that describe an unreality that is summoned into existence. The imperative is neither real nor unreal, and thus whatever it impacts cannot be said. The world becomes entirely plastic before will-worshipers battling for control.

Yet every command creates crisis. An imperative may come to be, or not, and this produces an anxiety of apocalyptic dimensions. Agamben rightly cites Ivan Illich's claim that the modern world is neither anti-Christian nor post-Christian, but the most explicitly Christian Era in Human history. It's a betrayal of Christ, yes, but it's entirely ecclesiastical and apocalyptic worldview that dominates. In relation to the religion of capitalism, it's the constant production of crisis. One can easily become exhausted by the sheer number of claims about the end of capitalism. Lenin's critique of "late capitalism" (imperial and financial) in the early twentieth century seems ridiculous, only to be outmatched by far less incisive commentators who repeat the same nostrum. Any day the system will collapse. Every war, every depression, every epidemic will have a swarm of leftists announce the immanent end of things. Yet the liturgy goes on. What is the telos of Capitalism? It has, again, siphoned off a Christian eschatological sense of Apocalypse - defined as linear time hitting the wall. The new preachers of doom are the secular priestcraft of professionals:

"today it is above all the scientists, transformed into apocalyptic prophets, who announce the imminent end of life on earth. And in every sphere, in the economy as in politics, the capitalist religion declares a state of permanent crisis (crisis etymologically means 'definitive judgement'), which is, at the same time, a state of exception that has become normal, whose only possible outcome presents itself, precisely as in the Apocalypse, as 'a new earth.' But the eschatology of the capitalist religion is a blank eschatology, without redemption or judgment" (74-75)

It's not only a pandemic that seems to offer a constant threat. It's also the never-ending environmental catastrophe of Global Warming and its Malthusian apologists. The world will be doomed, all life wiped out, unless western corporations start buying carbon credits. It's no surprise a traffic in a fiat indulgences mirrors the traffic in fiat money. The crisis generates its own solutions, which pass in the night without much of a twinkle of thought. Nevertheless, many people groan beneath the policy decisions that regulate movement, thought, and exchange to operate within these parameters. Green theology is nothing more than an avatar for the empty cult. Alarmist imperatives summon their own results. A never-ending crisis must constantly generate its own solutions, which salve the conscience even as they're incapable of concluding. The dark secret is that the Earth (more a mythologeme than a geo-spatial thing) can never be saved. And because this crisis has no conceivable end, its beginning becomes folded into an infinitely expanded presentism. The crisis is now!! Yet at that very moment, the anarchic origins of the crisis is unveiled. Capitalism can never end because it is nothing; climate change can never end because it is nothing. It has no origins, it simply appears, and no amount of data-plotting demonstrate any coherent account of a "beginning". The entire system runs from a void.

It's in this way that capitalism, as much as mass democracy or post-modern art, reflect the zone of indistinction that has plagued the West's metaphysical fracture. The quest for an origin and an end has, in most Western history, produced pairs of dualities that maintain their own borders. Authority and power, spiritual and temporal, family and city, subject and object - these were maintained and their relation investigated without collapse. Yet the question remains how one crosses the threshold, or how to tolerate indistinction, or even where the binary emerged. If, for example, several families constituted a city, what was *it* that allowed this transition? The current era is unique for this collapse has become increasingly severe, producing more chaos and more confusion, and thus the importance of the apparatus to determine what is one and what is the other. The liquidity thus takes a form, but from the voice of the magician that demands. The value of the dollar exists at the bellowing of the Federal Reserve.

But this too flows from its parasitic relationship to Christianity. The ontological aporia, criss-crossed through an apparatus of the imperative, flows from trinitarian theology. God is an-arche, without origin. Triadology - especially Latin theology influenced by Augustinian reflection and Boethius - emphasized the an-archic nature of the Godhead. At the center of the trinitarian relations between Father-Son-Spirit is an emptiness, the no-foundation and no-origin point. Agamben references the Arian controversy, where the debate revolved around whether Christ was an-archic like the Father or originated "in the beginning" [en arche]. But however these relations are affirmed, they raise the question of how precisely governance of the world in trinitarian terms can occur if there's no source or origin point. If there's no beginning for God's economy of the world, could that also mean an increasingly elusive end? Capitalism fully secularizes this phenomenon and brings the instability of the fracture to a more intense form. Thus the crisis point in theology proper, when God presumed a hidden God, that every revelation cast the shadow of Deus Absconditus, reveals the constant crisis. Behind the organization of all things, given the veneer of order and nature, lay a caesura that depends upon the skiff of the will to cross. Thus as a Luther trembled before the naked God of election, who stands behind (without comprehension) the Christ of mercy, there too does welfare economies become the mask for the naked will of financiers. Freedom becomes uncertain and must choose, bolted to its own ontologization at the behest of the anarchies governing of power. The final vision of the imperative is the demand to live or die from a source unknown and fundamentally indiscernible. The Invisible Hand is invisible precisely because it does not exist.

Agamben ends the essay without conclusion, but a sketch of what is to come:

"Against the anarchy of power, I do not intend to invoke a return to a solid foundation in being: even if we ever possessed such a foundation, we have certainly lost it or have forgotten how to access it. I believe, however, that a clear comprehension of the profound anarchy of the societies in which we live is the only correct way to pose the problem of power and, at the same time, that of true anarchy. Anarchy is what becomes possible only when we grasp the anarchy of power. Construction and destruction here coincide without remainder. But, to cite the words of Michael Foucault, what we gain in this way 'is nothing more, and nothing less, than the unfolding of a space in which it is once more possible to think'." (77)

The rest of the essay will develop the thesis a bit further.

In Ivan Karamazov's Parable of the Grand Inquisitor, the returned Christ is confronted with the bloodless and nearly omnipotent cardinal of the church. While the peasants of Spain rejoiced at the miracles they witnessed, the appearance of the inquisitor immediately cowed them. Arrested and imprisoned, the cleric informs the Christ that the same crowd which thronged him will cheer on his destruction. It was precisely the Word's failure to address these people in terms they understand that brought about his doom. If Christ had only accepted the serpentine promises in the Wilderness. If he had turned stones into bread, he would have won the loyalty of the masses. If he had performed the spectacle of the Temple Jump, he would have amazed the world into divine obedience. If he had bent the knee, all the kingdoms of the world would have been his. Did not Man's maker understand the needs of man? Only a few could bear the impossible possibility of obedience. Most men are weak, cowardly, derivative of their material conditions. If the Son of God would not accept man as man, then it was up to the Church to do so. God had abandoned man to an impossible path, the Church would govern as necessary, telling them comforting myths as babes and holding their hands as they expire. An ascetic who had loved God but departed, the cold hatred revealed a jaded love. Nevertheless, the Messiah should die. The Cardinal will kill God to defend the faith, maintaining the illusion no matter the cost.

Taking the parable on its own terms, and read through Agamben, the Cardinal represents the anarchy of power at the heart of the Church's rule. There was no origin, since God was clearly an incompetent creator and governor. There was no end, as Christ could not return. Instead, the clergy would maintain the non-existent power at the center of their power. In the name of a silent God would they act, never to conclude, only to govern. But the problem presents its own solution, for it is precisely at the moment that the anarchy of power is unveiled, it is as a counter to the anarchic freedom of the Christ. The Jesus of this parable does not speak. Instead, within the walled Babylon of the Cardinal, Christ opens new possibilities: the lame walk, the deaf hear, the blind see, the dead rise. What is the basis of this power? Where did Christ come from? Where will Christ go? In both cases, the biblical answer is God: the an-arche. Redemption does not happen in a moment of return or a moment of progress. Instead, the Kingdom of God is within you. The spiritual aristocracy of grace, the potential beyond all potential, the hope beyond all hope. It is the free life Agamben's beloved St Francis, who makes use his very life to establish a living form. He lives, but not him, but Christ in him.

In terms of this empty liturgy of capitalism, the endless rolls of finance's dominion, the objective is not to roll back the clock. No matter what happens, the "idolatry" of gold or silver will never return. Nevertheless, this creates an opportunity for a truly free market. Instead of entirely empty credit, the void at the heart of a commodity transformed into money is held at a standstill. Instead, a paper money linked to a wide plethora of commodity goods would overthrow a theory of endless debt without re-erecting the golden calf. A form of barter would be restored, though one that does not seek to dissolve money (or is a result from the loss of money) as some anarcho-socialists desire. Money isn't the problem in itself, but it remains as something that reflects the ephemeral nature of use-value. The defense of private property does not require a highly elaborate constitutional-state, which would only feed off the endless regulatory bureaucracies and litigious bottom-feeders that are concerned with cash-value. Instead, commodities and money are held at a stand-still, so man may recognize the insuperable gulf between what is and the medium of exchange. Instead, a credit would be suspended, and commodity exchange would not depend on the never-ending illusion of future wealth. This is not a firm or sophisticated economic analysis or platform, but simply the rudiments of a way beyond the nightmare capitalism - if it can be rightly so called - of the current era. If the liturgical production of Fiat Currency is not ended, the whole world will simply become money - a perverse fulfillment of God being in all things.

The an-arche of Christ opens the possibility of a faith suspended from works. The final work of Christ upon the cross was not the production of a new bank, with new notes to trade (a more potent righteousness substance that can be trafficked in). Rather, as fulfillment of the Law, the atonement put an end to its imperative. All these fake debts are wiped away, unveiled in their unreality. Thus the eschatological prayer of Christ calls upon the saint to forgive all debts, to neither seek them nor live beneath them. The future-oriented nature of the Law's command were manifest now in their reality. You will not steal, not because a punishment hangs over your head, but because you are now a cheerful giver. The door to righteousness, to a world of justice, appears amidst the wreckage. True Christology is the messianic, which defines biblical apocalypse -- it is the Apocalypse of Jesus Christ. And the messianic is not merely a religious disposition, but unites all modes of thought, whether economic or political. In a strange twist, the future of politics must flow from this point. The only way towards sound money is good Christology.

Priest of Nature: Humanity, Animality, and an Exposition of Giorgio Agamben's 'The Open'

What is man's relationship to his own animality? This question, more than man between angels and beasts or man as body and soul, has defined the modern political crisis. And this question has founded the modern political crisis that threatens to annihilate all that's human in the world. This stark reality - perhaps overwrought - was first seriously approached, indirectly, in the work of Alexandre Kojeve. 

Drawing on dialectical materialism of Hegel and Marx, Kojeve believed humanity was fast approaching its own end. This apocalypse did not mean an end of the species, so much as the end of history. Since the Battle of Jena, the human political question had come to a halt. The major questions had dissipated, the substance of revolution had evaporated. Even the Russian and Chinese Revolutions were nothing more than efforts towards Americanization, with projects to electrify the country side and impose Fordist industrial uniformity. The human would end, and with it all art and philosophy as decisive acts of wisdom. Instead, Kojeve posited that Homo sapiens would continue without reflection. Capitalism and Communism were two sides of the same coin, destined towards mutual recognition and synthesis (whether through FDR's New Deal and Lenin's NEP). The result was government over animal life and consumption, an economy of comfort. Human life would continue, but without decisive and meaningful action. Politics would simply be about the best management. Human art would resemble the songs of birds and the webs of spiders. The only alternative towards this Americanization of bestial consumption was Japanese snobbery. High culture and rituals refined to the point of extreme precision and difficult, yet without meaning, such was the possibility of a man freed from his animality. But what becomes of it? Here Agamben criticizes Kojeve's misunderstanding of this modern form of governance:

"Kojeve, however, privileges the aspect of negation and death in the relation between man and the anthropophorous [man-appearing] animal, and he seems not to see the process by which, on the contrary, man (or the State for him) in modernity begins to care for his own animal life, and by which natural life becomes the stakes in what Foucault called biopower. Perhaps the body of the anthropophorous animal (the body of the slave) is the unresolved remnant that idealism leaves as an inheritance to thought, and the aporias of the philosophy of our time coincide with the aporias of this body that is irreducibly drawn and divided between animality and humanity" (12)

In other-words, Kojeve's Hegelianism fails to see how man comes fully alive, not disappearing, through this entire dialectical co-incision of man and animal. Humanity does not disappear, but wax even stronger as it asserts greater domination over his own animality. Dialecticals do not find resolution through sublation, but only intensifies towards greater efforts of integration. Hence why Japanese Zen Buddhists of the Kyoto School criticize Hegel's Christianity as a stumbling block towards full dialectical fulfillment. Nishida, like Kojeve, appeals to the fecund nothingness of pure potency towards which dialectical fulfillment leads (beyond the tension of Creator-creature). Agamben's conjecture is that this sublation always has additional layers, and the nothingness of death does not arrive. Instead, self-care becomes the dominant paradigm. The aporia in this dialectic - life between organic life and life lived - drives modern politics forward in its effort to master Nature. The regime of comfort does not see the end of man for the smooth-brained comfort of the wise ape, but simultaneously the effort to make all things fit for Humanity. History may have ended, but it has only done so at the victory of an increasingly perverse form of Humanism.

The inhumanity of Humanism originates from the fracture between the two beings of man. The first is man as a biological organism, the mindless and repetitive functions of the body (the heart beating, the lungs expanding/collapsing, the cells dividing). The second is man's external interaction with the world, both his sensory and intellectual apprehension.  But what is the thing that holds these two things together? Life itself becomes *the thing*, yet it is precisely life because it is not anything, but an inappropriable and undefined potentiality. But unlike Descartes, and much of modern philosophy, the key point of examination is now how these two relate, but separate. The core issue is not to find where the soul is in the body (eg Descartes' pineal gland), but how the "person" is set aside in the consciousness removing medical acts of anesthesia and surgery. The inverse - the subsumption of animality - was present in Medieval thought experiments about the bodies of the blessed. How could a Human body remain distinct Human when so many of its functions were impure? Would intestines continue to excrete filth? Would genitals continue to reproduce? The general solution, found in Thomas, was that these organs remain without use. And this question then provokes thought about why God created these fallen organs in the first place. Medieval Christian Paradise and Modern Atheistic Posthistory both draw the mind back to origins. And this coinhering of beginning and end - between organic life and life lived - reveals the collapse that has become increasingly normative:

"When the difference vanishes and the two terms collapse upon each other - as seems to be happening today - the difference between being and the nothing, licit and illicit, divine and demonic also fades away, and in its place something appears for which we seem to lack even a name. Perhaps concentration and extermination camps are also an experiment of this sort, an extreme monstrous attempt to decide between the human and inhuman, which has ended up dragging the very possibility of the distinction to its ruin" (22)

The split has created the demand for a forced conjunction to determine precisely what is Human apart from what is strictly animal. The death-camp was an experiment to determine precisely where the line ran, to fix the moment of conversion from beast to man. This thought experiment, which formed the basis of Human taxonomy, became increasingly confused as Humanity seemed to have no formal significance whatsoever. Linnaeus, doubtful that man was any different from an ape, was simply the creature which could recognize itself as a creature. Such a disposition was more harshly unveiled in the Renaissance Humanism of Pico della Mirandola, which struggled with what man was in the hierarchy of being. Neither an angel nor a beast, man was capable of both. Thus to be a human was to be an empty mirror, a chameleon capable of change. The conjunction of Man with his own animal body was to recognize that he had nothing; he had no rank or place in the order of things, but capable of fluctuation as spirit or simian.

The core element of this self-knowledge, of a directed intellect, was man's relationship with language. It was language which set Man apart from the Apes, which lacked this capacity. The animals are silent. However, Agamben claims (contrary to Chomskyite fascism) that language is a historical phenomenon, not inherent in biology. Thus a fictive *moment* must be understood to distinguish Man prior to speech (Homo alalus, Man speechless) and Humanized Man. But this conceptualization involves a coinhering dialectic, for the humanization of the animal presupposes the animalization of man and vice versa. Every animal may become a man, every man may become an animal. The plasticity of Man's potentiality thus results precisely in regimes to fully regulate the animal so as to extract the Human or remove the animal. The death-camp with the Jew, as much as the operating table with the comatose, represents this process of animalizing the Human, the production of bare-life. Thus every effort to master Nature-Animal as Human is simultaneously an attempt to master the Human as Nature-Animal. 

This operation explains the drive, from the Renaissance onwards, to master the natural world as a speechless lump that could, through work, be humanized. But at the same time, it also opened the darkened possibility of man's reversion into animality. This caesura mobilizes both industrial exploitation of the environment (a favorite topic for quasi-Marxist Left academics) as well as eco-crusaders. Jane Goodall's mission to prove that the Apes are like Man mirrors the Nazi doctor's efforts to prove that the Jews are not like Man. In antiquity, this apparatus operated through the phenomena of the slave and the barbarians. What was in human form was not-human, at the same time questions arose of whether what was not-human (the satyr, the centaur, the dwarf, etc.) was in fact human. The truth of Green politics and Environmental movements is revealed at its most inhumane.

For Agamben, whether it's the ancient apparatus of designating the body of the slave from the citizen, or it's the modern apparatus of designating the body of the comatose from the Human (deserving of Rights), both unveil the categorical nothingness that is Man:

"Both machines are able to function only by establishing a zone of indifference at their centers, within which - like a 'missing link' which is always lacking because it is already virtually present - the articulation between human and animal, man and non-man, speaking being and living being, must take place. Like every space of exception, this zone is, in truth, perfectly empty, and the truly human being who should occur there is only the place of a ceaselessly updated decision in which the caesurae and their rearticulation are always dislocated and displaced anew. What would thus be obtained, however, is neither an animal life nor a human life, but only a life that is separated and exclusded from itself - only a bare life." (37-38)

Whether it's the process of humanizing the animals or animalizing the humans, they both result in the extraction of this empty middle term: bare life. This remnant can't be saved, the locus of damnation that the Anthropophorous machine (whichever way it moves) utilizes as it constructs Babel. Again, this applies as much to Green politics as industrial capitalism. The latter's drive to exploit the Earth as fundamentally inhuman was part of the process of humanization (hence the fascination with automata). The former's drive to animalize humanity in a flattened ontology. Is it any surprise that this double-movement was contained in the movement in an age of movements: National Socialism? Agamben, as are many leftists, are wont to criticize fascism and nazism with fairly uncritical vehemence. And my purpose is not to litigate the historiographical aporia on what precisely National Socialism was and did, and where it came from. However, Agamben's purpose can be simplified to recognize that the same regime which could effectively manage an industrial war operation (which liquidated undesirables - Jews or no - as much as it produced munitions) was also concerned to preserve animals and their environment. NSDAP could meld together its left and right wings (which, from time to time, faced purges and struggle) under Hitler as a symbol of this anthropophorous technique. The Fuhrer became the deciding factor, the enfleshed imperative - the living word - that determine the rising and falling of souls. In this way, the Fuhrer principle was the anti-Messianic expectant hope for many ancient Jews who saw the whole Gentile world brought under the heel of Torah. It was a cataclysmic determination: man would finally have his rank.

The alternative to this destructive drive is suspension of the machine, to cease the production of bare life. Heidegger began the process to reverse this through recognition of the split between the animals and humanity resides in its experience of the world. While the stone and all inanimate objects were worldless and humans were world-building, animals were poor in world. Instinct drives the animal, often in ways that defy any rational reflection. A spider creates a web in such a manner to perfectly fit the body of the fly, as well as allow the spider able motion, but it does so without intention or desire. And what sort of world does a tick experience, whose sensory abilities flow only to its natural progression to feed and reproduce (eerily described by environmental scientist Jakob von Uexkull)? However, in so doing, an animal remains entirely open for the entirety of experience, of full capture. Such was visible in the bee feeding on nectar, which continue to suck even as an experimenter removed its abdomen. It is the mystical imagery of a moth drawn to a flame, completely enchanted in its full submersion into its world. The experience of this light disinhibits the moth to fullness of its instinct. Yet, like this image of self-immolation, what was it that the animal was opened to? The animal is given (by its own internal instinct) to full immersion without significance, only opacity. The poverty of the animal is a openness without revelation.

But how is this open if this world remains fundamentally invisible in its opacity? Thus Heidegger, according to Agamben, is caught in a paradox:

"The animal is at once open and not open - or, better, it is neither one nor the other: it is open in a nondisconcealment that, on the one hand, captivates and dislocates it in its disinhibitor with unmatched vehemence, and, on the other, does not in any way disconceal as a being that thing that holds it so taken and absorbed. Heidegger seems here to oscillate between two opposite poles, which in some ways recall the paradoxes of mystical knowledge - or, rather, non knowledge. On the one hand, captivation is a more spellbinding and intense openness than any kind of human knowledge; on the other, it is closed in total opacity. Animal captivation and the openness of the world thus seem related to one another as are negative and positive theology, and their relationship is as ambiguous as the one which simultaneously opposes and  binds in a secret complicity the dark night of the mystic and the clarity of rational knowledge." (59)

This paradoxical relationship between profound ignorance and self-consciousness of knowing is revealed again in camera obscura through boredom. Heidegger describes the experience of one stuck at a train station. The next train is in four hours. He could read, but the words become meaningless and heavy. He goes for a walk, he counts the trees, he analyzes the board of trivial facts about arrivals and departures. He checks his watch, it's only been ten minutes. Extreme boredom is the closest man comes to the animal's full enrapture: he becomes fully rooted to a world that he can neither contemplate nor understand. It is simply before him, opaque and alien, enrapturing precisely in that is unwanted. Nothing is possible. But that's precisely the moment of true potentiality. The moment when the world becomes invisible in its opacity, a simply formless given, that the mind is opened to pure possibility. When all concrete possibilities suspend (the bored man can't read, can't concentrate, can't care) then pure possibility is possible, what Heidegger called "the originally possibilitization" [die ursprungliche Ermoglichung] (66). In this pure possibility, the potential to act and not act simultaneously emerges. It's this capacity to realize what will not be realized is precisely the moment of anthropogenesis, where Man can deactivate his relationship with his dishibitor. Man's freedom is in his self-awareness of being-here:

"Dasein is simply an animal that has learned to become bored; it has awakened from its own to its own captivation. This awakening of the living being to its own being-captivated, this anxious and resolute opening to a not-open, is the human" (70)

 It's precisely in this self-awareness of its undisclosed animality that humanitas is manifest. What is animal is neither reconciled nor removed, but left alone. However, Hedegger condemns metaphysics as prioritizing animalitas. In the current epoch, where all historical tasks have faded, the only thing left is the anti-politics of economization. The totalitarian movements of the Fascists and the Communists were not the last gasp of nationalism or imperialism, but their twilight. Politics had become the care of the animal body, to provide material safety through access to money, supplies, and medicine. Fascism, National Socialism, and Communism were not revolutions, as much as "movements" to reclaim (or build) a state. That's why German Nazis and Italian Fascists preserved the prior constitutional state (even if in a state-of-exception). Lebensraum was not a question of politics, but policy. It was the health of the German people, not a question of man's relation to the world, that was at stake. It's also why the Russian Revolution toppled the Empire for a modern state (a process already underway since the activation of the Duma). Lenin praised Ford as the only true Marxist in America and sought to bring about a revolution that mirrored the cartelization of the US toward material expansion. It was a process of Americanization, defined as the Kojevean end of history. And these efforts are thus no different than the Social Democracies of the West, which have only increasingly engaged the anti-politics of welfare-warfare from the turn-of-the-century onwards. The only thing that matters is the economy, and such marks out the emptiness of life hence. It is worth quoting Agamben extensively:

"Do we not see around and among us men and peoples who no longer have any essence or identity - who are delivered over, so to speak, to their inessentiality and their inactivity [inoperosita] - and who grope everywhere, and at the cost of gross falsifications, for an inheritance and a task, an inheritance as task? Even the pure and simple relinquishment of all historical tasks (reduced to simple functions of internal or international policing) in the name of the triumph of the economy, often today takes on an emphasis in which natural life itself and its well-being seem to appear as humanity's last historical task -if indeed it makes sense here to speak of a 'task.'

The traditional historical potentialities - poetry, religion, philosophy - which from both the Hegelo-Kojevian and Heideggerian perspectives kept the historic-political destiny of peoples awake, have long since been transformed into cultural spectacles and private experiences, and have lost all historical efficacy. Faced with this eclipse, the only task that still seems to retain some seriousness is the assumption of the burden - and the 'total management' - of biological life, that is, of the very animality of man. Genome, global economy, and humanitarian ideology are the three united faces of this process in which posthistorical humanity seems to take on its own physiology as its last, impolitical mandate.

It is not easy to say whether the humanity that has taken upon itself the mandate of the total management of its own animality is still human, in the sense of that humanitas which the anthropological machine produced by de-ciding every time between man and animal; nor is it clear whether the well-being of a life that can no longer be recognized as either human or animal can be felt as fulfilling. To be sure, such a humanity, from Heidegger's perspective, no longer has the form of keeping itself open to the undisconcealed of the animal, but seeks rather to open and secure the not-open in every domain, and thus closes itself to its own openness, forgets its humanitas, and makes being its specific disinhibitor. The total humanization of the animal coincides with a total animalization of man." (76-77)

All animals are humanized through welfare, all humans are animalized through warfare, driven together in the absolute confusion of both. All that's left is bare-life. This crisis is manifest in the constant LARP of both Left and Right. The desire to return to the guillotines of revolutionary Paris or the crusades of the medieval knight all reveal the utter emptiness of modern life. These are significations without reality, gestures towards the absolute boredom that modernity finds itself enthralled to. But rather than find a way out, it buries deeper. Third-positionism is the norm: the coinherence of capitalism and communism into a tertium quid. It's why fringe critics on both Left and Right are half right. The Nazis won World War 2, as much as the Communists won. The New Deal bureaucracy baptized unreconstructed Nazis (viz. Gladio) as much as it did make deals with Communists. The CIA empowered right-wing military juntas, as much as it built up left-wing parties abroad. The strategy-of-tension simply reflects a paradigmatic consolidation. As Kojeve noted rightly, the conflict between Capitalism and Communism was superficial and its end was in its synthesis. Either the Anglo world would absorb socialism or the Slavic world would absorb capitalism, but posthistory had already dawned. And thus, in Heidegger's analysis, the pure potency that marks out Humanity (an openness to opacity) was traded. Instead, man sought to bury into every secret of its biological reality. In opening what was ultimately closed (ie there's nothing below the empirical of Dasein), man closed his only opening.

Is there escape? Heidegger gestured towards one:

"man, the shepherd of being, appropriates his own concealedness, his own animality, which neither remains hidden nor is made an object of mastery, but is thought as such, as pure abandonment" (80)

This alternative is explored in the messianic philosophy of Walter Benjamin. In a critical appraisal of Gnostic cosmology, Benjamin utilized Pauline paradox: at the precise moment that creation was concealed as damned, it was saved. While Gnostics like Marcion saw redemption as what was heavenly leaving behind the hell-world of the Demiurge, Benjamin saw this evacuation as precisely the moment when Nature could be Nature. It was the "saved night" of unredeemable redemption. The transcendental and immanent are not resolved in commingling, but saved as the moment of their permanent disjuncture. The result is not a mastery of Nature, which had been abandoned to itself, but mastery of the relationship between Nature-Animality and Humanity:

The anthropological machine no longer articulates nature and man in order to produce the human through the suspension and capture of the inhuman. The machine is, so to speak, stopped; it is 'at a standstill,' and, in the reciprocal suspension of the two terms, something for which we perhaps have no name and which is neither animal nor man settles in between nature and humanity and holds itself in the mastered relation, in the saved night."

Agamben would, in other works, elaborate the name for this disjuncture as form-of-life. But here it's important to see what has been posited. Rather than the metaphysical operation which sought to think humanity from its animality (Heidegger's critique), humanity (or its truth) becomes possible through a suspension. Animality is not a puzzle to solve, it's not conundrum to master (either through humanizing nature or animalizing man). Rather Nature's limit is cognized without being understood, unveiled in its veiledness. 

Such was manifest, for Benjamin, in the experience of sex. In erotic entanglement, the opacity of man's sexuality is revealed. There's no higher meaning, no power or potency, merely the scandal of nudity. Agamben explicates Titian's Nymph and Shepherd - perhaps his last work - in this vein. The shepherd and nymph turn from each other in disinterest, with the former ceasing from his song and the latter's gaze turned away seductively towards the viewer. A darkened background sprawls out infinite, speared with the harsh visage of a lightning-struck tree. An image of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, its fruit eaten, the lovers have lost their innocence. They now know what would end the mystery. But it's precisely in ending the erotic enchantment that something new emerges. Conversant with each other's body, the lovers can embrace in forgiveness. Eroticism finds an end in the imaginative potential of love. Each one no longer seeking for a mystery behind the persona, but receiving each other as they are. Human nature - with its mythologized copulative extinction - is fulfilled. The moth does not fly into the flame. The reditus never consummates. The Many do not fold back into the One. Instead, the "dialectic at a standstill" resolves as Man's contemplation of all things as things. The metaphysical depth resolves in their opacity. The mystery is to be made use of towards a new politics. Justice becomes possible.

Such is the "economy of the mystery" that opens up a new relation, the eschatological immanence of the Sabbath.  The created world is precisely saved in its being left alone, animality finding redemption in its being left as animals. The vision here is not to resume, once again, a Humanizing machine to redeem the world. Rather, the world is seen as redeemed. The Pauline "groaning of creation" that awaits the sons of God finds fulfillment here. The messianic banquet - the wedding feast of the Lamb - is an end of history that establishes the politics of the New Jerusalem. The King ceases to govern, he can take his seat and reign. The Kingship of Christ finds its impotential here, as Man as a divine word can make use of the creation God had made. Pure potentiality leaves all things open as God has laid them open. Like the Kabbalistic imagery of the saints seated at the messianic banquet having animal heads, the new politics will not engage the same political metaphysics that had ended with the posthistorical totalitarian Social Democracy. Man becomes the priest - the naming of the name of all things unveiled as they simply are. Thus marks out the life everlasting.