When discussing the Messianic philosophy of St Paul, Agamben takes a tangent to discuss exigency. The truth is that we not only have a mass of forgotten memories scattered through our mindscape, but an infinite number of "unforgotten" memories of things never remembered. Every tiny twitch, every micro gesture, every fidget, all of these are historical, and yet obliterated from consciousness. We take millions and millions of breaths, but how few any are remembered, and yet our entire existence depends on actions that we take no notice of. Thus, any image of the past, which we call memory or history, chew on this tough nut. Caesar crossing the Rubicon was full of all kinds of tiny bits and pieces of Unforgotten, inextricably woven into the event but irretrievably invisible. However, the point is not to do the impossible, but to recognize the invisible. Thus, for Agamben, the question is not a binary between becoming conscious of these abject fragments, or not; it's not a question of remembering or forgetting. Instead, the historical task is to honor the Unforgotten without ever hoping to retrieve them. They are simply the unseen of Human life.
However the threat in the above is what this therefore means for the historical task. If we are surrounded with so many unremembered memories, then what happens to the historical task? In more moralizing terms, if there are millions of souls that pass nameless across the pages of annals and chronicles than do we simply let them disappear into the dark? Should not the good historian retrieve these persons, constituting the Real of historical processes? Certainly the Marxist, as well as all the latter offshoots of post-Marxists & quasi-Marxists of Critical Theory, takes up the task. Social and cultural history are attempts to recreate the world as seen from the bottom-up. The Marxian political-economist sees in the Proletariat the subject of world-history, the means which will lead Humanity to the final stage of Historical struggle. More scientific Marxists will not say more than this, projecting a kind of swarm-like consciousness that acts (or will act) as one. However later sentimentalists, less sure of the iron laws of history, will then reconstruct the lives of these abject subalterns of time. It may be interviewing "regular people" in modern anthropological projects, or it may be the genre of "micro-history" following around a singular figure and restoring (in truth, ventriloquizing) his voice, along with the wider world around him. Cultural history produces a frozen moment, according to epochal divisions, of a particular world, may it be late Medieval England or late Imperial China. As the nomenclature demonstrates, grasping a particular "era" often reflects prejudgements about chronological division. Jacksonian America is set apart from "the Early Republic", and not for no reason. However, to consider this true history is to confuse a photograph for the entire world. History always is prejudiced on some logic. The goal to reconstitute a particular subject (whether the working-class or some preferred minority) is an impossible task.
The exigent always exposes the cracks in the portraiture of such historical projects (which Agamben is, as his political commitments, more sympathetic towards). These figures do not reveal their subjectivity, but (inexplicably!) reflect the author's concern. The subjectivity of the past is really a subjectivity of the future presented as a stable place, reified almost into an object. Thus one may speak authoritatively about what early Americans thought. Such may useful as a heuristic to average trends and general feelings, but it will never grant a true vision of Human history. Our ratlike Democratic ethos yearns to count heads and average means. Even worse, modern Jacobins would shriek about who *actually* represents the *authentic* voice of the people. There are then shades of subjective purity, endlessly groping towards the objective. Or, perhaps I should say, they grope towards the Absolute Subject. The epistemic revolution of Kant's "Copernican" turn meant that one could not naively speak about objective realities. Nevertheless, there was still a question of how one attained to knowledge of a transcendental subject. I will not rehash the theoretical efforts of Kant himself in his later years, Fichte, Goethe, Schelling, Hegel, among many others. Nevertheless, while Carlyle may seek it in a Hegelian world-spirit, most turned towards a kind of red-tinted view of the Masses or the People, whether in the liberal-nationalism of 1848 or the specter of Communism Marx prophesied about. All seek the key to the time and to find the right point-of-view to exegete History and "unseal the scroll" that God had shown Daniel.
Exigency is the unbreakable stone upon which all these methods crack. One may dismiss them in an arbitrary manner, claiming the mantle of "objectivity", or one may try to absorb them all, but failing in such an absurd task. Yet, as stated above, these are not the only paths available. Exigency may simply be allowed to exist, an invisible world that surrounds and constitutes us, yet never may be spoken (or remembered) except as a syntagma for the Unforgotten.
Agamben connected this theme to St Paul's curious displacement of himself. He was the "scum of the earth" and all his earthly merits were "dung" before the incomparable weight of Christ. It is worth quoting Agamben in long-form before continuing the argument:
"For Paul, the redemption of what has been in the place of an exigency for the messianic. This place does not involve a point of view from which we could see aworld in which redemption had taken place. The coming of the Messiah means that all things, even the subjects who contemplate it, are caught up in the as not, called and revoked at one and the same time. No subject could watch it or act as if at a given point. The messianic vocation dislocates and, above all, nullifies the entire subject. This is the meaning of Galatians 2:20, 'It is no longer I that live [zo ouketi ego], but the Messiah living in me." He lives in him precisely as the 'no longer I,' that dead body of sin we bear within ourselves which is given life through the spirit in the Messiah (Rom. 8:11)." (The Time that Remains, 41).
In other words, the Messiah cancels all our self-constructed or fleshly subjectivities without replacing them. What it meant to be Paul was to be, but not be Paul (the Pharisee, the Benjamite, the Hebrew, the student of Gamaliel, and so on), but Christ living in Paul. Such was part of Paul's very name change, where the royal Saul gave way to a play-on-words (paulos meaning 'small') nickname. Paul the Christian did not mean he replaced one kin-network with another (he still loved his country-men and would suffer eternal death for them!) or replaced a new school (sect) with another. Instead, the Messianic victory meant the suspension of all these bonds and reforged them to be made use of. One's ultimate fate was not tied to country or kinship, let alone deeds. The quest for immortality was now offered in the broken body of Christ, now risen to eternal glory. Christ, the King of Heaven, was all. And the Christ was not far away, neither inaccessible in the Heavenlies or cast down into Tartarus, but in your mouth. The Kingdom of God is within you, as the Lord said. Thus, Paul could only be Paul, he could only constituted himself as a subject, through a negation. He was Paul as not Paul, the not-Paul, the Christ in him.
What this analysis does is open a vantage on proper Christian subjectivity against the many false missteps, whether ancient or modern. The claim of subject is to cast a shadow, the sub-jectum, the posited core "thing" which holds an individual together. In ancient metaphysics, the pagan masses feared this being as a ghost destined for Hades, while the philosophers posited a true soul that could cycle through the cosmos. Whether the philosophers drew this idea from the Indian brahmins (viz Pythagoras et al.) or it derived from some shared Aryan influence and/or heritage, connecting Greece to India through a shared Sanskrit origin, it offered stability. The Atman of the Hindoo was similar to aspects of the Greek nous, a real self that moves up, down, and across the cosmos towards finality (howsoever conceived). This soul, which is something of a fragment of the divine, was a subjectivity that could only achieve salvation through knowledge of the absolute. The universal whole was a manifestation, in some way, of an original divine cosmos. Thus one achieves the "objective" view of the All. Christians sometimes blended this theory into efforts to see from the eye of God that was abstracted from the Passion of Christ. The modern turn, of course, absorbed the soul into the self, which then became increasingly cut off. Efforts to find an "objective" view always melted down, as positive legal theory swallowed up natural law and vomited forth nihilism. The effort to arrive as the Objective through secular ascesis, with ritual purifications and alchemical magic, has turned to nothing but a destructive subterfuge.
Instead, what Agamben wants to restore is the kind of mysticism that has consistently survived throughout the Church. It is manifest, particularly, in the theology of William Law, who had become enthusiastic after reading the works of Jakob Boehme. Law's rigid moralizing high-churchmanship, in the vein of Jeremy Taylor, gave way to a new kind of piety. As he would argue in his Dialog Between a Churchman and Methodist, it was neither faith nor works which saved in se. The Methodist (as many of today's megachurches and pentecostals) drum up faith, but it is a faith-in-faith work of flesh. It is the I grasping again and again to believe. It is not seeing salvation in the Spirit of Christ, the not-I I, but in the crude metaphor of Christ giving you his bank-account of righteousness. I even dislike Luther's analogy of a rich prince marrying a pauper girl. It is too weak, even as it is a handgrip towards the truth. It's not only that she receives his name and title, but she is him (in the same way a married woman may be addressed as Mrs. John Doe). For Law, the Spirit of Christ indwelling meant that spirit-wrought faith and works poured out from the same redeemed heart.
The question before us is not: who am I? but what form am I? Scripture provides the bedrock of images that dance before our eyes, intensely wound-together and condensed in the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. As I am nailed to the cross, am I the penitent thief or the scoffer? When I fall, am I humbled Peter who weeps and begs for forgiveness, or am I proud Judas who in grief suicides? The form-of-life is ever before us, cancelling out questions of subjectivity or objectivity. Instead, like Plato's Myth of Er we see our lives again and again caught up and chosen again. To negate the fleshly subjectivities is to invite the question of what is. If I live as not in my stations, how then shall I live?
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