Giorgio Agamben has demonstrated the empty (and extremely destructive) aspiration of social democracy. Far beyond anything the National Socialists ever dreamed of, the average Social Democrat (or in the center-right as Christian Democrat, or center-left as Democratic Socialist) imagines a complete collapse of all dualities that the West has inherited from Aristotle (among others in an ancient tradition). Sovereignty and government, spiritual and temporal, is and ought, political and economic, public and private, all of these have simply collapsed into each other. The duality still exists in rhetoric, but its reality has moved to a complete confusion. Bio-medical tyranny of sequestering Jews away from the body-politic as lice or a disease has been far surpassed in the Ronareich of treating the insufficiently "healthy" as a threat to public policy. It's easy to forget the treatment of the Unvaccinated as not so much as The Enemy, but as a kind of pestilence to be done away with. The Homo sacer (he who is set apart from the polity) can die with impunity, for he has forfeited his rights as citizen, as human.
Agamben's project, in contrast, is to recognize that this hyper-governmentality (the need to catalogue and regulate everything) is a product of anarchy. There is no sovereign, there is no ought, there is no private, there is no economic, there is no cordoned off space which is, in effect, a product of a quarantine. You cannot claim the inviolable household, or soul, or absolute authority that is outside the group; it's a fiction that does not offer freedom, but ultimate slavery. Thus, for Agamben, the political solution lies with Plato. The Nocturnal Council, the ad hoc polis of concerned citizens to solve *particular* issues, is the basis of a just government. The suspension between all these binaries allows something else to emerge. It is not about ownership, it is not about mastery, but of making use. One lives their life in a particular mode, a particular style and way, according to the enrapture of the intellect. Like getting caught up in a landscape, all things blur in distinction, without any kind of collapse. One is in the landscape, but does not simply melt into it, but is rather suspended. Such is the importance, per Agamben, of Paul's theology, which counseled a kind of suspension. The throne is empty, the sovereign void, power has ceased, and all things may simply be because they exist.
I turn this on its head. Perhaps it is because I am a biblical Christian, where sovereignty and omnipotence cannot be simply put aside, where the resurrected Christ wields a rod of iron and will subdue all things until they're put under his feet. The crucifixion was not merely the suspension of the law, its cancellation, but its completion, engraved in heart of flesh, becoming the very reason-to-be for the saints. Agamben is a Platonist finding common cause with Christianity, I am a Christian finding common cause with Platonism. As Nyssen recognized that faith was the foundation of knowledge and thus the highest form, he inverted Plato's epistemology. The Scripture starts with the ear, while Plato begins with the eye (in Timaeus). Nevertheless, the same conclusions (which brought Christian praise for Plato as a fellow traveler) were enough for recognition. So it is with the critique of modern anarchy found in Agamben's work.
What is the alternative? For Agamben, the ideal is, again, being caught up in a landscape. It is his interpretation of Nirvana as neither being nor non-being. It is the wonder of gazing upon a beautiful woman asleep, there but not there. It is Plato's "bastard-kind of reasoning" in the insensate, but existent, phenomenon of Space, or chora, something that can be touched without being felt, like a numbed hand grasping an object. Here, the dichotomy is not solved, but suspended, leaving the mind to fully roam and contemplate itself. Who shall I be? as the Myth of Er replays again and again in a pseudo-reincarnation. The choice we have is not to self-determine ourselves, as if we were both Pygmalion and his statue, but rather to fall in love with the very path we cannot help but choose.
But while Agamben wants to disentangle means from ends, to snap the Karmic cause-effect system that fuels Samsara, that propels judgement, I want to do the same to prioritize ends. Why did God make the heavens and the earth? To rest, a state that God already had prior to and outside of creation. God is at rest before creation, but he is also at rest from within creation. Is God some Atlean builder, hosting up the pillars of the earth, musclebound with sweat running down his brow? No, he spoke and it was; his labor was always at rest. And so the crowning of the seventh day, the sabbath, as the time of rest was to ratify that the totality of life, of all things, was to be as God in rest. There are no means, all things put aside towards lounging and day-dreaming, not someone plunged into slumber but as someone fully aware in the totality of his imagination, the lucid dream in which all things are felt without any orientation to something else. God was at rest, remains at rest, and will be enthroned in rest. Labor is always a curse, as it was to Adam so it was to the Word of God whose ministry was to restore mankind to rest.
The question is not "how then shall I live?" as if life would simply be populated with hobbies until one is swallowed back up into being, cast down to be again (this aspect of Plato is consistent with Hindoo philosophy, and probably derived from it in some form viz. Pythagoras). Rather, in the Christian severity that beggars belief, there's only one life to live, there's only the heavenly sabbath rest of Edenic paradise. What will we do in Heaven? Will there be baseball? Can I see my friends? All of these are semi-formed pagan instincts armed against the true vision of rest. It is not as if there will not be friends, but they are products of thoughts, and thought is a product of leisure. But there is no intention, no effort, no work, only ends. It is not contemplation as pure means, but as pure ends, where all mediation is finally at rest as the Son hands the Kingdom over to his Father. Why this mystery drama? Why this unfolding of history? Only to show case that it all manifests the eternal state of rest, where one not only can look upon his works with ease, but work itself with ease. One not only sees the result of labor, but can remember the process and its feelings without then experiencing them. A bastard kind of reasoning indeed, but one suffuse with feeling even as one dreams.
Such might be splitting hairs, but the cash out (the supreme importance) is how history itself is seen. The truth of this world is not an endless rumbling (though without conformity to any particular form), but rather total stillness. It is the Parmenidean awareness that all is one, that the end was always at the beginning and intersected every supposed means. The joy that was set before Christ as he endured the cross was always his, as begotten regal word and as reigning resurrected supreme. To sit down, to contemplate, is not the unleashing of means, as if life was simply to take any form whatsoever. It is freeing being from existence, to fill all things as the glorious heavenly light encompasses all without confusion. I will not be a shackled body, but fill all things, as much as Christ sits on his throne even as he pervades all things in an eternal state of rest. The reversal here is that here lay an end that is everpresent without any means of acquisition, given by God through his Word. The grace of salvation is in recognition that, in the end, that was simply who you were, it was the life you were predestined to live seated upon a throne. The reversal is that there is a single pattern of saintly life to which all life must be formed. It is not a question of being the bee or the bird, but to be Adam in his Edenic radiance, yet now perfected like God, rested on the seventh day, watching over the guarded borders and named animals.
Man has not in his capability to be anything, a hero or villain, a beast or a god, severed from the pain of judgement. It is not a way to escape the current anarchy. The only end is the LORD's Law, to be the godlike Adam as we rule and reign, Eve the helpmeet and mother of all living. To deny this is to suffocate Mankind, whose dignity is unfixed because it is simply unrecognized, the rest ignored. We do not sit before the moving pictures of Er, but with a firm end of Edenic Jerusalem, now severed from any means of arrival. The bridge is closed, the time is ended, it is the moment of total assurance in the life of the saint where all works cease. Here, being seated with Christ, we live the end without means, already arrived, even as the means carry on. Earth's beasts teem and swarm, it is but for man to name them and shepherd them. It is not the Sabbath restricted to a single day, Saturday, but (as Calvin recognized) Sabbath is to be an ever intruding reality. We are not under the reign of elements, as Hesiod taught that man must always work or languish in poverty then death. Rather, bounty and prosperity is for us here and now, even as we may be poor and sick. For we are to rejoice always, living as not, for the end has come.
Man is to reign as a sabbath monarch, may we do so now and forevermore.
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