Catastrophe and Redemption

SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy

Dennis]. Schmidt, editor

The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben

JESSICA WHYTE

~ "' .,
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany Contents
2013 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Acknowledgments vii
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, Introduction: On Catastrophe and Redemption I
magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior Katechon, Antichrist, Messiah 7
permission in writing of the publisher. Flowers and Chains 10
Chapter Outline I5
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu 19
1. The Politics of Life
Production by Cathleen Collins
Agamben and Foucault: On Biopolitics, Ancient and
Marketing by Anne M. Valentine Modern 25
Biopolitics and Sovereignty 28
Library of Congress Cataloging~in~Publication Data Biopolitical Being 31
The Rights of Bare Life 35
Whyte, jessica (Jessica Stephanie) Hoping Merely Out of Stupidity 42
Catastrophe and redemption : the political thought of Giorgio Agamben /
Jessica Whyte.
pages em
2. Politics at the Limits of the Law: On the State of Exception 47
Includes bibliographical references and index. The State of Exception 52
Summary: "A striking new reading of Agamben's political thought and its Carl Schmitt: The Paradox of Sovereignty 54
implications for political action in the present"-Providcd by publisher. Presupposition and the Problem of Application 59
ISBN 978-1-4384-4853-4 (hardcover: alk. paper) The State of "Nature" 63
1. Agamben, Giorgio, 1942-Political and social views. 2. Political science- Challenging the Normalization of the Exception? 68
Philosophy. l. Title.

JC265.A34W49 2013
3. If This Is a Man: Life after Auschwitz 73
320.0!-dc23 2012048336 The Remnant Shall Be Saved 76
The Danger 78
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I Where Danger Is, Grows the Saving Power Also 87
 vi / CONTENTS

4. "I Would Prefer Not To": Bartleby, Messianism, and the

Potentiality of the Law 97
The Law Is a Dry Canal 102
Aristotle and the Origins of Sovereignty 104
Past Contingent 110
Bartleby as Messiah? 119

5. A New Use: On the Society of the Spectacle and the

Coming Politics 123
Paying Pilgrimage to the Commodity Fetish 129
The Eclipse of Use and the "Dialectical Salvation of the
Commodity" 132
A New Use for the Self: The Global Petty Bourgeoisie
and the Coming Community 144
We Are Saved When We No Longer Want to Be 150

Conclusion: Unemployment and the Ungovernable 159

Notes 167

Bibliography 199

Index 211
 viii f ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

the final chapter appeared as "A New Use of the Self: Giorgio Agamben on
the Coming Community," Theory and Event, val. 13:1 (2010), http://muse.
jhu.edu/login?uri=/joumals/theory_and_event/v013/13.1.whyte.html.

Introduction
On Catastrophe and Redemption

This is forgetfulness: that you remember the past and not remember
tomorrow in the story.

-Mahmoud Darwish, This Is Forgetfulness

In March 2009, Giorgio Agamben gave an address inside the Notre-Dame

Cathedral in Paris. In the audience were a number of high-ranking Church
officials, including the Bishop of Paris. Although his talk has been described
as a homily, its content was far from edifying. "An evocation of final things,
of ultimate things, has so completely disappeared from the statements of the
Church," he told the assembled listeners, "that it has been said, not with-
out irony, that the Roman Church has closed its eschatological window."'
Charging the Church with having abandoned its messianic vocation, he
argued that, with the renunciation of the promise of salvation, the Church
had become simply another worldly power dedicated to the eternal govern
ment of this world. Despite his addressees, Agamben's remarks were not
simply an indictment of the Catholic Church. Rather, they touched on the
structural analogy he has elsewhere employed between the Church's aban-
donment of its messianic vocation and contemporary governments' aban..
donment of politics. Lacking a redemptive horizon, he argues, all politics
is "imprisoned and immobile"2-reduced to a technocratic, yet nonethe.-
less bloody, management of survival.' "The crises-the states of permanent
exception and emergency-that the governments of the world continually
proclaim," Agamben told his audience, "are in reality a secularized parody
of the Church's incessant deferral of the Last Judgment."4 Contemporary
politics, as he sees it, is this parody, in which all worldly powers are fun
damentally illegitimate and we are faced with the "complete juridification

1
 2 I CATASTROPHE AND REDEMPTION
and commodification of human relations."' In a bitter reproach to the
gathered Church Officials, he noted that in Christian theology there is one
"legal institution," an institution founded on judgment and punishment,
that continues eternally without interruption or end: hell. "The model of
contemporary politics-which pretends to be an infinite economy of the
world," he continues, "is thus truly infernal."
6 that "the twentieth century ended with a single surviving model of human
In this depiction of the permanence of the liberal capitalist present as
hellish, we see the immense gap that separates Agamben from the liberal
consensus that shaped the period in which many of his major works were
written. The unexpected fall of the Berlin Wall and rapid collapse of the
Soviet Bloc gave rise to a form of liberal utopianism that was most starkly
expressed in Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. In that
book, which now has the feel of a relic from a bygone (post)-historical era,
Fukuyama argued that despite the horror of the twentieth century, "good news
has come" in the form of the demise of totalitarianism and the ascendancy
of liberal democracy as the only coherent political idea with global reach.'
Writing in 1992, he argued that although it is possible to imagine numerous
political regimes that are worse than liberal democracy, we now have trouble
imagining a "future that is not essentially democratic and capitalist" or in
envisaging a political regime that could be better than the one currently in
existence." If we can no longer conceptualize a future that would be a fun-
damental improvement over our current order, he suggested, the "possibility
that History itself might be at an end" is worthy of serious consideration.'
This liberal utopianism was a paradoxical one-more a sigh of resigna-
tion in the face of the failures of previous, more compelling, utopias than
a promised land. 10 Although even Fukuyama was unable to stifle a note
of anxiety about whether such a posthistorical condition could actually
make us happy, the purchase of his thought relied on its ability to capture
a zeitgeist marked by the foreclosure of such anxieties, and the promise of
happiness they recalled, and the affirmation of the eternal and uninter
rupted continuation of the liberal democratic present. In stark contrast,
for Agamben, it is this transformation of the liberal-capitalist present into
an infinite horizon that is truly infernal.
Before long, it became clear that liberal capitalism had not produced
the irrepressible movement toward a world of peace and democracy that
had been proclaimed in the wake of the fall of the wall. Agamben's thought
was particularly suited to analyzing the transformations the demise of the
Soviet Bloc wrought on those liberal democratic states that Fukuyama had
portrayed as the victors of the ideological battle against totalitarianism.
By the time Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life appeared, with its
striking claim that today "it is not the city but rather the camp that is
INTRODUCTION I3
the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West," 11 liberal democratic
states were transforming from within, suspending basic rights and opening
spaces, like Camp X-Ray, that eerily evoked the repressive regimes that had
supposedly been permanently defeated. By 2002, when then-U.S. President
George W. Bush, echoing Fukuyama, told a military academy gathering
progress," the proliferating wars and draconian emergency regimes then in
place in many liberal states made it more difficult to view this as cause for
optimism." By 2005, when State of Exception was published in the midst of
the "War on Terror"-which saw the declaration of a state of emergency,
the suspension of a host of basic rights and the utilization of Guantanamo
Bay as an interrogation camp in which so-called enemy combatants were
placed outside the reach of the U.S. court system-Agamben's analysis of
our time seemed disturbingly prescient.
More than a decade later, it is clear that while the early reception
of his explicitly political works was bound up with the events that seemed
to confirm his central theses, the descriptive value of his thought was
double-edged: while it led to enormous interest in his work across a range
of disciplines, it tended also to obscure the underlying philosophical claims
about the nature of Western politics and metaphysics that provided the
horizon of intelligibility for his more provocative arguments. Furthermore, it
led to a one-sided focus on Homo Sacer and its critical diagnosis of politics,
which displaced attention from what I call the redemptive moment of his
thought. This one-sided focus generated an interpretation of his work as
"overly dramatic and alarmist,"" and marked by "a rhetoric of histrionic
hyperbole." 14 By focusing exclusively on his depiction of the catastrophic
nature of contemporary politics, critics tended to miss the extent to which
this diagnosis informs his view that our time is making possible a new
politics and a new form of life that would free humanity from sovereign
power. This means that such criticisms did not touch on what I suggest is
the real weakness of his political thought: that is, his tendency to see the
'I
intensification of the catastrophe of the present as the path to redemption.
It is undoubtedly true that Agamben is prone to profoundly bleak
characterizations of contemporary politics. He may be far from celebrating
Fukuyama's "good news," but he shares with the latter the view that we
have reached the end of history, and that this may have turned us into what
the latter calls a race of "men without chests"" unable to affirm any values
or to imagine anything worth fighting for-or, in Agamben's (admittedly
hyperbolic) terms, turned us into "the most docile and cowardly social body
that has ever existed in human history." 16 In The Open, he explicitly situates
this diagnosis at the end of history, remarking: "man has now reached his
 4 I CATASTROPHE AND REDEMPTION
historical telos and, for a humanity that has become animal again, there
is nothing left but the depoliticization of human societies by means of
the unconditional unfolding of the oikonomia." 17 By oikonomia, Agamben
means a form of economic government modeled on the household, and it
is this domestic focus on the sustenance of life itself that is central to his
indictment of contemporary politics. If "men are unable to affirm that any
particular way of life is superior to another," Fukuyama warns in The End
of History, "then they will fall back on the affirmation of life itself, that
is, the body, its needs, and fears." 18 For Agamben, this is the catastrophe
of our posthistorical present.
In his notes on the theory of knowledge and the theory of progress in The
Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin, a key influence on Agamben's thought,
briefly defines several "basic historical concepts," among them: "Catastro-
phe-to have missed the opportunity. "19 This book contends that, by "catas
trophe" Agamben understands that things continue as they are. Fukuyama's
utopia is his hell. Like Benjamin's, Agamben's thought is oriented to iden-
tifying opportunities to interrupt the machinery of the present. And yet, it
is within this catastrophic present that he sees the possibility of a new form
of life that would be worthy of the name redemption. To demonstrate this,
throughout this book I examine a number of central aspects of what he
views as the catastrophic situation of the present: his account of biopolitics
and the reduction of life to what he terms bare life; his examination of the
normalization of the state of exception; his reading of one specific historical
catastrophe, which he metonymizes with the name Auschwitz; his account
of the commodification and instrumentalization of human potential in the
society of the spectacle; and his depiction of contemporary government as
the rule of the economy over all of life. In each of these catastrophic situ
ations, however, I suggest that Agamben sees the condition of possibility
of a form of redemption that appears, as "an 'otherwise' where everything
is finished forever. " 20
In speaking of redemption, I refer (as I believe Agamben does) to a
profane experience, and not to a religious one. Although his work draws
heavily on Jewish and Christian messianism, his vision of redemption is
oriented to a use of the world that is "profane, free of sacred names,"
and "negligent" toward the divine.' 1 "Redemption" he makes clear in The
Coming Community, "is not an event in which what was profane becomes
sacred and what was lost is found again. Redemption is, on the contrary,
the irreparable loss of the lost, the definitive profanity of the profane.""
INTRODUCTION I5
Walter Benjamin once remarked that, with the idea of the classless society,
Karl Marx secularized the messianic kingdom.'3 It is my contention that
the redemptive moment of Agamben's thought takes us closer to Marx's
secularization of the kingdom than it does to those Church officials who
assembled in the Notre Dame cathedral to hear this professor of profanation
rail against their fatal compromise with the world. Marx's critique of capi
talism was a critique of a system in which the workers' needs to sell their
labor in order to survive drive them to "surrender its creative power, like
Esau his birthright for a mess of pottage."24 Similarly, Agamben's critique
of contemporary politics is oriented to a world in which potentiality could
be experienced as such, in the form of a free use of human capacities. This
redemptive moment of Agamben's thought is given various names in dif-
ferent books, among them "form.. of.. life," "use," "profanation," "the coming
community," and 11 the ungovernable." Each of them, I suggest, turns on a
state of the world in which human potentiality would not be substantivized
as the foundation of particular exclusive identities (national identity, for
instance), actualized in the body of a sovereign, or fixed in a naturalized
vocation. Like the ongoing catastrophe of the present, this conception of
redemption should not be conceived as a future state, and Agamben's mes-
sianism should be distinguished from eschatology. The "Day of Judgment,"
as Walter Benjamin put it "is not different from any others. "25 The present
contains potentialities that exceed the seeming necessity of its actualized
forms and Agamben's thought is oriented to a Destruktion of these forms,
which would enable us to uncover and experience this potential.
The central claim of this book is that there is no irreducible antag-
onism between this redemptive moment of Agamben's thought and his
damning account of the present as catastrophe. I therefore provide a reading
that departs from the dominant tendency to isolate the redemptive aspect
of his work from his diagnosis of the present. In doing so, I aim to illu-
minate the ambivalence of his diagnosis of our contemporary catastrophe.
The tendency to treat the redemptive moment of his thought in isolation
from his critique of the present has generated a portrayal of it as "a vague
prophesy"" disconnected from concrete politics, in which "despair with
what passes for political reality and indifference to historical change [are]
brightened only by the dream of ultimate redemption, some new "beauti
ful life."27 In contrast to this position, I argue that his political thought is
animated by the belief, as the German poet Friedrich Holderlin famously
wrote in Patmos, that "where danger threatens/That which saves from it
also grows. "28 It is in the very exhaustion, or bankruptcy, of the categories
through which the West has understood politics since its inception that
he sees both catastrophe and the possibility of redemption. Rather than

6 I CATASTROPHE AND REDEMPTION
seeking to revive the categories of Western politics that he believes are
exhausted (the rule of law, citizenship, sovereignty, human rights, etc.),
Agamben sees their exhaustion as the condition of the possibility of a new
politics. He thus offers an account of the present in which the catastrophes
of biopolitics, the normalization of the state of exception and the rule of
the economy bring us closer to, not farther from, the possibility of what
he terms the happy life.
In his classic study The Messianic Idea in judaism, Gershom Scholem
draws attention to the belief in the "catastrophic nature of redemption,"
which accompanies acute messianism." The nature of the catastrophe that
would precede redemption takes a number of forms, which appear in "glar
30
ing images" throughout the texts of the tradition. The "birth pangs of the
Messiah/' Scholem writes, are expressed in "world wars and revolutions, in
epidemics, famine and economic catastrophe; but to an equal degree in apos
tasy and the desecration of God's name, in forgetting of the Torah and the
upsetting of all moral order to the point of dissolving the laws of nature.""
Within Judaism, the belief in the relation of catastrophe and redemption
has a long and significant history-stretching back as far as the destruction
of the second temple in 70 CE-and is "deeply rooted in visionary religious
tradition."" This belief that disaster presages redemption is epitomized in
Sanhedrin 98a of the Babylonian Talmud: "When thou seest a generation
overwhelmed by many troubles as by a river, await him."" Such a mythic
understanding of history, as Aviezer Ravitsky notes, constituted a flight from
a historical reality that seemed beyond hope. When faced with such a hope
less situation, Ravitsky suggests that in the view of such messianists reality
itself "should be turned upside down and accorded redemptive significance.
34
Otherwise, the only alternative to paradox would be despair." This temp
ration to treat catastrophe on earth as a sign of a promised redemption is
one to which not only Judaism, but also Christianity and Marxism have
succumbed, and one to which Agamben is not immune.
In what follows, 1 argue that Agamben is too prone to see the inten
sification of catastrophe as the precondition of redemption. Beyond this
characterization of his thought, this treatment makes it possible to rethink
key problems of contemporary political theory. Seeing the catastrophe of
the present as itself a sign of redemption, 1 argue, constitutes a flight from
the difficulties of formulating a response to the seeming closure of the
political imagination that characterized the end of history euphoria of the
post-Cold War period. Today, even Fukuyama has acknowledged that his
tory may have a future." As new political struggles break out across Europe
and the Middle East, I suggest that, instead of reassuring ourselves that
the dangers of the present are the birth pangs of a new redeemed form
INTRODUCTION I7
of life, it is necessary to invent new political forms that are capable both
of forestalling the dangers of the present and contributing to a world in
which we are able to make free use of our own capacities. This will require
not the intensification of the dangers of the present (a strategy Benjamin
Noys has aptly dubbed "accelerationism"36 ) but a rupture with the truly
catastrophic dominance of capital. What is required is not the linear path
of that locomotive that Marx, as a quintessentially modern thinker, saw
as a metaphor for revolution, but, in Benjamin's beautiful formulation,
"an attempt by the passengers on this train-namely, the human race-to
activate the brake."37
Katechon, Antichrist, Messiah
In approximately 52 CE, the Apostle Paul received word that disorder was
threatening his congregation in Thessalonika. He responded with a letter of
censure addressed to the Thessalonians, who, it is reported, "had rejected
conventional sexual behavior and abandoned vocations in ecstatic expecta
tion of the imminent end of the world."38 In attempting to restore order,
Paul had to explain why the expected second coming had been delayed.
He can hardly have imagined that the figure that he introduced in order
to do so, "the katechon" (or restrainer), would go on to have an important
afterlife in the theory of state power. Christ will not return, Paul told the
Thessalonians, until the "man of lawlessness" (anomos)-a figure usually
understood as the Antichrist-usurps God's place in the temple. Yet, we
cannot know when this will be because there is a figure who holds back
the lawless one, and thereby delays the second coming: "For the mystery
of lawlessness is already at work [energeitai] but only until the person now
holding it back [ho katechon] gets out of the way. Then the lawless one
[anomos] will be revealed, whom the Lord will destroy with the breath of
his mouth, rendering him inoperative [katargesen] by the manifestation of
his presence [parousia]." 39 The katechon is thus an ambiguous figure who
both holds back the already operative, "mystery of lawlessless," and, by
extending secular history, delays the final redemption.
According to an interpretation that can be traced as far back as to
the Church Father Tertullian, the katechon is the Holy Roman Empire,
which is therefore assigned a positive historical function. 40 "We pray for the
permanence of the world [pro stato saeculi]," Tertullian wrote, "for peace in
things, for the delay of the end [pro mora finis]."" The political significance
of this figure was articulated most forcefully by the conservative German
jurist Carl Schmitt, who is better known for his definition of sovereignry as
 8 I CATASTROPHE AND REDEMPTION
the decision on the exception.42 In the Nomos of the Earth, Schmitt argues
that the katechon provides the only basis for a specifically Christian theory
of the state and history, as it enables a compromise between eschatology and
historicity, other-worldly promises of redemption and this-worldly political
power. "Empire," he wrote, "meant the historical power to restrain the
appearance of the Antichrist." 43 The centrality of this figure for Schmitt's
theory of the state cannot be overstated. "One must be able to name the
kate chon for every epoch of the past 1948 years," he wrote in 1947 "The
44
position has never gone unoccupied, otherwise we would no longer exist. "
As the secular force that holds back the "mystery of lawlessless," the kat-
echon plays the same role that this "apocalypticist of counterrevolution""
assigned to the sovereign: that is, it wards off what he saw as the greatest
danger: "the faith in the unlimited potential for change and for happiness
in the natural, this-worldly existence of man."46
Like Schmitt, Agamben sees the position of the katechon as one that
has never yet gone vacant; "every theory of the State, including Hobbes's-
c which thinks of it as a power destined to block or delay catastrophe-can
be taken," he writes, "as a secularization of this interpretation of 2 Thessa-
1 lonians 2."" From this perspective, contemporary liberal government, which
~ to survival. His political thought thus rejects every katechonic conception
finds its rationale in its supposed ability to ward off the dangers of political
A radicalism, would be as much a katechonic politics as the authoritarianism
A of the Schmittian sovereign. So, too, would the contemporary politics of
d This "Pauline passage," he writes, "does not harbor any positive valuation
humanitarianism, which renounces universal emancipation in favor of the
o of katechon." 56 Indeed, for Agamben, it is the katechon that ensures the
prevention of suffering, seeking, in Maurice Glucksmann's words, "not to
open the gates of paradise, but to bolt the gates of hell."48And, any left
politics that abandoned the idea of revolution and limited itself to preserv-
ing the victories of the past, whether conceived as accumulated rights, the
welfare state, or still-existent noncommodified areas of life, could similarly
be considered katechonic.49
In The Kingdom and the Glory, Agamben depicts the katechon as the
power that delays the end of history, and thus subjects us to the permanence
of a form of economic government that he ultimately traces to the Chris-
tian doctrine of providence. 50 While early Christianiry was eschatological,
and its believers-as we saw in the case of the Thessalonians-awaited
the imminent end of the world, when the promised second coming did
not eventuate, "Christianity," as Hans Blumenberg remarks, "had to adjust
51
itself to the rules of the game in the given and persisting world." When
the eschatological future becomes indefinite, Blumenberg suggests, it loses
its original connection with salvation, leading to the substitution of hope
for final events with fear of the destruction of the world and the judgment
believed to accompany it. With what Agamben terms the "exclusion of
INTRODUCTION I9
concrete eschatology," Christianity accommodated itself to the permanence
of the world. 52 It is in the context of this accommodation that Blumenberg
situates the doctrine of Providence, which was assimilated into Christianity
from Stoicism in order to turn the good administration of the world into a
source of satisfaction-something that is possible, as he argues persuasively,
"only if its duration is once more supposed to have a positive value."53
From this institutionalization of the Church, and the providential
accommodation of Christianiry to the permanence of the world, Agamben
derives contemporary forms of government, which are therefore premised
on the abandonment of eschatology and the renunciation of immediate
expectations of redemption. In his address to the Church officials at Notre-
Dame, he depicted the katechon as a figure of the law or state that is dedi-
cated to "the indefinite-and indeed infinite-governance of the world."54
With the abandonment of the Messianic economy of salvation, he argued,
this other economy, this katechonic infinite government, "extends its blind
and derisive dominion to every aspect of social life."55 Agamben, thus sees
the contemporary government of life, which Foucault had already stressed
exchanged belief in the parousia for a salvation that now took the form
of material subsistence, as a biopolitical economy that reduces human life
of politics that serves to defer redemption, whether this is understood in
messianic or revolutionary terms, through the fear of catastrophic dangers.
perpetuation of a catastrophic form of government that oscillates between
the biopolitical protection and the abandonment of life.
It is this eternal perpetuation of the present that Agamben refers to
as the "the days of the Messiah, which are also 'the "state of exception"
in which we live' "-a time between times, in which law, political forms,
substantive identities, and vocations have been stripped of content, and yet
remain in force. 57 Our situation, as he sees it, mirrors that of the Thessa..
lonians. The old forms of Western politics have been stripped of meaning,
and yet the law (which Paul saw as aligned with sin) remains in force,
disciplining our behavior and warding off the possibility of a new form of
life. The idea of redemption, and the "completely new politics" to which
his work gestures, would not provide the political with a new foundation
or new ends, but neither would it simply leave the empty forms generated
by the old ones in force. 58 The possibility of redemption, as he sees it, is
premised on our ability to "render inoperative" what he sees as the empty
forms of past social and political orders, in order to make possible a life
that is freed from both sovereignty and the apparatuses of government. 59

10 / CATASTROPHE AND REDEMPTION
The katechon, he argues, whether conceived as the Roman Empire
or as any "constituted authority," is simpty a "semblance" that covers over
"the mystery of lawlessness." 60 The katechon is therefore like a legal order
that must mask its own reliance on unlawful violence. It is, in the words
of the liberal magistrate in J. M Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians "the
61
lie that empire tells itself when times are easy." This lie, in Agamben's
view, is told by all those worldly powers that cover over the fact that the
state of exception is not the exception but the norm, and he therefore
gives positive significance to the revelation of the substantive lawlessness
of power. "The unveiling of this mystery," he writes, "entails bringing to
light the inoperativity of the law and the substantial illegitimacy of each
and every power in messianic time."62 It is therefore possible, he suggests,
to think of katechon and anomos not as two separate figures but "as one
single power before and after the final unveiling."" The unveiling of the
katechon reveals the lawlessness of earthly power, which then clashes with
the Messiah, who aims to render this power inoperative. This theologi
cal language is keyed in to the redemptive possibilities I have suggested
Agamben identifies in catastrophe. To shed light on his understanding of
this profane Messiah figure, and to clarify its relation to his diagnosis of
the present as catastrophe, I now turn from the theological register to the
political one, and give this web of connections an indicative sketch in the
political register of Marxism.
Flowers and Chains
If we reconceptualize Agamben's argument about the katechon in political
rather than theological terms, we find an argumentative structure that has
played an important role in the history of Marxism. This matters, because,
as I suggest in what follows, "capitalism" is a more analytically useful cat-
egory for grasping the simultaneously destructive and creative ambivalences
of the present than the categories of "modernity," "metaphysics," "nihilism"
or "the politics of the West," to which Agamben makes more frequent ref-
erence. This means that the way in which the Marxist tradition has dealt
with what G. M. Tamas terms the "Faustian-demonic" power of capital
is not without relevance for the attempt to analyze the way Agamben's
64
thought depicts the relation between catastrophe and redemption. Agam-
ben shares with Marx and Engels a certain celebration of capital's capacity
to melt all that is solid into air, to expropriate fixed social relations and to
nullify substantive identities. Although his thought largely avoids the view
that capital will crumble under the weight of its own contradictions, as
INTRODUCTION /11
numerous Marxists in the past had hoped, he does share the tendency to
give epistemological value to capital's power to drown illusions in the icy
waters of monetary exchange. Tamas has suggested that the road that passes
beyond capital would be an apocalypse in the original sense of the term,
65
"which reveals all the social mechanisms in their stark nakedness." The
catastrophe of the present, as Agamben depicts it, offers precisely such a
privileged epistemological point from which we can see our situation clearly
and formulate a way out of it.
In his very first book, The Man Without Content, Agamben refers to
"the principle by which it is only in the burning house that the fundamental
architectural problem becomes visible for the first time."66 This insight, I
argue, has remained consistent throughout his oeuvre. The collapse of those
state forms that purported to civilize capital, his work suggests, brings the
present into sharper focus. The fall of the Soviet Union, and the "uncon-
~ea.~ed rule of the capitalist-democratic state of a planetary scale," as he puts
It, have cleared the field of the two main ideological obstacles hindering
the resumption of a political philosophy worthy of our time: Stalinism on
61
one side, and progressivism and the constitutional state on the other."
Today for the first time thought faces its task "without any illusion and
without any possible alibi."68 The unconstrained rule of capitalist parlia-
mentarism has destroyed the referents of the categories of existing politics
"(sovereignty, right, nation, people, democracy and general will)," forcing
us to admit that we no longer know what we mean when we use them."
Even Fukuyama, writing in 2012, has identified what he depicts as "very
troubling" trends that may "threaten the stability of contemporary liberal
democracies and dethrone democratic ideology."1 The katechon has fled
the temple, and what remains is the catastrophic clash between an earthly
power deprived of lawful cover and those who seek to render it inoperative.
The catastrophe of the present, as Agamben sees it, is the burning house
in the glow of whose flames we can discern the outline of new political
forms to be constructed from the embers of what were once the seemingly
sohd structures of an entire political edifice.
"Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain" Marx
writes in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, "not
so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will
shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." 11 If as Tamas suggests
"h , ,
t e last flowers have fallen off the chains," this may allow us to see our
sit~ation clearly. It does not mean, however, that a form of redemption,
whtch I argue Agamben conceives as a world in which we are able to
make free use of our own potentiality, is more likely than ever.l' Capital
does melt all that is solid, and many emancipatory movements have been
 ----------- --- - -- -- ____ !111!11!!11!!11!1!11!!!1111!!1_ _ _,.........._ _ _ _ __
- -------------
12 f CATASTROPHE AND REDEMPTION
only too glad to see it wash away feudal power structures and fixed hier
archies, even if those hierarchies were quickly replaced by less tradttlOnal
ones." Yet to view the destruction of katechonic political forms as a cause
for celebration is complicated by the realization that these forms, from the
rule of law to the welfare state, were won by the emancipatory struggles
of previous generations. . Postone identifies to overstate the redemptive possibilities constituted by the
The unveiling of a purer form of capitalism and a state wtthout
recourse to legal cover is a product of capital's defeat of rival political and
economic possibilities (and of the forms of agency capable of actualizing
them) that served as brakes on its ceaseless subsumption of all life. Any
"political philosophy worthy of our time," in Agamben's words, will indeed
be situated after these defeats, and must attempt to explain a world in which
the political options of the twentieth century are largely without purchase
on the present. There is a danger, however, as Nays has tdenttfied, that
theoretical positions "remain tilting at reified models of the s~ate and capt.tal
derived from the previous social-democratic consensus, whtle reproducmg
in their alternative conceptions the dynamics of deterritorialising and dis
embedding capital."" To recognize the lack of purchase of older political
concepts does not mean that the empty forms of ascendant ~eoliberalcapi
talism offer greater opportunities for a noninstrumental pohttcs. Nor ts the
replacement of naturalized, fixed vocations with flexible, pr~c~rious ones
necessarily more conducive to the free use of human potenttahty.
To begin to think a redemptive politics that would contribute to a
world in which we could make free use of our capacities-in which, in the
words of The Communist Manifesto, "the free development of each is the
condition for the free development of all"-it is necessary to pose the ques
tion of agency." To speak of agency is not to suggest the voluntarism of an
agent conceived as bearing an omnipotent power to bend the world to hts
witl. As Perry Anderson has noted, "agent" Hke "subject" carries a ucurious
ambiguity," signifying both an active initiator and a passive instrume~t.
16
Forms of agency, and indeed our representations of them, are constramed
by the historical logics in which they seek to intervene. Anderson was
famously responding to another British Marxist, E. P. Thompson, whose
defense of agency in the face of the rise of structuralist Marxism reminds
us of the need to historicize our representations of the relationship between
structure and agency. Much of Agamben's work was written in an "end
of history climate" in which the ascendancy of a right-wing Hegelianism
coincided with a vision of the world as largely impervious to political
interventions. In such a context, there arose a postmodern temptation to
celebrate fragmentation, the breakdown of so-called meta-narratives and
the rule of simulacra, and to anticipate a "possible future" as Moishe Post
INTRODUCTION /13
one has put it, "on the basis of present developments in an implicitly linear
fashion without understanding what's constraining that future from being
. d ."77 A gamben ts
real tze - ulttmate
ly too attuned to the catastrophic dangers of
the present and too averse to the banaliry of what, following Guy Debord,
he sees as the society of the spectacle, to offer any simple celebration of
capitalism's powers of abstraction. Yet, Agamben too shares in the tendency
nullifying logic of capital, while paying inadequate attention to the ways
in which this logic simultaneously blocks their actualization.
Against the faith in redemptive reversal that would see the dangers
of the present as auguring a form of salvation, I argue that it is necessary
to experiment with forms of agency, or political action. These experiments
will undoubtedly be constrained by the logic of capital, but must none
theless see their task not as accelerating or intensifying this logic, but as
slamming on the emergency brake. The starting point of such action would
be the non-necessity of the current state of the world. Its task would be to
realize those potentials that are both created and blocked in the present:
potentials to realize the free use of human capacities; to create forms of
life that are not separated into an abstract and increasingly meaningless
political life and a private life that is ever more caught within govern
mental apparatuses and subjected to the imperative of merely catering to
the necessities of life; and to construct political forms and solidarities that
do not presuppose substantive identities and a dialectic of inclusion and
exclusion. These potentialities do exist, and they serve as inspiration for a
politics that would not nostalgically attempt to prop up what once existed
or hark back to an elitist premodern polis "uncontaminated" by economic
concerns, or what Hannah Arendt termed the ''social question.ms
The immense productivity of capital makes possible a world in which
the freedom from the imposition of labor would not be the privilege of the
few, premised on the exploitation of many (as in the Greek polis, for which
Arendt yearns). Yet, this productivity does not lead to what Marx, citing
Dilke, saw as true wealth, "liberty to seek recreation-liberty to enjoy life-
liberty to tmprove the mind ... disposable time." 79 Instead, it leads to the
abandonment of whole sections of the world's population, whose workless
ness condemns them to poverty and to a form of inclusive-exclusion that
expels them to the margins of a sociery in which social worth is tied to
productive employment. Capitalism both creates and blocks the potential
fo.r a free use ~f the self, and only a form of praxis capable of breaking
Wtth tts logtc wtll be sufficient to free this potential from commodification
and diversion into new circuits of productive capital. While capital may
expropriate fixed identities and vocations and reveal the contingency of
-------~~~~-~-~------...----------
14 /CATASTROPHE AND REDEMPTION
previous social positions, our task is to reveal the contingency, the non ..
necessity, of capital.
At its best, Agamben's thought allows us to think a form of politics
that would withdraw from the vacuous shells of established political forms
and experiment with new forms of political praxis in the present. At its
worst, he depicts the dangers of the present as themselves cause for hope
and gives redemptive significance to the expropriative power of capital,
leaving him unable to adequately think a rupture with its logic. At its best,
his political thought follows Benjamin in seeing our time as shot through
with "revolutionary chances" to redeem the hopes of those whose struggles
were defeated in the past.80 At its worst, he portrays the present as a time
in which all praxis is "imprisoned and immobile,"" and we can do little
but place our hope in the intensification of the dangers of the present. In
the face of the dangers Agamben's thought allows us to recognize, I argue
that we cannot risk a form of quietism justified by a belief that the saving
power will be found amidst the danger. Paradoxically, such a stance would
be open to the same charge Benjamin leveled at German Social Democracy
in the lead-up to World War 11: that it allowed fascism a chance because
it believed itself to be "moving with the current."82
Certain dangers are worth restraining, and certain gains of past strug-
gles are worth defending. To recognize, as Frederic Jameson does, that today
most left movements are conservative reactions against the creative destruc ..
tion of capital, which seek to "preserve the few enclaves still remaining
from a simpler era"83 should not compel us to dismiss these movements, as
Agamben tends to do. We should learn from the failures of eschatological
forms of Marxism, for which, as Benjamin Noys notes, "the katechon may
be any reform that delays final reckoning and so the ushering in of the
new communist society.""Among the most disastrous results of this posi-
tion-which found its starkest form in "Third Period" Stalinism of the early
1930s, for which Social Democracy was "social fascism"-was the refusal of
the German Communist Party (the KPD) to countenance a united front
with social democrats against Nazism. Ernst Thalmann the KPD's leader
who coined the hideously optimistic slogan "After Hitler, our turn!" was
shot in Buchenwald in 1944 on Hitler's orders."
Yet, a recognition of the need to contest specific dangers and bring
about specific reforms should not result in the embrace of a katechonic
politics, for which defending the remaining victories of past struggles is
detached from a continuing effort to realize their hopes for universal eman
cipation. Both the belief that such emancipation is too dangerous, and
should be renounced in exchange for a concentration on reforms in the
present, and the converse position, which sees such reform as a barrier to
INTRODUCTION /15
emancipation, rely on the belief that katechon and Messiah, reform and
revolution are counterposed. To assume that "the Messiah" will come only
after the antichrist has been revealed, presupposes that we must choose
between katechon and Messiah, or, between reform and revolution, assuming
that to the extent that reforms hold back the worst they also hold back the
possibility of emancipatory social transformation. In contrast, T J. Clark's
insistence that "it is wrong to assume that a politics of small steps, bleak
wisdom, concrete proposals, disdain for grand promises, and a sense of the
hardness of even the least 'improvement' is not revolutionary" leads us in
the opposite direction: towards conceptualizing the fight for reforms in the
present as co .. extensive with a revolutionary position. 86 Such a position
enables us to view forestalling the dangers of the present and preserving the
victories of past struggles as integral aspects of a revolutionary politics with
larger redemptive goals, whose realization would ultimately be premised on
a break with the logic of capital. If we recognize this, then perhaps we can
formulate a new form of politics, for which it would not be the katechon
and Antichrist, as Agamben suggests, but the katechon and the Messiah,
,,
defensive struggles and redemptive politics, which are revealed as a single
figure. Rather than simply wait in the face of catastrophe, we would then
take seriously the dangers of the present, without allowing ourselves to be
blackmailed into accepting that politics can be nothing other than the
demand for a comfortable protection, secured by the state.
Chapter Outline
Chapter 1 examines Agamben's claim that Western politics has been, what
Michel Foucault termed biopolitics since its inception. It traces the rela-
tion that Agamben terms abandonment and demonstrates that it is both
a political relation, which constitutes political life through the exclusion
and capture of a supposedly "natural life," and an ontological one, through
which the human is constituted in opposition to the merely living being. I
argue that Agamben's reorientation of biopolitics enables him to maintain
a critical stance toward those discourses, including human rights, which are
increasingly used to legitimate the biopolitical state, and to resist nostalgic
attempts to reassert a separation of life and politics modeled on the Greek
polis. It is only on the uncertain terrain of contemporary biopolitics, amid
the dangers he analyzes, I argue, that he sees the possibility of what he
terms a form-of-life-that is, an indissoluble unity of life and politics that
would escape the hold of sovereign power. 87 Yet, I suggest that he plays
insufficient attention to the role of past struggles in resisting the separation
 16 I CATASTROPHE AND REDEMPTION
of life and politics, and offers little on what would make the difference
between a form-of-life, and a life absolutely abandoned to the biopolitical
production of survival. Conceptualizing such a difference, I suggest, would
require attention to possibilities for political praxis in the present.
Chapter 2 examines Agamben's theorization of the state of exception,
a term he borrows from the National Socialist jurist Carl Schmitt. 88 I focus
on Agamben's suggestion that politics has been "contaminated by law" and
that, therefore, an analysis of the exception is a necessary precondition for
answering the question: "what does it mean to act politically ?"89 I contend-
against the recurrent tendency in the critical literature to utilize his critique
of exceptional politics to bolster the rule of law-that his engagement with
the exception is oriented to the possibility of a, new, nonjuridical politics-
that is, a politics whose terms are not those of the law. The normalization
of the state of exception that his work identifies, I argue, is conceived
both as a situation of profound danger, and as the condition of possibility
of this new politics. Such a politics, I suggest, is desperately necessary in a
context in which discourses of rights and legality are mobilized to legitimize
state militarism. Nonetheless, I argue that Agamben's account of the juridi-
cal contamination of contemporary politics makes him overly dismissive of
forms of political praxis that do exist in the present.90 I conclude that there
is no reason to be particularly hopeful about the contemporary normaliza-
tion of exceptional power, and that it is necessary to formulate a political
praxis that takes seriously the dangers with which we are faced, rather than
viewing them as signs that salvation is at hand.
Chapter 3 interrogates Agamben's reading of the profound danger that
he sees as consequent to the rule of biopolitics: the reduction of life to pure
survival. I suggest that the Muselmann-that figure of the Nazi Lager who
was deprived of all linguistic and relational existence and reduced, in Jean
Amery's words, to a "staggering corpse"'11-is the paradigmatic figure of this
danger. I trace this danger to his account of anthropogenesis, and suggest he
sees the production of the Muselmann as the final outcome of the produc-
tion of the human through the abandonment of the living being. Yet, in
the midst of this catastrophe, I argue, that Agamben sees the redemptive
possibility that politics could renounce its reliance on a transcendental fig-
ure of the human. I situate this redemptive reading of Auschwitz in relation
to other messianic attempts to see redemption emerging from catastrophe,
most notably in Zionism, and I suggest that seeing catastrophe as the pre-
condition of redemption leads only to a cycle of catastrophe.
Chapter 4 turns from Agambens's account of catastrophe to his under-
standing of redemption. My interrogation is framed by his claim that the
titular figure of Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener"-who neither
INTRODUCTION I 17
af~rms nor negates the law but simply "prefers not to" carry out his employ-
ers requests-" offers the strongest objection to the principle of sovereign-
ty."" Agamben's characterization of Bartleby as a new Messiah leads me to
a consideration of the messianic in relation to law, and I argue that he sees
the contemporary exhaustion of the law as the precondition for what he
terms, in reference to the Apostle Paul, law's fulfillment. I suggest that the
tdea of fulfillment enables him to provide an alternative to the dialectic of
constituting and constituted power and therefore to articulate the possibility
of a break with sovereignty. Nonetheless, I question his identification of
Bartleby as the key proponent of such a break, insomuch as this leads to
the valorization of individual weakness and passivity. In contrast, I suggest
that the "weak messianic power" evoked by Walter Benjamin in "On the
Concept of History" is better suited to thinking a form of collective praxis
that would break with the sovereign ban.''
. In Chapter 5, I suggest that the "world to come" to which the redemp-
tt~e .moment of Aga~;e~'s thought gestur~s differs from our world only by
~ shght adjustment. I tdenttfy the condttion of possibility of redemption
m what he sees as the eclipse of use value by exchange value in spectacular
capttahsm. I examine the new forms of praxis Agamben terms profanation
and play, which aim to find new, nonutilitarian, uses for the empty forms
produced by the nullifying power of capital. However, I argue that, because
he tgnores the problems of exploitation and the use-value of human labor
power, he is unable to adequately articulate how it would be possible to
put human capacities to a new use. Further, I question his claim that the
~p~ct~cle has dis~olved all social classes into a single petty-bourgeoisie that
ts mdtfferent to tdenuty, and I suggest that capitalism not only erodes the
foundations of previous identities, but also produces new identities and
identifications, making the project of forming a community without identity
a more. dtfficult one, whtch must be premised on a break with the logic of
capttaltsm, rather than in the extension of this logic.
. To conclude, I turn to contemporary Greece, which offers a para-
dtgmattc example of a specifically capitalist catastrophe. In the midst of
thts catastrophe, in which youth unemployment has risen to a staggering
SO percent, I identify the conditions of possibility for a life that would
not be defined by work, and could freely experience its own potentiality.
Ltke Agamben's coming community, I suggest that the realization of this
possibility requires a rupture with the dominance of capital. To finish, I
therefore turn to the figure he terms the ungovernable and suggest that the
combination of strike action, refusal of taxes, and withdrawal from the
empty for~s .~f parliamentary politics in the contemporary Greece signals
to the posstbtltty of a form of politics that could bring such a rupture about.