International Journal of Philosophy and Theology

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About chronos and kairos. On Agamben’s

interpretation of Pauline temporality through
Heidegger

Ezra Delahaye

To cite this article: Ezra Delahaye (2016) About chronos and kairos. On Agamben’s interpretation
of Pauline temporality through Heidegger, International Journal of Philosophy and Theology, 77:3,
85-101, DOI: 10.1080/21692327.2016.1244016

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/21692327.2016.1244016

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY, 2016
VOL. 77, NO. 3, 85–101
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21692327.2016.1244016

About chronos and kairos. On Agamben’s interpretation of

Pauline temporality through Heidegger
Ezra Delahaye
Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

One of the key concepts in Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Paul is Received 2 July 2016
temporality. In this article, Delahaye examines this concept. Accepted
29 September 2016
Delahaye shows that Agamben’s understanding of messianic tem-
porality hinges on the opposition between kairos and chronos, KEYWORDS
which Agamben takes for granted. He consequently traces this Agamben; Paul; Heidegger;
opposition back to Heidegger’s influence on Agamben. This leads temporality; messianism
Delahaye to conclude that messianic temporality can be under-
stood as a variation on Heidegger’s idea of ecstatic temporality.

Introduction
In The Church and the Kingdom, a lecture delivered in the Notre-Dame Cathedral in
front of the Bishop of Paris, Giorgio Agamben accuses the church of having lost its
messianic vocation1. This accusation echoes Alfred Loisy’s lament that Jesus came to
proclaim the Kingdom, but it was the Church which came. Agamben comes to the
conclusion that the Church has lost its messianic vocation, because it no longer has the
original experience of temporality which can be found in the letters of Paul. In this
paper, I want to examine what this original temporality entails according to Agamben.
In order to do this, I will engage with Agamben’s reading of Paul in The Time That
Remains. The Church and the Kingdom, which came 9 years after The Time That
Remains for a large part repeats arguments Agamben already made in The Time That
Remains. For Agamben Paul is not just a founding thinker for the Church, but actually
for Western society as such2. Agamben’s accusation that the Church no longer under-
stands itself and its own temporality can, then, also be levelled against Western life.
In this paper, I will examine this idea of messianic temporality. I will do this in three
parts. First, I will examine what Agamben says about this temporality in The Time That
Remains. I will show that Agamben’s understanding of messianic temporality hinges on
the opposition between kairos and chronos, which Agamben takes for granted. In
the second part, I will trace this opposition back to Heidegger’s understanding of
temporality in both The Phenomenology of Religious Life and Being and Time. In the
final part, I will use Heidegger’s idea of primordial temporality as an ecstatic unity and
confront this with Agamben’s idea of temporality. I will conclude that Agamben’s

CONTACT Ezra Delahaye e.delahaije@ftr.ru.nl

© 2016 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License
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86 E. DELAHAYE

temporality is for a large part very close to Heidegger’s, except for the understanding of
the past, where Benjamin’s influence on Agamben is very noticeable.

A Agamben’s messianic temporality

Agamben’s most basic insight in understanding Paul’s letters, and thus Christian life, is
that these can only be understood through their messianic temporality. Agamben
writes:
The restoration of Paul to his messianic context therefore suggests, above all, that we
attempt to understand the meaning and internal form of the time he defines as ho nyn
kairos, the ‘time of the now.’3

The understanding of the temporality of Christian life is central for Agamben.

Agamben attempts to establish messianic temporality through a close reading of
the first 10 words of Paul’s letter to the Romans and the related semantic fields.
Interestingly, however, he does not in the first place try to understand this tempor-
ality by an examination of what Paul writes about temporality. Rather, he tries to
discover how Paul incorporated the messianic temporality as the background of his
proclamation. So, instead of turning immediately to what Paul says about time,
Agamben first gives an account of Paul’s self-understanding and the temporality
which is at work in it.
Agamben does this by considering the term apostle, which Paul uses to describe
himself in numerous letters. According to Agamben, the figure of the apostle needs to
be distinguished from the prophet and the apocalyptic. Each of these distinctions shows
something about the temporality of the apostle. First, on the prophet Agamben writes:
What is a prophet? He is first and foremost a man with an unmediated relation to the ruah
Yahweh (the breath of Yahweh), who receives a word from God which does not properly
belong to him; Prophetic discourse opens with the formula ‘Thus speaks, or spoke,
Yahweh.’ As an ecstatic spokesperson for God, the nabi is clearly distinct from the apostle,
who, as an emissary with a determinate purpose, must carry out his assignment with
lucidity and search on his own for the words of the message, which he may consequently
define as ‘my announcement’ (Rom. 2:16; 16:25)4.

The prophet, like the apostle, conveys the message of God. Each does this in his own
specific way. The apostle has an unmediated relationship to the word of God. He
receives God’s message and relays it to other people. The prophet speaks on behalf of
God. The prophet’s own voice is effectively lost in the prophecy. The apostle, on the
other hand, must search for his own words. The apostle is involved in the message he
relays. Agamben continues:
However one understands this closure, the prophet is essentially defined through his
relation to the future. In Psalm 74:9 we read, ‘We see no signs, no prophet any more,
and there is no one among us who knows how long.’ ‘How long’: each time the prophets
announce the coming of the Messiah, the message is always about a time to come, a time
not yet present. This is what marks the difference between the prophet and the apostle.
The apostle speaks forth from the arrival of the Messiah. At this point prophecy must keep
silent, for now prophecy is truly fulfilled. (This is how one should read its innermost
tension toward closure.) The word passes on to the apostle, to the emissary of the Messiah,
whose time is no longer the future, but the present. This is why Paul’s technical term for
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY 87

the messianic event is ho nyn kairos, ‘the time of the now’; this is why Paul is an apostle
and not a prophet5.

The prophet only speaks about the future. He gains his message directly from God and
the message is essentially the same for every prophet. People are no longer living the
right way and the messiah will come to correct it. Agamben emphasizes the future-
orientedness of the message of the prophet. Even though, through the prophet, God
intervenes in the present, the intervention is aimed at the future. Agamben opposes the
apostle to this, whose temporality is the aforementioned ho nyn kairos, the time of the
now. Agamben equates this with the present, but I will show later on that the present of
messianic time is not the present of our everyday conception of temporality. The
apostle’s temporality is the present, because the apostle always follows the arrival of
the messiah. The messiah, whom the prophet announced, has already come for the
apostle.
The difference in temporality between the two figures can be better understood
against the question of mediation. The prophet has an unmediated relationship to the
message of God. The apostle, however, has to convey the message through a mediation.
On the one hand, he does not proclaim a message of God, but rather the messiah and
its actions in the world. Because of this, the apostle himself has to translate these actions
into words. The prophet has a message which he can relay, but he does not necessarily
need to understand it himself. The apostle, however, does not receive a message, but
rather needs to relay a figure. The apostle’s activity, then, is a hermeneutic activity. He
has to understand and explain what has happened. The only way he can do this is by
relating it to life in the present.
The second figure against which Agamben contrasts the apostle is the apocalyptic.
About this, Agamben writes:
But the apostle must be distinguished from another figure, with whom he is often
confused, just as messianic time is confused with eschatological time. The most insidious
misunderstanding of the messianic announcement does not consist in mistaking it for
prophecy, which is turned toward the future, but for apocalypse, which contemplates the
end of time. The apocalyptic is situated on the last day, the Day of Wrath. It sees the end
fulfilled and describes what it sees. The time in which the apostle lives is, however, not the
eschaton, it is not the end of time. […] What interests the apostle is not the last day, it is
not the instant in which time ends, but the time that contracts itself and begins to end (ho
kairos synestalmenos estin; 1 Cor. 7:29), or if you prefer, the time that remains between
time and its end6.

Apocalypse is what happens on the final day, at the very end of time. In Agamben’s
view, this is the same as the eschaton. The apocalyptic, or eschatological, thinker
concerns himself with what happens on this final day. Apocalypse is a description of
an expected future event. The apostle, however, deals precisely with the time it takes for
time to end.
Agamben presents the prophet and the apocalyptical thinkers as figures against
which the apostle needs to be distinguished. In my opinion, it would be more precise
to say that these figures form the limits of the messianic temporality about which the
apostle speaks. The prophet comes to announce the coming of the messiah. His message
ends at the point where the activity of the apostle begins. The apocalyptic thinker
speaks about the very end of time. Messianic time is precisely the time in between the
88 E. DELAHAYE

two, namely the time which begins with the messiah and ends with the end of time.
These two events, the arrival of the messiah and the eschaton, form the limit markers of
messianic time. This remnant of time is the time of the now.
The remnant is a concept which shows up on numerous occasions in Agamben’s
oeuvre7. Even though he employs this concept for different ends, in each case it denotes
an inexhaustible excess between two concepts. In The Time That Remains, for example,
Agamben employs it in relation to time, the law and life. According to Agamben it can
be applied to Paul, because the remnant is a Pauline concept8.
Agamben begins by noting that the remnant is not a concept Paul invented himself,
but is one which he revived from the Jewish, prophetic tradition. In the prophetic
literature, the remnant is that part of the elected people which will be saved. Agamben
shows how for Paul his proclamation is addressed to that remnant of Israel9. Agamben,
then, addresses the question of how this remnant should be understood. He writes:

How should we conceive of this ‘remnant of Israel’? The problem is misunderstood from
the very start when the remnant is taken as a numeric remainder or portion, as is the case
with sever al theologians who understand it as that portion of the Jews who survived the
eschatological catastrophe, or as a kind of bridge between ruin and salvation. It is even
more misleading to interpret the remnant as outright identical to Israel, in the sense of its
being an elected people that survived the final destruction of peoples. A closer reading of
the prophetic texts shows that the remnant is closer to being a consistency or figure that
Israel assumes in relation to election or to the messianic event. It is therefore neither the
all, nor a part of the all, but the impossibility for the part and the all to coincide with
themselves or with each other. At a decisive instant, the elected people, every people, will
necessarily situate itself as a remnant, as not-all10.

In the first place, Agamben defines the remnant negatively. It is not a numeric
remainder. It is not Paul’s point that the messianic event makes a new, but smaller
division. The remnant is not a smaller group of electi. It is also not the same as the
Jewish people. Rather, the remnant is a figure that people assume when confronted by
the messianic event. The remnant can only be understood through what Agamben calls
the ‘unusual dialectic’ of the all and the part which can be found in Paul.
In Agamben’s reading of Paul, the all refers to the eschatological telos of the world.
The world moves towards its final fulfilment and at that point all of Israel will be
saved11. This world is ruled by the law, which Agamben establishes is a principle of
division for Paul. According to Agamben, the law is for Paul in the first place the
division between Jews and non-Jews12. The remnant is the threshold between these two
worlds, between the all and the part. Agamben writes:

Finally, the messianic remnant, which does not go beyond the part, but, as we have seen,
results from the part’s division, is intimately linked to this division. In this sense, the fact
that the messianic world is nothing other than the secular world, means that it is still in
some way partial13.

The remnant is neither the all, nor the part. Rather it is a division within the part. This
remnant will ultimately lead to the fullness of the all. This fullness can paradoxically
only be attained through the part. This leads Agamben to conclude the following:

The remnant is therefore both an excess of the all with regard to the part, and of the part
with regard to the all. It functions as a very peculiar kind of soteriological machine. As
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY 89

such, it only concerns messianic time and only exists therein. In the telos, when God will
be ‘all in all,’ the messianic remnant will not harbor any particular privilege and will have
exhausted its meaning in losing itself in the pleröma14.

In the remnant both the all and the part, the secular world and its eschatological
fulfilment are retained. They remain, but both are divided. They are divided in that
the other term is introduced into them. So, through the remnant the secular world is
divided and the potential for its fulfilment is introduced into it. On the other hand, the
eschatological fulfilment is also divided in that the particularity of the secular world is
retained in it. It is not an all-encompassing salvation in which all particulars are
annulled. In this way the remnant, and consequently the messianic, is itself fundamen-
tally a threshold.
Messianic temporality, the time of the now, should also be understood as a thresh-
old. It is a threshold in temporality itself. To further establish this point, Agamben turns
to the Jewish opposition between the temporal world in which we live and the
atemporal world to come. He writes:
The Jewish apocalyptic tradition and rabbinic tradition recognized a distinction between
two times or two worlds (‘olamim): the ‘olam hazzeh, which designates the duration of the
world from creation to its end, and the ‘olam habba, the world to come, the atemporal
eternity that comes after the end of the world. In the Greek-speaking Jewish communities,
it follows that two aiones or two kosmoi are marked out: ho aiön touto, ho kosmos outos
(“this eon, this world,”) and ho aiōn mellōn (“the coming eon”). Both of these terms appear
in the Pauline text, but messianic time, the time in which the apostle lives, the only time
that concerns him, is neither the ‘olam hazzeh nor the ‘olam habba, neither chronological
time nor the apocalyptic eschaton. Once again, it is a remnant, the time that remains
between these two times, when the division of time is itself divided15.

Agamben evokes the Jewish tradition of the two worlds. The Jewish idea of the two
‘olamim opposes a temporal, finite world in which we live to an infinite, atemporal
world in which we live after we die. This is the basic dualistic presupposition underlying
Christianity and the thinking of many philosophers. It is Agamben’s claim that mes-
sianic time lies at the threshold of these two times. It is neither our conception of linear
time, nor is it the atemporal eternity.
On first glance, things seem simple. First, you have secular time, which Paul usually refers
to as chronos, which spans from creation to the messianic event (for Paul, this is not the
birth of Jesus, but his resurrection). Here time contracts itself and begins to end. But this
contracted time, which Paul refers to in the expression ho nyn kairos, ‘the time of the now,’
lasts until the parousia, the full presence of the Messiah. The latter coincides with the Day
of Wrath and the end of time (but remains indeterminate, even if it is imminent). Time
explodes here; or rather, it implodes into the other eon, into eternity16.

Agamben reads the philosophical opposition between kairos and chronos into Paul. It is
highly doubtful that Paul himself used this terminological opposition. Paul only uses
kairos and chronos in close proximity to each other in 1 Thessalonians 5:1 and in this
context Paul uses both kairos and chronos together to refer to the time when the
messiah will return.
When he discusses the relation between kairos and chronos, then, Agamben cannot
turn to Paul, but rather turns to the philosophical tradition17. In this text chronos is seen
as containing kairos, but not the other way around. Agamben concludes that kairos is a
90 E. DELAHAYE

seized chronos18. This ‘definition’ is problematic in that it only indicates a relation

between two concepts, but does not define either one. Even more problematic is the fact
that Agamben does not discuss these concepts any further in his book. He seems to take
the meaning of kairos and, to a certain extent, chronos for granted.

B Kairos and chronos

Agamben’s understanding of kairos and chronos becomes understandable against the
Heideggerian background of much of his work. Heidegger is Agamben’s often unmen-
tioned, but ever-present source. In 1969 Agamben, still a student, was invited to attend
Heidegger’s le Thor seminars. These seminars were of a vital importance to the young
Agamben’s development as a philosopher19. In another interview, Agamben states that
he understands his own work as the development of the work of authors which are
important to him. One of the four authors he explicitly mentions here is Heidegger20.
Heidegger is an important resource for Agamben and in the following I will argue that
Agamben’s conception of time in The Time That Remains can fruitfully be understood
as a development of Heidegger’s notion of temporality in Being and Time.
Now, how does Heidegger conceive of kairos and chronos? Interestingly enough
Heidegger develops his concepts of kairos and chronos based on his own reading of
Paul’s letters and specifically the aforementioned letter to the Thessalonians.
‘Time and moment’ (5:1: ‘ περὶ τῶν χπόνων καὶ καιρῶν’ always used in one) offers a special
problem for the explication. The ‘When’ is already not originally grasped, insofar as it is
grasped in the sense of an attitudinal ‘objective’ time. The time of ‘factical life’ in its falling,
unemphasized, non-Christian sense is also not meant. Paul does not say ‘When,’ because
this expression is inadequate to what is to be expressed, because it does not suffice21.

Heidegger defines chronos as the unemphasized sense of time. It is time as it is

experienced in everyday, factical life. This time is ‘objective’. It is the time of the
clock and the time which one can measure and calculate with. Heidegger puts
‘objective’ between scare quotes, because this chronological account of time is far
from objective22. Although Heidegger later drops the term ‘chronological’ to refer to
this conception of time, it will continue to play an important role in Being and
Time.
The best articulation for this chronological conception of time, however, is found in
Heidegger’s The Concept of Time, a lecture he delivered in 1924, 3 years after his
lectures on Paul.
What do we learn from the clock about time? Time is something in which a now-point
may be arbitrarily fixed, such that, with respect to two different timepoints, one is earlier
and the other later. And yet no now-point of time is privileged over any other. As ‘now’,
any now-point of time is the possible earlier of a later; as ‘later’, it is the later of an earlier.
This time is thoroughly uniform, homogeneous. Only in so far as time is constituted as
homogeneous is it measurable. Time is thus an unfurling whose stages stand in a relation
of earlier and later to one another. Each earlier and later can be determined in terms of a
now which, however, is itself arbitrary. If we approach an event with a clock, then the clock
makes the event explicit, but more with respect to its unfolding in the now than with
respect to the how-much of its duration. What primarily the clock does in each case is not
to indicate the how long or how-much of time in its present flowing, but to determine the
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY 91

specific fixing of the now. If I take out my watch, then the first thing I say is: ‘Now it is
nine o’clock; thirty minutes since that occurred. In three hours it will be twelve.’23

In his lectures on Paul Heidegger defined chronological time as ‘attitudinal objective’

time. At the beginning of the text, Heidegger argued that this approach to reality is the
scientific one24. In The Concept of Time, Heidegger makes a similar point about the
time of the clock. This time is a measurable time in which any moment can be replaced
by any other. This time is a pure linear homogeneity. The scientist needs this, because
he needs to be able to calculate with time.
Like Agamben, Heidegger claims that Paul opposes kairological time to chron-
ological time. Heidegger finds Paul’s discussion of kairological time in the answer he
formulates to the question Paul was probably asked about when the parousia,
the second coming of the Messiah, will happen25. Paul’s answer to this is that one
can never know in a theoretical or cognitive sense when the parousia will happen. It
will always happen unexpectedly and one can never prepare oneself for its occur-
rence. The kairological experience of time means understanding the insecurity of
time.
Paul expresses the opposition between chronos and kairos by opposing two reactions
people have to the proclamation of the parousia. First, there are people who understand
the coming of the parousia chronologically. These people want peace and security. The
people who want peace and security not only misunderstand Paul’s proclamation of the
parousia and the eschatological dimension of Christianity, but they also misunderstand
their own lives26. These people have, at some point, accepted Paul’s proclamation and
became Christians. They could not, however, accept the radical insecurity of their
transformed subjectivity. Even without any mythical or apocalyptical element – which
is completely irrelevant for Heidegger’s philosophical reading of Paul – it is easy to
understand how a person who wants to secure everything against life and its inherent
unpredictability will be overcome by ruin. It is impossible to control everything in life.
A simple example that attests to this is the fact that no one can choose when or where
one is born.
Second, there are the people who understand the coming of the parousia kairologi-
cally. These people remain sober and awake and understand that the parousia always
comes like a thief in the night. They do not prepare or plan for it, but rather live their
lives differently. They live their lives accepting the fundamental insecurity of their
lives27. Because any moment could be the last, the homogeneity of chronological time
disappears. Chronological time understands every moment as equal to every other
moment. This way of thinking breaks if any moment could be radically different and
has to be understood in relation to event. In Heidegger’s reading of Paul, kairological
time entails living each moment in relation to its end.
Felix Murchadha argues that for Heidegger the underlying structure of the relation
between kairos and chronos is an opposition between continuity and discontinuity28.
Chronology as a linear, homogenous conception of time sees a continuity between
every moment and the next. Time gradually and consistently presses on. Kairology is a
discontinuity in this idea of time. The kairological moment breaks the linear progres-
sion of time and makes it impossible to understand time homogenously29. Kairological
time happens within and breaks chronological time.
92 E. DELAHAYE

According to Murchadha, Heidegger repeats this analysis of temporality in Being and

Time, albeit in a different vocabulary30. In Being and Time Heidegger neither uses the
terminology of kairos and chronos, nor does he explicitly develop his ideas about
temporality based on Paul. He does, however, make an opposition between two
forms of temporality, which mirrors the kairos/chronos distinction. On the one hand
there is primordial time, which corresponds to kairological time and on the other hand
there is the ordinary conception of time, which corresponds to chronological time31.
The ordinary conception of time is time as it is experienced in everyday life.
Heidegger defines this ordinary conception of time as follows:

This time is that which is counted and which shows itself when one follows the travelling
pointer, counting and making present in such a way that this making-present temporalizes
itself in an ecstatical unity with the retaining and awaiting which are horizonally open
according to the ‘earlier’ and ‘later’32.

In everyday life, one can either take the time for something or not allow any time for
something at all. In this way, Heidegger claims time itself is experienced as present-to-
hand33. This point can be clarified by considering the relationship between time and
space. Through the development of the natural sciences time has become an expression
of space: time is understood as the time it takes for something to move from point A to
point B. Space is understood as the place something occupies. This space itself is then
understood as an object, it is a ‘here’. It can, however, also be elsewhere. This is the case,
because space is homogenous. Similarly, time is understood as a ‘now’ or a ‘later’. These
are moments when something occurs in the world. The most important aspect of this
ordinary conception of time is that it mirrors the homogeneity of space. Both the now
and later are distinct moments which are completely equivalent. Heidegger explicitly
links this to the time of the clock34. This ordinary conception of time understands time
solely as a succession of now moments, which are all equivalent and with which one can
count35. Heidegger’s analysis of ordinary time in Being and Time is a development from
his idea of clock time in The Concept of Time, which is itself related to the idea of
chronos in Paul.
This ordinary conception of time is opposed to primordial time. This form of
temporality is a mode of being. One lives temporalizing. Time is not an external entity
as it is in the ordinary conception of time. Rather, it is a way of relating to the world. In
his discussion on kairological time, Heidegger makes a similar point. Kairological time
is a way of living time in which time is not seen as a linear, homogenous process.
Rather, it means accepting the insecurity of life. In Being and Time, Heidegger makes a
similar point about temporality. About this temporality, Heidegger writes:

Temporality is not, prior to this, an entity which first emerges from itself; its essence is a
process of temporalizing in the unity of the ecstases. What is characteristic of the ‘time’
which is accessible to the ordinary understanding, consists, among other things, precisely
in the fact that it is a pure sequence of ‘nows’, without beginning and without end, in
which the ecstatical character of primordial temporality has been levelled off. But this very
levelling off, in accordance with its existential meaning, is grounded in the possibility of a
definite kind of temporalizing, in conformity with which temporality temporalizes as
inauthentic the kind of ‘time’ we have just mentioned36.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY 93

Ordinary time, the time of the clock, is levelled off primordial time. The homogeneity of
ordinary time, then, stems from a ‘flattening’ of primordial time. Primordial time is,
according to Heidegger, ecstatic: it stands out towards something. Heidegger uses this
to denote that in primordial temporality the three ecstases, past, present and future, are
not ‘nows’ which are all the same, but rather that they all have their own specific
character. As was the case for Heidegger’s analysis of kairological time in his reading of
Paul, primordial temporality can only be understood through how it is lived.
Even though Heidegger had not developed this idea of ecstatic temporality when he
discusses Paul and as such, it plays no role in his understanding of kairological
temporality, I will argue in the final section of this article that Agamben does interpret
kairological temporality in this vein, albeit in a changed and critical way. In the
following, then, I will – from the perspective of reading Heidegger, improperly –
understand Pauline kairological temporality in the light of primordial temporality37.
With this I do not want to make any claims about Heidegger’s understanding of Paul,
but only about Agamben’s understanding of Heidegger.
Primordial temporality has the future as its primary ecstasis38. What is characteristic
about a life marked by this form of temporality is that it understands itself in relation to
the future as possibility. Heidegger claims that Dasein – the term which for present
purposes is equivalent to life – understands itself as its possibilities. You live towards a
future which you project ahead of yourself. The essence of life is not what someone is,
but rather life’s possibilities. This is the case because Dasein always has possibilities left
outstanding. As a very minimum, Heidegger argues, death is always necessarily left as a
possibility39. Essentially, the future should be understood as an openness towards what
is to come40.
This is very similar to what Heidegger claims about kairological time. Kairological
time is lived towards the parousia. Life has to be lived in the radical insecurity of not
knowing when the parousia will happen. For kairological time, however, Heidegger
does not explicitly discuss the dimensions of the past and the present. These ecstases do
play a role in primordial time and in Agamben’s understanding of kairos, however.
Heidegger defines the present in primordial time not as a now, but as a making
present. It means that Dasein should let itself be encountered by that which is present41.
Again this denotes an essential openness. This time not towards the future, but towards
that which is present in one’s surroundings. This does play a role in Heidegger’s
understanding of Paul, but not as a temporal dimension. Rather, this is present through
Heidegger’s reinterpretation of how one should relate to the world42.
In primordial time the past is understood as ‘thrownness’. Dasein finds itself always
already in a situation. One has already been. This having been determines the possibi-
lities of life43. It is the idea that life is contingent in the sense that every concrete life is
determined by things which are impossible to control. You cannot decide where or
when you are born for example.
Primordial temporality, then, should be understood as the unity of these three
ecstases. Dasein is ‘ahead-of-itself-already-being-in (a world) as Being-alongside (enti-
ties encountered within-the-world)’44. Life is lived towards the future with an openness
towards what is encountered, but always determined by the thrownness of life. In the
final section, I will thematize in what way Agamben uses Heidegger’s account of kairos
and what this says about messianic temporality.
94 E. DELAHAYE

C The ecstases of messianic time

Both Agamben and Heidegger use the same concept of chronological time. For
Heidegger, chronological time is time conceived of as a sequence of ‘nows’, which is
completely homogenous. This time lends itself to being counted. The paradigm for this
conception of time is the clock. Similarly, Agamben’s conception of chronological time
is time as the duration from the beginning of the world to the beginning of the end of
the world. It is the everyday time of the world, which – as Heidegger shows – is
precisely the time of the clock.
How is this for kairological time? For Agamben kairological time is the time in-
between chronological time and atemporal eternity. As we have seen, however,
Heidegger understands kairological time through life. Similarly, Agamben’s idea of
kairological time as contracted time only becomes understandable through its relation
to life.
Kairological time comes into existence at a specific point within chronological time,
namely after the resurrection45. This is the messianic event after which time starts to
contract itself. This ‘lasts’ until the parousia, the moment when the messiah is fully
present. Agamben develops this into the idea of messianic time as the time which is left
to us46. This messianic time, however, can only be fully understood through an
examination of messianic life: life which lives time as remaining.
As I have already noted, through the messianic event life itself produces a remnant.
In Agamben’s reading of Paul life is determined by the law. The law, which instates all
conditions, is the principle of division. The law divides people based on their identity
markers. Every identity marker is, in its turn, forced into a binary A or non-A
opposition. This logic of the law is sustained by the law of noncontradiction and the
law of the excluded third. So, not only does the law see the world in terms of A or non-
A, it also prohibits any other option47. The messianic event overcomes this logic
through the katergein, the suspension of the law. Through this operation it instates a
remnant into any identity. Because of this, life is always lived as a remnant. I will
establish the meaning of this through how temporality is lived.
For Heidegger, primordial temporality has three ecstases. This understanding of
temporality is, as we shall see, at the background of Agamben’s idea of kairological
time, even though he does not explicitly state this. The question is, now, how should we
understand the three ecstases in Agamben.
The first ecstasis I will discuss is the future. For Heidegger, the future was the
primary ecstasis of primordial temporality. It denotes Dasein’s understanding of itself
as a possibility in the future. In Agamben’s reading of Paul this analysis of possibility by
Heidegger plays a central role, even though Agamben does not explicitly mention
Heidegger.
One of the central concepts in Agamben’s work is potentiality48. Agamben’s analysis
of potentiality, however, is also very reminiscent of Heidegger’s analysis of possibility49.
Heidegger’s main point is that the possible precedes the actual and that, because of this,
Dasein is determined in the first place by its possibilities. This is precisely what
Agamben claims the law does in Paul.
Agamben notes that katergein, literally means a taking out of the ergon, the activity.
When the ergon is in something it is energeia, which is the Greek word for act.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY 95

Katergein, then, is taking the ‘act’ out of something and consequently restoring it to
potentiality. Agamben notes that Paul only uses the word katergein in the context of the
law. The law is deactivated, which means that the actuality of the law is suspended.
Through this operation a space is opened up for potentiality50. Because the law decides
on identity, identity itself is suspended in a similar way. Who someone is can no longer
be decided by any specific identity, because the actuality of identity is suspended.
Rather, life is potentiality.
So, both Heidegger and Agamben make the same point that the potential precedes
the actual for a life which lives time kairologically. For Heidegger, this aspect of life is
what he calls the future. Agamben does not make this connection. The reason for this is
that Agamben only discusses the future in the chronological sense of the word. He
continually emphasizes that the messianic is not oriented towards the chronological
future51. This future is understood as a final fulfilment of life. Agamben rejects this,
because messianic temporality can only exist in a tension in chronological time52. This
chronological future is teleological. It has a specific fulfilment, or in other words:
actualization, which is already clear at the outset53. This is precisely the idea of the
future which Agamben wants to reject. The point of his analysis of potentiality was
precisely that life is potentiality, which means that it does not have an a priori
determination with regards to its essence. This, however, is also Heidegger’s point in
his analysis of the future of primordial time. Even though Agamben does not call this
overturning of the actuality /potentiality opposition future, he makes the same argu-
ment Heidegger makes and for the same reason. The ecstasis of the future is present in
Agamben’s reading of Paul in this way. So, Heidegger’s ecstasis of the future is present
in Agamben’s concept of kairos, albeit not explicitly discussed as related to the future.
The second ecstasis is the present. The present was defined as an openness towards
the surrounding world. This is present in Agamben, albeit in a slightly different way.
Again, for Agamben this is not an explicitly temporal character of messianic life. This
does not matter, however, because as Agamben repeatedly notes messianic life is living
messianic time54.
One of the main characteristics of messianic life is the hos me. Hos me is the Greek
for ‘as not’, which Paul repeatedly uses in this passage. Agamben remarks about the
hos me:
Hōs me, ‘as not’: this is the formula concerning messianic life and is the ultimate meaning
of klesis. Vocation calls for nothing and to no place55.

The messianic calling revokes the worldly calling by way of the hos me. The messianic
calling takes a worldly calling, such as the social–juridical condition of having a wife
and revokes it through the hos me. This revocation does not destroy the worldly calling,
but it does say how this calling should be lived. It should be lived as not being such.
This is not a matter of pretending that the condition does not exist. Agamben explicitly
rejects this56. Rather, the hos me is a way of living a worldly calling. In messianic life,
then, one should be open to life, but in this specific way. Life and the world present
itself, but they should be lived in the realization that the importance of the world is also
suspended.
Even though this is not Heidegger’s analysis of the present in Being and Time,
Agamben does get the idea of the hos me from Heidegger57. In Heidegger’s reading
96 E. DELAHAYE

of Paul, he makes the exact same point about the hos me58. The idea that the openness
to what presents itself should itself be understood from the perspective of its own
negation plays no role in Heidegger’s analysis of the present in Being and Time.
Agamben, however, understands openness precisely in this way, like Heidegger did
himself in his own reading of Paul. Here, again Agamben pushes Being and Time
towards The Phenomenology of Religious Life.
The last ecstasis is the past. For Heidegger, this is the thrownness of life. One’s past
determines one’s present life and one’s future possibilities. For Agamben the past
functions in a similar way, but the primacy comes to lie in it instead of the future.
As I have already noted messianic time starts with the resurrection. This event breaks
chronological time open. Agamben specifically focuses on how the past starts to
intertwine with the present. He writes:
Once again, for Paul, the messianic is not a third eon situated between two times; but
rather, it is a caesura that divides the division between times and introduces a remnant, a
zone of undecidability, in which the past is dislocated into the present and the present is
extended into the past59.

This contraction of time affects life. Life is changed by the messianic event and
temporality is experienced differently. This is why Agamben writes that messianic
time is the time we need to make time end60. There are two concepts which define
how, according to Agamben, the past should be thought in kairological time. These
concepts are typos and recapitulation.
First, the typos. In biblical scholarship typology is usually used to denote the alleged
prefiguration of the New Testament in the Old. Simply put, in the New Testament Jesus
is interpreted to be the Messiah announced in the Old Testament. The Messiah is the
‘type’ for Jesus. The same can be said for many other Old Testament figures with whom
Jesus or the new covenant which is instated with Jesus is compared, such as Adam,
Moses and Abraham. The concept of the ‘type’ denotes this kind of relationship.
The concept of the typos has a very specific temporality. Typology not only means
interpreting the New Testament in terms of the Old, but it also means reading the Old
Testament as the foreshadowing of the New. This is the point Agamben wants to make.
The typos signifies that the past and the present mutually refer to each other. The new is
already in the old, but the old is also in the new. The past already contains what comes
after it, but the present also contains the past. This can be clearly seen in the dual nature
of the messianic event. The resurrection announces the parousia and the parousia gains
its meaning from the resurrection. According to Agamben:
Through the concept of typos, Paul establishes a relation, which we may from this point on
call a typological relation, between every event from a past time and ho nyn kairos,
messianic time61.

Second, the recapitulation. According to Paul, messianic time is the fulfilment of time.
Agamben takes this to mean that messianic time recapitulates the past as a whole.
Agamben writes:
This recapitulation of the past produces a pleröma, a saturation and fulfillment of kairoi
(messianic kairoi are therefore literally full of chronos, but an abbreviated, summary
chronos), that anticipates eschatological pleröma when God ‘will be all in all’62.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY 97

Every kairological moment contains the fullness of the past. Agamben links the idea of
messianic recapitulation to ‘the panoramic vision that the dying supposedly have of
their lives, when the whole of their Memory and Salvation existence passes before their
eyes in a flash’63. The entire past flashes up in every messianic moment. Agamben’s
point is that in the messianic time the past is something which needs to be dealt with.
In the time of the now the past regains power.
Agamben clearly departs from Heidegger’s idea of the past as thrownness here.
While he retains the idea that the present and the future are determined by the past,
the past has a very specific appeal to the present. Where for Heidegger only the
future gives Dasein possibilities, Agamben sees the same power in the past. Contrary
to Heidegger, where the past is the horizons which limits the possibilities, Agamben
maintains that the past itself is a potentiality. For Heidegger the past is set and only
what actually happened matters, because that shapes the possibilities Dasein has.
What jobs someone did in the past, for example, determines which possibilities are
concrete. The jobs not accepted play no role. This is different for Agamben. The
jobs one could have accepted are also potentialities one still has, similar to the
possibilities the future offers. In this way, the past works like the future for
Agamben.
Agamben, then, takes the three ecstases of temporality which Heidegger defined and
potentializes all three of them. For Heidegger, the future has the character of possibility
and it is this aspect which fascinates Agamben. With regards to the future Agamben
almost copies Heidegger’s conceptuality. He only changes the vocabulary. With regards
to the past and the present, Agamben makes a bigger change. Agamben interprets both
ecstases in such a way that these two become potentialities. Essentially, Agamben
radicalizes Heidegger’s notion of temporality by attributing potentiality to all three
ecstases of temporality.
Messianic temporality, then, is the threshold between kairological time and chron-
ological time. That is to say, the chronological is opened up and kairological time enters
it. Because of this, there is a continual interplay between each of the ecstases and
chronological time. The future, which is for Agamben, the potentiality of life only gains
its meaning through the fact that it is precisely chronological time which is ending.
Because this time is in the process of ending the tyranny of the actual is suspended. The
present, understood as hos me, is similarly only understandable in relation to the
chronological time of the secular world. It is precisely the things of this world which
should be encountered with openness, but always as not being of the utmost impor-
tance. Lastly, the past. The chronological past is considered a static has been. Through
the messianic event, however, this past is re-potentialized and re-empowered. Simply
put, the past is not dead, but very much alive as a concrete potential. Kairological
temporality, then, means living these ecstases in unison.

Conclusion
In this paper, I have attempted to give a thorough examination of the messianic
temporality which Agamben finds in the letters of Paul. This temporality is central to
understanding Christian life and, because Paul’s letters are also founding texts for
Western society, life in the West.
98 E. DELAHAYE

According to Agamben, for Paul temporality is not in the first place a theoretical
problem, but a lived one. In order to understand Paul’s temporality, Agamben does not
begin with an examination of Paul’s words, but rather with the performative aspect of
temporality. Agamben thematizes how messianic temporality is bound up with Paul’s
self-understanding as being an apostle. The apostle needs to be distinguished from the
prophet, who conveys an unmediated message of God about the future, and the
apocalyptic thinker, who speaks about events which will happen at the end of time.
The apostle operates at the threshold between the present world and the eternal world
to come after the end of time. The temporality of the apostle is precisely this threshold
between time and eternity. Agamben defines this in terms of a threshold between kairos
and chronos.
Agamben takes the meaning of both kairos and chronos largely for granted. I have
shown how this can be attributed to Agamben’s implicit use of Heidegger. Heidegger
first uses the terminology of kairos and chronos in his own reading of Paul. He uses it to
establish the opposition between two types of temporality, which he will call primordial
and ordinary time in Being and Time. Chronological time is the measurable time of the
clock, which is a derivative of kairological time. Kairological time is time as it is lived.
This time is the ecstatic unity of past, present and future.
Agamben takes this idea of kairological time – which is not Heidegger’s own, but
Agamben’s construction – as the basis for his own understanding of messianic time. He
copies Heidegger’s analysis of the future being characterized by potentiality. Agamben
also repeats the idea of the present as openness, but he interprets this to the specifically
Pauline idea of the hos me, which is a potential for life. With regards to the past
Agamben only takes the idea of thrownness as a basic starting point. Agamben
radicalizes the idea of the past and also attributes the same potentiality to the past as
he did to the future. Agamben’s messianic temporality, then, can be understood as
ecstatic temporality in which all ecstases have potentiality.

Notes
1. Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom, 41.
2. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 1.
3. Ibid., 2.
4. Ibid., 60.
5. Ibid., 61.
6. Ibid., 62.
7. The remnant plays a role in many of Agamben’s works, but most prominently in:
Agamben, The Time That Remains and Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz.
8. See note 2 above.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., 54–5.
11. See note 3 above.
12. Ibid., 47.
13. Ibid., 56.
14. See note 9 above.
15. See note 3 above.
16. Ibid., 63.
17. Ibid., 68.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY 99

18. Ibid., 69.

19. Agamben notes the importance of Heidegger on his work in a number of interviews, see:
Agamben, “Agamben, le chercheur d’homme” and Agamben, “I luoghi della vita”.
20. Agamben, “Un Libro Senza Patria,” 45.
21. Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, 72.
22. See note 9 above.
23. Heidegger, The Concept of Time, 4E–5E.
24. See note 21 above.
25. I say probably because the nature of Paul’s texts leaves us with a gap in our knowledge.
Paul wrote letters which, as Paul at times states, are responses to inquiries in either written
or oral form. Unfortunately, we only have Paul’s responses, so the original inquiries are
only a matter of educated guesses.
26. For Heidegger, the eschatological problem is the centre of Christianity. The eschatological
nature of Christianity has, however, been covered up and misunderstood in the course of
the history of the Church. Although Heidegger does not become more explicit than
remarking this, his reading of Paul’ ‘primordial Christianity’ can be read as a criticism
of all – especially dogmatic – theology. See: Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious
Life, 73.
27. See note 9 above.
28. Murchadha, The Time of Revolution, 36–7.
29. See note 3 above.
30. Ibid., 39.
31. In the original text, the entire part I cite was emphasized. I removed this, because there is
no reason to emphasize the entirety of a citation. The citation alone is emphasis enough.
Heidegger, Being and Time, 457.
32. See note 3 above.
33. Ibid., 457.
34. Ibid., 473.
35. Heidegger uses the German term Jetzt-Zeit to denote this ordinary conception of time,
which understands time as a succession of nows. Agamben, following Benjamin, also uses
Jetzt-Zeit, except for him it is the time of the now, messianic time.
36. Heidegger, Being and Time, 377.
37. Sheehan rightly criticizes this method of reading Being and Time into Heidegger’s text on
Paul. See: Sheehan, “Heidegger’s Introduction to the Phenomenology”
38. See note 36 above.
39. See note 3 above.
40. Ibid., 373.
41. Ibid., 374.
42. See note 21 above.
43. See note 36 above.
44. See note 9 above.
45. See note 2 above.
46. See note 3 above.
47. Ibid., 49.
48. Agamben, “On Potentiality,” 358.
49. For an examination of the relationship between Heidegger’s account of possibility and
Agamben’s notion of potentiality, see: la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 24–5.
50. See note 2 above.
51. See note 3 above.
52. Ibid., 75.
53. Whyte, Catastrophe and Redemption, 110.
54. See note 2 above.
55. See note 3 above.
56. Ibid., 35.
100 E. DELAHAYE

57. Ibid., 33.

58. See note 21 above.
59. See note 2 above.
60. See note 3 above.
61. Ibid., 74.
62. Ibid., 76.
63. Ibid., 77.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
This work was supported by the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek:
Grant Number [360-25-120].

Notes on contributor
Ezra Delahaye MA is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and
Religious Studies of the Radboud University and master student at the Tilburg School of Catholic
Theology of Tilburg University. He spent 2015 as a visiting scholar at Villanova University. His
PhD research focuses on the interpretation of the apostle Paul in contemporary metaphysics.

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