Panel: AGAMBEN'S THEOLOGICAL-POLITICAL HORIZONS REIMAGINING JUDAISM, CHRISTIANITY, AND MESSIANIC POTENTIALITY



170.5 - AGAMBEN'S REMNANT AND THE CHRISTIAN PROBLEM

AUTHORS:
Kirkland S. (Trinity College ~ Melbourne ~ Australia)
Text:
This paper challenges Giorgio Agamben's recent provocations concerning the "end of Judaism" by pointing to the Christian coordinates of this claim. In order to understand Agamben's rendering of the theological-political dynamics of Zionism it is important to draw attention to the way that in Il tempo che resta and Quel che resta di Auschwitz he develops the concept of the remnant. The remnant is figured both as a mode of thinking a messianic temporality, thought through the Pauline kairos, but also as a mode of thinking a people. The latter is apparent in the relationship between the establishment of the messianic community in the revocation of vocation, or messianic klesis, and that people's relation to chronos, or to this world, but also in the coterminously authored Auschwitz, which is interested in the destitution or bare life that biopolitical modernity produces through the racialisation of Judaism. Agamben's "cut of Apelles", borrowing from Benjamin, cuts across the distinction between Jew and Gentile to generate a "not all", a people for whom ethnic belonging or circumcision is not a prerequisite for community. And so in Agamben's work a question remains over those who remain committed to the marker of circumcision. As has been noted by critics, Agamben's work makes little of the question of the dynamics of European Christian racialisation, particularly from the fifteenth century onwards, and indeed fails to note those theological critics who point to Christian antisemitism as the ground of modern racial thinking. Rather than simplistically seeing Paul as the hero of an anti-Zionist theology, it is suggested that the division Agamben wants to see Paul cutting across is precisely the division that remains, and with which Agamben's crypto Christianity cannot recon. In order to critically move forward with Agamben's messianism, then, we need to understand its supposition of a distinction between race and religion.