An accusation of aestheticism will often be levelled in order to invalidate the intended target as impractical, unserious, even frivolous. Yet it is the innate non-instrumentality of the aesthetic that Giorgio Agamben turns to when developing his conception of the transformative power of the Messianic. The Messiah, figured as the forever-presently-arriving initiator of the eschaton, functions precisely as that which de-instrumentalises and aestheticises life, and in this sense reveals an otherwise in which the violent machinations of history are brought to a standstill. In this paper I turn to Agamben's early focus on art and poetry in order to provide a reading of his Messianism that places the aesthetic and non-instrumental at the very heart of the redemptive telos of the Judeo-Christian traditions.