Giorgio Agamben has suggested that the West's capitulation to the machinations of historical time can be put down to its loss of a poetic use of language. For Agamben, to lose access to poetry is to succumb to the violence of a purely instrumental relation to language, such that all language is placed into relation with force. Few categories hold such a privileged place within Agamben's messianic artillery as poetry. Essential to poetry's capacity to produce this special time is its non-continuous, and fragmentary nature, and the ability of the poetic word in its capacity to make visible the non-coincidence of the signifier and signified, thus disengaging language from force. What is of interest here is that the messianic, in Agamben's work, requires no action, demanding only a cognition of the negativity that undergirds language, the suppression of which enables its instrumentality and thus its violence. A restoration of humanity's poetic faculty, then, does not indicate the spontaneous speaking-in-verse of entire populations, but rather an encounter with the fragmentary and contingent nature of signification, whether as poetry or prose. Often appearing alongside the poetic in Agamben's work is the feminine, though it is rarely (if ever) overtly named. Its conjunction with the poetic, however, provides an opening to discuss the feminine, and sexuation more broadly, as poetic and messianic categories. Engaging the Lacanian definition of the feminine as the constitutively "not-all," and the formulas of sexuation as formed in response to the castration complex, that is, the lack produced by entry into the Symbolic Order, in this paper I undertake a Lacanian reading of the messianic as it manifests as both the poetic and feminine in Agamben's oeuvre. I find that the feminine appears as an interruption to the instrumental, and constitutes an encounter with the negativity at the heart of language that any instrumental relation with language will necessarily suppress.