Huang excerpt

 

The equivalence of undead passivity, potentiality qua impotentiality and

messianism in the case of Bartleby has its sonorous echoes in The Open. In the

opening chapter of The Open, for example, Agamben refers to the miniatures in a

Hebrew Bible in the Ambrosian Library in Milan, which for him represent the

righteous on the last day as figures with animal heads. We would be justified in

reading these “representatives of the remnant of Israel, . . . of the righteous who are

still alive at the moment of the Messiah’s coming” (2) as the undead who inhabit the

zone of indistinction between humanity and animality. Such undeadness also stands

out in Agamben’s explication of Heideggerian “profound boredom,” which takes

the animal’s captivation by the environment as a point of departure. What appears

to be an ontological enclosure or “poverty in world” takes on a new ethical light.

That is, the human subject in a state of boredom first feels left in a state of

emptiness in the face of the indifference of all the things around. In the next phase

of its boredom, the subject, while being held in suspense or in a state of oblivion to

concrete space and time, encounters the refusal of the possibilities of Dasein, or the

moment when all its own unrealized possibilities are announced to the subject.

Ultimately, Agamben reads into this profound boredom, which captivates the

subject in a state of indistinction, in what Agamben calls “a potential-not-to, . . . an

impotentiality,” that is, an “originary possibilitization” that makes possibilities

possible without pointing to any concrete possibilities (67).

Now we may see that Agamben’s messianism, be it figured in homo sacer,

Bartleby, or Christ, passes beyond the domain of any specific religion. Profusely

citing Judaism, Christianity, and Shiite Islam in The Time That Remains, Agamben

hollows out the specific religious contents of the messianic so as to preserve the

latter’s potentiality qua impotentiality. With all the above discussions of potentiality

in mind, we will have no difficulty in understanding Agamben’s messianic reading 

of St. Paul’s letters in The Time That Remains. Pauline texts for Agamben aim to

resolve all problems regarding what it means to live in the Messiah, what the

messianic life is and what the structure of messianic time is. Once again, it is the

undead logic of the remnant that persists throughout The Time That Remains. First

of all, messianic time, the contracted “time that remains” (between Christ’s

resurrection and the apocalyptic completion to come), designates neither secular,

chronological time nor eternal time (or the end of time), but a singular interruption

of both. It introduces a remainder into, but exceeds the division between, the two

times. It does not come as a transcendental absolute from outside but as “a time

within time” (67), an Event that transforms the chronological time from within and

makes it out of joint with itself: hence, making “as not” (hōs mē) possible (68). That

is to say, the messianic seizure of time comes neither as a golden age nor as a

completion of totality; it breaks with any such conceptions of time as homogeneous

time, the process of degeneration, cyclical time, and dialectical and directional

progress (Roberts 77-78): simply put, it is both non-teleological and

non-progressive. The messianic converts the “now-time” into a moment, an opening

for our actions (de la Durantaye 302), or “an immanent transcendence” signaling

that “the future is ‘already here,’ insofar as the revolutionary event can break

through at ‘any time’” (Roberts 77; emphasis in original).9 In fact, near the end of

Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben, in a Benjaminian anti-teleological fashion,

                                                      

9 Regarding the exigency of the now-time, we are unlikely to bypass its Benjaminian

undertones, though it is a topic more appropriate to another project than my current one:

In reality, there is not a moment that would not carry with it its revolutionary

chance—provided only that it is defined in a specific way, namely as the chance

for a completely new resolution of a completely new problem. For the

revolutionary thinker, the peculiar revolutionary chance offered by every

historical moment gets its warrant from the political situation. But it is equally

grounded, for this thinker, in the right of entry which the historical moment

enjoys vis-à-vis a quite distinct chamber of the past, one which up to that point

has been closed and locked. (Benjamin 402; emphasis in original)

The messianic, revolutionary intervention in the now-time, for Benjamin, coincides with entering

into the past and redeeming the repressed memories of the past of the oppressed and defeated. On

top of this, the dialectical image unexpectedly “flashes up in a moment of danger” (Benjamin 391)

or occurs in the moment of a standstill like “ball lightning that runs across the whole horizon of

the past” (403). These speculations are perfectly justified by Agamben’s recurrent invocations of

Benjamin in The Time That Remains, particularly regarding the exigency to remain faithful to the

unforgettable (39-42), and his discussion of the gaze that fulfills and puts an end to the past in the

freezing moment of the now-time in Potentialities (153). For both Benjamin and Agamben, in a

word, the undead past has a claim on the weak messianic power at issue. Han-yu Huang 187

already takes this messianic time as a remnant, as a time that remains:

[At the center of historical processes] lies an irreducible disjunction

in which each term, stepping forth in the place of a remnant, can bear

witness. What is truly historical is not what redeems time in the

direction of the future or even the past; it is, rather, what fulfills time

in the excess of a medium. The messianic Kingdom is neither the

future (millennium) nor the past (the golden age): it is, instead, a

remaining time. (159; emphasis in original)

This time as a remnant in excess of, “as not,” itself also pertains to the

ontological change in the subject. For Agamben, Christ’s resurrection, a

revolutionary event as Paul preaches, revokes a Christian citizen’s vocation (or

“calling”) by way of “crucifying” it. This crucified and revoked vocation does not

have any positive content; it has, in the logic of potentiality, vocation as its object.

In a similar vein, the messianic vocation forces the subject to live “as not” (hōs mē)

itself, to call into question every world-condition by way of adhering to it: the

messianic vocation is, then, “the revocation of every vocation” (Agamben, Time 23).

The subject who lives in messianic time is thus ontologically dislocated and

becomes a remnant in excess of itself and out of joint with itself (41, 52-53), out of

joint with any socially constructed identity and reality, with linear time and “the

history of progress.” As testified by his own passage from regal grandeur to

creaturely insignificance, Paul’s messianic vocation invokes a sense of power from

weakness, a “God without sovereignty,”10 who stands in solidarity with the poor

                                                      

10 “God without sovereignty” is an essential part of Caputo’s postmetaphysical, deconstructive

theology that arises in the wake of the 1960s’ “death of God” theology (Robbins, Radical 174-75).

The death of God theology, as voiced by Thomas J. J. Altizer, William Hamilton, and Gabriel

Vahanian, seeks to sever theology from its traditional moral-metaphysical and ontotheological

bearings. As Robbins explains, “This radical death of God theology . . . represents a critical and

prophetic voice in the midst of a culture and faith in crisis, one that was moving away from the

old religious certainties and assurances” (“Introduction” 9). It helped to lay the foundation for

postmodernist critique in general and, by incorporating deconstructive philosophy, gave rise to

postmodern theology (Robbins, Radical 7). Whether this death of God theology and the

subsequent various radical theologies are sufficiently political or authentically radical, as Robbins

wonders, remains a debatable topic beyond the scope of this paper. More relevant to the concerns

of this paper is the fact that Caputo, in his seminal Weakness of God: A Theology of Event, aligns

his theology of event or “theology without theology” with Benjamin’s “weak messianic force” as

well as Derrida’s “religion without religion” (7), which fits Agamben’s persistent efforts to free

religious faith of its positivist contents and, hence, preserve its potentiality and weak messianic

power. Caputo’s theology of event, as an offspring of deconstructive “spectral hermeneutics,” is 

and the outcast (Robbins, Radical 7, 175-76) rather than wielding violent political

power to cast them out. The messianic community and political agency thus formed

are those of neither the majority nor the minority; rather, they are closer to the

Marxian proletariat and Rancière’s “non-parts” (Agamben, Time 57-58), those who

remain uncounted by the sovereign power and who cannot be reduced to any class,

communitarian affiliation or cultural intelligibility. Thus we see the intersection of

the Christian and Marxist revolutionary tradition in Agamben, 11 though his

alignment with either of these is far from self-evident.

On the other hand, this interruption or seizure of time and this messianic

calling suggest a kind of inoperativity (katargeō), one which deactivates the subject

                                                                                                                                    

congenial to Agamben’s theology in the way that it stresses the ghostly look, potentiality, and

irreducible possibility of the event, which constantly presses for expression but resists being

contracted into any finite form, instantiation or order (Death 50-51, 55). The task of a theology

like Caputo’s, according to Robbins, is not to “restore transcendence over against the immanent

logic of secular reason” but to follow the way of the Christ who is “thrust inextricably into this

world” (Radical 175). But Agamben’s congeniality to Caputo’s and other versions of negative

theology stops at his biopolitical views of the realm of the undead, the zone of indistinction

between life and death.

11 For more on this, see Roberts. Roberts’s work offers a comparative reading of Agamben,

Badiou, and Žižek within the dialectical tradition in which, according to him, Christianity and

Marxism easily fit: in spite of their divergence, all three theorists hold on to the universalism of

the break and the messianic destruction of history as progress and eternal recurrence; they are all

concerned about how the past is redeemed and recognized in the present in order to be wakeful to

the future. Roberts’s reading, nevertheless, does not particularly address the undead, which, as

this essay argues, is the necessary ground of the theological, emancipatory project that does not

lose sight of biopolitical conditions. Put in more explicit terms, the undead deactivates, disrupts,

and remains in excess of the process of symbolization and historicization; this first and foremost

must not be foreclosed in our authentic understanding of the radical potentiality of the Christian

and Marxist dialectical tradition. For example, in spite of his “fighting, militant universalism,”

which appears to be diametrically opposed to the Agambenian weak messianism, Žižek draws on

a variety of sources, such as Schelling, Lacan, and quantum physics, to formulate a dialectical

materialism grounded in the logic of “non-all,” the inherent gap, and indivisible remainder: that is,

the logic of the undead. Obviously, Žižek orients the undead to more downright Marxist-inflected

conceptions of reality, identification, subjectivity, and class struggle. As Žižek straightforwardly

puts in “The Spectre of Ideology,” class struggle “designates the very antagonism that prevents

the objective (social) reality from constituting itself as a self-enclosed whole” (74). Such non-all

undeadness pertains to the ontogenetic kernel of the subject: the subject emerges out of but is

never reducible to the material Real. The tendency to immaterialization, spiritualization or

spectralization gaps and undeadens the material Real from within and makes it something in

excess of, out of joint with itself—in other words, it doubles the condition of the subject’s

freedom (Johnston 82-83). Thus I am arguing that any comparative or differential reading of

Agamben, Žižek or any other in alignment with the so-called dialectical tradition can fruitfully

take the undead as their shared ground but, at the same time, as that which resists or remains in

excess of any imposed unity. Han-yu Huang 189 by making it inoperative rather than 

annihilating it (Agamben, Time 43). Agamben’s

task, in other words, is “how to conceive a law beyond law rather than a law

without law” (Crockett 118). He sees in Paul’s use of aphōrismenos (separation or

division) a presupposition of the law or a need to grasp the complex structure of the

law in order to be separated from it, to make it other than itself or, as indicated by

Thanos Zartaloudis when addressing Agamben’s act of profanation, “to eliminate

the negative division of law and make it ‘coincide with social praxis’” (281).12

Here, once again, we should not fail to grasp the logic of the remnant at work. In

Agamben’s own words: “[M]essianic division introduces a remnant into the law’s

overall division of the people, and Jews and non-Jews are constitutively ‘not all’”

(Agamben, Time 50); it is “an operation that divides the divisions of the law

themselves and renders them inoperative, without ever reaching any final ground”

(52). This operation opens up an indestructible, resurrectional realm of radical

universality beyond the normative force of the law, rather than one without the law

as such, and ultimately brings about the “the fulfillment and the complete

consummation of the Law” (Agamben, Homo Sacer 56). As Eleanor Kaufman

explains, “[T]he very act of wanting to overturn the law . . . is symptomatic of an

inability to escape the thought structures of the law and the state” (43). The

messianic political subject thus formed acts in a kind of quietest disinterestedness in

the outcome of actions (Griffiths 190-91), or a kind of undead, Bartlebyan

potentiality to not-be, not-think, and not-write, or a finding of power in weakness, a

departing from the supremacy of will.

If God has always been seen from the traditional Western theological

perspective as potentiality par excellence actualized in His act of creation,

Agamben’s messianism thinks “impotentiality as the limit of potentiality” and aims

not so much at the creation of a new world as at decreation (as the limit of creation):

this, and nothing more, is exactly what Crockett names as the task for today’s

theology (57). However, the non-apocalyptic and constitutively ambiguous

messianism at which Agamben arrives through the undead figures of homo sacer,

the Muselmann, and Bartleby has received a variety of critical responses. This

uneven reception could be attributed to Agamben’s figural thinking. Figures

                                                      

12 Besides, through the remnant as I am discussing here, one may understand the messianic

deactivation or profanation of the law, as Dickinson suggests, in linkage with children’s play. As

an image recurring in Agamben’s works such as State of Exception, Infancy and History, and

Profanations, children play with objects not in the way that adults use them, and then discard

them when they are no longer needed, just as in messianic time when humanity can profane, play

with, and free the law from value, humanity, and sacredness, as well as from its binding with the

violence of sovereign power (Agamben, Profanations 76; Dickinson 84-85). 

embody for him the truth about our bare life in the world of modern biopolitics,

where “we are all virtually homines sacri” (Homo Sacer 115)—for instance,

Agamben has designated the Muselmann as the true witness and his marginalization

and exclusion in the camp as paradigm of modern politics. Many critics, however,

see Agambenian figures as rhetorical devices employed to wake readers up to the

dire biopolitical conditions around them. 13 Other critics, like Leland de la

Durantaye, may caution us against exaggerating the scope of homo sacer and see

this as “a figure from the remote past who brings into focus a disturbing element in

our political present—and points toward a possible future” (211). These critical

responses are mostly enunciated in the name of terminological exactness and

historiographic vigor. However divergent, they either refuse to go to the limit and

see that boundaries or oppositions, including the one between singularity and

universality, no longer hold in the undead Agambenian threshold figures, or they

leave unexplained the concept of messianic political potentiality, agency, and

community.

The point is that Agamben is always aiming at that which remains in excess of

historical specificities, for his theological project takes biopolitics as the ontological

dimension of human existence. Thus for Agamben, if any redemption is possible, it

will arise from that which undeadens us, rather than in any ahistorical, apolitical

utopia. Critics like Patrick O’Connor may take Agamben’s philosophical output as a

repetition of traditional metaphysical constructs of a redeemed life “impervious to

transformation and temporality” (336, 348), a happy life “over which sovereignty

and right no longer have any hold” (Agamben, Homo Sacer 115). However, I

believe we may see the form of life Agamben is speaking of as being never identical

with the human-all-too-human subject, or any essence in the metaphysical sense or

practical goal to be actualized, but rather as a potentiality qua impotentiality in

excess of violent sovereign power and biopolitical domination. The undead from

the Agambenian perspective is life as pure potentiality, on the threshold, out of joint

with itself and thus not as biopolitical life, not as the “immanent reign of

sovereignty” or any sort of “idyllic life.” Such pure potentiality belongs to neither

animality nor human rationality, nor does it imply the Nietzschean overman’s

surmounting of humanity (Dickinson 118-19). It is the kernel of redemption,

freedom, and justice that remains in excess of and in this way de-limits linguistic

representations, logical reasoning, metaphysical and onto-theological

presuppositions, sovereign power, identitarian markers, and all historical,

biopolitical determinations.

                                                      

13 See, for instance, LaCapra, “Approaching.” Han-yu Huang 191

A weak messianic angel like Bartleby points out to us the “limit of limits of

all possible politics” (Beverungen and Dunne 181). From what I see as the

Agambenian perspective, what appears to be a quietist withdrawal and

resistance—resignation or even a form of regression14—in effect radically clears the

ground for the political and is thus a form of that passive aggression which in

Žižek’s view we urgently need today.15 For this is a time when higher Causes have

lost their raison d’etre, politics has collapsed into life itself through so-called

biologico-scientific principles, and life has become an immanent essence subject to

biopolitical administration; this is a time when so many ethical imperatives of the

care of self (body, health, sex, happiness . . .) have turned out to be the other side of

biopolitical domination, when the world is being seen and measured from the

perspective of risk and risk calculus, when liberal democracy engenders a

continuous or even permanent state of emergency and legalizes its right to resort to

the extra-legal (Milbank, “Paul” 129); this is a time when, in sum, everything is a

depoliticizing move that works to prevent the true Event from happening.

                                                      

14 Of course, “regression” in a unique, non-commonsensical sense. Dickinson’s Agamben and

Theology offers an insightful genealogical reading of Agamben’s philosophico-theological work

as a whole through the perspective of regression. Compared with a variety of thinkers and writers

such as Freud, Benjamin, Beckett, who are preoccupied with infancy, trauma, ruins, and so on,

Agamben through the act of regression uncovers the irreducible facticity and singularity of

Dasein, of the prelinguistic or prerepresentational subject, of the whatever-form of life. For

Dickinson, Agamben “is actively seeking to undo the false dichotomies of all representations,

such as that between the particular and the universal, or between historiography and history,

which are reproduced or staged, so to speak, by the conscious/unconscious division itself” (109).

This gesture of regression, in the context of this essay’s arguments, amounts to the messianic

division of divisions, as discussed above, and introduces a remnant into, and hence undoes, the

Western representational, metaphysical, and onto-theological architecture.

15 Armin Beverugen and Stephen Dunne have offered a differential reading of Bartleby via a

variety of contemporary theorists including Hardt and Negri, Deleuze, Žižek, and Agamben. For

Beverugen and Dunne, Agamben’s “whatever Bartleby” is a figure of pure potentiality—a reading

congenial to mine—while Žižek overpoliticizes Bartleby as the paradigmatic figure of

“interpassivity,” that is, a subtraction from contemporary forms of pseudo-resistance (Beverugen

and Dunne 175; Žižek, “Notes” 393). However, the logic of the undead as I formulate it in this

essay also applies to the figure of Neighbor-Thing, as exemplified by Kafka’s Odradek as well as

Melville’s Bartleby, which Žižek brings together with the Agambenian homo sacer and

Muselmann in his works such as “Neighbor and Monsters” and The Parallax View (Chapters 2

and 6). At this point, we may venture to claim that Agamben’s formulation of the Pauline hōs mē

and katargeō, that is, weak messianism as discussed above, resonates forcefully with the purely

structural, formal minimal difference that Žižek reads into Bartleby’s gesture: that is, “what

remains of the supplement to the Law when its place is emptied of all its obscene superego

content” (Parallax View 382). This amounts to, again, the ground-clearing gesture at issue here,

“a new space outside the hegemonic position and its negation” (Žižek, “Notes” 393; emphasis in

original), or the way to undo the vicious circle of the Law and its transgression.