"The crises-the states of permanent exception and emergency-that the governments of the world continually proclaim," Agamben told his audience, "are in reality a secularized parody of the Church's incessant deferral of the Last Judgment." 4 Contemporary politics, as he sees it, is this parody, in which all worldly powers are fundamentally illegitimate and we are faced with the "complete juridification and commodification of human relations." In a bitter reproach to the gathered Church Officials, he noted that in Christian theology there is one "legal institution," an institution founded on judgment and punishment, that continues eternally without interruption or end: hell. "The model of contemporary politics-which pretends to be an infinite economy of the world," he continues, "is thus truly infernal."

Agamben