Negri on Agamben
Thursday, February 14, 2008
In what seems to me to be an amazing coup, the current issue of the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory features a review of Agamben’s newest book [PDF] by Negri.
Other authors of note include Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Marcus Pound, and Carl Raschke.
Thursday, February 14, 2008 at 10:22 am
Thanks for the reference. I totally forgot about that publication, shame on me since its a very nice journals and I forgot that I had published something there several years ago.
Thursday, February 14, 2008 at 10:41 am
This might be a good thread to ask a question I’ve been meaning to ask: I know in _The Time That Remains_ that Agamben argues against an “apocalyptic” understanding of Benjamin’s messianism. Are there any other passages in any other works where Agamben states and makes the same argument?
Thursday, February 14, 2008 at 11:38 am
Nate, there is something interesting in his outlining of the debate between Schmitt and Benjamin that seems to suggest that a “redemptive” hereafter (Benjamin’s messianic) must be pitted against the sovereign state of exception, which is a “catastrophe” (B. uses this sort of language, along with “eskhaton” not apocalyptic, but it seems to convey what Agamben understands by apocalyptic in Time that Remains)…State of Exception, 56-7:
“The baroque knows an eskhaton, and end of time; but, as Benjamin immediately makes clear, this eskhaton is empty. It knows neither redemption nor a hereafter and remains immanent to this world: ‘The hereafter is emptied of everything that contains the slightest breath of this world, and from it the baroque extracts a profusion of things that until then eluded all artistic formulation…in order to clear an ultimate heaven and enable it, as a vacuum, one day to destroy the earth with catastrophic violence.’
“It is this ‘white eschatology’–which does not lead the earth to a redeemed herafter, but consigns it to an absolutely empty sky–that configures the baroque state of exception as catastrophe. And it is again this white eschatology that shatters the correspondence between sovereignty and transcendence, between the monarch and God, that defined the Scmittian theologico-political. While in Schmitt ‘the sovereign is identified with God and occupies a poistion in the state exactly analogous to that attributed in the world to the God of the Cartesian system’…in Benjamin the sovereign is ‘confined to the world of creation; he is the lord of creatures, but he remains a creature.’
“This drastic redefinition of the sovereign function implies a different situation of the state of exception…it is…a zone of absolute indeterminacy between anomie and law, in which teh sphere of creatures and the juridical order are caught up in a single catastrophe.”
Hope this is somewhat helpful. It seems to converge with what you are getting at even if it is not directly provocative.
Thursday, February 14, 2008 at 11:53 am
Wow. Fantastic stuff. I’d heard rumours that Agamben went more into patristics in his latest, but didn’t realise this was out already. Are there any translations (French and Germen tend to come out before English with Agamben I think) that would make it easier than slogging through the Italian? We’re not all panlingual…
And roll on volume five! He really needs to address the forms of life with his project: the lack of treatment of asceticism seemed to be a real lacuna in homo sacer and state of exception.
Thanks for bringing this to our attention!
Thursday, February 14, 2008 at 11:56 am
My introductory comments to that quote were entirely unhelpful and obscure…sorry about that. I’ll let the quote stand, though, and respond again later.
Thursday, February 14, 2008 at 12:14 pm
Let me try again. The notion of a “pure violence,” a violence outside of the nomos (the convergence of anomie and nomos), and the law of law-making, is framed here in a strikingly “apocalyptic” tone (eskhaton, catastrophe). An empty “eskhaton” wholly immanent to creation and creatures that is yet catastrophe, destruction of the earth, outside of the juridical order (he amends Schmitt here, the sovereign must not include, but “exclude” the “real” state of exception). This may not directly correspond to what Agamben is doing in Time that Remains, but this sort of “indecisive” between appears more apocalyptic to me.
Thursday, February 14, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Nate, I can say with a relative degree of certainty that if Agamben has fleshed out that argument elsewhere, it would be in one of the books I haven’t read: Stanzas, Language and Death, Infancy and History, or The End of the Poem. From what I know of them, none seems to be a likely candidate.
Thursday, February 14, 2008 at 3:05 pm
[makes vaguely disparaging noises about Carl Raschke, evangelicals* in general who read The Postmodern Condition and thought "great! now's our chance!"]
* not that Anglo-Catholics trying that shit on would be any better.
Thursday, February 14, 2008 at 4:40 pm
‘not that Anglo-Catholics trying that shit on would be any better.’
Hey now…
Thursday, February 14, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Looks like the German translation came out before the Italian. As far as I can tell, no French translation yet. And especially if Chicago or Stanford gets the translation rights, it’ll be like 500 years before we see the thing in English.
Friday, February 15, 2008 at 4:56 am
Transposed into conceptual or theoretical terms (as if we have not already been conceptual or theoretical enough), this has important implications for the question of the very possibility of both theology and nihilism. If the world is constituted by an interplay between presence and absence, God and the ‘nihil’, then neither theology nor nihilism alone will be adequate means of understanding that world. If God’s total presence is as much an impossibility as nihilism’s total absence, then both theology alone and nihilism alone likewise become impossibilities.
I don’t think Hyman is going to be getting any more work from the Radical Orthodoxy crowd.
Friday, February 15, 2008 at 6:12 am
Well, if he’s right, shouldn’t they just, ummm…, you know, change their minds.
Sunday, February 17, 2008 at 11:21 am
Dominic, In my defense, the only Carl Raschke I’ve ever read is his critique of The Weakness of God for JCRT. If I had known he was an evangelical, he would of course be homo sacer in the eyes of this blog.
Sunday, February 17, 2008 at 3:49 pm
That review of Weakness is hilarious…the God on life-support thing had me on the floor.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008 at 5:10 pm
I wouldn’t want anyone thinking that I showed up on theology blogs purely for the purpose of saying mean things to/about Prof Raschke. But I’m curious to know: same guy?
Thursday, February 21, 2008 at 1:24 am
Yes, same guy. I too was thrown a bit when I came across Painted Black way back when and realized it was the Carl Raschke who had edited Deconstruction and Theology. I regret to say I never read it. On average, the reviewers at Amazon were not overly impressed. Amongst other complaints, Celtic Frost is apparently misidentified as “Sultic Frost” and Rush and the J. Geils Band are included in the discussion of heavy metal music.
Pretty cool pic of Professor Raschke at the bottom of his portfolio page though:
https://portfolio.du.edu/pc/port?portfolio=craschke
Thursday, February 21, 2008 at 2:12 am
Figures. “Gnosticism”…”occultism”…”postmodernism”. Never use a concept where an ill-defined catch-all will do.
Thursday, February 21, 2008 at 9:41 am
J. Geils Band??! As in, “Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na Centerfold”? Yeah, them and Huey Lewis fucking ROCK man!
Thursday, February 21, 2008 at 10:15 am
I went to see Rush recently. The live virgin sacrifices were quite something!
Monday, February 25, 2008 at 10:01 pm
I wouldn’t necessarily call myself an “evangelical”… not in a traditional sense anyway, and if you were to look at my recent work, I am actually quite critical of the “deconstructive theology” in the form of such movements as, for example, Emerging Church.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008 at 3:02 am
Excellent: do we get to choose what we’re called? Right, then I’m a radical genius Christ-following hippy.
Lies, all lies.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008 at 4:01 pm
You still wrote a deeply reactionary (and according to that review above factually spurious) book about “metal” though.
Thursday, May 29, 2008 at 9:45 am
[...] French translation in September. This joins a German translation that, at the time I was writing a previous post, appeared to have come out even before the Italian original, but which now looks to be [...]