6 - Paul and the Messianic Division of Division

Summary

A POSSIBLE HERMENEUTIC

We have delayed the conversation long enough and it is perhaps most helpful to take a moment to address Agamben's method for rendering inoperative the apparatuses and the logic of presupposition that ceaselessly divide our world up into those dualistic splits that govern it. To analyse this technique more closely I want to look at a brief passage in a lecture published as The Church and the Kingdom, which I will contrast with a possible negative dialectic at work in his commentary on Paul's letter to the Romans in order to more fully elucidate the ‘division of division itself’. I believe this is one of the major concepts at work in the Homo Sacer series, as well as his characterisations of form-of-life.

In a 2009 lecture at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, and in collaboration with various high-ranking members of the Catholic Church, Agamben reflected on the nature of the Church as an institution and the perpetual conflict it feels in relation to its own messianic impulses which cause the Church merely to sojourn in this world, and not to dwell permanently in it. However, this experience of sojourning, or of being in a permanent state of pilgrimage where everyday life is suspended, is not one wherein the Church should anticipate the end of the world. Its sojourning nature implies that there is an experience of the messianic, its peculiar nature of interruption and suspension, which potentially breaks into every present moment. In his words:

It is important to bear in mind that the term ‘sojourn’ does not refer here to a fixed period of time: that it does not designate chronological duration. The sojourning Church on earth can last – and indeed has lasted – not only centuries but millennia without altering its messianic experience of time. This point requires special emphasis as it is opposed to what is often called a ‘delay of the parousia.’ According to this position – which has always seemed blasphemous to me – the initial Christian community, expecting as it did the imminent arrival of the messiah and thus the end of time, found itself confronted with an inexplicable delay.