It was my intention to demonstrate that the relationship between the messianic and canonical forms permeates the historical structures of both theological and philosophical reflection, and has lately moved to the fore of their ongoing discussions. To do this, I traced the contours of their tension as it ran through certain Jewish antinomian thinkers as well as in the debate that has arisen between Derrida and Agamben. Though at times oversimplifying matters into a more or less “clean” distinction between dialectical (Derrida) and antinomian (Agamben) thought, such an oversimplification was made through reference to each thinker’s own gestures, as they sought over the years to evaluate and understand their own work. There is no doubt that such a reading of each of their work could be further problematized—especially as their thoughts evolved in less “clean” ways over the years—though, as the debate between them evidences, their varied positions often reflected the core dynamics of religious and philosophical tensions as I have sought to outline throughout this study. Quite simply, if they had not been adhering to certain core principles such as those that continue to divide our most basic religious, political, and cultural identities, then there would have been no debate between them to witness. Despite the published realities of their divergence, however, I yet continue to read each author as engaged in studies that continue to place the adjective radical prior to the word hermeneutics.
Indeed, if Derrida could be identified as the first thinker to “radicalize” hermeneutics in an attempt to deconstruct the hermeneutical project itself, as John Caputo has put it, then Agamben’s work further radicalizes it, though, I would argue, he does not escape it altogether.1 As Thanos Zartaloudis has recently pointed out in his work on the limits of law and power, Agamben’s major insight is not necessarily one that seeks to do away with law altogether. Instead, Agamben seems to be seeking a space “outside” of the functioning of law that is yet responding to the actuality of law. By examining the relationship between law and Christianity in a western context specifically, Zartaloudis concludes that Agamben’s work is not, in the end, advocating a complete destruction of the law, but rather a re-evaluation of life (form-of-life) itself.2 As he words it,
Perfect antinomianism is a force internal to the actuality of the law . . . though not internal to the law, which inverses the latter’s effectiveness; it does not preserve the law as it is nor destroy it, nor does it create a new law to replace the old law, but it instead restores law to the sphere of pure means, and renders it free to common use.3
This is a “perfect antinomianism,” then, because it is “contemporaneous” with the actuality (nomos) of the law, though it is created beside the law itself. Such an interpretation of law is conditioned of course by Agamben’s reading of Paul and messianic time, though, as both Zartaloudis and I separately read it, his conclusions are perhaps closer to the dynamics I have been defending throughout this study than Agamben himself has expressly admitted. That is, the ceaseless tension between canonical forms and messianic forces does not produce a complete (antinomian) rupture with tradition, but rather develops a hermeneutics, albeit a radicalized one, in response to the tension itself. As Zartaloudis puts it,
The non-normative and the normative operations are not two entirely distinct domains that stand untampered in their integrity, but instead complex operations that in referring to a single object (the thing itself, it was suggested, is not other than the thing) must every time reckon with something like a residue or remnant of non-normativity in every consecrated thing and a remnant of normativity in every profaned object.4
This is what he moreover defines as a form of “pure criticism” that unflinchingly stares into the abyss of loss and ruin (“absolute profanation”), and yet finds a way to overcome it through the reorientation of our initial perspective on the “right use” of the “thing itself.” Indebted a great deal to what I have been calling the hyperbolic use of language, a sense of radicality is ushered in to this reading through Agamben’s refusal to accept one particular usage of any given thing. Again, in Zartaloudis’ words, “Every time the systems of spectacular religion, economy and law claim that something can be rightfully used only in this or that way, an act of profanation will endeavour to say that something is otherwise than it is, and that a different use of it is always possible aside from its rightful use.”5
As I was finishing this book, a new translation of one of Agamben’s texts appeared in print, and provides a perhaps clearer line of thought on the issue of a possible hermeneutics available in his thought. From a text he read in a Church in Paris, in front of bishops and priests in 2009, we find that he speaks of messianic forces, something he continues to juxtapose against the law, but, he here points toward the necessity for a dialectical tension that must be maintained between them. Here, he takes up this binary tension, which, one might expect he would seek to do away with in order to have a more “one-sided” antinomian position maintained. Yet, he says this:
By placing origin and end in contact with one another, this force endlessly fulfils and ends time. Let us call this force Law or State, dedicated as it is to economy, which is to say, dedicated as it is to the indefinite—and indeed infinite—governance of the world. As for the second force, let us call it messiah, or Church; its economy is the economy of salvation, and by this token is essentially completed. The only way that a community can form and last is if these poles are present and a dialectical tension between them prevails.6
The tension, which he goes on to say has “disappeared” in our time, must prevail if a community is “to form and last.” The Church, he specifically singles out, will be lost if it abandons its original messianic vocation and becomes little more than another (political) institution of this world, caught up in the “infernal” character of the legalistic (and bureaucratic) mindset that permeates our world.
It is this uncompromising tension between canonical forms and messianic forces that must be sustained, and, if maintained, that determines from the very outset the inherently radical nature of hermeneutics, as it refuses to allow any-thing (“whatever being”) to be settled into one proper usage (much as Butler’s work points toward no single “natural” ontological form that we should adhere to, though, as she puts it, we must adhere to some form in the end). It is for this reason that I have sought to utilize Agamben’s work not simply as an obstacle to be overcome en route to a more hermeneutical position, but rather, again and again, to problematize (or “divide”) the very positions I have been working with (including my own) in order to maintain something of a (self-reflexive) “pure critical” approach. If a radical hermeneutics is to present itself as a genuine methodology, it must realize accordingly that even its own methods are in need of problematizing from time to time.
It has also been one of the major points of this study to inspect the way in which a theology of immanence—if understood from a political–theological perspective—constitutes one side of the historical and political tensions that comprise the domain of the theological—an insight given to us from more recent philosophical traditions of thinking immanence apart from transcendence. Immanence, in this light, constitutes a “pure” form of (the ultimately “unformable”) messianism. Such a theological development could be seen in some early forms of Judaic messianism, though it has subsequently extended far beyond this historical context, as we have seen already.
Despite this isolation of the phenomenon, there are a great many thinkers of philosophical immanence today, I would argue, who owe a certain debt to the original religious struggle to conceive a form of immanent theology as a response to the failures of their own hopes, and which were first posited as a response to the legalistic mindsets internal to a particular religious framework. Such “failures of representation” have often turned away from the “transcendent” grounding of our most basic representational claims, though they have not necessarily deviated too far from our inscriptions in language and culture. As I hope by now is clear, I have tried to situate such a debate between immanence and transcendence within a series of historical and philosophical tensions that make up a somewhat larger hermeneutical field. If Agamben’s focus upon immanence could be said to issue forth from his similar approach to law and sovereign forms, as I believe it can, then we must see such calls for an immanent position as not yet indicating a complete rupture with more traditional transcendent (religious) frameworks. Rather, we must respect the deconstruction of such frameworks (as well as their often very real hierarchical structures and institutions) in order to reread and even redefine those frameworks that govern our day-to-day realities. As Agamben himself has noted, even the Church today—in the face of so much decline and distress—is capable of grasping this fundamental truth and redefining itself accordingly.
As such, I have argued that it is a form of radical hermeneutics made available for theology that is capable of incorporating such claims as those that arise from the various corners of theology calling for an immanent theological vision of the world. The hermeneutics I am describing is capable of establishing itself upon a subsequent “hermeneutics of violence” that distinguishes between the various canonical forms before us in terms of their propensity and proximity to violence. Making an essential (Pauline) “division of division itself” as a division of signifying canonical forms, allows us to “de-activitate” the violences of canonical impositions and to find a possible “presentation” available to us through the failures of representation, which certain less violent canonical forms are capable of demonstrating. Just such a hermeneutics was what I have here sought to develop using the various critical writings of Assmann and Benjamin. I subsequently expanded upon such a project by confirming this form of hermeneutics (as well as radicalizing it) through the work of Ricoeur and Butler.
Perhaps the direction I am most inclined to head in at this point, and after such analysis, is one that I believe is opened up through these reflections—a return to the historical contexts that first birthed the dynamics I have been studying. In many ways, of course, such a return has been evident from the outset. We can glimpse, for example, how those theologians and biblical scholars who have engaged with the various philosophical returns to Saint Paul have taken the opportunity to caution such a universalizing reading of his work as one that often neglects the complex realities of exegetical and historical study, a point we would likewise do well not to neglect.7 We can also understand how a more complete picture of the “origins” of the canonical scriptures, such as I have only begun with the study of Assmann’s work, would provide a unique perspective from which to view the rise of messianic desires and literatures. Likewise, a number of doctrines, teachings, and traditions within both Jewish and Christian lineages could be re-examined from a radical hermeneutical point of view, demonstrating not only the necessity of a political–theological approach (which respects even its most antinomian, heretical counterparts as part of a larger ongoing dialogue), but also providing ample opportunity for the “development of doctrine” to continue in our own age.8 These are only some of the more major and pressing areas of future research that the present study points us toward in a very explicit manner. A good many more, it is hoped, will be created through such openings.
The hermeneutics that I am here really just beginning to articulate is not radical in the sense that it need be conceived without God.9 It is radical only insofar as it does not subscribe to a predetermined set of ontological forms, leaving such matters to be played out on the fluctuating field of historical–canonical forms, whether these be religious, cultural, or political. God, it could be said, would be free of any such ontological categorizations, and would perhaps fittingly be beyond the scope of what I am proposing. (Hence, what I have been proposing has been mainly a philosophical analysis, even if conducted on the terrain of historical theologies.) I am also certainly ascribing a great deal of merit to so-called non-essentialist positions, a position, no doubt, that often grades against the rigidity of more “canonized” (or even ecclesiastical) positions. The recognition of the dynamics between canonical forms and messianic forces, however, admits that such a hermeneutics be honest about the state of such oscillations, evolutions, and reformulations as do (and will continue to) take place throughout history.