Cat-and-Mouse Game

Abstract

The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (2007) is not the first time that Agamben has taken recourse to Pauline thought as a messianic counterforce for the redemption of life captured in the frame of the spectacle. Following Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (1998) in which the temporality of non-coincidence played a critical role in the formation of his concept of testimony, Agamben directed his attention to a Pauline conception of messianic time with the book The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (2000). Ostensibly a treatise on Pauline theology, nowhere more explicitly does the author grapple with time than in this text, which in tandem with a move to the para- sees the total transformation of the state of exception from catastrophic coincidence to redemptive non-coincidence. Reconceptualizing the liminal terms of his earlier work, Agamben figures as messianic time the kairos of the taking place of language, an immanence that paradoxically comprises the promise of presence through its impossibility. With messianic time, Agamben attempts to distance himself further from the authentic originary temporality rejected in Remnants of Auschwitz, with this formulation of an interior dimension, both implicit and ungraspable, in which contingency is preserved.