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Article Excerpt
"[...] si tratta [...] di una specie di regressione archeologica [...] Come se tornare indietro fosse per me il solo modo di aprirmi una strada, di rendermi il pensiero nuovamente possibile" (A gamben "Intervista" 41).
The thought that took possession of Giorgio Agamben's mind when viewing Vanessa Beercroft's performance in Berlin ("nothing but dressed urban people, looking at naked urban people") was that of the nudity of the resurrected waiting for the Last Judgment. Agamben carries the idea even further by suggesting that "[T]he dressed people circling around them were, without knowing it, servants in some celestial administration, who were preparing to lead them to heaven or cast them to Gehenna" ("A Theology of Nakedness" 1). Agamben proceeds to elaborate the theological significance of nakedness as it relates to Judgement Day and recalls the authority of theologians who suggested that before the Fall Adam and Eve, although not wearing human clothing, were not naked but were dressed in a garment of mercy, of "tight-fitting glory." "What we must find again," Agamben writes, "is the nakedness of Adam, before God covered him in a dress of glory" (2). Agamben is ultimately interested in the ancient Christian theological writings that speak about the concept of "Glory" in that they help us understand how "la funzione delle acclamazioni e della Gloria, nella forma moderna dell'opinione pubblica e del consenso, e tuttora al centro dei dispositivi politici delle democrazie moderne" (Il Regno e la Gloria 10).
In Agamben's writings we find the repeated use of the Christian theological tradition to explain contemporary issues, as exemplified in the review of Beercroft's performance. Materialist approaches to cultural inquiry have, on the one hand, sought to unmask the purportedly faceless Transcendent body invented by and agreed upon by humans. On the other hand, however, the same materialist perspectives have forced us to re-think the significance of Transcendence by pinpointing elements that have a contemporary relevance that goes far beyond, or, for that matter, has nothing to do with spiritual ideology. Modernity is characterized by, among other particulars, the attempt to overcome religion with the view of liberating and making autonomous the plurality of realities, objectives and desires of humans. Yet, as John Millbank intimates, religion has not lost its relevance precisely because any social phenomenon is arbitrary and is thus "religious." For Millbank, there is no "purely human space" that opens up once we throw off the shackles of religious illusion. In fact, there is no purely secular space outside of the constitutive opposition of this term to the "sacred." The secular, as an immanent and autonomous space, is supported exclusively by a conventional symbolic codification. Moreover, it is only through "imaginary" identification that we are able to attribute the meaning of "real" to this space (Millbank 37). Given this, if Transcendence, if the hypostatic Ens are human inventions that are to be deconstructed and reduced to a series of disjoined signifying elements, it is also true that our perception and cognition of human/secular space is, in essence, a human construction composed of the shattered ruins of Transcendence and of the theological textuality that sustained it for centuries.
Agamben's view on this matter has been influenced by thinkers such as the jurist Carl Schmitt, according to whom,
All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development--in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver--but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts (Political Theology 36).
Schmitt gives the example of the "exception" in law which corresponds in his mind to the miracle in theology. Agamben, in fact, cites the opening part of the quote from Schmitt (Il Regno e la Gloria 14) and suggests it implies that theology has a significant presence in modernity. However, this does not mean that there exists a linear and direct affinity between ancient theology and the present, nor, for that matter, is there a relationship of transparent consonance between theology and political concepts. Instead, "(...) si tratta, piuttosto, di una relazione strategica particolare, che segna i concetti politici, rimamandandoli alla loro origine teologica" (Il Regno e la Gloria 16).
For Agamben, secularization is not a conceptual category but what he terms a "segnatura"; that is to say, that element in a sign or in a concept which marks it and goes beyond it with the aim of referring it to a specific interpretation or context, without, however, exceeding its signifying structure which would create a new meaning or concept. In other terms, the "segnature" dislocate and transpose concepts and signs from one context to another, from the sacred to the profane, "senza ridefinirli semanticamente" (Il Regno e la Gloria 16). Agamben goes to the extent of intimating that many concepts found in the disciplinary discourse of philosophy are "segnature" which, in a manner that is akin to Benjamin's (a major influence On Agamben's thought) "secret indices," guide the interpretation of the sign in a specific direction. (1) Moreover, "[I]n quanto mettono in conessione tempi e ambiti diversi, le segnature agiscono, per cosi' dire, come elementi storici allo stato puro" (Il Regno e la Gloria 16).
In the first thesis on the philosophy of history Benjamin contends that historical materialism "(...) enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is small and ugly and has to keep out of sight" ("On the Concept of History" 389). On the basis of what Benjamin writes in the "Theological Political Fragment," the destiny of the philosophy of history is to reveal the link between the historical and the messianic as a messianic redemption in itself. This notion is echoed in thesis XVIIa on the philosophy of history when Benjamin claims that in the same manner that a physicist detects the presence of ultraviolet rays in the solar spectrum, the historical materialist detects the redemptive signs of a messianic pulsation in history ("Paralipomena to 'On the Concept of History'" 402). The key in all of this is understanding what Benjamin means by redemption and redeeming the past. In the third thesis on the philosophy...
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