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the time and language of messianism: levinas and saint paul Bettina Bergo Levinas and the Ancients: Saint Paul as Messianic Thinker To address the question of Levinas’ relationship to the Ancients—which certainly entails more than one question—we should be mindful of Levinas’ relation to the Greeks and to ancient Jewish thought like that of Philo, who gave us the first exhaustive exploration of the meaning of the name and the letter. Rather than examining Philo, I will turn to a dimension of Jewish thought that has arguably arisen out of prophetism: messianism. When does messianism begin in Jewish thought? With Isaiah? With Amos? While much of the meaning of Jewish messianism has become skewed by Christian readings of the “Old Testament” as realized by the “New,” the meaning of messianism breaks down according to two axes: (1) the time of the temple and the time of the universe; and (2) the resources available to the free creature (to save itself) and redemption from without. The messianism understood as restorative concerns the promise of the reestablishment of the temple, which is also the promise of a Heimkehr, or return to a home. Restorative messianism therefore takes on political or mystical qualities. It conjoins with apocalyptic messianism in the question of the end of cosmic time, at which point the Messiah returns. As Levinas reminds us, it is a classic Jewish thesis “that there is a difference between the future world and the messianic era” (DF 60). The messianic era would represent an intermediary time 178 10 before the end of the world and the world to come. It is like a sort of hinge between the future and the atemporal. Levinas writes, “As for the future world, it seems to exist on another level . . . it therefore concerns a personal and intimate order , lying outside the achievements of history that wait for humanity to be united in a collective destiny” (DF 60). The messianic dimension of redemption and return has the paradoxical character of being at once close to the prophets and close to what the twentieth century called the New Thinking. In Levinas’ recapitulation of the debate between Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Joshua—concerning the meaning of and path to salvation—it is important to remember that Rabbi Eliezer is silent at a crucial moment. Rabbi Joshua declares, with a decisive hermeneutic intervention: “And I heard the man clothed in linen . . . [swear] by him that liveth for ever that it shall be for a time . . . [and then] all things shall be finished” (DF 74). To this, R. Eliezer says nothing. But R. Joshua means that redemption imposed from without is necessary, because in the fact of human freedom lies an inevitable gnosticism of good and evil. Does this gnosticism touch messianism? Can messianism stand as a pure promise apart from the dangers of freedom and evil? If that were the case, would prophetism serve any purpose? What would messianism be, other than a strange calendaric announcement that we humans, like the earth, are zum Tode: beings unto-death? In other words, if redemption from without is inevitable, and constitutive, then the prophet does no more than remind us of our finitude, which is trivial. In messianism, two axes, that of time, that of redemption, each pose separate difficulties. But the second axis requires the first axis to become meaningful. Messianic time must evince a different quality than world time or the atemporality of the world-to-come if the problem of return and redemption is to move past the aporetic position in which we find it when the debate between R. Joshua and R. Eliezer grinds to a halt. This appears to be the contribution of Paul, when we read him as messianic thinker within and without the rabbinic tradition. This alone recommends a close inspection of a study written in response to Jacob Taubes’ seminar on Paul’s Letter to the Romans.1 The question is taken up again in Giorgio Agamben’s The Time that Remains.2 We will thus read Agamben’s Paul as an “ancient ” and as an early, post-prophetic messianist. Ultimately, we will show the crossings between Agamben’s Paul and Levinas’ late philosophy. I believe that this best shows in what way Levinas’ philosophy is messianic and how his philosophical messianism undercuts those elements of “restorative” messianism in his Jewish texts without denying them. Agamben’s argument moves through six fundamental themes: service, the inversion of the world, the call, time...

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