- Girard’s Lost TimeMessianic Temporality in Things Hidden
Where are we at this point in time? As Girardians? As human beings? At this time in time, assuming that time is not all the same, a hard mechanical clock, but has taken on different human contours and depths, much as the shape of a river will change according to the variety of terrain?1
How do we situate ourselves in a Girardian discourse, which brings to the surface fundamental themes in history, and at the end, “battling to the end,” sees human history as a deadly face-off of world-historical rivals, according to “the implacable law of the escalation to extremes?”2
How has time itself fared in this story? How can we even talk of time when time itself appears—and according to a classic opposition to eternity—to be coming to its end? Girard has not investigated the inner conditions of time, although, given his massive sense of the interruption in human history by the revelation of the victim, one would think such an investigation is called for. Or, is Battling to the End in fact his authentic commentary on time, in its central thematic of the exacerbation of difference leading to destruction? In view of this inevitable outcome the new can never be in time as we now know it. [End Page 175]
As he says, “The absolute new is the Second Coming, in other words, the apocalypse. Christ’s triumph will take place in a beyond of which we can describe neither the time nor place.”3 Thus the meaning of this time, of here-and-now temporality, seems exhausted, without content. Difference decides present time violently, and absolute or apocalyptic difference leads to “the absolute new.” The Christian message, which could have made possible a “peaceful identity” between humans, has failed.4
In face of this judgment on human history—one called “apocalyptic” according to a violent sense of that word—it is urgent to examine the full dynamic of Girard’s thought, placing it in what might rightly be termed its “transcendental” context, in the sense of examining its inherent conditions of possibility. Girard’s thought is in fact formally transcendental in as much as the explicit, foregrounded, and independent matrix of his analysis is the revelatory power of the Hebrew and Christian scripture, and in particular the New Testament. It has always been the womb of his insight. “The most improbable source of our demythologizing is religion itself, and in our world, more particularly, it would appear to be the religious tradition proper to it. … I propose that if today we are capable of breaking down and analyzing cultural mechanisms, it is because of the indirect and unperceived but formidably constraining influence of the Judaeo-Christian (sic) scriptures.”5 The element of “formidable constraint” cannot be simply an abstract inventory of the figure of the victim, much less so because it is “indirect and unperceived.” Much more convincingly, it corresponds to the scriptural dynamic, especially marked in the New Testament, which creates a radical, new relationship in time and through time. It is this fundamental relationship that enables us to feel, at a phenomenologial level, the old victimizing order as something “different”: the medium that makes all perception possible now brought itself to perception. What makes this happen is the other, new human possibility, creating an existential difference and so placing the old order under increasing critical pressure. The specific name of this transformed and transforming quality of time is “messianic.”
In a recent book, The Time That Remains, A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, Giorgio Agamben provides a singularly apt resource for identifying the contemporary character of messianic temporality, thus helping us to clarify its function in Girard’s thought.6 The book functions in relation to Girard on two levels. First, a book on the writings of the Apostle Paul from the hand of a career philosopher suggests the way the constraining influence of the scriptures has penetrated the heady confines of traditional academe. This is a vital point in the establishment of the [End Page 176] argument: Agamben’s turning of intellectual attention...