Benjamin–Agamben: Politik, Messianismus, Kabbala ed. by Vittoria Borsò et al. (review)

This bilingual book contains the proceedings of two international conferences which took place in November 2005 and March 2006 in Düsseldorf on behalf of the “Internationale Walter Benjamin Gesellschaft” as well as of the “Institut vor Joodse Studies” of Antwerp. The main topic of the conference was actually not specifically an illustration of Agamben’s indebtedness to Benjamin, as the somewhat misleading title suggests, but “The Political in the 21^st Century” (to which the seven papers in German of the first part are devoted) and “Messianism and the Law,” a theme discussed in the six articles written in English which make up the second part.

As both Bernd Witte and Vittoria Borsò point out in their concise and somehow complementary overviews, Agamben can be seen in many ways as an heir of Benjamin’s “Schwellenkunde” or threshold wisdom. His research is constantly moving between different fields and disciplines (literary criticism and politics, linguistics and ethics, aesthetics and theology), linking together extremely heterogeneous phenomena and forcing the reader to question his usual patterns of thought. So it is no wonder that the collected contributions reveal a considerable variety of different topics and approaches which deserve to be briefly summarized.

Echoing Agamben’s insights in “thanatology,” Boris Groys describes a characteristic phenomenon of our time: the emergence of the immortality of the body. This “materialistic or hetero-metanoia” displays itself not only in the persistence of the corpse after the soul’s departure, but also in a variety of other cases, for example, the Homo Sacer as “Muselmann” or the vampires and zombies that proliferate in today’s blockbuster movies and best sellers. But the privileged places of this metanoia according to Groys are the museums, since “works of art are actually the corpses of things.” Dealing with the figure of the curator as a new paradigm of sovereignty over these corpses, Groys goes on to present a remarkably bold utopia outlined by the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov in 1903. According to the latter, “the State should become the museum of its own population” by enabling the resurrection of all previous generations. Undoubtedly an astonishing image of an absolute “bio-power,” which gives us much to think about.

Karl Ivan Solibakke offers an interesting contribution to an archaeology of the state of exception with his reinterpretation of Schiller’s Trauerspiel “Wallenstein.” In the first part of this trilogy (i.e., “Wallensteins Lager”) Schiller describes a “zone of anomie,” a decisive political threshold where the decline of the feudal order is fulfilled and the modern rational state is born. Solibakke’s effort to develop an “aesthetic of the state of exception” is worthy of further investigation.

Eva Geulen’s paper about Agamben’s endeavor to think politics beyond relationship (or in form of a nonrelation) and Claas Morgenroth’s reflections about a “politics of the post-histoire” both allude to an overcoming of traditional ontology. Geulen, who had already published the first German introduction to Agamben in 2005, finds in Arendt’s concept of the world (as primarily a world of things) an example of politics not as a relationship but as a coexistence of different perspectives on the same things. However, it seems problematic to deem—as Arendt does—the relationship as “neither logical nor ontological,” not to mention the difficulty of reconciling such a view with Agamben’s insistence on the deep connections between politics and ontology. Morgenroth, instead, criticizes Agamben for his “ahistorical approach” to paradigms and for his reduction of politics to a mere “background for the ontology of politics.” It is worth noting that, since 2006, Agamben published six new important books in which he clarifies some key issues of his thought, particularly in relation to his “archaeological” method. So in The Signature of All Things (2008) we can find an indirect response to Morgenroth’s criticism.

Then, Frieder Otto Wolf argues that Agamben tends to understand politics...