'A New Use of the Self': Giorgio Agamben on the Coming Community

Heaven and Hell, however, hang together.

Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Amongst the voluminous speculations on the 'world to come' that have accompanied messianic prophecies, one stands out, not for the extravagance of its predictions, but for the very banality of its account of redemption. In The Coming Community, Giorgio Agamben recounts the following tale, as told by Walter Benjamin to Ernst Bloch: "The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different."¹ There is no doubt something disappointing about such an image of redemption, particularly when placed alongside Christian promises of "a new heaven and a new earth" [Rev 21:1], in which "there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying" [Rev 21:4]. Nonetheless, in offering a vision of the world to come that is intimately connected to our world, it seems to foreshadow the possibility of changing our world, even if, as it were, only a little. And yet, as this tale was passed down by tradition, and ultimately passed from Gershom Scholem to Benjamin to Bloch, the question of the nature of the change that would be required, and that of the agency that could accomplish it, received different, and often contradictory, emphases. In Bloch's recounting of the tale—which introduces a slight, yet decisive, alteration into the version previously told by Benjamin—if the world to come will be just like this world, this does not mean that the little difference that would constitute it is easy to accomplish. All that is necessary to establish this new world, Bloch suggests, is the slight displacement of a stone, a cup or a brush. "But," he writes, "this small displacement is so difficult to achieve and its measure is so difficult to find that, with regard to the world, humans are incapable of it and it is necessary that the Messiah come."²

What would it mean, for us, today, to imagine a redeemed world in which everything "will be as it is now, just a little different"? In what would this difference consist, and how would it be possible to achieve it? And what inflection would it give to the very idea of "redemption"? In the second thesis of his "On the Concept of History," Benjamin offers a vision that seems to owe something to the Hassidic tale: in contrast to a utopia whose inspiration lies outside this world, he suggests that our own times thoroughly color our image of happiness. "The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us," he writes, "exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us."³ Moreover, Benjamin makes clear that, "our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption."⁴ By deriving our vision of happiness from the world in which we find ourselves, it becomes possible to eschew a model of redemption premised on divine intervention and to imagine a form of immanent social transformation, indeed, a form of politics. In treating Agamben's work, however, such an approach is complicated by his unrelentingly bleak diagnosis of this world. What would it mean to take our vision of happiness from a world whose paradigmatic instance is the concentration camp? What does it mean to suggest that the new form of life necessary to save us from catastrophe resembles nothing so much as the life we live today—a life typified by biopolitics, the normalisation of the state of exception and unceasing commodification? In what follows, I suggest that, in Agamben's view, it is precisely from this world—amidst what Agamben, following Guy Debord, terms the "society of the spectacle"—that we must find...