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  • Saving Literary Creation:Agamben and Baudelaire, the Poet and the Critic
  • Joseph Acquisto

GIORGIO AGAMBEN’S RECENT ESSAY “Creation and Salvation” represents a departure from the work on biopower for which he is best known.1 The essay explores the secularization of religious traditions related to the interdependent acts of creation and salvation, in the context of the work of the modern poet and the critic. My essay will read Agamben in tandem with Charles Baudelaire in an attempt to demonstrate that Agamben’s reflections can illuminate Baudelaire’s unique poetic and critical status. At the same time, the world of prophets, angels, creators, and redeemers who populate Agamben’s essay can be illuminated by careful attention to the way in which Christian discourse functions in Baudelaire. While the theological framework in Agamben applies chiefly to the critic, in Baudelaire it is the poetry that abounds in reconceived religious structures. The enabling mechanism of religious discourse is thus transferred from poetry (in Baudelaire) to criticism (in Agamben), serving as an interesting test case of the kinds of exchanges and mutual interdependence that Agamben theorizes between creation and salvation. Agamben (the critic-become-poet) and Baudelaire (the poet-become-critic) demonstrate the ways in which the critic’s redemptive work also simulates, instead of merely reproducing or describing, the poet’s creative work.

Several features of Agamben’s essay invite questions about the best way to read it. While its nine pages can be read continuously, it is divided not so much into sections as nine page-long propositions or theses that could also stand independently as variations on a theme. Another notable feature of the essay is its willful lack of contextualization within any larger critical conversation. In this essay that offers a meditation on the act of criticism, Agamben writes without footnotes, implicitly proposing an ahistorical intervention that blends quite well with the nonlinear temporality that his reflections on creation and salvation as perpetual and simultaneous acts imply. By flattening critical time, demonstrating the interdependence of the creative and critical act, and refraining from limiting the critical field by identifying fellow critical interlocutors, Agamben invites dialogue with other creators and critics from other periods who have considered questions of the relationship of creation to [End Page 53] salvation in the context of literary production and interpretation. My own attempt to read Agamben and Baudelaire together will pass through two other critics between Baudelaire’s time and Agamben’s, the early Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man. What follows is an attempt to “interhistoricize” (to borrow a term from Hilary Thompson in her reading of Benjamin and Virginia Woolf) Agamben’s essay in a way faithful to the kind of reading he suggests via his own ahistorical critical intervention in the “Creation and Salvation” essay.2

After considering, in the first half of his essay, the role of the prophet in several world religious traditions, Agamben establishes what at first appears to be a straightforward secularization hypothesis whereby creation and salvation have been transformed into non-religious domains:

In modern culture philosophy and criticism have inherited the prophetic work of salvation (that formerly […] had been entrusted to exegesis); poetry, technology, and art are the inheritors of the angelic work of creation. Through the process of secularization of the religious tradition, however, these disciplines have progressively lost all memory of the relationship that had previously linked them.

(5)

Agamben’s essay attempts to restore the memory of the link between creation and salvation by rethinking the relationship between literature and criticism, in ways I shall trace below, but from the outset I would ask whether the secularization of these concepts was as complete as Agamben implies. If we are to take, for instance, the concept of political theology seriously, we need to rethink a simple secularization thesis whereby new concepts come to replace the old without remainder, leaving us with nostalgia for a time when criticism and poetry were interconnected in ways we find it difficult now to fathom.

Agamben goes on to attempt reading creation and salvation together, claiming that “inasmuch as they represent the two powers of a single God” they are “secretly conjoined” (6), and necessarily so, since...

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