The Church and the Kingdom by Giorgio Agamben (review)

Giorgio Agamben's The Church and the Kingdom is the transcription of a presentation he delivered at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris in March of 2009. In it, Agamben admonishes the Church of Rome for having lost its sense of messianic time, for having made itself at home in a world that it should recognize as a place of exile. This message is delivered in a succinct fourteen pages. Interspersed among these pages of text are more than thirty pages containing Alice Attie's photographs of fragments of classic Christian iconography. As the artist tells us, these are photographs of photographs that have been folded and twisted so as to suggest the "separation, grief, or rupture" of exile. The text and photographs are followed by a twelve-page afterword in which Leland De La Durantaye comments on Agamben's philological method and defends the work against what he feels are the misunderstandings of some of Agamben's critics.

Agamben's text begins by noting that early Christian communities described themselves as sojourners or exiles rather than as permanent citizens of the cities in which they dwelt. He points out that in the Greek of the New Testament, the word "paroiken," to sojourn, "designates how a Christian is to live in the world and, by that token, that person's experience of time—and, more precisely, of messianic time" (2). Messianic time does not consist of a measurable chronological duration; it is a state of expectation that produces "a qualitative change in how time is experienced" (4-5). Agamben contrasts messianic time with both apocalyptic time and chronological time. In apocalyptic time, the apocalyptic thinker believes that she is witnessing judgment day, that she lives at the end of time. By contrast, chronological time is the time of the everyday. It is easy to represent chronological time as an infinite and homogenous succession of events, but by doing so, he claims, we empty it of all human content. Messianic time mediates between these two extreme experiences of temporality. It connects the penultimate moments of human history with the ultimate moment of the messiah's return and thus destroys the false opposition between apocalyptic radicalism and the compromises of chronological time. Messianic time infiltrates chronological time, transforming it from the inside so that every moment has a relationship to the eternity at the end of time. This, Agamben tells us, is what Walter Benjamin means when he claims that "every day, every instant, is the small gate through which the messiah enters" (5).

The effects of messianic time are numerous: Individuals whose lives are governed by chronological time experience their lives as spectators, but messianic time allows them to embrace and become themselves. Quoting Paul, Agamben observes that messianic time "revokes every vocation and every condition so as to free them for new usage." History itself is transformed from an alienating narrative of inevitability to a sign of an economy of salvation. These descriptions invoke a rich phenomenology of the experience of messianic time, but they do not directly address the kind of institutional reforms for which Agamben is calling. Specifically, he argues that the Church as an institution requires a dialectic relationship between the Law of the State (Kingdom) and the expectation of the messiah (Church): "The only way that a community can form and last is if these poles are present and a dialectical tension between them prevails" (35). As he diagnoses it, modernity has brought about a hypertrophy of law and thrown this dialectical relationship off balance. As a result, there is no place on earth, including the church, where power might be legitimated. A self-defeating will to power has inflated the importance of the law by instituting a permanent state of exception.

A question, however, persists: How does the Church, or any other institution, rebalance the dialectic by reducing the importance of the law and increasing the importance of the messianic moment? Some of those who have responded...