Agamben's understanding of time and its implications for Christology

Thesis

The writing of Giorgio Agamben (b1942), most often recognised for his political philosophy, in fact encompasses an extraordinary range of subjects, including philology, cultural and literary criticism, political theory, and jurisprudence. His well-known series Homo Sacer (finally collected together in 2017), deals with the questions of the status of human life in the present, sovereign power, and laws creating states of exception. In his most recent and intriguing publications however (such as Pulcinella, The Kingdom and the Garden, and The Fire and the Tale), those questions are freshly inflected. In order to assist an answer to the question of what it is to live in the present, there is an apparent predilection towards theological resources, leading to theological conclusions. This trend towards the theological follows earlier more isolated works – most famously his ‘Commentary on the Letter to the Romans’ The Time That Remains, and the ‘Theological Genealogy’ of The Kingdom and the Glory. Whilst the contemporary reception of Agamben tends to treat these earlier theological discussions as anomalies, it is clear from the relative silence which has greeted the more recent works that a consistent force of theological thinking has not yet been perceived.

The facet of “time” that I will investigate is limited to Agamben’s focus, namely time as it is experienced by human life in the present. This limited focus, what is sometimes called temporality, is not new to theology, or indeed philosophy. But in the case of Agamben’s work, the discussion of temporality finds a new form of textual presentation: Agamben seeks to orchestrate other ‘texts’ (St Paul’s letters, Franciscan Rules of Life, poetry, art) to create an experience in his reader of his understanding of time. The success of Agamben’s project, therefore, depends on this new textual quality. It represents a qualitative alteration to the philosophical tradition bequeathed to him, a tradition going back to Kant, and ‘time’ as an a priori structure of the intuition on which, it is assumed, empirical data is linearly to be plotted. The temporality for which Agamben argues, therefore, needs to be understood both from its constituent metaphysical parts, but more importantly from within the performance of that understanding. Agamben’s ‘performance’, and particularly the performance of liturgy, is the principal original analysis of this dissertation. With a theological performance of temporality, Agamben stands closer alongside the likes of Jean-Yves Lacoste, Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Louis Chrétien than he does with his more usually recognised contemporaries Žižek and Badiou.

Authors: Wright, O

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-gjzbvzxpk
• Type of award: MPhil
• Level of award: Masters
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: liturgy; Agamben; eschatology; time; Christology
• Subjects: Theology, Doctrinal; Continental philosophy