Messianism between religion and post-religion: on Giorgio Agamben's “new politics”

Abstract

The article discusses the paradoxical status of messianism in Giorgio Agamben’s political philosophy. This status conveys most of all in the specific location that messianism assumes with regard to religion. Agamben himself, as well as main interpretations, conceive messianism as a “limit point” in which “religious experience passes beyond itself”, and therefore as a non-religious phenomenon. After briefly summing up the main conceptual line that led Agamben towards such a conclusion, the article shows how Agamben’s concept of the messianic must be read having as its background his reading of Freud’s fetishist disavowal from his early work Stanzas, where Agamben argues in favour of the latter insofar as he understands fetishism as a privileged weapon against the metaphysics under which he subsumes modern semiology as well as the psychoanalytic concept of interpretation of the repressed unconscious content. Although Agamben’s reading of Freud may seem convincing, he nevertheless misreads a rather crucial moment in Freud’s theory, represented by the concept of primal repression. Considering this concept, fetishist disavowal appears rather as an operation that holds the subject within metaphysics and interpretation at the point in which the subject may encounter its limit, represented exactly by the primal repression, which marks the moment of incompleteness or non-totalisability of interpretation as such. In this sense, according to Lacan’s reading of Freud, fetishism, by fixing the image and projecting it on the veil, rather constitutes the phallic realm “beyond” the veil, which makes interpretation infinite. With this as its basis, the article finally turns back to the initial question and claims that messianism is neither a religious nor a non-religious concept, but rather the interval in which religion overcomes itself – yet this overcoming, insofar as it is traversed by eternal postponement, cannot accomplish itself.