Agamben Giorgio - Agamben and Theology

Agamben and Theology

Other titles in the Philosophy and Theology series include:

Adorno and Theology, Christopher Craig Brittain

Badiou and Theology, Frederiek Depoortere

Derrida and Theology, Steven Shakespeare

Foucault and Theology, Jonathan Tran

Girard and Theology, Michael Kirwan

Habermas and Theology, Maureen Junker-Kenny

Hegel and Theology, Martin J. De Nys

Kant and Theology, Pamela Sue Anderson and Jordan Bell

Kierkegaard and Theology, Murray Rae

Nietzsche and Theology, Craig Hovey

Vattimo and Theology, Thomas G. Guarino

Wittgenstein and Theology, Tim Labron

Zizek and Theology, Adam Kotsko

Colby Dickinson

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Copyright Colby Dickinson, 2011

Colby Dickinson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work.

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ISBN 13: 978-0-567-22138-4 (hardback)

ISBN 13: 978-0-567-62224-2 (paperback)

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For Elisabeth & Rowan

I am extremely grateful for the multiple counts of assistance given to my work by Lieven Boeve, Frederiek Depoortere, Joeri Schrijvers, and the various members of the research group Theology in a Postmodern Context within the Faculty of Theology, K.U. Leuven, as they have provided valuable feedback and insight on the research undertaken for this book at multiple stages in its formation. I am also deeply indebted to the K.U. Leuven Research Fund for their generous support which has made my research possible. The many conferences where I have presented various stages of this book were excellent springboards from which to ponder the directions I should take. In particular, I would like to thank the organizers of the following venues for allowing me to participate and to share the research I was then conducting: Towards a Philosophy of Life held at Liverpool Hope University, England (2009), Real Objects or Material Subjects? held at the University of Dundee, Scotland (2010), the Catholic Theological Society of Americas annual conference (2010), and the Colloquium on Violence and Religion held at Notre Dame University (2010). In addition, I would also like to acknowledge those who have given their time by looking over earlier versions of this book and offering their comments and suggestions, including Ken Surin, Peter Langford, and Elisabeth Bayley, as well as Adam Kotsko, for his assistance with translational queries.

In a staged dialogue with Juliane Schiffers for the journal Law Critique, Alice Lagaay speaks about the experience of reading Giorgio Agamben through a childhood image which seems, for her, to evoke a similar existential dissolution of the will as she encounters it in reading his work. As she describes it, and as it bears repeating,

[i]ts a sudden, physical encounter with a sense of the profound foreignness of the world (or the foreignness of my own being-in-the-world). In this state, which even as a child would sometimes overcome me, the activities of every day life are suddenly put on hold, making space for the perception of a state of bare existence, whatever that may be, yes something like neutral, meaningless, material existence. This state corresponds to a very intimate, indeed quite unique (and at the same time uncannily general) and perhaps even (despite this attempt here) quite incommunicable feeling. It is on the one hand an individual, personal experience, in the sense that it has to do with a sensing of my own being. Yet on the other hand, there is something about it that is clearly more impersonal, more general than perhaps any other experience Ive ever had, for, when under the grips of this mystery, it feels as if all that is personal and individual in me were suddenly to dissolve, as if my very being were about to merge with the concrete walls of the room that my fingers may just be brushing.

At which point an unnamed interlocutor (simply designated as voice off) asks [w]hat sense can it possibly make to talk about such a personal and indescribable event in an academic context such as this? Where will it lead? Her dialogue partner seemingly responds for her by pointing out that the recounting of such an experience, no matter how indescribable, points to the limits of language, as well as of academic discourse. That is, the experience which has just been recounted is one which seems to indicate a place where the typical divisions between the individual and the universal are dissolved. This, she indicates, is what Agambens work is all about.

What this event signals, no less, is the dissolution of the boundaries typical of thought, not to mention academia in general. Schiffers can therefore state that what an event such as this directs our attention to is not the pros and cons of an argument; rather, thought is turned toward itself. It becomes self-referential and thus, to a certain extent, without distance to itself. A strange state indeed.

Considering that his work in general attempts to defy those reductionistic representations or labels we so often apply to people in the academic world, and that the experience of reading Agamben apparently lends itself to dissolving those traditional boundaries anyway, it perhaps would be in bad taste to begin this study of Giorgio Agamben and his relation to theology with a few quick gestures toward whichever fields of inquiry would seem to be most receptive to his writings. Political theory, philosophy, law, theology, poetry, literary studies, linguistics, philology, history, cultural studies, film and visual arts, as well as a host of others to be sure, could all lay claim to his work, which, for its part, seems content to crisscross through each and every one of these disciplinary boundaries. But, just as assuredly, none of these disciplines could be said to typify his writing which seems to address the heart of each theoretical realm and yet transcend the very boundaries of every one. And, as we will soon see, crossing over borders and boundaries is precisely what he has foremost in mind.