(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

196
VIVIAN LISKA
Faced with urgent concerns at the turn of the twenty-first century — the
fate and status of democracy, the embattled legacy of Marx and the renewed
impact of religion in both the theoretical and political realms — Jacques
Derrida and Giorgio Agamben turn to Benjamin’s messianism in elaborating
their own positions. Derrida, though repeatedly invoking Benjamin’s
messianism in his political writings of the nineties, explicitly distances himself
from Benjamin’s views, which he deems “too messianico-marxist or
archeo-eschatological.” 2 By contrast Agamben, a leading figure in contemporary
Continental thought, who from 1979 to 1994 served as editor of
the Italian edition of Benjamin’s collected works, fully embraces Benjamin’s
legacy and performs the most radical recovery of his messianic thinking
to date. In his references to Benjamin, which permeate his work from his
early theoretical studies on aesthetics and language to his latest juridical
and political texts, he forcefully wrenches Benjamin away from the views of
his former milieu, especially those of Scholem and Adorno, as well as from
his later readers, foremost among them Derrida. For Agamben, the constitutive
inability of Derridean deconstruction to reach closure partakes in
perpetuating the prevailing dismal condition of humanity through an attitude
that he terms “a petrified or paralyzed messianism.” 3 An exploration
of these new battle lines reveals the challenges and risks of an actualization
of Benjamin’s messianism today.
Agamben’s recovery of Benjamin’s messianism occurs as an often
implicit but occasionally overt critique of some of the major interpretations
of Benjamin’s thought developed both in his lifetime and after. His
earliest references to Benjamin can be found in dialogue with Hannah
Arendt, whose view of Benjamin is, in accordance with her own political
thinking, situated at the furthest remove from theologically inspired
ideas of redemption. Agamben takes up important elements from her
writings about Benjamin but, without ever explicitly refuting them,
shifts them in a direction that reintroduces Benjamin’s most theological
ideas. Agamben’s disagreement with Scholem unfolds in a more direct
mode: He overtly develops his Pauline vision of Benjamin’s messianism
against Scholem’s insistence on its mostly Jewish roots and, more
particularly, argues against Scholem’s notion of a “life in deferral and
delay” (P, 166) that derives from messianic expectations in the Jewish
tradition. 4 In a similar vein, Agamben also takes to task Adorno’s hypothetical
understanding of messianic redemption as nothing more than a
virtual or fictional vantage point to be adopted for the sole purpose of
assessing the bleak state of the world. 5 Most explicitly, Agamben rejects
Derrida’s “messianicity without messianism,” his exhortation of an endless
“anticipation without anticipation” and his definition of the messianic
as an existential structure of infinite deferral and radical openness
toward an incalculable, unpredictable future. 6 Against Derrida, Agamben
recovers aspects of Benjamin’s messianic thinking that foreground