(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

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ative expressed in the eighth Thesis on the Philosophy of History: “Dann
wird uns als unsere Aufgabe die Herbeiführung des wirklichen Ausnahmezustands
vor Augen stehen” (GS I.2:697; “Then we will clearly see
that it is our task to bring about the true state of exception,” SW 4:392)
While the negative state of exception proclaimed by the sovereign spills
over into every aspect of life and puts the entire planet under the ban of
an oppressive law, the “true,” messianic state of exception suspends the
validity of the law and releases bare life from its ban into a new freedom.
Only when life has absorbed the law to the point of suspending it, instead
of letting the law rule over life, will the ban be abolished and humanity
redeemed. In this redeemed world, not only the law will be undone, but
along with it, the medium that supports and transports it — the written
word. Among the unexpected commonalities between Paul and Benjamin
suggested by Agamben is their similar attitude to writing. Agamben
conflates Paul’s injunction to suspend the written commandments of the
Torah with Benjamin’s messianic idea of a history that will no longer be
written but will be “festively performed.” Against Derrida’s theory of
Grammatology, in which the medium of writing is potentially subversive
of the codified and controlling order, Agamben assimilates the letter with
the law and imagines redemption as the demise of both.
In “Idea of Study,” a short text from Idea of Prose (IP, 63–65), Agamben
recalls how after the destruction of the temple the study of the Scriptures
became, in the Jewish tradition, a surrogate for the sacrificial rituals.
In contradistinction to rabbinic commentators like Maimonides, who
imagine messianic times in terms of a reconstruction of the temple and
a reinvigoration of the Torah and its commands, Agamben echoes cabbalistic
speculations about the eventual demise of all commentaries and
conflates the deposing of today’s hermeneutic temple keepers with a messianic
anticipation of the end of all study. In the course of his argument,
Agamben takes up, but radicalizes and slightly shifts, Benjamin’s reflections
about the messianic mission carried out by the scribes and students
of the Scriptures in Kafka’s writings. These reflections, which make up the
last pages of Benjamin’s Kafka essay, develop the thought that “das Recht,
das nicht mehr praktiziert, sondern nur noch studiert wird, das ist die
Pforte der Gerechtigkeit” (GS II.2:437; “the law which is studied and not
practiced any longer is the gate to justice,” SW 2:815). In keeping with
Benjamin’s interpretation, Agamben considers the study of the law a beneficial
replacement for its practice and a subversive assault on the power of
the lawmakers, but in Agamben’s messianic design, study itself is only an
intermediary stage. Eventually, it should lead to a renunciation of the very
desire for a messianic reconstruction of the temple and, in the end, to its
vanishing from human memory. For Benjamin, however, Kafka’s students
are the forebears of the Messiah because they are the ones who watch
that “the best” not be forgotten, “denn es betrifft die Möglichkeit der