CANON AS AN ACT OF CREATION

Abstract

The term 'messianic' has recently become one of philosophy's most appropriated religious terms, yet one apparently now bereft of its historical religious particularity and instead placed at the service of a secularized universal ethics. Hence, its initial association with such theologically inflected terms as 'redemption' or 'salvation' has seemingly been pushed aside. In this light, a genealogical approach to certain contemporary reworkings of the 'messianic' might prove most helpful in uncovering the reasons for this transformation from the theological to the philosophical, and what role, if any, theology still has in determining the meaning and usage of this highly significant term. Accordingly, I will here attempt to do just that by tracing the term through the work of the German Jewish critic Walter Benjamin, who wrote mainly in the interwar period, see the term significantly modified through the French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, who utilized it between the mid to late-century, before being returned to in the Italian literary and political theorist Giorgio Agamben, whose usage runs up to the present. Accordingly, I will proceed as follows. First, I will begin by briefly looking at the formulations of Benjamin on the theo-political dimensions of the 'state of exception', which is a state called into existence through a decision of the reigning sovereign (akin perhaps to a president's power to pardon). This is a notion completely intertwined for him with the theological as it is an action that takes place external to the normal 'rules' of order. This state, however, is yet unfolded by Benjamin in fuller historical terms than is traditionally the case for a general political theory, a move he seems to borrow from the Judaic tradition's critique of political sovereignty. Indeed, he envisions this state as the obverse partner to the messianic, hence as a reworking of this originally Judaic term into an historical (immanent) call to remember what has been repressed (by sovereign power). The messianic becomes then, for Benjamin, a form of remembrance issued as a bid for justice to be disclosed within an alternate (non-sovereign) horizon of history. Second, though in modified form, this same expression of 'remembrance as justice' returns as the force of the 'messianic without messianism' revealed along similar eschatological horizons in the work of the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida. Indeed, Benjamin is often invoked by Derrida who, for his part, presents a thematic he only emphasized as more and more central to 1 …