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Giorgio Agamben is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Venice. Stanford University Press has published five of his previous books: Homo Sacer (1998), Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (1999), The Man Without Content (1999), The End of the Poem (1999), and The Open (2004).

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THE TIME THAT REMAINS

Stanford University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments and Translator's Note..................................ix The First Day Paulos doulos christou Iesou..........................1In memoriam: Jacob Taubes..............................................3Paul's Language........................................................3Methodos...............................................................5The Ten Words..........................................................6Paulos.................................................................7On the Good Use of Gossip..............................................8Doulos.................................................................12Talmud and Corpus iuris................................................14Christou Iesou, 15 Proper Names........................................16 The Second Day Kletos...............................................19Beruf..................................................................19Vocation and Revocation................................................23Chresis................................................................26Klesis and Class.......................................................29As If..................................................................35Impotential............................................................37Exigency...............................................................39The Unforgettable......................................................39Parable and Kingdom....................................................42 The Third Day Aphorismenos..........................................44Pharisee...............................................................45The Divided People.....................................................47The Cut of Apelles.....................................................49Remnant................................................................53The All and the Part...................................................55 The Fourth Day Apostolos............................................59Nabi...................................................................60Apocalyptic............................................................62Operational Time.......................................................65Kairos and Chronos.....................................................68Parousia...............................................................69Millenary Kingdom......................................................72Typos..................................................................73Recapitulation.........................................................75Memory and Salvation...................................................77The Poem and Rhyme.....................................................78 The Fifth Day Eis euaggelion theou..................................88Eis....................................................................88Euaggelion.............................................................88Plerophoria............................................................91Nomos..................................................................91Abraham and Moses......................................................93Katargein..............................................................95Astheneia..............................................................97Aufhebung..............................................................99Degree Zero............................................................101State of Exception.....................................................104The Mystery of Anomia..................................................108Antichrist.............................................................111 The Sixth Day (Eis euaggelion theou)................................113Oath...................................................................113Deditio in fidem.......................................................115Berit..................................................................117Gratuitousness.........................................................119The Two Covenants......................................................121Gift and Grace.........................................................123Faith Divided..........................................................124Belief In..............................................................126Nominal Sentence.......................................................127The Word of Faith......................................................129Performative...........................................................131Performativum fidei....................................................134The Nearness of the Word...............................................136 Threshold or Tornada.................................................138Citation...............................................................138Image..................................................................141Jetztzeit..............................................................143Appendix: Interlinear Translation of Pauline Texts.....................147References.............................................................187Index of Names.........................................................195

Chapter One

Paulos doulos christou Iesou

First and foremost, this seminar proposes to restore Paul's Letters to the status of the fundamental messianic text for the Western tradition. This would seem a banal task, for no one would seriously deny the messianic character of the Letters. And yet, this is not self-evident, since two thousand years of translation and commentary coinciding with the history of the Christian church have literally cancelled out the messianic, and the word Messiah itself, from Paul's text. Not that one should conclude that there was something like a premeditated strategy of neutralizing messianism, but anti-messianic tendencies were doubtlessly operating within the Church as well as the Synagogue, at various times and in diverse ways; nevertheless, the problem raised here touches on more essential matters. For reasons that will become clear over the course of the seminar, a messianic institution-or rather, a messianic community that wants to present itself as an institution-faces a paradoxical task. As Jacob Bernays once observed with irony, "to have the Messiah behind you does not make for a very comfortable position" (Bernays, 257). But to have him perennially ahead of you can also, in the end, be discomforting.

In both cases, we are confronted with an aporia that concerns the very structure of messianic time and the particular conjunction of memory and hope, past and present, plenitude and lack, origin and end that this implies. The possibility of understanding the Pauline message coincides fully with the experience of such a time; without this, it runs the risk of remaining a dead letter. The restoration of Paul to his messianic context therefore suggests, above all, that we attempt to understand the meaning and internal form of the time he defines as ho nyn kairos, the "time of the now." Only after this can we raise the question of how something like a messianic community is in fact possible.

In this vein, one could say that a kind of subterranean solidarity had existed between the Church and the Synagogue in presenting Paul as the founder of a new religion. All evidence indicates that Paul would have never dreamed of claiming this status, given that he expected the imminent expiration of time. The reasons for this complicity between Church and Synagogue are clear: for the one as for the other, the aim is to cancel out or at least mute Paul's Judaism, that is to say, to expunge it from its originary messianic context.

For this reason, a long-standing Hebrew literature on Jesus presents him in benevolent terms-as "a nice guy," as Jacob Taubes jokingly notes, or as Bruder Jesus, to quote the title of Ben Chorin's book, published in 1967. Only recently have several Jewish scholars undertaken serious reexamination of Paul's Jewish context. In the 1950s, when W. D. Davies's book Paul and Rabbinic Judaism emphatically called attention to the substantially Judeo-messianic character of Pauline faith, Jewish studies were still dominated by Buber's book Two Types of Faith. The thesis of this book, to which we will later return, and which Taubes notes as being "highly dubious but from which I learned a great deal" (Taubes, 6), opposes the Jewish emunah, an immediate and objective trust in the community to which one belongs, to the Greek pistis, the subjective recognition of a faith one judges to be true and to which one converts. For Buber, the first is the faith of Jesus (Glauben Jesu), while the second, the faith in Jesus (Glauben an Jesus), is, naturally, Paul's. But since then, things have clearly changed, and in Jerusalem as in Berlin and the United States, Jewish scholars have started to read Paul's letters with regard to their own context, even if they have not yet considered them for what they really are, that is, as the oldest and the most demanding messianic texts of the Jewish tradition.

From this perspective, Taubes's posthumous work The Political Theology of Paul (2004) marks an important turning point, despite its being the record of a seminar that lasted only a week. Taubes, who belonged to an old family of Ashkenazi rabbis and had worked in Jerusalem with Scholem (whose relation to Paul is, as we shall see, as complicated as his relation to Benjamin), finds Paul to be the perfect representative of messianism. Since our seminar proposes to interpret messianic time as a paradigm of historical time, now, eleven years after his Heidelberg seminar, we cannot begin without a dedication in memoriam.

Paul's Letters are written in Greek, but what kind of Greek are we talking about? Are we referring to New Testament Greek, about which Nietzsche said that God gave proof of his tactfulness in choosing such an impoverished language? Philosophical lexicons as well as dictionaries and grammars of New Testament Greek consider the texts that comprise the canon of the New Testament as though they were perfectly homogeneous. From the perspective of thought and of language, this is, of course, untrue. Paul's Greek, unlike that of Matthew or Mark, does not consist of a translation behind which an attentive ear, like Marcel Jousse's, could perceive the rhythm and idiom of Aramaic. Wilamowitz-Mllendorf's anti-Nietzscheanism is finally right in characterizing Pauline Greek as a writer's language. "The fact that his Greek has nothing to do with a school or a model, but rather flows directly out of his heart in a clumsy fashion and in an uncontrollable outburst, and the fact that his Greek is not translated Aramaic (as are the sayings of Jesus), makes him a classic of Hellenism" (Wilamowitz-Mllendorf, 159).

Describing him as a "classic of Hellenism" is nevertheless particularly infelicitous. Taubes's anecdote on this subject proves enlightening. One day in Zurich during the war, Taubes was taking a stroll with Emil Staiger, the renowned Germanist, who was also an excellent Hellenist (and who had engaged in an interesting epistolary exchange with Heidegger on the interpretation of a line of Mrike's poetry). "One day we were walking along the Rmistrasse from the university to the lake, to Bellevue, and he turned a corner, and I was continuing on to the Jewish quarter in Enge, and he said to me: You know, Taubes, yesterday I was reading the Letters of the Apostle Paul. To which he added, with great bitterness: But that isn't Greek, it's Yiddish! Upon which I said: Yes, Professor, and that's why I understand it!'" (Taubes, 4). Paul belongs to a Jewish Diaspora community that thinks and speaks in Greek (Judeo-Greek) in precisely the same manner that Sephardim would speak Ladino (or Judeo-Spanish) and the Ashkenazi Yiddish. It is a community that reads and cites the Bible in the Septuagint, which Paul does whenever necessary (even if he occasionally appears to use a corrected version that is based on the original, using what we would nowadays call a "personalized" version). Unfortunately, this is not the occasion for us to elaborate on this Judeo-Greek community and its having remained in the shadow of the history of Judaism-the reasons for which undoubtedly concern Paul at the core. The opposition between Athens and Jerusalem, between Greek culture and Judaism has become commonplace, starting at least with Shestov's book (1938), which Benjamin characterizes as "admirable, but absolutely useless" (Benjamin 1966, 803), and is particularly popular with those who are not experts in either field. According to this commonplace assumption, the community to which Paul belonged (which also produced Philo and Flavius Josephus, as well as numerous other works requiring further study) was subject to distrust because it was imbued with Greek culture and because it read the Bible in the language of Aristotle and Plato. This is the equivalent of saying, "Trust not the Spanish Jews, because they read Gngora and translated the Bible into Ladino," and "Trust not the Eastern Jews, because they speak a kind of German." Yet there is nothing more genuinely Jewish than to inhabit a language of exile and to labor it from within, up to the point of confounding its very identity and turning it into more than just a grammatical language: making it a minor language, a jargon (as Kafka called Yiddish), or a poetic language (like Yehuda Halevi's and Moshe ibn Ezra's Judeo-Andalusian kharjas, discovered in the Cairo genizah). And yet, in each case it is also a mother tongue, even though, as Rosenzweig says, it bears witness to the fact that "so far as his language is concerned, the Jew feels always he is in a foreign land, and knows that the home of his language is in the region of the holy language, a region everyday speech can never invade" (Rosenzweig, 302). (In Scholem's letter to Rosenzweig, dated December 1926-one of the few texts in which Scholem adopts a prophetic tone in describing the religious force of a language that revolts against the very people who speak it-we witness one of the most intense rejections of the Hebrew language as a language of everyday use.)

This is the perspective from which we should account for Paul's language and this Judeo-Greek community that constitutes just as important a chapter in the Jewish Diaspora as does Sephardic culture up to the eighteenth century and Ashkenazi culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hence the meaning of both Staiger's observation ("It's not Greek, it's Yiddish!") and Norden's reserve, which he expresses in his excellent book Die antike Kunstprosa: "Paul's style, globally speaking, is not Hellenistic" (Norden, 509). Nevertheless, Paul's style does not have a peculiarly Semitic coloring either. Being neither Greek, nor Hebrew, nor lashon ha-qodesh, nor secular idiom, is what makes his language so interesting (even if we are not yet at the point of confronting the problem of its messianic status).

I would like to have read and gone through all of this non-Greek in the Letter to the Romans with you today word by word, given that it is the testamentary compendium of Paul's thought, of his gospel, par excellence. But since we do not have time for such an endeavor, in addition to reasons I will not pursue at this moment, we will have to place our stakes in this brief time, on this radical abbreviation of time that is the time that remains. For Paul, the contraction of time, the "remaining" time (1 Cor. 7:29: "time contracted itself, the rest is") represents the messianic situation par excellence, the only real time. I have subsequently decided on our reading only the first verse of the letter, and translating and commenting on it, word for word. I will be satisfied if, at the end of this seminar, we are able to understand the meaning of this first verse, in its literal sense and in every other aspect. This is a modest endeavor, but it depends on a preliminary wager: we will be treating this first verse as though its first ten words recapitulate the meaning of the text in its entirety.

Following epistolary practices of the period, Paul generally begins his letters with a preamble in which he presents himself and names his addressees. The fact that the greeting of the Letter to the Romans differs from others in its length and doctrinal content has not gone unnoticed. Our hypothesis pushes further, for it supposes that each word of the incipit contracts within itself the complete text of the Letter, in a vertiginous recapitulation. (Recapitulation is an essential term for the vocabulary of messianism, as we shall see later.) Understanding the incipit therefore entails an eventual understanding of the text as a whole.

PAULOS DOULOS CHRISTOU IESOU, KLETOS APOSTOLOS APHORISMENOS EIS EUAGGELION THEOU. The Latin translation by Jerome used for centuries by the Catholic Church reads: Paulus servus Jesu Christi, vocatus apostolus, segregatus in evangelium Dei. A current literal English translates, "Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated to the gospel of God."

One preliminary philological observation. We read the Pauline text in modern versions. (In our case Nestle-Aland's critical edition, which is a revised edition, published in 1962, of Eberhard Nestle's 1898 edition that abandoned the Erasmian Textus receptus and instead based itself on a comparison between the 1869 Tischendorf text and the 1881 Westcott-Hort text.) In contrast to the manuscript tradition, these editions necessarily introduce modern conventions of writing, like punctuation, into the text, and in doing so they occasionally presuppose semantic choices. This is why, in our verse, the comma after Iesou makes for a syntactic break, separating doulos from kletos, that refers the latter to apostolos ("servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle"). Yet nothing prevents us from opting for a different scansion, reading Paulos doulos christou Iesou kletos, apostolos aphorismenos eis euaggelion theou as "Paul, called as slave of Jesus the Messiah, separated as apostle for the announcement of God." This second reading would, among other things, better correspond with Paul's explicit affirmation (1 Cor. 15:9): ouk eimi hikanos kaleisthai apostolos ("I am not worthy to be called apostle"). Without yet choosing one over the other, at this point we should remember that, from the syntactic point of view, the verse presets itself like a single nominal syntagma that is absolutely paratactic, uttered in one single breath, moving according to the crescendo: servitude, calling, envoi, separation.

I will spare you the endless discussions on the subject of the name Paulos, concerning whether, as a Roman name, it is actually a praenomen or a cognomen, or perhaps even a signum or a supernomen (that is to say, a surname), and the reasons for which "the young Jew with the proud biblical-Palestinian name of Sha'ul, which at the same time emphasized the descent of his family from the tribe of Benjamin, was given this Latin cognomen" (Hengel, 9). Why doesn't Paul ever give his full name, if, according to a completely unfounded conjecture, his name was Caius Julius Paulus? What relation exists between his Roman name and Sha'ul, his Hebrew name (which, in the Septuagint, is written as Saoul or Saoulos, and not Saulos)? These problems as well as others stem from a passage in Acts 13:9, which reads, Saulos ho kai Paulos (ho kai is the Greek equivalent of the Latin qui et, which usually introduces a surname and can mean "who is also called").

My methodological choice (which also entails basic philological precaution) consists here-and in general for the interpretation of Pauline texts-in not taking into account later sources, even if they are other New Testament texts. In his letters, Paul always and only calls himself Paulos. And this is all there is, nothing more to add. For those who would like to know more on this subject, permit me to refer you to the early study by Hermann Dessau (1910) or to the more recent work-though by no means more astute-by Gustave Adolphus Harrer (1940). Most of what you find there, however, is simply gossip, which is also the case for all the speculations on Paul's trade, on his studies with Gamaliel, and so on. This does not mean that gossip cannot be interesting; on the contrary, to the extent that it entertains a nontrivial relation to truth that eludes the problem of verification and falsification and claims to be closer to truth than factual adequation, gossip is certainly a form of art. The peculiarity of its epistemological status lies in the fact that in itself it accounts for the possibility of an error that does not entirely undermine the definition of truth. Intelligent gossip therefore interests us independently of its verifiable character. That said, to treat gossip as though it were information is truly an unforgivable apaideusia [lack of refinement].

While it may not be legitimate to unhesitatingly deduce from a text information that supposedly refers to the biographic reality of its author or characters, such information may still be used as a starting point for a better understanding of the text itself, or for the internal function that the author, the characters, or their respective names assume within the text. In other words, the good use of gossip is not excluded. In this vein, when the author of the Acts changes to Paulos the name of the character who up to that point had been called Saulos, we can read a significance in the sudden shift. In literary texts, we occasionally find that an author changes identity over the course of the narration-for example, when Guillaume de Lorris, the supposed author of The Romance of the Rose, gives way to an equally unknown Jean de Meun, or when Miguel de Cervantes declares at a certain point that the real author of the novel he is writing is not himself, but a so-called Cid Hamete Benengeli. (In this case, Benengeli is actually the transcription of an Arabic word that means "son of a stag," which is probably an ironic allusion to the hazy circumstances surrounding the author's birth, taking into account those laws concerning the limpieza del sangre, purity of blood, that discriminate against those with Hebrew or Moorish ancestry.)

(Continues...)

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