Let us now take a closer look at the structure of messianic time in Paul. As noted, Paul decomposes the messianic event into two times: ressurection and parousia, the second coming of Jesus at the end of time. Out of this issues the paradoxical tension between an already and a not yet that defines the Pauline conception of salvation. The messianic event has already happened, salvation has already been achieved according to believers, but, neverthelsess, in order to truly be fulfilled, this implies additional time. [69]
what is this additional time? the time of the becoming of the world? (see below on the katechon)
– ON THE POEM
– THE STATE OF EXCEPTION / SCHMITT / KATECHON
THE POEM / ABSENT SIGNIFIER / MECHANISM OF SUNSET
On the poem in relation to messianic time [on this, rethink arguments in chapter 3. M’s S]
By now, you will have perfectly understood the hypothesis I am about to put forth, which should be taken more as an epistemological paradigm than as an historical-genealogical hypothesis: that rhyme issues from Christian poetry as a metrical-linguistic transcodification of messianic time and is structured according to the play of typological relations and recapitulations evoked by Paul. [85]
[…] rhyme, understood in the broad sense of the term as the articulation of a difference between semiotic series and semantic series, is the messianic heritage Paul leaves to modern poetry, and the history and fate of rhyme coincide in poetry with the history and fate of the messianic announcement. One example is enough to prove beyond a doubt that this is to be taken quite literally and show that this is not a question of secularization, but of a true theological heritage unconditionally assumed by poetry. When Holderlin, on the threshold of a new centruy, elaborates on his doctrine of the leave-taking of the gods – specifically of the last god, the Christ – at the very moment in which he announces this new atheology, the metrical form of his lyric shatters to the point of losing any recognisable identity in his last hymns. The absensce of the gods is one with the disappearance of closed metrical form; atheology immediately becomes a-prosody. [87]
ESSENTIAL QUESTION: does the above (confirmed, it would seem, by way of Mallarme’s sunset) mean that messianic time is over – that it came to an end in the long 19th, the century of the sunset – and therefore that the post of postmodernity is the post messianic? This then would be the meaning of globalisation as a becoming immanent of the world [NANCY]. [SEE ALSO HERE]
[derrida on the messianic]
At this point, I must return to the discovery I alluded to concerning the poshumous life of the verb katargein in the philosophical tradition. How does Luther translate this Pauline verb […]? Luther uses Aufheben – the very word that harbours the double meaning of abolishing and conserving […] used by Hegel as a foundation for his dialectic! A closer look at Luther’s vocabulary shows that he is aware of the verb’s double meaning, which before him occurs infrequently. This means that in all likelyhood the term acquires its particular facets through the translation of the Pauline letters, leaving Hegel to pick it up and develop it. It is because of the word’s having been used by Luther to convey the antinomial gesture in Pauline katargesis in Romans 3:31 that the German verb then took on this double meaning – which was a ‘delight’ for ‘speculative thought’. This is how a genuinely messianic term expressing the transformation of the law impacted by faith and announcement becomes a key term of the dialectic. [99]
We find a genuinely messianic exigency reemerge in Hegel in the problem of the pleroma of times and the end of history. Hegel, however, thinks the pleroma nost as each instant’s relation to the Messiah, but as the final result of a global process. His French interpreters – Koyré and Kojève, who are actually Russian, which comes as no surprise given the importance of the apocalypse in twentieth-century Russian culture – thus start off with the conviction that ‘in Hegelian philosophy, the ‘system’, is only possible if history is over [NB. see above!], if there is no more future and if time stops’ (Koyré, 485). But what happens here, as is clearly the case in Kojève, is that both of these interpretations end up flattening out the messianic onto the eschatological, thus confounding the problem of messianic time with the problem of posthistory. The fact that the concept of desoeuvrement – a good translation of Paulin katargein – first appears in twentieth century philosophy precisely in Kojève, in his definition of the post-historical conditon of man, the voyou desoeuvre as the Shabbat of man [Critique 60], is enough to prove that the connection here to the messianic has not yet been completley neutralised. [101]
NB, Agamben gloss of the trace in JD:
Beginning with Speech and Phenomena and Of Grammatology (1967), Derrida restored philosophical standing to these concepts, demonstrating their connectedness to Hegelian Aufhebung and developing them into an actual ontology of thetrace and originary supplement. In his careful deconstruction of Hussurlian phenomenology, Derrida critiques the primacy of presence in the metaphysical tradition and shows how metaphysics always already presupposes nonpresence and signification. This is the setting in which he introduces the concept of an ‘originary supplement’, which is not simply added onto something but comes to supplement a lack and nonoriginary presence both of which are always already caught up in a signifying. ‘What we would ultimatley like to draw attention to is that the for-itself of self-presence (fur-sich) – traditionally determined in its dative dimension as phenomenological self-giving, whether reflexive or prereflexive – arises in the role of supplement as primordial substitution, in the form ‘in the place of’ (fur etwas), that is, as we have seen, in the very operation of significance in general’ (Derrida Speech and Phenomena). The concept of the ‘trace’ names the impossibility of a sign to be extinguished in the fullness of a present and absolute presence. […]
[…] these concepts presuppose both the exclusion of presence and the impossibility of an extinguising of the sign. They therefore presuppose that there is still signification beyond prsence and absence, meaning that nonpresence still signifies something, it posits itself as an ‘arche-trace’, a sort of archiphoneme between presence and absence. […]
[…] ‘Therefore the sign of this excess must be absolutely excessive as concerns all possible presence-absence, all possible production or disappearance of beings in general, and yet, in some manner it must still signify… The mode of inscription of such a trace in the text of metaphysics is so unthinkable that it must be described as an erasure of the trace itself. The trace is produced as its own erasure’ (Derrida Margins). In this instance, the archi-trace simultaneously shows its link to – and difference from – the Hegelian Aufhebung with its messianic theme. In this context, the movement of the Aufhebung, which neutralises signifieds while maintining and achieving signification, thus becomes the principle of infinite deferment. A signification that only signifies itself can never seize hold of itself, it can never catch up with a void in representation, nor does it ever allow anything to be an in-significance; rather, it is displaced and deferred in one and the same gesture. In this way, the trace is a suspended Aufhebung that will never come to know its own pleroma. Deconstruction is a thwarted messianism, a suspension of the messianic.
Yes and no. I agree with the analysis – it crosses over at several points with the reading of the nul signifier ‘ptyx’ in Mallarme’s Sonnet linked above. This Sonnet attempts to round off signification in a perfectly reflexive work, but in the moment of its apotheosis, it actually discovers and stages the explosion of the whole system (it is an originary deconstructive gesture in the micro-narrative of a sunset), and the Sonnet becomes Un Coup de Des (you’ll have to read further in the book for this): the rhyme scheme of messianic time (above) breaks down, and we quite literally encounter the end of time (hence the subtitle). So yes, deconstruction, taking off from this moment is a thwarted messianism, but not only this. More interestingly, it is a completed messianism – it opens on messainism’s closure. Everything figured through the motif of the sunset.
*
STATE OF EXCEPTION / SCHMITT / KATECHON
Concerning the first point (on the indiscernability of an outside and inside of the law): as we have seen, the distinction between Jews and non-Jews, those who are within the law and those who are outside, no longer holds in the messianic […]
the remant is an exception taken to its extreme, pushed to its paradoxical formulation […]
An ancient tradition, which is already found in Tertullian, identifies the power which delays or maintains the end of time as the Roman Empire, which in this sense has a positive historical function. [109]
on this, cf. PKD (the Black Iron Prison) also of interest – Heidegger on Enframing)
(this is why Tertullian says, ‘We pray for the permanence of the world [pro statu saeculi], for peace in things, for the delay of the end [pro mora finis].’) This tradition culminates in the Schmittian theory that finds in 2 Thessalonians 2 the only possible foundation for a Christian doctrine of State power:
‘Essential to this Christian empire was that it never consisted in an eternal reign and that it always kept in mind its own end as well as the end of the present eon, and despite all this, that it was still capable of exerting a historical power. The decisive and historically powerful concept that grounded its continuity was the concept of the ‘arresting force’, the kat-echon. ‘Empire here means the historical power that is capable of arresting the coming of the Antichrist and the end of the current eon. A force qui tenet, according to the words of the apostle Paul in the second letter to the Thessalonians… I do not believe that any other concept of history than the kat-echon is possible for an originary Christian faith. The belief in an arresting force that can stave off the end of the world is the only link leading from the eschatological paralysis of every human action to such a great historical agency as that of the Christian empire at the time of the Germanic kings. (Schmitt)
[109-110]
Things do not change much for those modern interpreters who link katechon with God himself and take the delay of the parousia to be an expression of the divine plan of salvation (‘the katechon, understood correctly, is God himself… It is not a matter of a worldly force that would delay the coming of the Antichrist, but of delaying the parusia implied in the divine temporal plan’ [Strobel]) [110]
[…]
The katechon is therefore the force – the Roman Empire as well as every constituted authority – that clashes with and hides katargesis, the state of tendential lawlessness that characterises the messianic, and in this sense delays unveiling the .mystery of lawlessness’. The unveiling of this mystery entails bringing to light the inoperativity of the law and the substantial illegitimacy of each and every power in messianic time. [111]
this ‘unveiling’ (following the chronology above) conicides with the new nomos anticipated by Schmitt, the turn in Heidegger (from enframing) and the sunset (with all its Hegelian heritage). It is the opening of autonomy as we are beginning to understand it.
It is therefore possible to conceive of katechon and anomos not as two seperate figures, but as one single power before and after the final unveiling [NB see above: anomos would then be what we are calling autonomy]. Profane power – albeit of the Roman Empire or any other power – is the semblance that covers up the substantial lawlessness [anomia] of messainic time. In solving the ‘mystery’, semblance is cast out , and power assumes the figure of the anomos, of that which is the absolute outlaw. This is how the messianic is fulfilled in the clash between the two parousiai: between that of anomos, who is marked by the workings of Satan in every power, and that of the Messiah, who will render energeia inoperative in it. [last sentence not clear to me – 111]