The Event of Deactivation and Deactivation of Event

Abstract

The paper addresses the notion of the messianic event in the philosophical project of Giorgio Agamben. The central reference for this paper is the book The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, in which the Italian philosopher proposes his conception of messianism. The central event that lies at the foundation of this conception is the event of deactivation of the apparatus of law, which introduces the time of anomia. Based on a close reading of The Time that Remains, the author singles out three key features of the messianic event: 1) This event has already taken place in the past. 2) The event, as conceptualized by Agamben, is deprived of its capturing power and is deactivated and decomposed into parts. 3) The messianic event cannot be a foundation of any positive historical power, which constitutes an important aspect of the critical component of Agamben’s project. As the fifth section of the paper demonstrates, such understanding of the messianic event leads to an abolishment of the horizon of the future itself, which poses obstacles to the political potential of messianism and introduces serious limitations to Agamben’s philosophical strategy: if we abolish the possibility of the future event itself, we have nothing to do but to overlook and neglect the future.