The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government

Homo Sacer #II.4

by Giorgio Agamben, Lorenzo Chiesa (Translator), Matteo Mandarini (Translator)

Why has power in the West assumed the form of an "economy," that is, of a government of men and things? If power is essentially government, why does it need glory, that is, the ceremonial and liturgical apparatus that has always accompanied it?

In the early centuries of the Church, in order to reconcile monotheism with God's threefold nature, the doctrine of Trinity was introduced in the guise of an economy of divine life. It was as if the Trinity amounted to nothing more than a problem of managing and governing the heavenly house and the world. Agamben shows that, when combined with the idea of providence, this theological-economic paradigm unexpectedly lies at the origin of many of the most important categories of modern politics, from the democratic theory of the division of powers to the strategic doctrine of collateral damage, from the invisible hand of Smith's liberalism to ideas of order and security.

But the greatest novelty to emerge from The Kingdom and the Glory is that modern power is not only government but also glory, and that the ceremonial, liturgical, and acclamatory aspects that we have regarded as vestiges of the past actually constitute the basis of Western power. Through a fascinating analysis of liturgical acclamations and ceremonial symbols of power—the throne, the crown, purple cloth, the Fasces, and more—Agamben develops an original genealogy that illuminates the startling function of consent and of the media in modern democracies. With this book, the work begun with Homo Sacer reaches a decisive point, profoundly challenging and renewing our vision of politics.

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, History, Theology, Politics, Theory, Nonfiction

324 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Giorgio Agamben is one of the leading figures in Italian and contemporary continental philosophy. He is the author of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life; Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive; Profanations; The Signature of All Things: On Method, and other books. Through the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s he treated a wide range of topics, including aesthetics, literature, language, ontology, nihilism, and radical political thought.

In recent years, his work has had a deep impact on contemporary scholarship in a number of disciplines in the Anglo-American intellectual world. Born in Rome in 1942, Agamben completed studies in Law and Philosophy with a doctoral thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil, and participated in Martin Heidegger’s seminars on Hegel and Heraclitus as a postdoctoral scholar.

He rose to international prominence after the publication of Homo Sacer in 1995. Translated into English in 1998, the book’s analyses of law, life, and state power appeared uncannily prescient after the attacks on New York City and Washington, DC in September 2001, and the resultant shifts in the geopolitical landscape. Provoking a wave of scholarly interest in the philosopher’s work, the book also marked the beginning of a 20-year research project, which represents Agamben’s most important contribution to political philosophy.

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Kingdom and the Glory is an almost unbelievably erudite book, surveying a huge array of material while also managing to read like a good detective story (yet minus any outright conspiracism, thankfully).

For all the textual analysis and detail, Agamben advances a fairly straightforward argument: that the ancient Greek split between polis (public, city-state rule) and oikonomia (home management) was appropriated over time by Christian theology in order to rationalize the conceptual paradoxes which develop when a transcendent God is thought to manage, alongside its incarnation, the totality of all shifting, immanent activity. Through so-called "secularization," this general framework — operating as a "machine" to functionally unite spheres of the "political" (sovereign authority) and the "economic" (immanent governance) — is then unwittingly bequeathed to modern governments, democracies included (separation of powers, the economy's "invisible hand," and even contemporary political concepts of "collateral damage," are here traced back to their theological origins). Philosophically, this line of the book's argument is convincing, especially given the level of detail Agamben devotes to his textual genealogies. (Although categories alone do not make history, which Agamben can overlook, as critics like Alberto Toscano have noted: "[Agamben's] 'theory' of signatures, like so many attempts to link the religious to the political, thus seems to engage in what we could call a reductivist idealism, a mirror-image of sorts of the much-maligned Marxian reduction of ideal structures to social relations.")

The "take away" from Agamben's analysis at first blush seems equally straightforward. As if a refrain, Agamben offers restatements of it at the conclusion of various sub-sections, always highlighting a formal parallel between theological and political categories and then claiming that, ultimately, "the emperor has no clothes" (in one section, the metaphor is exact: "What appears in God when the distinction [between glorification and the substance of divinity] breaks down is something that theology absolutely does not want to see, a nudity that must be covered by a garment of light at any cost," p. 221). For example:

• "More original -- or better, more decisive -- than the opposition between theology and politics, spiritual power and profane power, is the glory within which they coincide. . . . The theology of glory constitutes, in this sense, the secret point of contact through which theology and politics continuously communicate and exchange parts with one another" (pp. 193-194).
• "But the center of the machine is empty, and glory is nothing but the splendor that emanates from this emptiness, the inexhaustible kabhod that at once reveals and veils the central vacuity of the machine" (p. 211).
• "...It is not necessary to share Schmitt's thesis on secularization in order to affirm that political problems become more intelligible and clear if they are related to theological paradigms. On the contrary, we have tried to show that this comes about because doxologies and acclamations in some sense constitute a threshold of indifference between politics and theology" (p. 229-230).
• "The throne is empty not only because glory, though coinciding with the divine essence is not identified with it, but also because it is in its innermost self-inoperativity and sabbatism. The void is the sovereign figure of glory" (p. 245).
• "Political economy is constituted, in other words, as a social rationalization of providential oikonomia" (p. 282).

Where Agamben seems to run aground a bit is when he implies that these formal connections should or do automatically give any level of insight whatsoever into lived religious traditions/experience or "actually existing" politics. His implied criticism of Karl Barth's politics is telling, in this regard. Agamben, firstly, legitimately questions and criticizes Barth's tendency to "aestheticize" glory theologically (p. 212), but then proceeds to willfully conflate Barth's theological statements with Barth's actual political stances (pp. 215-216). Simply put: it's not as if Barth just "called it quits," leaving 1930s' Germany out of a superficial disappointment with how he (supposedly, according to Agamben) saw the formal structure of "Christian glory" somehow just taking its due course in German politics (!). On the contrary, what Agamben completely writes out of this history is Barth's "Barmen Declaration," which he had personally mailed directly to Hitler himself — a symbolic political act, at the time, if there ever was one. Granted, the majority of German Christians didn't follow Barth's lead (tragically), yet it's important to acknowledge that it wasn't the formal structure or textual content per se of anything whatsoever that prompted Barth's stance, and it certainly was not the Reich's "glory"; it was Barth's lived reaction to what he recognized as the Nazis' desacralized idolatry, very much in contrast to Barth's own relation to his "empty" (in Agamben's terms), yet living (to Barth), God.

For all of Agamben's subtle or suggestive political denunciations, then — and these are always given in passing asides, rather than as more developed investigations on par with his textual genealogies — it's Agamben himself who, throughout, insists on fixating on the impossible ground of power per se, seeking to "penetrate the central mystery of power" (p. 245), rather than focus on the always-dynamic interplay between political and religious realms. Hopefully the final installments of the Homo Sacer series (the books which will eventually constitute volume IV, starting with an examination of monasticism in relation to form-of-life?) will move more in this other direction.

As it stands, what still redeems this book is Agamben's brief return, at the end, to advocating St. Paul's "hos me" (as not) as the mode of being of "messianic life," describing "an inoperativity within [every] operation itself" (p. 251), irrespective of a deferred (eternal) glory (pp. 248-251). And Agamben's unique attempt to link Paul's particular, mystic messianism with the legacy of Guy Debord's political criticism (pp. 255-256; p. 259).

[sologdin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part V of author’s Homo Sacer project.

Very impressive. The most substantial, rigorously sustained, and abjectly humbling argument in the Home Sacer series.

Prefaced by the statement of purpose to investigate “why power in the West has assumed the form of an oikonomia, that is a government of men” (xi). It’s good to set modest goals for oneself, I suppose.

Chapter 1 – The Two Paradigms

The argument proceeds from the distinction between “political theology, which founds the transcendence of sovereign power on the single God, and economic theology, which replaces this transcendence with the idea of an oikonomia, conceived as an immanent ordering—domestic and not political in a strict sense—of both divine and human life” (1). The point of departure is Schmitt’s thesis that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” (2). Author notes that Schmitt must be supplemented with the contrary hypothesis that “a secularized theological paradigm acts retroactively on theology itself, since it implies that from the beginning theology conceives divine life and the history of humanity as an oikonomia, that is, theology is itself ‘economic’ and did not simply become so at a later time through secularization” (3). Curiously, “a zoe aionios [eternal life] and not a bios lies at the center of the evangelical message,” which “ultimately lies in the paradigm of the oikos, not in that of the polis” (id.). Lots on Schmitt &c.

From Aristotle, theology obtained the notion that “the rule of many is not good; let there be one” (id.), which becomes “the concept of divine monarchy” (9). Even though “the doctrine of a single substance in three different hypostases” was established in 381 (12), Gregory of Nazianzus “introduced a sort of theory of civil war (‘a genuine politic0-theological stasiology’) into the core of Trinitarian doctrine” (12). Gregory was concerned that anarchy is disorder and polyarchia is stasis and thus disorder, whereas monarchy is orderly. For Gregory, “it is a matter of thinking the Trinitarian articulation of the hypostases without introducing a stasis in God” (13). Gregory believes that one must distinguish in this context “the discourse of nature and the discourse of economy” (13), which is the point of departure for the entire oikonomia argument: “in Gregory, the logos of ‘economy’ is specifically designed to prevent the Trinity from introducing a stasiological, or political fracture in God” (13).

Chapter 2 – The Mystery of the Economy

Noting that oikonomia “designates the ordered arrangement of the material of an oration” in the rhetorical context (19), author indicates that the term “is transposed into a theological field, in which, according to a widespread belief, it would acquire the meaning of a ‘divine plan of salvation’” (20).

Argument in this section seeks to establish that, in early Christian theology, “the relation between oikonomia and mystery […] is a matter of carrying out faithfully the task of announcing the mystery of redemption hidden in the will of God that has now come to completion” (23). The issue is that somewhere a chiasmus slips into the apologetics: “in Paul, there is an ‘economy of the mystery’ and not, as will be the case in Hippolytus and Tertullian, a ‘mystery of the economy’” (26). Analysis of oikonomia is “limited to texts of the second and third century AD, a period during which the concept receives its original form” (25). Much work here tracking the chiasmus, all very cool. The punchline:

The concept of oikonomia is the strategic operator that, before the elaboration of an appropriate philosophical vocabulary—which will take place only in the course of the fourth and fifth centuries—allows a temporary reconciliation of the trinity with the divine unity. In other words, the first articulation of the Trinitarian problem takes place in ‘economical,’ not metaphysico-theological, terms; for this reason, when the Nicene-Constantinopolitan dogmatics achieves its final form, the oikonomia will gradually disappear from the Trinitarian vocabulary. (36)

Ultimately, the “oikonomia corresponds to the Stoic doctrine of the modes of being and is, in this sense, a pragmatics” (38). The “crucial [ha] gesture is the transformation of the Pauline syntagma ‘economy of the mystery’ into >oikonomias sacramentum [cf. Homo Sacer, Sacrament of Language, &c.], which confers on economy all the richness and ambiguity of a term that means, at the same time, oath, consecration, and mystery” (40).

Oikonomia is “referred back to its original meaning as ‘administration of the house’” (41). The locus classicus for this is Tertullian, wherein what is at stake “appears to be the articulation of economy and monarchy in the figure of the administration” (42). For Tertullian, “angelology is here mobilized as a theological paradigm of the administration, this instituting—with a quasi-Kafkian move [cf. D&G!]—a correspondence between angels and officers” (43). Via Aristotle’s identification of monarchy with economy, “the divine monarchy now constitutively entails an economy, a governmental apparatus, which articulates and, at the same time, reveals its mystery” (id.).

This discussion grows organically out of HS II: “The meaning of ‘exception’ acquired by the term oikonomia in the sixth or seventh century, especially in the field of canon law of the Byzantine Church, is of particular interest for its semantic history” (49); “just as an opposition between theology and economy had emerged in theology, so an opposition between ‘canon’ and ‘economy’ is produced in law, and the exception is defined as a decision that does not apply the law strictly, but ‘makes use of the economy” (id.). In this connection, “the paradigm of government and of the state of exception coincide in the idea of an oikonomia” (50). The issue resolved:

Between the inarticulate Unitarianism of the Monarchians and Judaism and the Gnostic proliferation of divine hypostases, between the noninvolvement in the world of the Gnostic and Epicurean God and the Stoic idea of a deus actuosus that provides for the world, the oikonomia makes possible a reconciliation in which a transcendent God, who is both one and triune at the same time, can—while remaining transcendent—take charge of the world and found an immanent praxis of government whose supermundane mystery coincides with the history of humanity. (50-51)

(There is of course a semiurgical nihilism inherent in the belief “it is the economy itself that is mysterious […] conferring a hidden meaning upon every event” (50).)

Chapter 3 – Being and Acting

The doctrine of oikonomia “revokes” “the perfect unity of being and praxis” (54). This fracture is the production of modern ethics and its “insoluble aporias” (id.). Arius as “careful to specify that the Son was generated achronos, outside of temporality” (57), from which the question becomes whether the Son is likewise “without principle, anarchos, that is, unfounded” (id.)—indeed, “without arche.” “In other words, the oikonomia is always already anarchic, without foundation, and a rethinking of the problem of anarchy in our political tradition becomes possible only if we begin with an awareness of the secret theological nexus that links it to government and providence. The governmental paradigm, of which we are here reconstructing the genealogy, is actually always already ‘anarchic-governmental’” (65). (NB: “Christian theology is, from its beginning, economic-managerial, and not political-statal—this was our original thesis contra Schmitt” (66).)

Chapter 4 – The Kingdom and the Government

The point of departure here is the arthurian roi mehaignie, who reigns over the wasteland (68)—he “reigns but does not govern” (69), having become a “divided and impotent sovereignty”: “even if he does not lose any of his legitimacy and sacredness [!], the king has in fact for some reason been separated from his powers and activities, and reduced to impotence” (id.), which should sound familiar to readers of Trinitarian doctrine, supra. Plenty on numbnut illiberal Schmitt.

Lots here, with the punchline that “the aporia that marks like a thin crack the wonderful order of the medieval cosmos now begins to become more visible” (87): “The only content of the transcendent order is the immanent order, but the meaning of the immanent order is nothing other than the relation to the transcendent end” (id.). We see that “Trinitarian oikonomia, ordo, and gubernatio constitute an inseparable triad, whose terms interpenetrate, insofar as they name the new figure of ontology that Christian theology bequeaths to modernity” (91). The “gnostic doctrine of the idle god” is “the doctrine of divine impotence” (106).

Chapter 5 – The Providential Machine

We see that the debate on providence, as between pagan, Judaic, and Christian writers,

constitute the place in which the theologico-economic paradigm and the fracture between being and praxis that it entails take the form of a government of the world and, vice versa, the government presents itself as an activity that can be thought only if ontology and praxis are divided and coordinated ‘economically.’ (113)

The history of “providence coincides with the long and fierce debate between those who claimed that God provides for the world only by means of general or universal principles (providential generalis) and those who argued that the divine providence extends to particular things” (id.). (Recall the etymology of providence, pro- + videre, ‘foresight.’) Lots lots lots here working this out. But ultimately: “through the distinction between legislative or sovereign power and executive or governmental power, the modern State acquires the double structure of the governmental machine” (142). “The providential economical paradigm is, in this sense, the paradigm of democratic power, just as the theological-political is the paradigm of absolutism” (id.).

Chapter 6 – Angelology and Bureaucracy

This is “the old Augustinian theme according to which the celestial city will be constituted by angels and the blessed” (145); this is “interpreted literally” (id.) as “the foundation of ‘politico-religious’ character of the celestial city and, therefore, of the Church.” It follows that “if the politicality and truth of the ekklesia is defined by its participation in the angels, then men can also reach their full celestial citizenship only by imitating the angels and participating in the song of praise and glorification” (147). Eww?

“The caesura between assistants and administrators (that is, between contemplation and government) cuts through each angel, which is divided between two poles that are constitutive of the angelic function, which is at once administrative and mysteric” (151). Hierarchy is “the activity of government, which as such implies an ‘operation’” (152). Lots here.

The central aporia: “The oikonomia, the providential government of the world, is not eternal but is completed on the Day of Judgment” (160); “the Kingdom that will follow is what we might call radically without government” (id.). Aquinas seeks above all to “overcome […] the end of the oikonomia” (161). This means that the objective of the apparatus is to become inoperative: “the perfect cipher of Christian citizenship is constituted by the song of praise, and the pleromatic figure of the political is bestowed upon angels who have become inoperative” (162). Whereas “liturgy survives only as doxology” (id.), what remains elsewise? “The principle according to which the government of the world will cease with the Last Judgment has only one important exception in Christian theology. It is the case of hell” (163). After governance ceases, “demons will carry out their judicial functions as executors of the infernal punishments for all eternity” (164). I.e., “hell is that place in which the divine government of the world survives for all eternity, even if only in a penitentiary form” (id.). Important because, according to Aquinas, “the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them if they are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned” (164)—a “spectacle of suffering” in “solidarity with the power of the ancient regime Foucault has demonstrated” (id.).

Despite this “demonic radicalization of law” (166), author notes that the “theme of the law no longer applied, that in Kafka’s novels goes hand in hand with that of the constantly inoperative angel-functionaries, here reveals its messianic pertinence. The ultimate and glorious telos of the law and of the angelic powers, as well as of the profane powers, is to be deactivated and made inoperative” (166).

Chapter 7 – The Power and the Glory

Regarding the “ceremonial aspects of power” (168), what’s needed is a “political archaeology of liturgy” (id.). He begins with the old ‘acclamation’ Heis theos, which means “pushing back the origin of these essentially Christian expressions to a more obscure foundation in which they overlap with the acclamations of the pagan emperors and with the cries that greeted the epiphany of Dionysius in the Orphic rituals” (169). The “juridical value of the acclamation” is “the essential link that unites law and liturgy,” noting in this connection “the pagan origin of many Christian acclamations” (170). Agamben criticizes Schmitt, who disliked individual secret ballot because it “annihilates precisely the specific possibilities of the united people” (171), preferring the acclamation as “the pure and immediate expression of the people” (id.). The acclamation of the people is an “immediate presence” (172), an “immediacy.” Language such as amen and kyrie eleison have a “technico-juridical meaning of the acclamation that constitutes the ‘publicity’ of the liturgy” (173). (liturgy is Greek leitourgia, from laos, the ‘people,’ to be contrasted at times with ochlos, NB: “the ochlos becomes laos; it becomes ‘politicized’ through liturgy” (175).)

It’s all completely cocked up, insofar as some of this apparently included the salutatio, the kissing of cheeks of the emperor, but also the adoratio, the kissing of the knees (176). FFS. Byzantine Constantine VII is considered in nauseating detail (184 ff). “On the whole, in the emergence of the acclamatory and ceremonial aspect of power, and in the contemporaneous raising up of the sovereign above the community of citizens, Alfoldi sees an element that is in some ways antagonistic to law: ‘Alongside the juridical formulation of the power of the prince we can also see another formative principle of imperial omnipotence, which is not objective and rational, but subjective and imaginary. In it, it is not reason but sentiment that is expressed’” (187).

All of this means that “acclamation points toward a more archaic sphere […] prelaw, in which terms that we customarily consider juridical appear to act in a magic-religious manner” (188). Here there is a “threshold of indistinction that is always operative, where the juridical and the religious become truly indistinguishable. A threshold of this type is that which elsewhere we have called sacertas, in which a double exception, from both human and divine law, allows a figure to emerge, homo sacer” (188). So that’s kickass. Much here.

But: “why does something that is essentially operativity and oikonomia need to become solemnly immobilized in glory?” (195).

Chapter 8 – The Archaeology of Glory

Recalling the initial principles of this argument, one is staggered by these ultimate ruminations, which concern glory in its Hebrew scripture sense of kabhod, and presuppose “the idea of ‘lordship’ and ‘sovereignty’” (197). Scripture sets up an equivalence of kabhod and doxa, which “means that between oikonomia and doxa there is a constitutive nexus” (201). This develops into the general problem of justifying or concealing “the double meaning, the homonymy and ambiguity of kabhod: at once glory and glorification, objective and subjective kabhod, divine reality and human praxis” (200). Kahbod is doxa in the Septuagint, so “this Greek term (which the Vulgate will translate as glory) thereby becomes the technical term for glory in the New Testament” (201).

In Homeric Greek, by contrast, “the semantic sphere of glory is not doxa but kleos” (202, which is etymologically related to kylo, ‘what is heard’ (id.)—such that Achilles trades nostos for kleos (203), say.

Lots going on in this final chapter. Suffice to say that “the economy of passion and the economy of revelation coincide in glory” (207). But: “the economy of glory can only function if it is perfectly symmetrical and reciprocal. All economy must become glory, and all glory become economy” (210). Byzantium, the Third Reich, &c. Glory is paradoxical insofar as “glory is the exclusive property of God for eternity, and it will remain eternally identical in him, such that nothing and no one can increase or diminish it; and yet, glory is glorification, which is to say, something that all creatures always incessantly owe to God” (216). This generates a second paradox: glory delivered to god is actually derivative of the glory of god. And this paradox leads again to a third: “everything that God accomplishes, the works of creation and the economy of redemption, he accomplishes only for his glory” (216).

As regards glorification, “the Church and the profane power enter into a durable threshold of indetermination, in which it is difficult to measure the reciprocal influences and the conceptual exchanges” (218). That is, the state adopts a “government of men” at the same time as the church “setting aside its eschatological preoccupations, increasingly identifies its own mission with the planetary government of souls, not so much for their salvation, as for the ‘increased glory of God’” (218).

We find an “intimate link between glorification and the substance of divinity” (221), a “consubstantiality.” Ultimately, glory is tied to inoperativity, “one of the recurrent themes of economic theology” (239). Inoperativity is the seventh day, essentially, and heaven: “at the beginning and the end of the highest power there stands, according to Christian theology, a figure not of action and government, but of inoperativity” (242). Heaven as zoe aionios, recall, “this inoperative center of the human” (251). This ultimately gets referred, via Schmitt and Heidegger and other assholes to the present moment: “contemporary democracy is a democracy that is entirely founded on glory [the empty throne recall], that is, on the efficacy of acclamation, multiplied and disseminated by the media beyond all imagination” (256)—though, post-Trump, we can imagine quite a fucking lot.

Appendix on Pascal, Malebranche, Rousseau, Foucault, &c.

Recommended for those who speak of a hidden and apocryphal character of the economy, readers who cannot act otherwise than they have chosen to act, and persons who interrogate not glory but glorification.

[Sara · Rating 2 out of 5]

Culture non facit saltus, or the subtle art of non-sequiturs

[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which fully owns Goodreads.com and in 2013 posted revenues for $74 billion and $274 million profits. Intellectual property and labor require compensation. Amazon.com Inc. is also requested to provide assurance that its employees and contractors' work conditions meet the highest health and safety standards at all the company's sites].

Thunder and lighting. Enter [two] witches: Carl Schmitt and a (now obscure) German catholic theologian, Erik Peterson, who in 1935 wrote a book aimed at demonstrating that catholic jurist Schmitt's idea of political theology had no grounding whatsoever in christian theology, because christian theology had always been exclusively concerned with the 'economy', i.e. the divine remote management of history, and by no means with politics.

Taking this controversy as his point of departure, Agamben dashes to check at great length all the theological sources from the East and the West of the Roman Empire (Tertullian to Origen through to Eusebius and Thomas Aquinas), looks up all the terminology in lexicons, and eventually confirms that Peterson was right and Schmitt wrong.

The erudition displayed in the process is so pedantic that you have the impression to be reading a caricature taken from some novel by Borges or Eco. But what is really problematic and embarassing is the author's heuristics exclusively based on textual analysis: if a text says something, and another text fifteen hundred years later, in another part of the globe, says something similar, then the first text has influenced the second and - what's worse - the two texts are now more 'true' as they bestow new authority on one another. Not even Bouvard et Pécuchet. Poor Foucault (as the best selling Hardt and Negri in passing) ends up being used to confirm the poignancy of the dead orthodoxies of high powered cappadocian theologians, not before being given a talking-to for not reading them thoroughly.

In practice, Agamben has transferred the method of inquiry used by jurists - the analysis of the text of laws - from a context of proximity and homogeneity (comparing the text of a constitution to subsequent laws or to another constitution) to the wild, complex non-textual space of history. See what happens: AS in the theological texts the divine providence in its general (not special!) form regulates the world without god ever getting entangled in worldly events, SO our democracies are governed with the total non involvement of their sovereign citizens. However fascinating the parallel, there's a logical jump, a non sequitur, of high order. Another example: "the ultimate and glo­rious telos of the law and of the angelic powers, AS WELL AS of the profane powers, is to be deactivated and made inoperative" (p. 166). Foucault's cartesian work, on the contrary, consisted in addressing local frictions, now invisible, bringing to life the past local battles that gave birth to specific knowledge and institutions.

The quasi-Midrashi, quasi-rabbinic illogical freedom (without the corresponding faith and graceful naïveté) whereby Agamben mixes disparate stuff (Eusebius, Hardt and Negri, the legend of the King Fisher, Kafka, ancien régime, Hegel, the fascist deportation of Rome's Jews), shakes well and then pens arbitrary statements without any consideration for time's arrow and (divinely managed?) actual history makes of The Kingdom and The Glory an entertaining literary curiosity.

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of the many things that can be said about the work of Giorgio Agamben, being lazy with his research isn't one of them. In fact, I imagine that if by some freak accident, all our sources regarding ancient and medieval theology were somehow lost to fire, one could, with a bit of extrapolation, reconstruct it all again just using Agamben's corpus of works. And if that really did come to pass, The Kingdom and the Glory - encyclopaedic as it is in its scope and its grasp - would be the go-to book from which to begin. Ostensibly a book about the theological roots of modern government, Agamben's actual procedure takes place by way of a meticulous - almost pedantic - tracing of the way in which theologians from Polycarp to Aquinas attempted to answer the age old chestnut: just how does God - who is supposed to be transcendent and removed from the world - go about governing that very world? Or, to put it in Agamben's preferred idiom, how does the Kingdom relate to the Government?

Agamben's answer - or at least the answer he finds in theology - is: by way of an economy. 'Economy' here understood not in the modern, narrow sense of 'distribution of goods', but in the wider sense of 'organization' and 'administration' (Agamben pretty much always uses the Greek spelling, 'oikonomia', to mark the difference). Central to the book's narrative then, is that the Christian doctrine of the trinity, in which God is at once unified and triune, and whose relations are organized by a divine oikonomia, is - in its formal functioning at least - at the core of today's apparatuses of modern government - including, perhaps especially so, democratic government. It's a wonderfully provocative thesis which ought to be read to be believed, if only for all the incredible pit stops of erudition along the way (one does wonder though where the Holy Spirit is in all this, the third figure of the trinity which Agamben only pretty much mentions in passing).

And of course there's the 'Glory', the analysis of which takes up about the latter third of the book, devoted to some wonderful excavations of the role of liturgy in Christian worship. Agamben's thesis here is that 'glory' serves to 'cover-up' the fact that the 'providential machine' - his catch phrase for the above articulation of Kingdom and Government - is fundamentally broken, 'empty' at its core, such that insofar as (spoiler alert!): "Government glorifies the Kingdom, and the Kingdom glorifies Government... the center of the machine is empty, and glory is nothing but the splendor that emanates from this emptiness, the inexhaustible kabhod [Glory] that at once reveals and veils the central vacuity of the machine."

Harsh words! And for all the academic theological discussion within - which is to say, for all of about the 250 pages of the 290 page book - the political point that Agamben attempts to impart is that this holds true for modern governmental functioning as well. Now, as a thousand readers of the book have pointed about, Agamben's 'method' here is somewhat suspect. OK, so theology ain't quite up to snuff, but does this translate so easily over into modern politics as Agamben constantly and repeatedly alludes (and I really do mean alludes, rather than 'argues')? It's an open question for me - and, in some sense, the rest of Agamben's Homo Sacer series - but it's a question that bristles with the promise of intellectual adventure.

[tout · Rating 4 out of 5]

After many months reading this when I could steal some time away from myself, from school and work, reading just a few pages usually at a time, I am finally done with this. A lot of it was profoundly interesting, primarily the idea of tracing a genealogy of power in the west back through Christianity (which also owed much to obvious pagan influence as well, but become paradigmatic within the discourses of the early Christian church), to the particular ways in which it made use of Oikonomia/economy to solve for the potential threat of paganism as a problem within the trinity, glory/spectacle, angelic bureaucracy, essential inoperativity, political theology, etc etc. Because of my scattered reading of I found it more difficult to connect these themes. My scattered reading was also due to that fact that this book is at times unbearable to wade through, with its endless and often unnecessary erudition of the Church founders and theological scholars. I've always been more seduced by his more fragmentary and poetic works, which don't fit into the Homo Sacer series. His attempts through the project to leave us with a history and new analytic tools for understanding power in the west, often end, no matter how grand and epic the scope of each book, with more questions, with aporias. His aim is certainly not to produce a system of thought capable of being applied generally upon history, instead being more a problematization in order to make possible paths more clear.

And what I'm left with or what I can think of just now is that...

Any conception of man, that conceives of them through the prism of economy, being political or otherwise, dooms man to the cage of the homo economicus, and of government. In the endless ordering and administration the question of being, of how to exist, is alien to us. Returning this questioning of the how of being to the question concerning technology (technology as social relationship), in the broadest sense, is a political task. Much of what he's always saying is a different way of saying things that are in appearance only slightly different than before, but the slight shift is an essential provocation for the thinking of a revolutionary project.

[Filip Wijnings · Rating 5 out of 5]

Minstens een vijf, tering, laat het maar aan Agamben over om zijn eigen theorie over profaneren en inoperativiteit om te zetten in theoretische producten (btw hoe tf kunnen filosofen zoveel boeken lezen en onthouden?)

[Derrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

The weirdest book on Trinitarian history you will ever read. Agamben (an atheist political philosopher, as it happens) starts from a basic question: why does power need glory? If power is, in its essence, action, activity, motion, why does it need the cumbersome ornamentation of ceremony, ritual, acclamation? To answer this question Agamben embarks on both a genealogy and archeology of glory. In short, Agamben argues at length that our forms of Kingdom, and our forms of Government, and the relationship between them, are traceable in their forms back to early trinitarian theology, the relationship between theology (God in himself in his glorious unity) and the economy (God's providential ordering of history). In theological history, the discussion relating God in himself to God in time and history have been, of course, a fundamental (and vexing) question. Alongside this question of transcendence and immanence, is also the question of the one and the many. But, for Agamben, "just as theology never truly manages to get to the bottom of the fracture of theologia and oikonomia" so too, the relationship of kingdom (theologia) and government (oikonomia) are themselves never reconciled, but constitute a circular "bipolar machine." On the one hand, is the office of unity, the sheer "office as such" (i.e. Kingdom): the King rules, but he does not govern, as the saying goes. There is a separation of the office from the execution of its function (government, oikonomia). But this office, the Kingdom so to speak, in its unity is only reconciled to its multiplicit distribution of government via glory: "Gory is the place where theology attempts to think the difficult conciliaration between immanent and economic trinity, theologia and oikonomia, being and praxis, God in himself and God for us."

But just so, Agamben's analysis also comes to another historically driven conclusion: "Doxology (glory) constitutes a threshold of indifference between politics and theology."Glory (politically read: the media, rhetoric, propaganda, campaigning, advertising) is the veil of light that covers the underlying nudity." This nudity is the void that actually stands between the reconciliation of God's unity and trinity, God's transcendence and immanence, but just so (given the historical threshold here in Glory between the theological and political) Glory is also the veil that covers the aporia that lay between Kingdom and Government: "Government glorifies the Kingdom, and the Kingdom glorifies government. But the center of the machine is empty, and glory is nothing but the splendor that emanates from this emptiness, the inexhaustible kabhod that at once reveals and veils the central vacuity of the machine."

Thus power needs glory, because in the doxology of public opinion lay the axis upon which the dialectical circle of kingdom and government are momentarily but only asymptotically (and so insatiably) reconciled, just as (here Agamben refers to Jurgen Moltmann) the immanent and economic trinities are held as one and the same in the moment of doxology, of praise.

This is really a brilliant work. It conjures the creative brilliance and bizarreness of Agamben's fellow Italian Umberto Eco, and stands as an example to all atheists of how to deal with theology properly: actually read what you are working with. While some of Agamben's interpretations and selections of church history are eclectic, and he has a tendency to use his sources more as illustrations than actual genealogical connections, he is nonetheless quite meticulous. He covers theologians from Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, Augustine, the Cappadocians, Thomas Aquinas, to modern theologians (he uses three especially--Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Karl Barth, and Jurgen Moltmann). There is certainly much to disagree with here, but it is a careful and thoughtful study from which I learned much.

[Nalanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

เท่าที่อ่านมาคิดว่าเล่มนี้ development idea ในตัวบทช้ามาก คือช่วงแรกๆ ไม่ช้านะ แต่การอธิบายขยายในเรื่องนั้นๆ ที่ค่อนข้างละเอียด มันเลยช้ามากกว่า และกว่าไอเดียต่างๆ จะมารวมรวบยอดให้กันและกัน อีกทั้งมันก็เลยออกเป็นว่า อากัมเบนพยายามเสนอเชิงสาแหรกให้เห็นธารเป็นมาเรื่องเทววิทยาที่มีผลต่อเรื่อง Government เสียมากกว่านั่นเอง แต่ก็เข้าใจว่าสิ่งที่เขาเสนอและวิพากษ์ต่างๆ มันก็อยู่ในการสืบสาแหรกเข้าไปในตัวการเล่านั้นเองอยู่แล้วด้วย
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บทที่ทำความเข้าใจยากสุดและยาวสุดคือบทสุดท้ายที่ชื่อว่า The Archaeology of Glory แกก็เสนอประวัติศาสตร์ต่างๆ เรื่องนี้ยาวมากเพื่อจะมารองรับสิ่งที่เสนอว่าทำไม power ยังต้องการ glory อยู่ และ glory ในปัจจุบันเปลี่ยนไปเป็นอะไรนั้น มันก็แทบจะเข้าบท threshold หรือถึงบทนั้นไปแล้วด้วยซ้ำ อย่างไรก็ตาม ถ้าจะเห็นจุดด้อยของหนังสือเล่มนี้จริงๆ--ถ้าจะถือมันเป็นจุดด้อยของเล่มนี้--ก็คือภาคผนวกที่มีศักยภาพมากสุดจะพัฒนาไปจนจุดไคล์แมกซ์แล้วคลายไอเดียที่เล่มนี้ทั้งหมดพูดมา ก็กลายเป็นบทสั้นๆ ที่พูดอย่างรวมๆ ให้เข้าไปแตะๆ หน่อยซะอย่างงั้น แต่แน่นอน ถ้าตามอากัมเบนมาบ้าง จะรู้ว่าแกชอบออกเล่มเล็กๆ ถี่มาก บางที แนวคิดมันก็คล้ายๆ เล่มก่อนหน้า แต่นั่นก็คือการพัฒนาไอเดียเรื่องนั้นต่อมาๆ นั่นล่ะ
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ประเด็นสำคัญในช่วงสองสามบทแรกที่เล่มนี้พาไปดูคือดีเบตระหว่าง Carl Schmitt กับ Erik Peterson ที่เห็นไม่ตรงกันเรื่อง economy (ในที่นี้หมายถึง the activity of the management of a househould หรือ administration) และที่เห็นไม่ตรงกันเนี่ย อากัมเบนก็เสนอว่า ทั้งคู่มีอะไรแชร์ร่วมกันบ้าง ตามที่เราตีความ นั่นก็คือการที่อากัมเบนพยายาม lead ไปสู่คอนเซปท์ glory ในช่วงสุดท้าย
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บทแรกคือเขาเปรียบเทียบระหว่างกระบวนทัศน์ political-theological กับกระบวนทัศน์ economic-theological ซึ่งกระบวนทัศน์แรกเราจะเห็นในข้อเสนอของ Schmitt ที่ว่าตัว politic มันมีการ secularization ในยุคสมัยใหม่อย่างไร ซึ่งมันอาจทำให้เรามองไม่เห็นกระบวนทัศน์เรื่อง economic ซึ่งที่จริงก็อยู่ในตัว theology นี้อยู่แล้ว อากัมเบนเลยพาเราไปทำความเข้าใจเรื่อง economy ที่ช่วยให้แนวคิดเรื่องตรีเอกภาพในทางศาสนาคริสต์มันพัฒนามาได้ ช่วงแรกๆ ที่หลักตรีเอกภาพเกิดขึ้นนั้น ก็ถูกโต้แย้งเหมือนกันว่ามันทำให้กลายเป็นการไม่ได้นับถือพระเจ้าองค์เดียว ซึ่งแนวคิดเรื่อง economy นี่แหละเป็นเครื่องมือหลักที่มาสนับสนุนแนวคิดตรีเอกภาพว่ามันเป็นไปได้ และอย่างน้อยก็ช่วยตอบปัญหาทางเทววิทยาไปได้ ในช่วงหนึ่งเขาอ้างถึงนักบุญเปาโลที่เสนอเรื่อง economy of the mystery ซึ่งก็หมายถึงพระเจ้าได้จัดเตรียมและวางแผนต่อเป้าหมายของพระองค์ ซึ่งนำสู่ mystery of the economy ก็คือการกระทำอย่างแรกที่ว่ามาของพระเจ้าในโลกนี้โดยตัวมันเองก็เป็น mystery เสียด้วยนั่นล่ะ โดยตั�� economic นี่ล่ะเป็นแนวคิดสำคัญซึ่งฝั่งโปรเรื่องตรีเอกภาพพยายามอธิบายปรากฏการณ์ภายในที่พระเจ้าถ่ายโอนตำแหน่งและอำนาจต่างๆ ในตรีเอกภาพอย่างไร และอากัมเบนพาเราไปดูว่าแนวคิดนี้มันเชื่อมความสัมพันธ์ระหว่าง transcendent (God) กับ immanent (government) อย่างไรบ้าง ซึ่งจะเข้าใจเรื่องนี้ อากัมเบนจึงเสนอเรื่อง Being and Acting ในบทที่สามต่อมา
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การที่พระบิดาไม่ปรากฏตัว (transcendent) และมอบอำนาจการจัดการให้กฏธรรมชาติทั่วไป, ฑูตสวรรค์, พระบุตร, หรืออะไรก็ตามแต่มาจัดการดูแลแทนนั้น (immanent) ทำให้เกิดการ ontological breakdown ในยุคนั้นมากๆ และแนวคิด economic นี่แหละมันพยายามเข้ามาเชื่อมช่องว่างระหว่าง Being กับ acting (praxis) กล่าวคือพยายามเชื่อมระหว่างพระเจ้าหรือพระบิดา (Being) และพระบุตร (action-economy) ว่าแนวคิดตรีเอกภาพมันเป็นไปได้อย่างไรนั่นเอง
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เราจะเห็นได้ว่าพระเจ้าผู้หนึ่งเดียวมีอำนาจสูงสุดนั้น ไม่ได้ดูแลทุกอย่างไปจนถึงสิ่งที่เล็กที่สุด แต่เกิดจากการแชร์อำนาจให้มาดูแลแทนพระองค์นั่นเอง ต่อมาบทที่สี่ (Kingdom and the Government) อากัมเบนจึงเปรียบเทียบให้เห็นโดยยกเรื่องเล่าถึงกษัตริย์ที่บาดเจ็บจนไม่สามารถ exercise อำนาจได้ แต่ก็ยังคงเป็น sovereign อยู่ ซึ่งเป็นกรณีตัวอย่างที่ดีต่อการศึกษาสำนวนทางรัฐศาสตร์ซึ่งคนเรียนก็พบกับประโยคที่ว่า "“the king reigns, but does not govern." มากๆ อากัมเบนก็เล่ามาเรื่อยๆ จนมาถึงแนวคิดยุคกลางที่เรียกว่า two swords (spiritual sword and political sword) ซึ่งดาบที่สอง (political) จะคอยทำงานเรื่องทั้งสกปรกใต้พรมของดาบ spiritual นั่นจึงทำให้เห็นว่า แท้จริงแล้วอำนาจนั้นมันแชร์ไหลเวียนกัน ไม่สามารถชี้จุดไปว่าใครมีอำนาจอย่างตรงๆ ได้ชัดเจน กล่าวคือ sovereign ก็มีลักษณะไม่ต่างจากกษัติรย์บาดเจ็บ เพราะการปกครอง การจะมีอำนาจเพิ่มพูนขึ้นนั้น ไม่ใช่รวบอำนาจมาไว้ที่ตนอย่างเดียว แต่ต้องกระจายอำนาจให้แก่องคาพยพแขนขาต่างๆ ไปดูแลจัดการ การปกครองจึงจะมีประสิทธิภาพยิ่งขึ้น แต่ในเวลาเดียวกันการแชร์อำนาจนี้ก็ทำให้สภาวะของตัว sovereign เป็น Being ไม่ใช่ตัว praxis ทั้งหมด กล่าวคืออำนาจจริงๆ ไม่ได้อยู่ที่ตัว sovereign ผู้เดียว แต่อยู่ตามไหล่แขนหรือพวก ministry ต่างๆ ที่คอยปฏิบัติการอำนาจนั้น
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บทต่อมา (Providential Machine) ค่อนข้างฟูโกต์เดียนมากๆ เพราะการจัดเตรียมของพระเจ้า (providence) มันเหมือน pastoral power ที่ว่า subject มี self-discipline กล่าวคือ economic ก็คือการจัดเตรียมของพระบิดาอันคอยประสานงานดูแลสิ่งที่พระองค์สร้างเอาไว้นั่นเอง เครื่องมือของตัว providential ก็คือการปล่อยให้มนุษย์มีเสรีภาพ พระเจ้าไม่สามารถบังคับให้ใครทำอะไรได้ แต่กระทำได้จากผลกระทบข้างเคียงที่เกิดขึ้น ซึ่งเรียกว่า collateral effects กล่าวคือ พระเจ้าไม่ได้ปฎิบัติทางตรง แต่ผ่านตัวแทนต่างๆ ซึ่งอากัมเบนเห็นว่ากระบวนทัศน์ทางเทววิทยาอันนี้มันตรงกับเทคนิคการปกครองในยุคสมัยใหม่ และเมื่อต้องอาศัยตัวแทน จึงเป็นบทต่อมาที่ชื่อว่า Angelology and Bureaucracy
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จะเกิดอะไรขึ้นหลังจาก Last Judgment จบลง ฑูตสวรรค์ที่คอยปฎิบัติตามแผนของพระองค์ อันอยู่ในสถานะเป็น the economy of salvation นั้น จะหยุดทำงานเพราะไร้งานให้ทำอีกต่อไปเลยไหม นี่เป็นอีกตัวหนึ่งที่อากัมเบนจะพาเราไปเรื่อง glory คือแกอ้าง น่าจะของนักบุญเปาโล ที่ว่าหลังจากสิ้นสุดวันนั้นแล้ว angels กับ saints จะทำพิธี worship นมัสการพระเจ้า ซึ่งเป็นการ glorifying God แต่ economy นั้นยังอยู่ เพราะผู้ปฎิบัติการไม่ได้มี angels ที่คอยนำ will ของพระเจ้าไปถึงฝั่งหมายเท่านั้น แต่ยังมี demons ที่คอยลงโทษคนบาปในนรก ซึ่งอากัมเบนยกตัวอย่างถึง modern politics ที่มีสภาวะอมตะอันนี้ ซึ่งเขายกตัวอย่างว่าเราอยู่ใน neoliberal นั้น รูปแบบของมันก็คืออยู่ในนรกนั่นเอง
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ในบทสุดท้าย (the Archaeology of Glory) เป็นบทที่เรายังเข้าใจไม่ครอบคลุมพอ บวกกับไม่ได้กลับไปทวนอีกที แต่ที่เข้าใจคร่าวๆ คือ การกระทำของเราที่ไป glorification หรือสรรญเสริญพระเจ้านั้นทำให้เกิดการประคับคองค้ำจุน [g]ods ต่อไปได้ ซึ่งตัว glory ถือเป็นหนึ่งในตัว economic ของทางคริสต์เลยด้วย ซึ่งบุคคลในตรีเอกภาพนั้นต่าง glorify ให้แก่กัน อย่างไรก็ตาม เป้าหมายของบทนี้ก็คือเรื่อง inoperativity (พูดมาตั้งแต่มนุษย์ศักดิ์สิทธิ์ จนเล่มล่าสุดก็ยังพูด) ซึ่งเป็นจักรกลสำคัญที่ glory-economy ตัวนี้ครอบคลุมอยู่ คืออากัมเบนเห็นว่า inoperativity คือการที่ชีวิตสามารถหลบหลีกจากสิ่งที่กำหนดมาให้เราก่อนแล้วได้ ชีวิตที่สามารถมี form-of-life ของตนเอง อันนำเราไปสู่ anthropogenesis ซึ่งเปิดความเป็นไปได้ในการเป็น มนุษย์ในรูปแบบใหม่ที่แตกต่างออกไป
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โดยรวมก็มีเท่านี้ เล่มนี้เราอ่านอยู่สองเดือนเพราะขาดช่วงไปบ้าง ทั้งนี้ทั้งนั้น ที่ว่ามาจะยังไม่ได้เสนอสิ่งที่อากัมเบนบอกทั้งหมด เพราะยังมีรายละเอียดน่าสนใจที่เขาพูดถึงอยู่ด้วยเช่น ทำไมกษัตริย์จึงมักไม่ปรากฏให้คนเห็น ทำไมต้องมีม่านกั้น และการที่ glory แปลงตัวเองไปเป็นเรื่อง acclamation ซึ่งยุคสมัย media ก็เป็นตัวแทนของ glory อันนี้
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อย่างไรก็ตาม แม้ยุคสมัยใหม่พระเจ้าจะหายไป หรือพระเจ้าตายแล้วอะไรนั้น แต่ที่จริงโลกถูกสร้างโดยพระเจ้าซึ่ง identified เอาไว้ให้เป็น the world without God อยู่แล้ว ดังนั้น แม้ยุคสมัยใหม่จะลบล้างพระเจ้าออกไปจากโลก แต่ก็ล้มเหลวที่ทิ้งรากทางเทววิทยาเอาไว้ อันปรากฏอยู่ในโครงสร้างการปกครอง รูปแบบกฏหมาย เป็นต้นนั้น อาจกล่าวได้ว่า การลบล้างพระเจ้าทิ้งในโลกยุคใหม่นั้น กลับกัน มันทำให้แผนการจัดเตรียมหรือ Providential oikonomia ของพระองค์นั้นยิ่งลุล่วงไปแล้วด้วยซ้ำ

[Gerardo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I testi di Agamben si inscrivono all'interno quel filone di pensiero che fa uso di un metodo chiamato "archeologia delle idee". In sostanza, Agamben va alla ricerca di quello che è stato il passato remoto di alcuni concetti contemporanei.

In questo caso, il concetto analizzato è quello di "economia". Il punto di partenza è strabiliante: il termine greco "oikonomia", dal quale deriva la più moderna parola, venne utilizzato in ambito teologico, soprattutto per indicare il rapporto tra Dio e Gesù.

Oikonomia è un termine greco che indicava la cura della casa, l'ordine delle questioni private. Il termine è legato al campo della gestione e si esercita come prassi. Il termine oikonomia è stato utilizzato per indicare il ruolo del Cristo all'interno della Trinità: in sostanza, il Cristo è la prassi di Dio. Infatti, mentre dio rappresenta l'essenza, il Cristo rappresenta l'azione di Dio, azione che, però, non deriva direttamente dall'essenza stessa, ma da essa è indipendente: infatti, se fosse altrimenti, Dio non possiederebbe il libero arbitrio (e ciò entrerebbe in contrasto con la nozione di Dio stesso, che ha creato gli uomini liberi "a sua immagine e somiglianza").

Questa divisione tra "essenza" e "prassi" si è declinata poi nella struttura dell'autoritas e della potestas: la prima è un potere posseduto, una carica ricoperta che concede onori e rispetto, la seconda, invece, l'esercizio del potere stesso. In ambito teologico, l'essenza è rappresentata dall'ordine generale delle cose, che agisce senza una particolare volontà, mentre la prassi si esercita attraverso gli interventi attivi del divino, in cui si sospendono le regole generali (i cosiddetti miracoli). Da qui la distinzione tra Regno e Governo: quest'ultimo è il potere in quanto esercizio, emanazione del suo corrispettivo trascendentale (ad esempio: la Legge è qualcosa di astratto che pone ordine all'interno della comunità umana, ma essa diviene effettiva solo attraverso un esercizio pratico della Legge, col tramite delle forze di governo politiche e di polizia). Quindi, da una parte c'è un'entità trascendente, dall'altra una immanente (ancora Dio e Cristo).

Oikonomia, quindi, risulterebbe un ordine pratico che, però, è emanazione di un ordine trascendente: da ciò il liberalismo, dove la pratica dei commerci dovrebbe autoregolarsi attraverso una "mano invisibile" capace di produrre denaro e benessere nei vari partecipanti al sistema. L'Economia contemporanea è una secolarizzazione di antichi concetti teologici.

Il discorso, però, non finisce qui: Dio, in quanto essere perfetto, non può far altro che agire attraverso il generale: perché dovrebbe sospendere le leggi da lui emanate? Ma allora, come si spiegherebbero i miracoli? Questi dovrebbero essere frutto degli angeli, considerati come degli amministratori del potere divino, capaci di sospendere le leggi quando necessario, per far fronte a casi particolari. Gli angeli, quindi, possono esseri visti come una sorta di "burocrati" del divino. In sostanza, il potere non agisce mai direttamente, ma sempre attraverso sottoposti che partecipano all'ordine di cui fanno parte. Ma non è tutto: gli angeli, oltre ad amministrare, si occupano anche di innalzare inni a Dio. Ma che cos'è l'inno? Un modo di glorificare il Signore, un canto che che ha come fine solo quello di ripetere che Dio è il Re, colui che possiede il potere del Regno.

Nella visione escatologica cristiana, inoltre, l'avvento del Regno alla fine dei tempi risulta anche la fine di ogni prassi: non bisogna più agire dopo che si sarà raggiunta la salvezza, perché non avrebbe più senso. Gli stessi angeli, quindi, non potrebbero più ricoprire il ruolo di amministratori, ma solo di cantori di inni. Non a caso, il giorno sacro è il giorno in cui Dio non fa nulla, non agisce, in cui si riposa. Questo perché la vera aspirazione di ogni potere è quello di non fare più nulla, di essere pura essenza indipendentemente dall'esercizio del potere. Per tale motivo, in molta iconografia è presente il trono vuoto: si venera il concetto astratto di potere, indipendentemente dalla persona in grado di esercitare tale potere. Questa è la massima aspirazione del potere: essere acclamato senza agire, ma essendo soltanto. Questo concetto mostra al meglio l'idea dell'opinione pubblica, in cui la fascinazione del popolo non sempre deriva da un realtà fattuale, dove la pura "spettacolarità", la pura immagine è sufficiente al riconoscimento del potere.

Il testo termina con due saggi molto interessanti, che mostrano come questo lungo discorso legato a questioni teologiche antiche sia facilmente applicabile a questioni moderne: l'economia è l'ordine che nasce da un potere che non agisce, ma che semplicemente è. L'evoluzione della specie, l'ordine naturale, l'economia smithiana sono tutte espressioni dello stesso concetto: c'è un prassi studiabile attraverso strumenti scientifici che risulterebbe emanazione di un ordine trascendentale, che però appare come "vuoto". In realtà, Dio non è morto: semplicemente la sua figura è mutata in forme più moderne.

[Yannic Meursault · Rating 4 out of 5]

Agambens Art zu schreiben ist definitiv eine der schwierigsten, die mir begegnet ist. Wer an "Homo sacer" und "Ausnahmezustand" verzweifelt ist, dem kann von "Herrschaft und Herrlichkeit" nur abgeraten werden. Gewohnt dicht geschrieben springt Agamben mühelos durch die Jahrhunderte und thematisiert Denker verschiedenster Epochen. Ein Dutzend Debatten der Kirchenväter werden untersucht und interpretiert, so dass der normale Leser ohne gelegentliches Nachschlagen grenzenlos überfordert ist. Ein Blick in Wikipedia dürfte in den meisten Fällen jedoch ausreichen.
Vom Schreibstil und Komplexität abgesehen liefert Agamben hier eine Archäologie der Regierungspraxis, die auch ohne Kenntnis der ersten zwei Bände verstanden werden kann. Angefangen beim Trinitätsdogma untersucht er die Versuche, die immer aufkommenden Brüche von Gottes Sein und Praxis zu schließen und verfolgt den Einfluss dieser ökonomischen Theologie auf das moderne Regierungshandeln, speziell die Herrlichkeit und Verherrlichung der Herrschaft. Am Ende stellt er die Untätigkeit als Wesen des Menschen vor und entwirft ein Bild des politischen Handelns, das an Arendt erinnert, was nicht verwundert, taucht sie doch immer wieder in seinen Werken auf.
Agamben, speziell dieses Buch, wird wohl nur wenige motivieren es zu lesen, was vor allem an seiner kryptischen und tiefgehenden Art der Untersuchung liegt. Wer an Agamben interessiert ist, findet in "Homo sacer" ein lebensnäheres und verständlicheres Werk zum Einstieg.

[k · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are many excellent works by Agamben. This is not one.
Agamben’s form here undermines his project. This is an ambitious attempt to somehow build on Schmitt and Kantorowicz but he fails to succeed in both the historical and theoretical objectives of the work. The use of historical examples is rich and varied but it often reads like a catalogue of random selections, since the burden of theorising the evidence is left to short excursuses at the end of each chapter, which are facile and insufficient in the face of the mountain of evidence outlined in the body of the chapter. In some places, important and obvious questions of theory are left unasked or simply rejected, often with a simplistic, bigoted confidence and little argument.

[Liliya · Rating 4 out of 5]

(specifically chapter 6) dynamic beautiful & interesting interpretation of the intersection b/w angelology and hierarchy. good analysis of power structures in Heaven n how they are analogous to those we have created on earth. enjoyable read if u like angels which u should.

[poslyn rosen]

Complete hackery or holds all the answers to all politics. Either way I don't understand it enough to fall into either of the two camps on this book.

I will update as I try to piece this together, its one of the hardest books I've ever read.

I will however be keeping Shabbos better.

[Ray Harajuku · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always feel like i miss the punchline with Agamben, but even lacking the forest for the trees the trees potentially re-orient your worldview.

[David Barrera Fuentes · Rating 5 out of 5]

La media volá, hermano.

[Cody Bivins-Starr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dense. Agamben’s thick prose. So much to gnaw on.

[CL Chu · Rating 3 out of 5]

On the seventh day God rest and opened the book and put it down.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Bad theology! ...(250 pgs later) and THATs why democracy don't work no more."

[Kevin Fitzpatrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense with allusive references to early Christian thinkers and theologians (think Augustine, Origen, Tertullian, and Irenaeus), "The Kingdom and the Glory" by Giorgio Agamben is a rigorous, hugely ambitious outlining, mostly within the confines of Christian thought, of the dichotomy between essence and praxis, knowledge and action, and the Kingdom and the Glory, in Western life. With keen insight and deep powers of analysis, Agamben identifies these pairs as part of a bi-polar system that is regulated by oikonomia and glory, the better to bring balance to these dueling opposites who are paradoxically utterly and completely dependent on each other. Along the way the reader receives insights into the nature of the Triune God, the government of the Angels, and the poetry of Rilke and Holderlin. Finding its summation in the figure of the empty throne, so ubiquitous in Western iconography, the book grounds itself in an analysis of inoperativity, seen as the key to understanding both the Kingdom (being) and its government, for emptiness determines both factors to their very core. Fascinating to those obsessed with early Christian thought, this work also looks forward, ending with salient comments on acclamation and public opinion that should shock both conservatives and liberals. But that is normal for Agamben, a thinker whose wisdom is matched by his erudition, a combination rarely found in the world today. A good book this is!

[Jacques le fataliste et son maître · Rating 5 out of 5]

«… a un libro come Il Regno e la Gloria manca fondamentalmente la descrizione di tutto ciò che manca sia al regno (cioè, la ‘tradizione degli oppressi’ e l’archeologia dei contropoteri) sia alla gloria (cioè, la tradizione delle oscure resistenze e l’archeologia delle ‘lucciole’). All’archeologia delle acclamazioni, derivata da Ernst Kantorowicz e da Carl Schmitt, manca un’archeologia delle manifestazioni, ossia delle rivoluzioni in cui i popoli fanno molto più che dire ‘sì’ o, d’altra parte, ‘no’, perché l’eventuale ‘no’ delle acclamazioni è sottoposto alle stesse condizioni del cerimoniale stabilite dall’istanza del potere. È allora che i popoli si costituiscono appieno come soggetti politici, così da cambiare le regole, sia del regno sia della gloria.» (G. Didi-Huberman, Come le lucciole , pp. 66-67)

[Mauro · Rating 4 out of 5]

L'essenza di questa puntigliosa analisi sulle correlazioni tra regno e governo, la troviamo in una pagina quasi alla fine del libro: La gloria, tanto in teologia che in politica, è precisamente ciò che prende il posto di quel vuoto impensabile che è l'inoperosità del potere. E il sovrano/dio è ozioso perchè non governa se non attraverso un'amministrazione delegata (oikonomia) che si incarica di esercitare il potere in suo nome. Ciò che precede la creazione del mondo e rimane dopo la sua fine -la vita eterna- è la glorificazione dell'essere, ed è inoperosità e beatitudine.

[Errol Orhan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The analysis is super interesting, providing insights on political theology in general, the way it is applied by Schmitt and the way it is applied by Peterson. Furthermore, it deals in great detail with theology, angelology and providence. Agamben's greatest contribution with this book is probably that it unravels the history of the term 'economy'. What it does not do, in spite of what it promises, is a radical theory of the political. It wants to, but ends up juxtaposing Habermas and Grimm. Learned? Yes! Novel? Ich don't think so.

[6655321 · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a really good volume and has a lot of insight into the condition of the theology underlying governance but also has this like *extremely irritating* and pedantic tone that Agamben is fond of along with just bricks of untranslated Latin that assume i (or any reader) is fluent that really keep it from being a 4 star book (more 3.5 stars)

[Nindyo Sasongko · Rating 5 out of 5]

The more I come across Agamben, the more I am in affection to the way he's pouring out his brilliant mind. The Kingdom and Glory is the culmination of his 'Homo Sacer' and his 'State of Exception.' One book that provokes us who are thinking that reality is just as it is. Reality is construction. Christian reality is political construction. So, what is Truth?

[Bijhenry · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book ned a lot of time to read for me a non philosophical man. One has to know the 20th centrury philosophy of Europe to fully appreciate the idea behind the book...still fighting with it :-)

[Tori.T]

Note to self:

Recommended by Davide "We need a new political model which means we need a new economy".

Youtube video to watch by the author : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jz7dxe...