GIORGIO AGAMBEN - Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy

PART TWO
History

§ 10 The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin
I
In the Eighth Thesis in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Benjamin writes: "The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of exception' in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history that corresponds to this fact. Then we will have the production of a real state of exception before us as a task." 1 In another fragment, which the editors of Benjamin Collected Writings (Gesammelte Schriften) published among the notes to the "Theses," Benjamin uses a similar concept to characterize messianic time:
The apocryphal saying of a Gospel, "Wherever I encounter someone, I will pronounce judgment on him," casts a particular light on Judgment Day [den jüngsten Tag]. It recalls Kafka's fragment: the Day of Judgment is a summary judgment [Standrecht]. But it also adds something: according to this saying, the Day of Judgment is not different from others. In any case, this Gospel saying furnishes the criterion for the concept of the present that the historian makes his own. Every instant is the instant of judgment on certain moments that precede it. 2
In these two passages, Benjamin establishes a relation between the concept of messianic time, which constitutes the theoretical nucleus of the "Theses," and a juridical category that belongs to the sphere of public law. Messianic time has the form of a state of exception (Ausnahmezustand) and summary judgment (Standrecht), that is, judgment pronounced in the state of exception.
It is this relation that the present chapter proposes to investigate. Such an investigation should be taken as a contribution to the history of the difficult relationship between philosophy and law that Leo Strauss sought to delineate throughout his works. Here it is not a matter of a problem of political philosophy in the strict sense but of a crucial issue that involves the very existence of philosophy in its relationship to the entire codified text of tradition, whether it be Islamic shari'a, Jewish Halakhah, or Christian dogma. Philosophy is always already constitutively related to the law, and every philosophical work is always, quite literally, a decision on this relationship.
II
In Benjamin's Eighth Thesis, the term Ausnahmezustand ("state of exception") appears in quotation marks, as if it originated in another context or another one of Benjamin's works. It is, indeed, a citation in both senses. It originated in Carl Schmitt Political Theology ( 1922) and the theory of sovereignty that Benjamin had already commented on and developed in his failed Habilitationsschrift on the origin of the Baroque German mourning play. Even the term Standrecht ("summary judgment") can be found in Schmitt, for example in his 1931 essay, "Die Wendung zum totalen Staat."
In Schmitt's words, "Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception," that is, the person or the power that, when declaring a state of emergency or martial law, may legitimately suspend the validity of law. The paradox implicit in this definition (which we may refer to as the paradox of sovereignty) consists in the fact that the sovereign, having the legitimate power to suspend the law, finds himself at the same time outside and inside the juridical order. Schmitt's specification that the sovereign is "at the same time outside and inside the juridical order" (emphasis added) is not insignificant: the sovereign legally places himself outside the law. This means that the paradox can also be formulated this way: "the law is outside itself," or: "I, the sovereign, who am outside the law, declare that there is nothing outside the law [che non c'è un fuori legge]." This is why Schmitt defines sovereignty as a "limit concept" of legal theory, and why he shows its structure through the theory of the exception.
What is an exception? The exception is a kind of exclusion. It is an in dividual case that is excluded from the general rule. But what properly characterizes the exception is that what is excluded in it is not, for this reason, simply without relation to the rule. On the contrary, the rule maintains itself in relation to the exception in the form of suspension. The rule applies to the exception in no longer applying, in withdrawing from it. The state of exception is therefore not the chaos that precedes legal order but the situation resulting from its suspension. In this sense the exception is not simply excluded but is rather truly "taken outside," as is implied by the word's etymological root (ex-capere). Developing a suggestion of Jean-Luc Nancy's, we shall give the name ban (from the Old Germanic term indicating both exclusion from the community and the power of the sovereign) to this original legal structure, through which law preserves itself even in its own suspension, applying to what it has excluded and abandoned, that is, banned. In this sense, the ban is the fundamental structure of the law, which expresses its sovereign character, its power to include by excluding. This is why Schmitt can say: "The exception is more interesting than the regular case. The latter proves nothing; the exception proves everything. The exception does not only confirm the rule; the rule as such lives off the exception alone [die Regel lebt überhaupt nur von der Ausnahme]." 3
III
It is this last sentence that Benjamin both cites and falsifies in the Eighth Thesis. Instead of "the rule as such lives off the exception alone," he writes: "the 'state of exception' in which we live is the rule." What must be grasped here is the sense of this conscious alteration. In defining the messianic kingdom with the terms of Schmitt's theory of sovereignty, Benjamin appears to establish a parallelism between the arrival of the Messiah and the limit concept of State power. In the days of the Messiah, which are also "the 'state of exception' in which we live," the hidden foundation of the law comes to light, and the law itself enters into a state of perpetual suspension.
In establishing this analogy, Benjamin does nothing other than bring a genuine messianic tradition to the most extreme point of its development. The essential character of messianism may well be precisely its particular relation to the law. In Judaism as in Christianity and Shiite Islam, the messianic event above all signifies a crisis and radical transformation of the entire order of the law. The thesis I would like to advance is that the messianic kingdom is not one category among others within religious experience but is, rather, its limit concept. The Messiah is, in other words, the figure through which religion confronts the problem of the Law, decisively reckoning with it. And since philosophy, for its part, is constitutively involved in a confrontation with the Law, messianism represents the point of greatest proximity between religion and philosophy. This is why the three great monotheistic religions always tried in every possible way to control and reduce the essential messianic properties of religion and philosophy, without ever fully succeeding.
IV
In his essay on "The Meaning of the Torah in Jewish Mysticism," 4 Gershom Scholem summarizes the complex relationship between messianism and law in two questions: (1) What were the form and content of the Law before the Fall? (2) What will the structure of the Torah be at the time of redemption, when man will be returned to his originary condition? The authors of the Raya Mehemna and the Tikunei ha-Zohar, two books that belong to the oldest stratum of the Zohar, distinguish two aspects of the Torah: the Torah of Beriah, which is the Torah in the state of creation, and the Torah of Aziluth, which is the Torah in the state of emanation. The Torah of Beriah is the law of the unredeemed world and, as such, is compared to the outer garments of the divine presence, which would have shown itself in its nudity if Adam had not sinned. The Torah of Aziluth, which is opposed to the first as redemption to exile, instead reveals the meaning of the Torah in its original fullness. The authors of these two books, moreover, establish a correspondence between the two aspects of the Torah and the two trees of Paradise, the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. The Tree of Life represents the pure and original power of the sacred, beyond all contamination by evil and death. Yet since the fall of Adam, the world has been ruled no longer by the Tree of Life but by the mystery of the second tree, which includes both good and evil. As a consequence, the world is now divided into two separate regions: the sacred and the profane, the pure and the impure, the licit and the forbidden:
Our comprehension of revelation is currently tied to the Tree of Knowledge and presents itself as the positive law of the Torah and as the realm of the Ha-lakhah lakhah. Its meaning appears to us now in what is commanded and what is prohibited and in everything which follows from this basic distinction. The power of evil, of destruction and death, has become real in the free will of man. The purpose of the law, which as it were constitutes the Torah as it can be read in the light--or shadows!--of the Tree of Knowledge, is to confine this power if not to overcome it entirely. . . . But when the world will again be subject to the Law of the Tree of Life, the face of Halakhah itself will change. 5
The decisive point at which all the issues coincide is expressed in the following question: "How are we to conceive of the original structure of the Torah once the Messiah has restored its fullness?" For it is clear that the opposition between the messianic law and the law of exile cannot be an opposition between two laws of identical structure, which merely contain different commands and different prohibitions. The Messiah does not only come to bring a new Table of the Law, nor does he simply come to abolish Halakhah. His task--which Benjamin once expressed in the image of a small displacement that seems to leave everything intact--is more complex, since the original structure of the law to be restored is more complex.
V
It is in this light that we must now turn to the theories of the nature of the original Torah that, elaborated by Cabalists from the sixteenth century onward, radicalized the ideas already contained in the Zohar and Nachmanides. In his Shi'ur Komah, Moses Cordovero states:
The Torah in its innermost essence is composed of divine letters, which themselves are configurations of divine light. Only in the course of a process of materialization do these letters combine in various ways. First they form names, that is, names of God, later appellatives and predicates suggesting the divine, and still later they combine in a new way, to form words relating to earthly events and material objects. 6
The implicit presupposition in this conception is that the original Torah was not a defined text, but rather consisted only of the totality of possible combinations of the Hebrew alphabet.
The decisive step in this progressive desemanticization of the law was accomplished by Rabbi Eliahu Cohen Itamary, of Smirne, in the eigh teenth century. Confronted with the rabbinic prescription that the Torah must be written without vowels and punctuation, he offered an explanation that according to Scholem expresses the "relativization" of the Law but that, as we will see, in truth involves something different and more complicated. Rabbi Eliahu Cohen Itamary writes:
This is a reference to the state of the Torah as it existed in the sight of God, before it was transmitted to the lower spheres. For He had before Him numerous letters that were not joined into words as is the case today because the actual arrangement of the words would depend on the way in which this lower world conducted itself. Because of Adam's sin, God arranged the letters before Him into the words describing death and other earthly things, such as levirate marriage. Without sin there would have been no death. The same letters would have been joined into words telling a different story. That is why the scroll of the Torah contains no vowels, no punctuation, and no accents, as an allusion to the Torah which originally formed a heap of unarranged letters. The divine purpose will be revealed in the Torah at the coming of the Messiah, who will engulf death forever, so that there will be no room in the Torah for anything related to death, uncleanness, and the like. For then God will annul the present combination of letters that form the words of our present Torah and will compose the letters into other words, which will form new sentences speaking of other things. 7
A very similar formulation is attributed to the Baal Shem, the founder of Hassidism in Poland. Rabbi Pinhas, of Koretz, relates that the Baal Shem said: "It is true that the holy Torah was originally created as an incoherent jumble of letters. . . . All the letters of the Torah were indeed jumbled, and only when a certain event occurred in the world did the letters combine to form the words in which the event is related." 8
The most interesting and perhaps most surprising implication of this conception is not so much the idea of the absolute mutability and plasticity of the Law (which Scholem defines, as we have mentioned, as "the relativization of the Torah") as the thesis according to which the original form of the Torah is a medley of letters without any order--that is, without meaning. Moshe Idel, who today, after Scholem's death, is one of the greatest scholars of the Cabala, has pointed out to me that while this last implication is logically inevitable, the Cabalists would never have stated it so crudely. To their eyes, the symmetrical implication would have been noteworthy, namely, that the original Torah contained all possible meanings. But these meanings were contained in it, to use a terminology that was certainly familiar to the Cabalists, only potentially; in actuality, the Torah was much more similar to the writing tablet of which Aristotle speaks, on which nothing is written. In the sense in which we speak in logic of "meaningful statements," the original Torah could have no meaning, insofar as it is a medley of letters without order and articulation. My impression is that many of the contradictions and aporias of messianism find their foundation and solution precisely in this surprising thesis, according to which the original form of law is not a signifying proposition but, so to speak, a commandment that commands nothing. If this is true, the crucial problem of messianism then becomes: how can the Messiah restore a law that has no meaning?
VI
Before confronting this question, I would like to consider an interpretation of messianism that has been advanced by the scholar who, in our century, contributed most to the study of the Cabala and whom I have already mentioned, Gershom Scholem. According to the central thesis of his 1959 essay "Towards an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism" (which has since been infinitely repeated by scholars and popularizers), messianism is animated by two opposed tensions: the first is a restorative tendency aiming at the restitutio in integrum of the origin; the second is a utopian impulse turned instead toward the future and renewal. The contradiction that follows from these opposed forces explains the antinomies of messianism as well as what is, according to Scholem, messianism's essential character: "a life lived in deferral and delay," in which nothing can be brought to fulfillment and nothing accomplished once and for all. Messianism, Scholem writes, "possesses a tension that never finds true release." 9 A variation of this thesis has been expressed by Joseph Klausner and Siegmund Mowinckel, according to whom messianism is constituted by two contrasting tendencies: a political and worldly one, and a spiritual and supernatural one. The impossible attempt to reconcile these two antagonistic tendencies marks the limits of messianism, giving messianic time its peculiar character as an interim period between two epochs and two ages.
Despite my respect for these scholars, I would like to propose that we overturn their claims and, along with them, the common interpretation of messianism. The tension between two irreconcilable tendencies can not explain the aporias of messianism; rather, messianism's antinomical gesture is the only strategy adequate to the specific problem that messianism must master: the problem of law in its originary structure. The idea of a Torah composed only of meaningless letters is not something like a Freudian compromise between two irreconcilable elements; on the contrary, it expresses a profound philosophical intuition of the structure of law and, at the same time, constitutes the most radical attempt to confront this structure. Every interpretation of the aporetic aspects of messianism must situate them above all from this perspective.
VII
Here I will mention only some of these aspects. First of all, there is the passage of Pesiqta Rabbati in which a phrase of the talmudic treatise Sanhedrin, which reads "the Law will return to its students" (referring to the days of the Messiah), is altered so that it reads the Law will return to its new form." Klausner has underlined the paradoxical character of this "return to the new" (an "unnatural experience," 10 as he observes, even if it is perfectly familiar to adepts of Benjaminian gnosis). Even more paradoxical is the idea of a commandment fulfilled by being transgressed, which characterizes the most antinomical messianic communities, such as that of Shabbatai Zevi, who stated that the "violation of the Torah is its fulfillment." This formula is not only, as a common interpretation maintains, the expression of an antinomical tendency always at work in messianism; instead, it presupposes a particularly complex conception of the relationship between the Torah of Beriah and the Torah of Aziluth. What is decisive here is the concept of fulfillment, which implies that the Torah in some way still holds and has not simply been abrogated by a second Torah commanding the opposite of the first. We find the same notion in the Christian conception of the pleroma of the law, for example in Matthew 5:17-18 ("I am come not to destroy [katalysai], but to fulfill [plērysai]") and in the theory of the law proposed by Paul in the Epistle to the Romans (8:4: "that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us"). What is at issue here are not simply antinomical tendencies but an attempt to confront the pleromatic state in which the Torah, restored to its original form, contains neither commandments nor prohibitions but only a medley of unordered letters. It is in this context that we must read the striking statement in the Tannaitic midrash Mekhita that "in the end, the Torah is destined to be forgotten," an opinion that could be reformulated in Sabbatean terms as "the fulfillment of the Torah is its being forgotten."
Analogous considerations could be made for the so-called "interim character" of the messianic kingdom, which, in Hering's words, seems "to oscillate between the present eon and the future eon." At first, in fact, the Messiah presented the eschatological realization of the divine kingdom, when Yahweh would appear as king, bringing salvation to his people. In rabbinic literature, however, the expression "the days of the Messiah" means only the intermediary period between the present time and the "world to come" (olam habah). In the Sanhedrin treatise (97a) we read, "the world will last six thousand years: two thousand in chaos, two thousand under the Law, two thousand during the messianic time." As we have seen, Mowinckel explains this interim character of messianic time as an attempt to reconcile the two opposed tendencies of messianism, the political and the supernatural. 11 But I would like to draw attention to the words that, in the text of the Sanhedrin, immediately follow the ones I just cited: "Because of our wickedness, all the time from the last period has been lost" (that is: the time under the Law is over, and yet the Messiah has not yet come). Here, just as in Benjamin's thought, where messianic time is not chronologically distinct from historical time, the days of the Messiah do not constitute a temporal period situated between historical time and the olam habah; rather, they are, so to speak, present in the form of a deferral and procrastination of the time under the law, that is, as a historical effect of a missing time.
One of the paradoxes of the messianic kingdom is, indeed, that another world and another time must make themselves present in this world and time. This means that historical time cannot simply be canceled and that messianic time, moreover, cannot be perfectly homogenous with history: the two times must instead accompany each other according to modalities that cannot be reduced to a dual logic (this world / the other world). In this regard Furio Jesi, the most intelligent Italian scholar of myth, once suggested that to understand the mode of Being of myth, one needs to introduce a third term into the opposition "is / is not," which he formulated as a "there is-not" [ci non è]. 12 Here we are confronted not with a compromise between two irreconcilable impulses but with an attempt to bring to light the hidden structure of historical time itself.
VIII
If we now return to our point of departure, that is, to Benjamin's Eighth Thesis, the comparison he makes between messianic time and the state of exception shows its legitimacy and its coherence. And in this light we can also seek to clarify the structural analogy that ties law in its original state to the state of exception. Precisely this problem lies at the center of the letters that Benjamin and Scholem exchanged between July and September 1934, when Benjamin had just finished the first version of his essay on Kafka for the Jüdische Rundschau. The subject of the letters is the conception of law in Kafka's work.
From the moment he first reads Benjamin's essay, Scholem disagrees with his friend precisely on this point. "Here," he writes, "your exclusion of theology went too far, and you threw out the baby with the bathwater." Scholem defines the relation to the law described in Kafka's novels as "the Nothing of Revelation" ( Nichts der Offenbarung), intending this expression to name "a stage in which revelation does not signify [bedeutet], yet still affirms itself by the fact that it is in force. Where the wealth of significance is gone and what appears, reduced, so to speak, to the zero point of its own content, still does not disappear (and Revelation is something that appears), there the Nothing appears." 13 According to Scholem, a law that finds itself in such a condition "is not absent, but unrealizable." "The students of whom you speak," he writes to Benjamin, "are not students who have lost the scripture . . . but students who cannot decipher it." 14
Being in force without significance (Geltung ohne Bedeutung): for Scholem, this is the correct definition of the state of law in Kafka's novel. A world in which the law finds itself in this condition and where "every gesture becomes unrealizable" is a rejected, not an idyllic, world. And yet, if only through this extreme reduction, the Law maintains itself "in the zero point of its own content."
If I am not mistaken, nowhere in his later works does Scholem compare this definition of the law in Kafka's universe--"being in force without significance"--to the Cabalistic and messianic conception of the Torah as a medley of letters without order and meaning. Yet even the quickest glance shows that what is at issue here is more than a simple analogy. The formula Geltung ohne Bedeutung applies perfectly to the state of the Torah in the face of God, when it is in force but has not yet acquired a determinate content and meaning. But the accord also holds with respect to the state of exception and its absolutization, as suggested in the "Theses on the Philosophy of History," from which we began. I would like to propose the hypothesis that the formula "being in force without significance" defines not only the state of the Torah before God but also and above all our current relation to law--the state of exception, according to Benjamin's words, in which we live. Perhaps no other formula better expresses the conception of law that our age confronts and cannot master.
What, after all, is a state of exception, if not a law that is in force but does not signify anything? The self-suspension of law, which applies to the individual case in no longer applying, in withdrawing from it yet maintaining itself in relation to it in the ban, is an exemplary figure for Geltung ohne Bedeutung. Fifty years later, Benjamin's diagnosis has thus lost none of its currency. Since then, the state of emergency has become the rule in every part of our cultural tradition, from politics to philosophy and from ecology to literature. Today, everywhere, in Europe as in Asia, in industrialized countries as in those of the "Third World," we live in the ban of a tradition that is permanently in a state of exception. And all power, whether democratic or totalitarian, traditional or revolutionary, has entered into a legitimation crisis in which the state of exception, which was the hidden foundation of the system, has fully come to light. If the paradox of sovereignty once had the form of the proposition "There is nothing outside the law," it takes on a perfectly symmetrical form in our time, when the exception has become the rule: "There is nothing inside the law"; everything--every law--is outside law. The entire planet has now become the exception that law must contain in its ban. Today we live in this messianic paradox, and every aspect of our existence bears its marks.
The success of deconstruction in our time is founded precisely on its having conceived of the whole text of tradition, the whole law, as a Geltung ohne Bedeutung, a being in force without significance. In Scholem's terms, we could say that contemporary thought tends to reduce the law (in the widest sense of the term, which indicates all of tradition in its regulative form) to the state of a Nothing and yet, at the same time, to maintain this Nothing as the "zero point of its content." The law thus becomes ungraspable--but, for this reason, insuperable, ineradicable ("undecidable," in the terms of deconstruction). We can compare the situation of our time to that of a petrified or paralyzed messianism that, like all messianism, nullifies the law, but then maintains it as the Nothing of Revelation in a perpetual and interminable state of exception, "the 'state of exception' in which we live."
IX
Only in this context do Benjamin's theses acquire their proper meaning. In his letter of August 11, 1934, he writes to Scholem that Kafka's insistence on law "is the dead point of his work." But in a plan for the same letter, he adds that his interpretation will ultimately have to reckon with it ("if this insistence has a function, then even a reading that starts with images like mine will ultimately have to lead to it"). If we accept the equivalence between messianism and nihilism of which both Benjamin and Scholem were firmly convinced, albeit in different ways, then we will have to distinguish two forms of messianism or nihilism: a first form (which we may call imperfect nihilism) that nullifies the law but maintains the Nothing in a perpetual and infinitely deferred state of validity, and a second form, a perfect nihilism that does not even let validity survive beyond its meaning but instead, as Benjamin writes of Kafka, "succeeds in finding redemption in the overturning of the Nothing." Against Scholem's conception of a being in force without significance, a law that is valid but neither commands nor prescribes anything, Benjamin objects:
Whether the students have lost Scripture or cannot decipher it in the end amounts to the same thing, since a Scripture without its keys is not scripture but life, the life that is lived in the village at the foot of the hill on which the castle stands. In the attempt to transform life into Scripture I see the sense of the "inversion" [Umkehr] toward which many of Kafka's allegories seem to tend. 15
The Messiah's task becomes all the more difficult from this perspective. He must confront not simply a law that commands and forbids but a law that, like the original Torah, is in force without significance. But this is also the task with which we, who live in the state of exception that has become the rule, must reckon.
X
I would like to interrupt my presentation of Benjamin's conception of messianic law. I will instead try to read a story by Kafka from the perspective of this conception: "Before the Law," which is to be found in both the collection Der Landarzt and The Trial. Naturally I do not mean that Benjamin would have read the story as I will read it. Rather, I will seek indirectly to present Benjamin's conception of the messianic task in the form of an interpretation of one of Kafka's allegories. I take for granted that the reader remembers the story of the doorkeeper standing before the door of the law and the man from the country who asks if he can enter it, waiting without success only to hear the doorkeeper tell him, at the end of his life, that the door was meant for him alone. The thesis that I intend to advance is that this parable is an allegory of the state of law in the messianic age, that is, in the age of its being in force without significance. The open door through which it is impossible to enter is a cipher of this condition of the law. The two most recent interpreters of the parable, Jacques Derrida and Massimo Cacciari, both insist on this point. "The law," Derrida writes, "keeps itself [se garde] without keeping itself, kept [gardée] by a door-keeper who keeps nothing, the door remaining open and open onto nothing." 16 And Cacciari decisively underlines the fact that the power of the law lies precisely in the impossibility of entering into the already open, of reaching the place where one already is: "How can we hope to 'open' if the door is already open? How can we hope to enter-the-open [entrare-l'aperto]? In the open, there is, things are there, one does not enter there. . . . We can enter only there where we can open. The already-open [il già-aperto] immobilizes. The man from the country cannot enter, because entering into the already open is ontologically impossible." 17 It is easy to discern an analogy between the situation described in the parable and law in the state of being in force without significance, in which the law is valid precisely insofar as it commands nothing and has become unrealizable. The man from the country is consigned to the potentiality of law because law asks nothing of him, imposes on him nothing other than its ban.
If this interpretation is correct, if the open door is an image of law in the time of its messianic nullification, then who is the man from the country? In his analysis of the parable, Kurt Weinberg suggests that we are to see the "figure of a hindered Christian Messiah" in the obstinate, shy man from the country. 18 The suggestion can be taken only if we return messianism to its true context. Those who have read Sigmund Hurwitz's book, Die Gestalt der sterbenden Messiahs, will recall that in the Jewish tradition the figure of the Messiah is double. Since the first century B.C.E., the Messiah has been divided into Messiah ben Joseph and a Messiah ben David. The Messiah of the house of Joseph is a Messiah who dies, vanquished in the battle against the forces of evil; the Messiah of the house of David is the triumphant Messiah, who ultimately vanquishes Armilos and restores the kingdom. While Christian theologians usually try to leave this doubling of the messianic figure aside, it is clear that Christ, who died and was reborn, unites in his person both Messiahs of the Jewish tradition. It is worth underlining that Kafka, for his part, was aware of this tradition through Max Brod book, Heidentum, Christentum, Judentum.
Scholem once wrote that the Messiah ben Joseph is a disconsolate figure who redeems nothing and whose destruction coincides with the destruction of history. While this diagnosis is certainly true, I am not at all sure that it can be wholly maintained if one considers the role that the Messiah ben Joseph had to play in the economy of the doubling of the messianic figure (which Kafka could have had in mind in conceiving of his country Messiah). In the Christian tradition, which knows a single Messiah, the Messiah also has a double task, since he is both redeemer and legislator; for the theologians, the dialectic between these two tasks constitutes the specific problem of messianism. (In his treatise on law, Tommaso Campanella defined the figure of the Messiah as follows, polemicizing with both Luther and Abelard on the subject of this dialectic: "Luther recognizes not the legislator, but the redeemer; Peter Abelard recognizes only the legislator, but not the redeemer. But the Catholic Church recognizes both" [Luterus non agnoscit legislatorem, sed redemptorem, Petrus Abelardus agnoscit solum legislatorem, non autem redemptorem. Ecclesia catholica utrumque agnoscit.])
One of the peculiar characteristics of Kafka's allegories is that at their very end they contain a possibility of an about-face that completely upsets their meaning. In the final analysis, all the interpreters of the parable read it as the apologue of the man from the country's irremediable failure or defeat before the impossible task imposed upon him by the law. Yet it is worth asking whether Kafka's text does not consent to a different reading. The interpreters seem to forget, in fact, precisely the words with which the story ends: "No one else could enter here, since this door was destined for you alone. Now I will go and close it [ich gehe jetzt und schliesse ihn]." If it is true that the door's very openness constituted, as we saw, the invisible power and specific "force" of the law, then it is possible to imagine that the entire behavior of the man from the country is nothing other than a complicated and patient strategy to have the door closed in order to interrupt the law's being in force. The final sense of the legend is thus not, as Derrida writes, that of an "event that succeeds in not happening" (or that happens in not happening: "an event that happens not to happen," un événement qui arrive à ne pas arriver), 19 but rather just the opposite: the story tells how something has really happened in seeming not to happen, and the apparent aporias of the story of the man from the country instead express the complexity of the messianic task that is allegorized in it.
It is in this light that one must read the enigmatic passage in Kafka's notebooks that says, "The Messiah will only come when he is no longer necessary, he will only come after his arrival, he will come not on the last day, but on the very last day." The particular double structure implicit in this messianic theologumenon corresponds to the paradigm that Benjamin probably has in mind when he speaks, in the Eighth Thesis, of "a real state of exception" as opposed to the state of exception in which we live. This paradigm is the only way in which one can conceive something like an eskhaton--that is, something that belongs to historical time and its law and, at the same time, puts an end to it. Although while the law is in force we are confronted only with events that happen without happening and that thus indefinitely differ from themselves, here, instead, the messianic event is considered through a bi-unitary figure. This figure probably constitutes the true sense of the division of the single Messiah (like the single Law) into two distinct figures, one of which is consumed in the consummation of history and the other of which happens, so to speak, only the day after his arrival. Only in this way can the event of the Messiah coincide with historical time yet at the same time not be identified with it, effecting in the eskhaton that "small adjustment" in which, according to the rabbi's saying told by Benjamin, the messianic kingdom consists.

Notes:
1.
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn ( New York: Schocken, 1968), p. 257; the original is in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser ( Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974-89), vol. 1, pt. 2, p. 697.

2.
Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, pt. 3, p. 1245.

3.
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab ( Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), p. 15; the original is in Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie, Vier Kapiteln zur Lehre von der Souveränität ( Munich-Leipzig: Duncker and Humbolt, 1922), p. 22.

4.
Georges Vajda French translation of this essay was first published as "La signification de la Loi dans la mystique juive" in Diogène14-15 ( 1956); this version now appears in Gershom Scholem, Le nom et les symboles de Dieu dans la mystique juive ( Paris: Cerf, 1988). It subsequently appeared in German, with certain changes, as the second chapter of Scholem's Über die Kabbalah und ihre Symbolik ( Zurich: Rhein Verlag, 1960). An English translation of this text can be found in Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans. Ralph Manheim ( New York: Schocken, 1996), pp. 32-86.

5.
Gershom Scholem, "Towards an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism," in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality ( New York: Schocken, 1971), pp. 23-24; the original is in Gershom Scholem , "Zur Verständnis der messianischen Idee im Judentum," in Judaica I ( Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1963), pp. 47-50.

6.
Moses Cordovero, Shi'ur Komah, quoted in Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, p. 71.

7.
Rabbi Eliahu Cohen Itamary, quoted ibid., p. 74.

8.
Rabbi Pinhas, quoted ibid., p. 76.

9.
Scholem, "Messianic Idea in Judaism," p. 35; original in Scholem, "Messianischen Idee im Judentum," pp. 73-74.

10.
Joseph Klausner, The Messianic Idea in Israel, from Its Beginnings to the Completion of the Mishnah, ed. and trans. W F. Stinespring ( London: Allen and Unwin, 1956), pp. 445-46.

11.
Siegmund Mowinckel, He That Cometh: The Messianic Concept in the Old Testament and Later Judaism, trans. G. W Anderson ( New York: Abingdon, 1956), p. 277.

12.
Furio Jesi, Lettura del "Bateau ivre" di Rimbaud ( Macerata: Quodlibet, 1996), p. 29.

13.
The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Schoirm, 1932-1940, ed. Gershom Scholem, trans. Gary Smith and Andre Lefevre ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 142; the original is in Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, Briefwechsel 1933-1940, ed. Gershom Scholem ( Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), p. 175.

14.
Ibid., English p. 147; original p. 180.


15.
Ibid., English p. 135; original p. 167.


16.
Jacques Derrida, "Before the Law," in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge ( London: Routledge, 1992), p. 206; the original is Jacques Derrida, "Préjugés," in Spiegel und Gleichnis, Festschrift für Jacob Taubes, ed. N. W Bolz and W Hübner ( Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1983), p. 356.

17.
Massimo Cacciari, Icone della legge ( Milan: Adelphi, 1985), p. 69.

18.
Kurt Weinberg, Kafkas Dichtungen: Die Travestien des Mythos ( Bern: Francke, 1963), pp. 130-31.

19.
Derrida, "Before the Law," p. 210; original in Derrida, "Préjugés," p. 359.