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If it is true that every work of the past only reaches full legibility at certain moments in its history, for the Epistles of Paul the hour seems to have come: to one of the most commented texts in the Western tradition, Agamben restores that messianic status that alone can reorient the perspective of an interpretation now two thousand years old. Paul does not found a religio of the universal, nor does he announce a new identity and a new vocation—instead, he revokes every identity and every vocation; he does not abolish the Law, but disposes it to a use beyond all rights. At the heart of messianism—from the Pauline Gospel to Benjamin's Theses On the Concept of History, which sometimes conceal its splendid casts—is an experience of time entrusted to the inversion of the relationship between past and future, between memory and hope. As a time of now, a segment of profane time stretched between the resurrection of Jesus and the apocalyptic eschaton, messianic time is constituted in the very figure of present time, of every present. Agamben's book is also modelled on the canon of “vertiginous recapitulation” that belongs to the messianic: the exegetical wisdom of a biblical scholar is transfused into the illuminations of the philosopher who interrogates Paul starting from Schmitt, Kafka and Scholem, and who knows how to grasp the conceptual ascendencies of the Hegelian dialectic in the Pauline word, through Luther.

Giorgio Agamben

Giorgio Agamben is one of the most hotly debated political philosophers today. His works on the political and legal paradigm of the West have caught the attention of philosophers, sociologists, political scientists and jurists alike, but his significance has been obscured by myths and misunderstandings. His works have been translated into more than 15 languages.