the future of emancipationit should be admitted that it provides, at least, an outline which could
be useful if developed further. What is missing, in this respect, is
precisely the properly messianic stance towards time.
As Agamben explains, Marx quite purposefully adopts the word
Klasse, derived from Latin, to name what previously had been re -ferred
to as Stand, “estate” in the standard English translation.^16 The reason
for this strategic change of terminology derives from the etymological
resonance between Klasse and the Greek klêsis, which is the word used
by Saint Paul to designate those who live under the heading of the “as
not” (hôs mê in Greek; see e.g. 1 Cor. 7.29–32).^17 More explicitly, what
is at issue here is the community of those who have been called upon
to take up a vocation beyond any particular (pre-established) vocation
— or, in other words, those who belong to the Klasse beyond any Stand.
It should be noted that, as these re-marks imply, Agamben draws a
direct parallel between the early community of Christians (ekklêsia)
and Marx’s idea of the proletariat.^18 To further demonstrate his point,
Agamben quotes Marx’s response to the question of the possibility of
emancipation (in the occurrence, the emancipation of the German
people) in the latter’s Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right. Where should we look for emancipation according to Marx?
The answer reads as follows:
In the formulation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society
which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of
all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal
suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but
wrong generally, is perpetuated against it; which can invoke no historical,
but only human, title; which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis
to the consequences but in all-round antithesis to the premises of
German statehood; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself
without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and
thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is
the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the- See Giorgio Agamben, The time that remains: A commentary on the Letter to the
Romans, trans. by Patricia Dailey, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005, 29. - Ibid., 23. Ibid., 23.
- Ibid., 31. Ibid., 31.