This Pathless Hour | 263understood as the relation of each instant to the Messiah—each kairos is unmit-
telbar zu Gott [immediate to God], and is not just the final result of a process (as is
the case with the model Marxism inherited from Hegel.”^74 Such a faith cannot be
described as a “holding something to be true,” as Buber had it; on the contrary, it
is identical with the qualities Buber had ascribed to the Hebrew emunah.^75
Agamben’s Paul is a revolutionary too, seeking “to create a space that es-
caped the grasp of power and its laws, without entering into conflict with them
yet rendering them inoperative” through his euanggelion (good message) of the
crucified Messiah, which is “power for he who believes” (Romans 1:16).^76 Con-
tained in this message is the concept of messianic klesis (calling), as defined in 1
Corinthians 7:17–22. For Agamben, klesis “indicates the particular transforma-
tion that every juridical status and worldly condition undergoes because of, and
only because of, its relation to the messianic event.... For Paul, the ekklesia, the
messianic community, is literally all kleseis, all messianic vocations. The mes-
sianic vocation does not, however, have any specific content; it is nothing but the
repetition of those same factical or juridical conditions in which or as which we
a re ca l led.”^77 Yet these conditions are now lived, as Paul urges, through the mo-
dality of “as not”: “that even those having wives may be as not having, and those
weeping as not weeping, and those rejoicing as not rejoicing, and those buying
as not possessing, and those using the world as not using it up. For passing away
is the figure of this world. But I wish you to be without care” (1 Corinthians
7:29–32). Agamben describes this messianic “as not” as “the revocation of every
vocation... the vocation calls the vocation itself, as though it were an urgency
that works it from within and hollows it out, nullifying it in the very gesture of
maintaining and dwelling in it.”^78
A strange revolution, indeed. At one point Agamben even compares the law
under messianic katargesis with the law under the Schmittian state of excep-
tion, explicitly mentioning the Nazi decree of February 1933. While exception is
eventually itself superseded in Paul’s figure of love, it is unclear exactly how this
overcoming differs from the original messianic suspension. Agamben’s reading
of Paul is best understood within the framework of his own larger philosophical
project, including his argument that Paul is the hidden hunchback theologian
pulling the strings of historical materialism in Benjamin’s first thesis “On the
Concept of History.”^79 There is no immediate textual reason or cue requiring us
to assume that Benjamin has a particular theology or theologian in mind when
he writes of “theology” here, yet Agamben insists on it.^80 This claim is placed at
the end of The Time That Remains, titled “Threshold or To r n a d a,” suggesting that
it relates to the previous six days of his seminar in the same way that the tornada
relates to the six verses of a sestina, and the Sabbath to the six days of Creation.^81
Agamben views Benjamin’s idea of a “weak messianic force” both as derived from
Paul and as the primary resource for contemporary revolutionary thinking. Like