Fire Flies, Interrupting Chronological Time
From the Sketches in Messianism Series
A few weeks back I joined my good friend
and others in Lucca, Italy, for a gathering of the friends of Ivan Illich. When I signed up I didn’t know that Giorgio Agamben would also be attending. I was rather struck for a moment when I noticed his name on the list of attendees. It would be true to say that in my own realm of work, Agamben is probably the most significant living philosopher.
On the morning of departure, after good days of rich conversation with new friends, I join a little circle under the shade of the grape vine, deep in discussion.
Agamben says: “If you’re a Christian the Messiah is behind you. For Jews the Messiah is ahead. Neither is a very good situation.” He then quotes Walter Benjamin: “Each moment is the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.” He goes on to say that the Messianic event is about interrupting the chronology of history, of law, state, power etc. I believe my friend Roger Mitchell would say, “interrupting imperial time.” And when is the moment to interrupt the chronology of history? It is now, the moment you’re in. Not the past or the future. Today is the day of salvation, as they say.
An orthodox Christian pitches in. “yes, but: the Messiah is also already with us…” She advocates for the Messiah in the past.
Agamben doesn’t disagree. He murmurs and gestures vaguely with his hands, in a fashion I interpret as a “well, ok… but even so…”
I, on the other hand, find myself wanting to advocate for the future. Why? It’s something to do with the structure of hope; the otherness of the Messiah. I consider this future orientation a sort of necessary madness: necessary in order to never be wholly assimilated to the present order of things. I am obliged to live in the state, but I am not of it: part of me lives in a not yet. I accept a position of present exile.
This uneasy connective tissue between the messianic now, the past, and the not yet, make up a kind of tri-lectic. Messianism always exists as a dialogue between the three: the Messiah: “who was, and is, and is to come…” says the John Revelator).
But I don’t raise the future, and the discussion gallops onward.
Instead, I ask Agamben if he sees this interruption of chronos as something to do with Walter Benjamin’s “divine violence” — the interjecting event that ruptures power and law, but differs from a revolution or a coup in that it leaves no new law behind itself.
Agamben concurs. He makes a distinction between revolution and rebellion. Revolution is a fixed idea reproduced in unfixed situations. It always reproduces some semblance of the previous law in the form of its own new law. Rebellion, however, has no fixed goals or content. It responds directly to whatever is occurring here and now. It institutes nothing. It is destituent.
Like jazz, I’m thinking. Like improvisation. As far as you can get from a national anthem.
The question I didn’t get to raise was about the “monstrous otherness” of the Messiah, as Derrida sometimes put it. This is the notion that, if I don’t want to just keep reproducing the world as it is, hope calls to the possibility of some player besides those apparently sat round the table. Some event to come, over which none of us have power or sway. Otherwise, are we not all just kicking off? Just progress, periodically jolted by odd moments of conscience, dissonance and doubt? Do we not just become a little grit in the machine?
But I didn't ask, partly because the question felt ungentlemanly — It might appear to be fishing for a confession of faith, or something like that — and also because there were plenty of voices gathered and I was conscious of not wishing to take up too much of the yarn.
The night before I wandered away from the group who were all drinking wine and singing Italian folk songs under the stars. Dougald had told me that he’d seen fireflies, in the woods a few nights before, which had reminded him of a song of mine. I’ve written more than a few lyric mentioning things I’ve never seen, and fireflies is one. A little way into the woods, and there they all were, gently floating all around with their orange glow switching on an off with astonishing regularity. I didn’t know they did that: the switching on and off. I sang a little koine Greek with them and went to bed.
Thank you for this David - this is rich in so many ways, and I am warmed by knowing you had time in Italy, meeting Agamben, seeing fireflies...
I am very taken with this idea of the ongoing messianic now. A kind of eternity, as I see it. I find myself linking it to my own ponderings on longing. Which once were for a redeemed future of some kind. Then I located the source of my longing in a distant, idealised past. Now I believe it is only ever for the now, for a real experience of connection with the self/other/divine/allness in any given moment, aided and abetted by the practice of fidelity and the hand of grace.
I am so glad you saw the Faerie fireflies, those guides to the Otherworld, where I think you often visit. They symbolize hope, and also perhaps, the distortion of time....our historic, chronological time. Of course the fireflies came as you open Messianic time!