Divine Management. Critical Remarks on Giorgio Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory

Abstract

The essay seeks to evaluate the pertinence of the inquiry laid out in Il Regno e la Gloria to a radical critique of contemporary politics and economics, in particular its relationship to a Marxian communism, which Agamben appears to consider incapable of a truly radical or total critique of the status quo. To do this, the paper is divided into three sections. In the first part the question of what is meant by the “theological genealogy of the economy and government”, as announced by the book’s subtitle, is elaborated. This involves subjecting to scrutiny Agamben’s reliance on a certain understanding of secularization, of the kind that permits him to declare that modernity merely brings to completion the Christian “economy’ of providence, or indeed that Marx’s notion of praxis ‘basically is only the secularization of the theological conception of the being of creatures as divine operation”. The paper tries to show that Agamben’s work relies on a type of historical substantialism that clashes with his claim to be engaging in a genealogy. In the second part Agamben’s suggestions about the genealogical thread running from Trinitarian oikonomia all the way to Smith’s invisible hand, and implicitly all the way up to the present, are contrasted to understandings of the (modern) economy which, being premised on the limitlessness of monetary accumulation, transcends any absorption by a theological genealogy. In the third and final part certain aspects of Agamben’s archaeological excavations – in particular his delineation of the economic-theological notion of administration – are examined, and the question is posed whether they might permit a deconstruction of the Marxist reference to communism as the withering away of the state and the shift towards an ‘administration of things’.