Giorgio Agamben

The Mystery of Evil

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In 2013, Benedict XVI became only the second pope in the history of the Catholic Church to resign from office. In this brief but illuminating study, Giorgio Agamben argues that Benedict's gesture, far from being solely a matter of internal ecclesiastical politics, is exemplary in an age when the question of legitimacy has been virtually left aside in favor of a narrow focus on legality. This reflection on the recent history of the Church opens out into an analysis of one of the earliest documents of Christianity: the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, which stages a dramatic confrontation between the “man of lawlessness” and the enigmatic katechon, the power that holds back the end of days. In Agamben's hands, this infamously obscure passage reveals the theological dynamics of history that continue to inform Western culture to this day.
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63 printed pages
Original publication
2017
Publication year
2017
Translator
Kotsko Adam
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Quotes

  • Sofya Averchenkovahas quoted7 years ago
    If the Church lays claim to a spiritual power to which the temporal power of the Empire or the State must remain subordinate, as happened in medieval Europe, or if, as happened in the twentieth-century totalitarian State, legitimacy insists on doing without legality, then the political machine spins in circles with often lethal results; if, on the other hand, as has happened in modern democracies, the legitimating principle of popular sovereignty is reduced to the electoral moment and is dissolved into procedural rules that are juridically fixed in advance, legitimacy runs the risk of disappearing into legality and the political machine is equally paralyzed.
  • Sofya Averchenkovahas quoted7 years ago
    Modernity’s attempt to make legality and legitimacy coincide, by seeking to secure through positive law the legitimacy of a power, is completely inadequate, as is clear from the inexorable process of decline into which our democratic institutions have entered. A society’s institutions remain living only if both principles (which in our tradition have also received the name of natural law and positive law, spiritual power and temporal power, or in Rome, auctoritas and potestas) remain present and act in them without ever claiming to coincide.
  • Sofya Averchenkovahas quoted7 years ago
    The hypertrophy of law, which presumes to legislate over everything, on the contrary betrays, through an excess of formal legality, the loss of all substantial legitimacy

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