Giorgio Agamben, _The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government_ (trans. Lorenzo Chiesa with Matteo Mandarini)

I WAS MOST of the way through this and enjoying it tremendously but regretting that it did not really intersect with my own official research interests--then in the penultimate chapter a slight pivot takes us right into the heart of interwar authoritarian political theory. Home sweet home.

Why is Agamben so alluring? It has something to do with one's never knowing what he is going to bring to the party next--the references here to Kafka's fiction and to Kojève's commentary on Hegel both took me by surprise and seemed perfect. And I did not even know that Hugo Ball (!) had written a book on Byzantine Christianity.

But the key, I think, is the way Agamben combines conceptual audacity, an ability to come up with ideas that seem unlikely ever to have occurred to anyone else, with old-school mastery of the archive and philological scrutiny--if Eliot's Casaubon actually were what Dorothea Brooke initially thought he was, he would be Agamben.

Agamben is here working with the idea that modern political thought descended less from ancient and medieval political thought than from early and medieval Christian theology. Not an utterly new idea, but I associate it with writers who are conservative, not to say reactionary--Carl Schmitt, Erik Peterson. (Agamben often mentions these two and Ernst Kantorowicz, familiar to me only because his King's Two Bodies is cited in almost very commentary on Act IV, scene ii of Hamlet.) Agamben seems to be working a different side of the street than Schmitt and Peterson, though.

One of the book's principal tasks of the book is the unpacking of oikonomos, the Greek word from which we get the English word "economy," which originally meant something like "household management" or "administration." It occurs in the New Testament a few times, where it was translated into Latin as dispositio. The King James version went went with "steward," as in 1st Corinthians 4:1, "Let a man so account of us, as of ministers of Christ, and stewards of the mysteries of God."

So--what does it mean to be a steward of the mysteries of God?

Agamben leads us through the thorny thickets of Trinitarian doctrine, especially the efforts to undermine the Gnostics' claims that the real God would not have dabbled in anything so nasty as gross matter. The question of how the stainless radiance of Heaven is somehow intimately involved with the mess of incarnation leads us into the even thornier thicket of theodicy (e.g., Boethius), but also raises a fundamental question of power, the relationship of authority to execution, the execution necessarily being handled by a network of people in-the-name-of-the-authority rather than immediately by the authority proper. So the distinction between being and praxis, between Kingdom and Government, between authority and the exercise of that authority, even between the Crown and whatever all-too-fallible little scamp who happens to be wearing it at the moment.

I can tell I will need multiple entries for this book.

By the way, Stanford University Press, no index?!? WTF?