Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Giorgio Agamben, translated by Lorenzo Chiesa with Matteo Mandarini.
The Kingdom and the Glory was issued a short while before The Sacrament of Language, but in the plan of Agamben’s Homo Sacer project, the first book follows the second, and that is the sequence in which I read them. They are closely connected in theme, exploring points in which concepts cross or transcend the boundaries between the theological and the political. The Kingdom and the Glory is a much larger undertaking in both scope and scale.
The work of the book is a Foucauldian (i.e. neo-Nietzschean) genealogy of “glory” as an operator in the conceptual justification of “economy” and “government”–that is, in the theological and political registers, respectively. (The ancient theological sense of “economy” is distinct from its modern significance.) It touches on esoteric fields such as Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, and Grail legendry. But it also traces its concerns through the vertebral canon of philosophy from Aristotle through Heidegger, as well as the entire span of Christian theology.
As The Sacrament of Language was trained on the performative language of the oath, so The Kingdom and the Glory in large measure revolves around the nature and function of acclamation. Section 8.19 in particular is a valuable inquiry into amen as “the acclamation par excellence” of Christian liturgy.
Some of the political consequences of the insights in this 2007 book seem to cast light on the fragility of the legislative function in putative democracies like that of Germany in the first part of the 20th century or the United States in the 21st. The sovereignty of the people is inadequately manifested by the legislature, which allows for the usurpation of its “kingdom” by the “government” of the executive, and the collapse of what Agamben calls in theology “the providential machine.”
My hat is off to translators Chiesa and Mandarini, not only for making Agamben intelligible in English, and for keeping track of the various linguistic registers among which he navigates, but for introducing me to two English words. In the course of reading this book, I learned tralatitious (152) and epenetic (246). Also, I forgive them for using mythologeme in lieu of mytheme (106).
Consistent with my prior reading of Agamben, I found this book difficult and rewarding.