“The Only Keys to the Interpretation of History are Angelology and Demonology”
A translation of Angeli e demoni, a blog post by Giorgio Agamben.
The talk heard so much today about the “end of history” or the advent of the “post-human” forgets the simple fact that man is always in the process of becoming human and therefore also of ceasing to be human, or dying to his humanity. The claims to an attained animality or a completed humanity at the end of history do not take into account this constitutive incompleteness of the human being.
Similar considerations apply when we talk about the death of God. Just as man is always in the act of becoming human and ceasing to be human, the becoming divine of God is always in progress and never finished. This is how we should understand Pascal’s phrase about Christ being in agony until the end of time (Jésus sera en agonie jusqu’à la fin du monde: il ne faut pas dormir pendant ce temps-là). According to etymology, this agony means that Christ is in struggle and conflict with his own divinity; for this reason he is never dead, but is always, so to speak, dying to himself. The only meaning of human history is to be found in this incessant agony, and talk about the end of history ignores the fact that history is always in the process of ending.
Thus the late Hölderlin’s insistence on demigods and almost-divine or more-than-human figures: History is made up of beings that are already divine and not yet divine, already and not-yet human. That is to say, there is a “demi-history,” just as there are demigods and quasi-men.
For this reason, the only keys to the interpretation of history are angelology and demonology. These studies see in history an unceasing struggle among the less-than-gods and the more — or less — than men, just as the Church Fathers did and as Paul himself did when he called the principalities and powers of this world “angels” (or “demons”).
If we can say anything about the present condition, it is that in the last two years we have seen with unprecedented clarity demons fiercely at work in history, but also the demoniacs following them blindly in their vain attempts to drive out the angels forever — the angels that they themselves once were, before their infinite fall into history.
4 agosto 2022