Abstract

While praising Agamben for his attempt to formulate a radically immanentist conception of redemption, Negri nevertheless points out that Agamben’s novel vision of redemption, according to which the world in which we live is also a source of possibility, remains singularly unproductive. This is because in Agamben’s universe, according to Negri, productive power is attributed to sovereign power alone, thus leaving no room for a radically inventive and transformative activity – except in the guise of passive marginal resistance. In this article, I will discuss how the dialectic of immanence and transcendence implied in Agamben’s identification of the irreparably profane world with God throws into relief what is at stake in his singular conception of redemption. If nothing is more urgent in the contemporary state of exception in which we allegedly live today than finding a way to wrench from it a potential for transformation, as Agamben claims, this is because the present regime of mastery succeeds in creating through this very lawlessness an interminable status quo, immune to all change. In examining the implications of Agamben’s analysis of the self-generating immanentism of the state of exception, I explore the possibility that his commitment to redemption might make a contribution to contemporary theorisations of resistance by identifying the difficulties of contemporary immanentist theories of resistance, such as Negri’s, in finding a way out of the present impasse and by developing the basis for an explanation of how the restoration of the possible is given only through the restoration of always-already missed opportunities.