The Testament of Time

Autor(en)

Kurt Appel, Brita Pohl, Christian Pössel

Abstrakt

This paper responds to the challenge that the virtual world poses to time. The author argues that virtuality, forgetful of death, leads to a melancholic search for the body and its time. The paper traces key concepts (sovereign, homo sacer, government etc.) of Agamben's Homo Sacer project and The Testament of Time that respond to these challenges and then responds to these concepts with observations from the Bible. Agamben's messianism is not to be understood as eternity (the mirror of working time) but as the end of chronological time and thus corresponds to biblical apocalypticism. The author shows that subjectivity appears in the witness of the homo sacer who represents a complete lack of representation. In the Gospel of John such a messianic moment that shatters denotative language occurs, when Jesus utters his last statement “ecce homo” (often attributed to Pilate). Homo sacer and divine sovereign coincide as Jesus becomes the witness of a desubjectivization. The letter of John recapitulates the entire biblical history and reinterprets it, what leads to a linguistic and symbolic displacement of all representations of the ruling and violent powers of history. What remains is a new symbolic order in which all images are rendered inoperative, a sphere of pure vulnerability and fragility.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Systematische Theologie und Ethik

Band

2

Seiten

733-758

Publikationsdatum

2020

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

603206 Fundamentaltheologie

Schlagwörter

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Allgemeine Kunst und Geisteswissenschaften

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/7ccdce1e-dc89-4405-b9f5-6988229a4719