… What happens to Jesus Christ after ‘The Death of God’? If we accept Friedrich Nietzsche’s proposition—that “God is dead! And we have killed him, you and I!” ^{Footnote 1} —must we also accept that, after the Christian God, Jesus Christ, too, is simply absent in contemporary existence? No longer a ‘real presence’ in the Christian sacraments, as, for a thousand years and more, Christian theologians from Augustine to Aquinas protested that he was? And if we accept Nietzsche’s word, that Christ is not risen, but simply crucified, must we also submit to the Nietzschean proposition that the Christian moral world-view has been violently overthrown, and all higher values have been devalued, leaving the contemporary world under the sway of the Antichrist?

Giorgio Agamben’s Pilate and Jesus might appear to follow in this Nietzschean line, since not only does Agamben recite the Christian Gospel story of Christ’s trial before the Jewish Sanhedrin and the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, almost exclusively from Pilate’s perspective, declaring, with Nietzsche, that Pilate, not Jesus, is the only real “character” in the story, and citing, with approval, Nietzsche’s sarcastic comment about the “noble scorn” of the Roman tribune for the Jewish Messiah ^{Footnote 2} ; but Agamben also begins his anti-scriptural account by postulating something like a Nietzschean ‘transvaluation of values,’ in which the spiritual and moral values and eternal truths embodied in Jesus Christ are overthrown in favour of Pilate’s skeptical, cynical point of view, sardonically emblematized by his infamous question: “‘What is truth?’” (John 18:38) “In the trial that unfolds before Pilate,” Agamben observes, “two judgments and two kingdoms seem to confront each other: the human and the divine, the temporal and the eternal. … And it is the world of facts”—in other words, Pilate’s world—“that must pronounce a judgment on the eternal kingdom” (P&J, 14-15): that is, on Christ’s kingdom, which “is not of this world” (John 18:36). And since Christ’s otherworldly perspective on this world-shaking confrontation is almost completely written out of Agamben’s account, it might also be argued that Agamben has, in fact, aligned himself with Nietzsche in this apocalyptic confrontation between Jesus and Pilate, if not actually proclaimed the triumph of Antichrist.

But Agamben’s objective is not to herald the triumph of the Antichrist, but to describe a ‘state of crisis’ (the Greek krisis: ‘a discord, dispute, trial, judgment, sentence, condemnation’ etc.) in the Roman and Jewish law, in which neither the spiritual and eternal, nor the temporal world, is able to arrive at a judgment, and the Roman and Jewish laws are both placed in a ‘state of exception,’ which calls them profoundly into question. In the trial of Jesus before Pilate, Agamben argues, “two judgments and two kingdoms truly stand before one another[,] without managing to come to a conclusion. It is not at all clear who judges whom … It is possible … that neither of the two pronounces a judgment.” (P&J, 37). This perpetual ‘state of crisis’ is then equivalent to what Agamben, in his earlier work, The State of Exception, had described as the profoundly paradoxical state of the Western law, in which the supreme sovereign—the tyrant, dictator, emperor, or judge—exists simultaneously within and without the law, is both subject to and supremely above the sovereign law, and therefore exercises his monopoly on violence with virtual impunity, as does Pontius Pilate in condemning Jesus Christ to death, without entering a final judgment under either Roman or Jewish law.

In Agamben’s judgment, Jesus’ trial before Pilate then inaugurates a perpetual ‘state of exception,’ in which the arrival of the messianic kingdom is indefinitely postponed, since neither can Pilate enter a judgment against Jesus, who is the perfectly innocent man under Roman law, nor can Jesus judge Pilate, since the refusal to judge is the essence of messianic law. But what Agamben fails to observe is that this perpetual ‘state of exception’ does not prevent the Sanhedrin and Pilate from exercising sovereign violence against Jesus Christ, condemning him to the cruel, violent death graphically described in the Christian Gospels. This perpetual ‘state of exception’ does not prevent the sovereign monopoly on violence from being executed upon the Jewish Messiah, who is ironically condemned as a ‘false messiah’ by those who assume the role of Antichrists. And it is this sovereign violence which resolves ‘the state of exception’ in favour of whomever wields that arbitrary power, whether that monopoly on violence is exercised within or without the sovereign law.

The publisher’s back-cover notes point out that Pilate and Jesus comes at the culmination of Agamben’s Homo Sacer project, thereby perhaps suggesting that Agamben’s Christ can be seen as a figure of the ‘sacred man’ of Roman law, who, by Sextus Pompeius Festus’ ambiguous definition in De Verborum Significatione, cannot be sacrificed, but can be killed by anyone without risk of prosecution for homicide. But, actually, Pilate and Jesus is more closely aligned with Agamben’s earlier essay, “The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin,” in which Jesus Christ appears as ‘the double figure’ of the Jewish Messiah, who “unites in his person” both the Messiah ben Joseph, “who is vanquished in the battle against the forces of evil,” and the Messiah ben David, “the triumphant messiah, who ultimately vanquishes [the adversary] and restores the [messianic] kingdom.” ^{Footnote 3} But Agamben’s faith in what he calls ‘the Benjaminian gnosis’ and its ‘messianic time’ appears to have waned, somewhat, since the earlier essay, since “The Messiah and the Sovereign” ends with a cautious statement of apostolic belief in “that ‘small adjustment’” in the structure of historical time “in which … the messianic kingdom consists.” ^{Footnote 4} Pilate and Jesus, by contrast, ends with “the paradox that in the end, before Pilate, cuts Jesus short” (P&J, 45), and thereby circumvents worldly hopes for the arrival of a messianic kingdom, as it also supplants Jesus Christ by the Antichrist.

In The Church and the Kingdom, a homily delivered to the Bishop of Paris and other high-ranking Church officials at Notre Dame Cathedral on 8 March 2009, Agamben had appeared prepared to declare the Catholic Church itself the Antichrist for dereliction of its ecclesiastical duty to bring about the convergence of world-historical and messianic time. But in The Church and the Kingdom, the Antichrist role predictably falls to ‘the Kingdom’ (the State) for its diabolic agency in establishing this permanent ‘state of exception’ or ‘state of emergency’ (C&K, 40) which Agamben compares to hell on earth (C&K, 41). Precisely who ‘the Messiah’ might be, in Agamben’s texts, who might break out of the nightmare of world-historical time and proclaim the inauguration of messianic time, is not exactly clear (unless it is St. Paul, or maybe Walter Benjamin?). But the Christian Messiah, Jesus Christ, surprisingly, merits only passing mention in Pilate and Jesus, and no mention whatsoever in The Church and the Kingdom.

In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin had written: “The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist” (Sec. VI, 255). ^{Footnote 5} Precisely what Benjamin meant by ‘the Messiah’ and the ‘Antichrist’ is also not exactly clear, except that, for Benjamin, the inauguration of ‘messianic time’ was associated with the Spartacist Revolt of the 1930s, and with a German Marxist/Leninist (Bolshevik?) revolution which would “make the continuum of history explode” and “blast open the continuum of history” into some future world, which Benjamin only obliquely prophecied. ^{Footnote 6} Whether or not Agamben endorses this distinctly violent notion of ‘messianic time,’ it’s clear that his ‘Messiah’ is not the Christian Messiah, who is conspicuously absent from both Agamben’s and Benjamin’s texts. And it is perhaps this conspicuous absence of the Christian Messiah, Jesus Christ, which finally prevents Agamben’s and Benjamin’s messianic scriptures from actually achieving that ‘small [non-violent?] adjustment’ in world-historical time, which might allow the real messianic kingdom to, finally, arrive.