The “End of History,” or Messianic Time*

Jean-Claude Paye

Operating outside any contradiction or actual questioning, the “end of

history,” as presented by Francis Fukuyama,1 the “clash of civilizations,”
as suggested by Samuel Huntington,2 or the notion of primeval violence
rehabilitated by René Girard shed complementary light on the future of
a society ruled by images. While Fukuyama denies any negativity, i.e.,
any possibility of change, Huntington points to how this can be achieved:
turning political conflicts into wars through images, i.e., into wars between
civilizations and religions. As to the present sacralization of violence, it
shows the way to a regression toward idolatry.

The Time that Remains

Predicting the end of history and a war of civilizations is actually a form of
civilian religion that echoes the theological impulse given by the founder
of Christianism, Paul of Tarsus. Such postmodern secularized views fully
belong to the Paulinian notion of messianic time, i.e., the time that remains
before the Revelation once it has been established that Jesus is indeed the
expected Messiah.
In his book The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to
the Romans,3 as well as in his lecture “L’Église et le Royaume” (“The
*   Translated by Christine Pagnoulle.
1.  Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press,
1992).
2. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World
Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
3.  Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the
Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2000).

181
Telos 173 (Winter 2015): 181–90
doi:10.3817/1215173181
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182    JEAN-CLAUDE PAYE

Church and the Kingdom”), delivered in Paris in 2009, Giorgio Agamben

defines messianic time as the time of the end, as the time that contracts and
begins to end.4 Paul suspends chronological time. Living in the time of the
end involves a significant transformation of duration. Agamben refers to a
time that grows inside chronological time and transforms it from within, a
time that is neither a defined moment nor a portion of chronological time
but some sort of inner time, as “the time that we are ourselves.”
Interpreting messianic time as a duration within every monad corre-
sponds to the way in which the media addresses every one of us. Each
event is constructed as a reminder of the primeval one on 9/11, and a
connection is established between that landmark and everyday life. Com-
ments inscribe the memory of the attacks into what Merleau-Ponty calls
“the flesh.” They thus establish some reversibility between inside and
outside, an equivalence between objective facts and the way in which
they are perceived. Thanks to this process of indifferentiation, individual
experience becomes the objective event itself. Any questioning of the fact
becomes not only a waste of time but downright blasphemy. It is read as
evidence of a conspiracy theory.

Time of Indifferentiation
The pervasiveness of a time that is reduced to a purely internal dimension
and that is independent of any material dimension is the direct result of the
erasure of the distinction between subject and object. As it bypasses the
articulation between external and internal dimensions, Paul’s First Epistle
to the Corinthians is attuned to the current discourse of the war on terror,
and more generally to the language of postmodernity. The epistle results
in a lack of differentiation not among external objects but between their
existence and their nonexistence: “But this I say, brethren, time contracted
itself; the rest is, that even those having wives may be as not [hos me]
having, and those weeping as not weeping, and those rejoicing as not
rejoicing, and those buying as not possessing, and those using the world
as not using it up.”5

4.  Giorgio Agamben, “L’ Église et le Royaume,” Lent lecture: “Jesus as Israel’s Mes-
siah,” Roman Catholic Church, Paris Diocèse, 2009, available online at http://www.paris.
catholique.fr/Conference-de-M-Giorgio-Agamben-et.html.
5.  1 Corinthians 7:29–32; quoted in English translation in Agamben, The Time That
Remains, p. 23.
THE “END OF HISTORY,” OR MESSIANIC TIME    183

The process of nullifying what is, which is a defining feature of “the

time that remains,” is perceived by Agamben as the tension of a concept
toward itself in the form of “as not,” between the existence of a thing and
its nonexistence,6 and not as a process of indifferentiation between one
thing and its opposite, between external things
The way in which the media reported on the Merah case is also
inscribed in this “as not” logic.7 If the scooter can be both black and white,
this is not a contradiction between two objects but two pieces of informa-
tion that nullify each other. They are not essential, since they refer to the
visible, not the invisible. The latter, the terrorist essence of the accused,
is only revealed by the statement of his characteristics: a violent and frus-
trated Islamist.

Reversal of “as if” into “as not”

If the process is indeed a nullifying of the relation between an external fact
and the way it is perceived, the “as not” cannot be conceived of as a form
of negativity, as Agamben does, but as an eidetic reduction of the world,
similar to the “know-how” of Husserlian phenomenology.
In order to consider the “as not” to be a negation, Agamben introduces
an analogy between the Paulinian process and the fictio legis in Roman
law. The latter is then reversed; for the fiction indeed builds up an “as if.”
As Agamben reminds us, the “fictio consists in acting as if . . . and in deduc-
ing from this fiction the validity of a juridical act that would otherwise be
null.”8 It is a fiction of existence, not a fiction of nonexistence.
In order to unite “as not” and “as if,” Agamben takes an example from
Roman law. Though a citizen reduced to a slave loses his citizenship, the
law treats him after his death “as if” he had died as a free citizen and, if he
had written a will, it acknowledges the validity of this act. This is indeed
behaving “as if” the dead prisoner were still a Roman citizen. It is not
denying his captivity; there is no “as not” of his being a slave. What mat-
ters is that he was at one time a Roman citizen and that this quality endures
with respect to inheritance. The formalism of the fiction is necessary to

6.  “The Apostle does not say: ‘weeping as rejoicing’ nor ‘weeping as [meaning =] not
weeping’ but ‘weeping as not weeping’” (Agamben, The Time That Remains, p. 24).
7.  See Jean-Claude Paye and Tülay Umay, “De Ben Laden à Merah: de l’icône à
l’image,” Mondialisation.ca, July 8, 2012, http://www.mondialisation.ca/de-ben-laden-
merah-de-l-ic-ne-l-image/31828.
8. Agamben, The Time That Remains, p. 28.
184    JEAN-CLAUDE PAYE

ensure the juridical validity of the law. On the contrary, by reversing the
assumption of existence into a presumption of nonexistence, Agamben
identifies what is likely and what is unlikely. This is a recurring pattern in
comments on 9/11 and on the Merah case.

Non-distinction of Likely and Unlikely

Fiction, “as if,” lies at the basis of the law. The principle that “no one is
supposed not to know the law” makes it possible to apply a juridical order.
Interpreting the fictio legis as the possibility of making a fact inoperative
in order to make it analogical to the process of suspending messianic time
is a reversal of the notion of fiction, which refers to the imaginary level of
social organization and thus makes it possible to organize the real instead
of giving oneself up to it, as demanded by “the time that remains.”
Naming the fictio “as not” is thus far from insignificant, since it
no longer founds the order of the law on a likely fact but rather on an
unlikely one—in the example above, on the denial that the Roman citizen
died as a captive. We find here again a now pervasive “know-how,” be it
in the comments on the 9/11 attacks or in those on the Merah case. The
unlikely and the dismissal of factual data must become the basis upon
which subjective certainty turns into authoritative discourse. This process
is a tenet of postmodernity. By doing away with any imaginary aspect, it
participates in a policy of chaos that locks us up in the real.

Nondifferentiation of Negation and Nullification

Agamben merges negating, which constitutes fiction, and nullification,
which results from “as not.” Yet they cannot be amalgamated, as they
are indeed opposed. As Hegel taught, negation is the very movement of
becoming whereas reducing to nothing achieves “the end of history” or
“the time that remains.” Negation is inscribed in time; it is an overreach-
ing that retains the determination in which it originates. While reducing to
nothing is pure immediacy,9 arresting us in the eternity of the instant. It is
liberated both from the past and from the future.
Converting as it does the fictio legis into the nullification of what
is, Agamben’s interpretation does not appear from out of nowhere. It

9.  Eduardo Mahieu, “Hegel, Freud et Lacan, sur le commentaire de Jean Hyppolite
de ‘Die Verneinung’ (S. Freud, 1925),” Cercle d’Etudes Psychiatriques Henry Ey, http://
eduardo.mahieu.free.fr/94-04/hyppolite.html.
THE “END OF HISTORY,” OR MESSIANIC TIME    185

is inscribed in the spirit of the time. His approach is quite consistent if

we think of the analogy between Marx and Paul of Tarsus, between the
struggle for emancipation and the jouissance of annihilation.
In order to enable the reading of messianic time as pure negativity,
Agamben relates Paul’s “as not” to Marx’s notion of the proletariat.10 This
would be a secular version of the time that remains, insofar as it “repre-
sents the dissolution of all ranks and the emergence of a split between the
individual and his own social condition.”11 However, unlike the process of
“as not,” “the nullification of all juridical-factical conditions”12 of exploi-
tation does not imply a reversal of the class to itself but a rejection, a
struggle against its opposite, the bourgeois class.

Nullification of Becoming
This is a process that Freud conceived of as Ausstossung, the primeval
repression by which the subject expels from himself what is bad or harm-
ful. Expelling is then coupled with introducing what the subject considers
to be good or useful. The primeval repression makes it possible to separate
outside and inside. Only through this rejection can there be any internal
consciousness. According to both Freud and Marx, “there must be a rejec-
tion to the outside in order that conversely an inside can be constituted.”13
This double process of ejection and introjection is similar to the
Marxian process of class formation. The subject of class is built up by the
struggle against its opposite. Consciousness is not an internal process of
education or of mere realization but a question of facing the materiality of
the relations of exploitation. Consequently, it must not be confused with
the Paulinian process of internal nullification of the conditions of exis-
tence. The analogy operated by Agamben negates the Marxian process of
education. It excludes any possibility of emerging from the present state
of things, from ordinary psychosis. The “as not” of the time that remains
may thus not be thought of as a negation. On the contrary, the function of
messianic time is to do away with the possible, and so with the negativity
that is the condition of it.

10. Agamben, The Time That Remains, p. 30.

11. Ibid., pp. 30–31.
12.  Ibid., p. 31.
13.  Gérard Pommier, Qu’est ce que le ‘Réel’?: Essai psychanalytique (Ramonville
Saint-Agne: Érès, 2004), p. 14 (our translation).
186    JEAN-CLAUDE PAYE

Transforming Marx into a Christian philosopher means identifying the

process of class struggle with Paul’s “as not,” the struggle for liberation
with considering the present state of things to be a horizon beyond which
it is impossible to go. This reversal is similar to the one identifying “as
not” with fiction. In both cases the social imaginary, that is, the ability to
control and change the real, is denied. Agamben’s interpretation perfectly
fits the paradigm of the end of history as the achievement of Paul’s mes-
sianic time.

Messianic Time, or the Time of Rejection

“As not” refers to the process that Freud calls Verwerfung and that Lacan
refers to as retranchement14 before finally adopting foreclosure. This
process is defined by Freud as follows: “This really involved no judg-
ment upon the question of its existence but it was the same as if it did not
exist.”15 The subject can thus never become. Failing to be able to inscribe
the real, he is on the contrary absorbed by it and remains in a state of
sideration. Unable to think the real, it becomes its waste.
Reducing the world to an originary intent encloses us in the indiffer-
entiation process of psychosis. Postmodernity, whose discourse on these
matters is symptomatic, achieves Paul’s paradigm: “There is neither Jew
nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female,
for ye are all One in Christ Jesus.”16 The end of history advanced by Fuku-
yama expresses the same relation to the world as Paul’s messianic time,
giving up the possible in order to be One with the symbolic Mother and to
go on indulging their jouissance.
In postmodernity, messianic klesis appears indeed to be the mode of
identification of the monad with political power. If there is no distinction
between inside and outside, the subject becomes one with the symbolic
Mother. The ability to perceive is disconnected and the relation of the indi-
vidual to the world is limited to unimodal individual experience when the
border between inside and outside has not yet been constituted thanks to
repression.17

14.  Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), pp. 322n5,
333.
15. Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed.
James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1956), 17:84, quoted in Lacan, Écrits, p. 333.
16.  Galatians 3:28 (King James version).
17. Pommier, Qu’est ce que le ‘Réel’?, p. 14.
THE “END OF HISTORY,” OR MESSIANIC TIME    187

Primeval Violence and Historical Violence

Reversing the possible into nullification and transforming “as if” into its
opposite “as not” are processes inscribed in the current religiosity. “The
time that remains” responds to the iconic character of social relationships
in postmodernity, which is a religion based on sacrifice,18 on surrendering
to primeval violence, as discussed by René Girard, or in its secular ver-
sion, the war against terror.
The notion of primeval violence is not new. A socialist contemporary
of Marx, Eugen Dühring, already saw in immediate violence the foun-
dation of politics and, by extension, the whole of economic and social
organization. Unlike today, when that nihilist view prevails, it was at that
time criticized by Engels in his Anti-Dühring. The two theses are opposed.
Dühring sees violence, an act of force, as primary, as constituting “the
original sin of the enslavement of man.”19 Engels mitigates that assertion
and relates it to a definite situation through reference to history.20
For both Engels and Marx, violence must not be isolated from its eco-
nomic and social conditions; as George Labica explains in his reading of
Engels’s text, “violence is not a concept.”21 Claiming the opposite, as do
Dühring or Girard, means confusing the unspeakable with what makes
it possible to inscribe it in the symbolic. The notion of primary violence
responds to the religious character of our societies, to the forceful return to
the function of sacrifice, and to the central part given to the victim.

Sacralization of Violence
The war against terror demands a continuous sacrifice to obscure gods,
exacting the erasure of our liberties. The fight against terror, of indetermi-
nate duration or definition, merges war and peace, hostility and criminality.

18.  See Jean-Claude Paye and Tülay Umay, “The Cult of Killing and the Symbolic
Order of Western Barbarism,” April 16, 2013, http://www.voltairenet.org/article178162.
html.
19.  Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring, pt. 2, “Political Economy,” ch. 1, “Subject Mat-
ter and Method,” trans. Emile Burns, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/
anti-duhring/ch13.htm.
20.  Georges Labica, “Pour une théorie de la violence,” transcript of a lecture read at
the Sorbonne on January 12, 2008, as part of the seminar Marx au XXIe siècle, http://www.
marxau21.fr/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=35:pour-une-theorie-de-
la-violence&catid=44:labica-georges&Itemid=65.
21.  Georges Labica, Théorie de la violence (Naples: La Città del Sole; Paris: J. Vrin,
2007) (our translation).
188    JEAN-CLAUDE PAYE

It confuses the inner and the outer, and it applies to a nation’s own citizens
the treatments once reserved for its enemies.
Terrorist violence is said to exist for its own sake. The victim’s voice
calls to us from outside but does not speak. Its action is silent but says the
truth. It affirms itself as originary signified. It takes the place of what Lacan,
working on psychotic structures, calls the original signifier, the symboli-
cally real, the side of the real that is immediately symbolized.22 The logos,
the symbolically real, i.e., what makes it possible to inscribe the real, is the
possibility of becoming. On the contrary the image of the victim’s voice
nullifies the ability to symbolize. It does away with the function of speech
and so with any possible negativity. It imposes a traumatic silence.
The current discourse on 9/11 or on humanitarian war introduces us
into a psychotic political order, demanding that we give up our liberties so
as to be protected from the other and from ourselves. A maternal political
structure suppresses any separation between state and citizens. However
the works of Lacan have taught us that it is precisely the fantasy of becom-
ing one with the imaginary mother,23 in this case the state, that is the very
foundation of the unlimited violence that the war on terror claims to fight.

A Society of Sheer Jouissance

Rejecting negativity manifests a turning away from the political and back
to the sacred. Nullifying desire to achieve increased jouissance does not
lead to a disenchantment of the world, to “exhaustion of the realm of the
invisible in this our world,” as Marcel Gauchet writes,24 but on the contrary
to the omnipotence of the invisible, of the image as defined by Marie-José
Mondzain. The result is indeed, as Marx puts it in Capital, a new enchant-
ment of the world, the enchanted “world of commodities,”25 a world that
nullifies use value and turns to exchange value instead.
Through his analysis of the commodity, Marx shows the fundamental
role of the fetish in the organization of capitalist society. The “commodity

22. Alain-Didier Weill, “Le symboliquement réel n’est pas le réellement symbo-

lique,” transcript of a seminar held on April 2, 2007, Insistance, http://www.insistance.org/
news/103/72/le-symboliquement-reel-n-est-pas-le-reellement-symbolique/d,detail_article.
html.
23.  Jacques Lacan, Séminaire XX Encore (Paris: Seuil, 1975).
24.  Marcel Gauchet, Le Désenchantement du monde: une histoire politique de la
religion (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), p. 2 (our translation).
25.  Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and
Edward Aveling (New York: Modern Library, 1906), ch. 1, “Commodities,” pp. 41–96.
THE “END OF HISTORY,” OR MESSIANIC TIME    189

form of the product of labor” or “the value form of commodity” is an

image that traps us into a psychotic structure.26 Through this image social
relationships operate as though they were relationships between things;
objects speak instead of people. The real is then out of reach of any attempt
at symbolization. The invisible, value, is substituted for the superego, and
the superego’s command of more enjoyment is embodied in its fetish,
money.
First used as a basis for the organization of production, fetishization
has invaded all aspects of everyday life as well as the media. Capitalist
production no longer bears only on reality; it summons the Real and makes
it possible to exploit the most intimate parts of our lives. It consequently
nullifies any becoming and replaces the possible with more jouissance,
more images, more fetishized objects.

Messianic Time as Transparency

Choosing to remain in psychosis corresponds to Paul’s “as not” or to its
equivalent, the statement of “the end of history.” Those paradigms, as the
self-fulfilling prediction of “the clash of civilizations,” reflect the religious
nature of capitalist postmodernity, i.e., a society that in the West no longer
has to face an organized opposition and which consequently rejects poli-
tics to turn to the sacred, rejects the management of differences to promote
the One.
Labor conflicts, the motor of capitalist development, dwindle and no
longer outline any social project. As a result, politics becomes pure trans-
parency of economic fetishization. As there is no collective desire, social
time is reduced to a purely internal time, that of monadic jouissance.
As in “the time that remains,” the jouissance that is specific to post-
modernity sets itself up as a cancelation of time through the “subjective
search for the ‘first time,’” referring to “an immemorial past before time,
thus to eternity.”27 Like any jouissance it lies outside the sequence of past,

26.  Marx writes: “A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in

it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped
upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of
their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves,
but between the products of their labour” (ibid., p. 83).
27.  Didier Moulinier, “Du temps de la jouissance à la jouissance-temps,” April 24,
2013, Jouissance et Perversion (blog), http://joui-sens.blogspot.be/2013/04/le-temps-de-
la-jouissance-et-la.html (our translation).
190    JEAN-CLAUDE PAYE

present, and future, explicitly rejects any desire, and confines itself to an
instinctual drive. As more jouissance, it is complete unto itself.
In messianic time as in the end of history, the connection between
jouissance and desire is out of joint. Jouissance is no longer only outside
time, outside the imaginary. It no longer constitutes time itself as real time
as opposed to imaginary time; it takes its place. It is thus no longer jouis-
sance of the body, of the signifier marking the body. It is located outside
the body, outside what separates inside/outside, and becomes jouissance
of the image. The “time that remains” is the abandonment of desire and
the petrification of pulsional movement. Alterity is disconnected, and the
faculty of judgment is abolished.
Messianic time is the suspension of chronological time demanded by
the annunciation of the “end of history.”
“As not” operates a conversion of the attention that is no longer turned
to the outside but exclusively to the inside: it is an internal process of
self-annihilation. “As not” puts us into the image “that is and at the same
time is not”; it is a way to acknowledge facts while not acknowledging
them. It nullifies the difference between existence and absence. In this
way outside objects are not repressed, they are negated. They are shown
but do not exist outside the meaning that they are supposed to have. Lying
acquires another function: it no longer tries to mislead us, but it locks us
up in psychosis by not differentiating what is from what is not.