'A new use of the self' : Giorgio Agamben on the Coming Community

Amongst the voluminous speculations on the 'world to come' that have accompanied messianic prophecies, one stands out, not for the extravagance of its predictions, but for the very banality of its account of redemption. In The Coming Community, Giorgio Agamben recounts the following tale, as told by Walter Benjamin to Ernst Bloch: "The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different." There is no doubt something disappointing about such an image of redemption, particularly when placed alongside Christian promises of "a new heaven and a new earth" [Rev 21:1], in which "there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying" [Rev 21:4]. Nonetheless, in offering a vision of the world to come that is intimately connected to our world, it seems to foreshadow the possibility of changing our world, even if, as it were, only a little. And yet, as this tale was passed down by tradition, and ultimately passed from Gershom Scholem to Benjamin to Bloch, the question of the nature of the change that would be required, and that of the agency that could accomplish it, received different, and often contradictory, emphases. In Bloch's recounting of the tale"”which introduces a slight, yet decisive, alteration into the version previously told by Benjamin"”if the world to come will be just like this world, this does not mean that the little difference that would constitute it is easy to accomplish. All that is necessary to establish this new world, Bloch suggests, is the slight displacement of a stone, a cup or a brush. "But," he writes, "this small displacement is so difficult to achieve and its measure is so difficult to find that, with regard to the world, humans are incapable of it and it is necessary that the Messiah come.