Agamben on the figure of “the assistant”: helpers toiling for naught, sidekicks, shameless nothings, the hero’s appendage, invisible laborers // -What are you doing? -Preparing for the Kingdom.

loneberry:

[excerpt from Profanations]

[Starting from the middle…]

Robert
Walser’s assistants are made of the very same stuff–these figures who are irreparably and stubbornly busy collaborating on
work that is utterly superfluous, not to say indescribable. If
they study–and they seem to study very hard–it is in order
to become big fat zeros. And why should they bother to help
with anything the world takes seriously? After all, it’s nothing
but madness. They prefer to take walks. And if they encounter a dog or some living creature on their walks, they whisper: “I
have nothing to give you, dear animal; I would gladly give you
something, if only I had it.” Nevertheless, in the end, they lie
down in a meadow to weep bitterly over their “stupid greenhorn’s existence.”

[…]

But how can one recognize these helpers, these translators?
If they hide among the faithful as foreigners, who will have the
vision capable of distinguishing the visionaries?

An intermediate creature who exists between the wazir and
Kafka’s assistants is the little hunchback that Benjamin evokes
in his childhood memories. This “tenant of the distorted life”
is not just the cipher of childish clumsiness, nor the trickster
who steals the glass from someone who wants to drink and the
prayer from someone who wants to pray. Rather, his appearance makes it so that whoever looks at him “can no longer pay
attention” to himself or to the little man. The hunchback is, in
fact, the representative of the forgotten; he presents himself in
order to lay claim to the aspect of oblivion that resides in every
thing. This share of oblivion has something to do with the end
of time, just as carelessness is a precursor to redemption. Distortion, the hump, and clumsiness are the forms things take in oblivion. What we have always already forgotten is the Kingdom, we who live “as if we were not the Kingdom.” When the
messiah comes, the distorted will be straightened, the obstacle
will become easy, and the forgotten will be remembered of its
own accord. For it is said, “for them and their kind, the incomplete and the inept, to them hope will be given." 

The idea that the Kingdom is present in profane time in sinister and distorted forms, that the elements of the final state are
hidden precisely in what today appears despicable and derisory,
that shame, in sum, secretly has something to do with glory,
is a profound messianic theme. Everything that now appears
debased and worthless to us is the currency we will have to
redeem on the last day. And we will be guided toward salvation
precisely by the companion who has lost his way. It is his face
that we will recognize in the angel who sounds the trumpet or
who carelessly drops the Book of Life from his hands. The bead
of light that emerges from our defects and our Iittle abjections
is nothing other than redemption. In this sense, the naughty
schoolmates who passed the first pornographic pictures to us
under their school desks, or the sordid closet in which someone showed us his or her nudity for the first time, were also
assistants. The assistants are our unfulfilled desires, the ones
we do not confess even to ourselves. On the day of judgment,
they will come smiling toward us like Arthur and Jeremiah.
That day, someone will count off our blushes like a collection
notice for paradise. To reign does not mean to fulfill. It means
that the unfulfilled is what remains. 

The assistant is the figure of what is lost. Or, rather, of our
relationship to what is lost. This relationship concerns everything that, in both collective and individual life, comes to be
forgotten at every moment. It concerns the unending mass
of what becomes irrevocably lost. Throughout our lives, the
measure of oblivion and ruin, the ontological waste that we
carry in ourselves, far exceeds the small mercy of our memories and our consciousness. But this formless chaos of the forgotten that accompanies us like a silent golem is neither inert
nor inefficacious. On the contrary, it influences us just as much
as our conscious memories, although in a different way. It is a
force and almost an apostrophe of the forgotten that, although
it can neither be measured in terms of consciousness nor accumulated as a patrimony, insistently governs the hierarchy of all
knowledge and all consciousness. What is lost demands not to
be remembered and fulfilled but to remain forgotten or lost
and therefore, for that reason alone, unforgettable. The assistant is at home in all this. He spells out the text of the unforgettable and translates it into the language of deaf-mutes.
Hence his obstinate gesticulations coupled with his impassive
mime’s face. Hence, too, his irreducible ambiguity. For the
unforgettable is articulated only in parody. The place of song is
empty. On every side and all around us, the assistants are busy
preparing the Kingdom.