Inoperativity Quotes

“If the postjudicial condition coincides with the supreme glory ('vera ibi gloria erit': The City of God, p. 696) and if glory in the century of centuries has the form of an eternal Sabbath, what remains to be investigated is precisely the meaning of this intimacy between glory and sabbatism. At the beginning and the end of the highest power there stands, according to Christian theology, a figure not of action and government, but of inoperativity. The indescribable mystery that glory, which is blinding light, must hide from the gaze of the scrutatores maiestatis is that of divine inoperativity, of what God does before creating the world and after the providential government of the world is complete. It is not the kabhod, which cannot be thought or looked upon, but the inoperative majesty that it veils with its clouds and the splendor of its insignia. Glory, both in theology and in politics, is precisely what takes the place of that unthinkable emptiness that amounts to the inoperativity of power. And yet, precisely this unsayable vacuity is what nourishes and feeds power (or, rather, what the machine of power transforms into nourishment). That means that the center of the governmental apparatus, the treshold at which Kingdom and Government ceaselessly communicate and ceaselessly distinguish themselves from one another is, in reality, empty; it is only the Sabbath and katapausis - and nevertheless, this inoperativity is so essential for the machine that it must at all costs be adopted and maintained at its center in the form of glory.”
― Giorgio Agamben, The Omnibus Homo Sacer