?
Иосиф в Египте: теологическая генеалогия Джорджо Агамбена
The article is devoted to Giorgio Agamben’s theological genealogy of economics and management. The purpose of the article is to reveal the key provisions of Italian philosopher’s genealogical project and to outline possible directions for its expansion and deepening. The starting point of Agamben’s arguments is the recognition of the total economization of all aspects of social life in the West. However, the triumph of economics and management in the Western culture should not be viewed as a result of the development of the sphere of production and administration, but as the result of centuries-old theological disputes about divine oikonomia. Agamben’s research is built up as a critical dialogue with the political theology of Karl Schmitt and the concept of secularization of Max Weber. According to Agamben, Schmitt rightly saw the origins of modern political categories in Christian theology, but overlooked the topic of oikonomia, which was once the main topic of Trinitarian discussions and played an important role in the fate of the West. Weber, for all his sensitivity to economic and theological issues, too unilaterally understood secularization, seeing in it a simple “disenchantment of the world”. In turn, Agamben himself, focusing on the methods of Foucault's archeology, the theory of Benjamin’s dialectic images and Derrida’s deconstruction, seeks to consider secularization, rather, in the optics of language and linguistics. For him, the process of secularization is a shift of the signature, that is, the displacement or expansion of the scope of theological concepts to areas not originally characteristic of them – rhetoric, natural science, politics and economics. Secularization understood in this way means that the theological content of categories that has been ousted to the periphery continues to affect profane culture and set in motion the basic mechanism of the functioning of Western societies, which Agamben calls “bipolar machine of Kingdom and Government”. The main task of Agamben’s genealogy is precisely to trace the history of the displacement of theological signatures in such a way that at each stage of semantic modulation the action of this “bipolar machine” is invariably exposed. For the implementation of his project, Agamben attracts a wide philosophical and theological material – from treatises of classical ancient authors to works of modern theologians. However, outside his field of vision (it is possible that this is a deliberate step) remains the text of the Old Testament. Meanwhile, according to the the author’s opinion, just from the Old Testament the main motives of the future binary theology of Kingdom and Government which keeps the “economy of mystery” and the “mystery of economy” take their origin.