Giorgio Agamben's Il tempo che resta (The Time That Remains), published in 2000, is a philosophical commentary on the first seven verses of Paul's letter to the Romans - a sustained close reading that argues Paul's concept of messianic time represents a unique and neglected contribution to Western philosophy, one with direct implications for ethics, politics, and the philosophy of history.
The Thinker and His Work
Giorgio Agamben (born 1942) is one of the most influential philosophers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His work spans legal philosophy, political theory, theology, and aesthetics, united by a preoccupation with thresholds and exceptions - states of being that resist capture by existing categories. The Time That Remains emerged from a series of seminars delivered at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris and represents a departure from his earlier work on biopolitics and the state of exception (Homo Sacer, 1995). Here Agamben turns to biblical exegesis as a philosophical method, treating Paul's Greek text with the same sustained attention he brings to legal and literary texts elsewhere.
Biblical Texts Engaged
Romans 1:1-7 - Paul's salutation - is the text Agamben takes as his starting point. He argues that the key word is kletos (called), which appears twice in the opening verses: Paul describes himself as 'called to be an apostle' and the Romans as 'called to be saints.' This calling (klesis) occurs in messianic time - ho nyn kairos, 'the time of the now' - which Agamben distinguishes carefully from both chronos (linear historical time) and aion (eternity).
Romans 13:11 - 'Besides this, you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed' - provides Agamben's central concept. The 'time that remains' is the time between the resurrection event and the end: not historical time moving toward a future horizon, nor the static eternity of God, but a peculiar contracted time in which every moment is charged with the urgency of the messianic call. This is Paul's ho nyn kairos - the remaining time.
1 Corinthians 7:29 - 'The appointed time has grown very short' - supplies the grammar of messianic existence. Paul's advice to the Corinthians about marriage and social status (remain as you are, but 'as if not') provides Agamben with the model of messianic life: not a transformation of worldly conditions but a use of them that is simultaneously a revocation, a living in the world hos me (as if not).
Core Argument
Agamben's central philosophical claim is that Western thought has been unable to think the 'time that remains' because it has conceptualized time in only two modes: diachronic historical time (the time of events in sequence) and synchronic eschatological time (the End). Paul's messianic time is a third category: it is the time in which historical time is contracted and compressed by the messianic event, creating a 'time within time' that is neither historical nor eternal.
Agamben calls this contraction a 'recapitulation' (anakephalaiosis) - a term from Ephesians 1:10, which Paul uses to describe the summing up of all things in Christ. The messianic event does not cancel history but gathers it, as Benjamin's Jetztzeit (time of the now) gathers the past in a moment of revolutionary recognition. Agamben reads Paul and Benjamin together: both thinkers describe a messianic time that is the operational time in which a subject constitutes itself as a subject - not waiting for salvation but already living in the time of its arrival.
The philosophical and political implication is that the messianic calling (klesis) does not require a change of social position (slave/free, Jew/Greek) but a transformation of the relation to that position. The messianic subject lives in every condition 'as if not' - inhabiting a revocation that is simultaneously a liberation. This, Agamben argues, is the proper model for political and philosophical subjectivity: not the liberal subject who accumulates rights and properties, but the messianic subject who uses the world without being possessed by it.
Intellectual Context
The Time That Remains is in explicit dialogue with three thinkers. Walter Benjamin's 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' (1940), with its concept of Jetztzeit and its critique of empty homogeneous historical time, is Agamben's closest philosophical interlocutor; he dedicates the book to the memory of Benjamin and argues that Paul is the only adequate commentary on the Theses. Martin Heidegger's analysis of authentic temporality in Being and Time (1927) - particularly the concept of the moment of vision (Augenblick) in which Dasein grasps its ownmost possibility - provides a secular parallel that Agamben both uses and corrects. Jacques Derrida's readings of Paul and messianism, particularly in Spectres of Marx (1994), provide a contrasting approach: where Derrida develops a 'messianism without a messiah' (an empty formal structure of coming), Agamben insists on the specificity of Paul's messianic event and its philosophical content.
Reception and Critique
The Time That Remains has generated extensive response in both continental philosophy and biblical scholarship. Theologians and New Testament scholars, including NT Wright and Dale Martin, have engaged and challenged Agamben's reading of Paul, arguing that he underreads the specifically Jewish and covenantal dimensions of Paul's thought and overreads him through a Continental philosophical lens. The philosopher Alain Badiou, whose own Paul book appeared three years earlier (1997), represents a contrasting appropriation: where Badiou treats Paul's resurrection as a 'fable' that enables a universal truth-event without theological content, Agamben insists on the philosophical specificity of Paul's Jewish messianism.
Legacy
The Time That Remains helped establish Paul as a central figure in contemporary Continental philosophy, opening a conversation that has continued in works by Slavoj Zizek, Stanislas Breton, and Jacob Taubes. It also advanced the method of philosophical commentary on Scripture - treating biblical texts with the sustained attention usually reserved for philosophical treatises - that Agamben continues in later work on the Sermon on the Mount and the Epistle of James.
Key Passages
'The messianic is not another time, but the transformation of time that the messiah operates on chronological time.' (Part IV)
'Paul's hos me [as if not] is not a prescription of indifference with regard to the world's things; it is rather a transformation of time that operates on the very form of living in the world.' (Part V)
Contemporary Relevance
Agamben's analysis of messianic time has gained renewed urgency in an era of permanent emergency and accelerating crisis. His argument that the modern state of exception - the sovereign's power to suspend law in an emergency - is itself a secularized theological category connects his Paul commentary to his Homo Sacer series. The 'time that remains' offers a philosophical counter to both the passive waiting of the apocalyptist and the activist's faith in historical progress: a third option of attentive, revocatory presence in the present.