[D66] 'Eternal government'

[A.O.]

"If heaven is filled with angels who, retired from their administrative
functions, have nothing to do but praise God, hell is the abode of their
fallen comrades, the demons, who can never consciously praise God and
yet “will carry out their judicial function as executors of the infernal
punishments for all eternity.” This means that “hell is that place in
which the divine government of the world survives for all eternity, even
if only in a penitentiary form,” and “the demons . . . will be the
indefectible ministers and eternal executioners of divine justice”
(164). This series of observations culminates in a rare joke: “this
means that, from the perspective of Christian theology, the idea of
eternal government (which is the paradigm of modern politics) is truly
infernal” (164). And with that, Agamben definitively turns away from the
paradigm of economy as completely unredeemable, devoting the remainder
of his text to an analysis of glory."
--p. 56 Neoliberalism's demons, Adam KOTSKO