Table Of ContentN
T he Ringdom and the Garden
GIORGIO AGAMBEN
TRANSLATED BY ADAM KOTSKO
st
LONDON NEW YORK CALCUTTA
SERIES EDITOR
Alberto Toscano
Seagull Books, 2020
Onginally published as /! regno e il giardino
© 2019 Neri Pozza Editore, Vicenza
First published in English by Seagull Books, 2020
English translation © Adam Kotsko, 2020
ISBN 978085742786 1
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Typeset by Seagull Books, Calcutta, India
Printed and bound by Versa Press, East Peoria, Ilhnois, USA
N
Contents
]
1. The Garden of Earthly Delights
16
2. The Sin of Nature
51
3. Man Has Never Yet Been in Paradise
75
4. The Divine Forest
107
5. Paradise and Human Nature
128
6. The Kingdom and the Garden
153
Bibliography
The Garden of Earthly Delights
1.1. In 1947, Wilhelm Fraenger, a German scholar who
was part of the group of intellectuals who assembled
around the Dutch journal Castrum Peregrini, published a
new interpretation of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych in the
Museo del Prado, known as The Garden of Earthly Delights.
According to Fraenger, the meaning of the enigmatic trip-
tych 1s clarified only if we return 1t to the theological con-
text from which it arose: the heresy of the Free Spirit or
of the homines intelligentiae, to which Jacob van Almaengien,
who commissioned and inspired it, belonged. The brothers
of the Free Spirit professed that spiritual perfection coin-
cided with the advent of the Kingdom and the restoration
of the Edenic innocence which humanity had enjoyed in
the earthly paradise. Concluding his meticulous interpre-
tation of the triptych’s figures, Fraenger writes:
The kingdom of the Spirit has been restored; the
evangelium aeternum has become flesh and blood 1n
countless awakened human beings who are
already living 1n a state of paradisical innocence
on earth. [ . . . ] The disciples of the Free Spirt
were accustomed to call their devotional commu-
nity life ‘Paradise’ and interpreted the word as sig-
nifying the ‘quintessence of love’. It is in this sense
that the ‘Paradise’ of the central panel must be
understood. What it shows is an idealized reality;
a ‘today’ at once real and mystery, symbolic down
to its most minute details. This instantaneity
determines the whole composition of the triptych.
Instead of the representation of a chronological
sequence, In which the Garden of Eden—the
beginning of all things—would have been sepa-
rated from the ‘Paradise’ of the central panel—
the future restoration of the original condition —
we find here the perfect simultaneity of a single
state of consciousness (Franger 1951: 103-04).
It 1s not surprising, therefore, that Fraenger, precisely
at the beginning of his investigation, discretely substitutes
GIORGIO AGAMBEN / 2
for the traditional title—7e Garden of Earthly Delights—the
unheard-of rubric ‘The Millennial Kingdom’ (das tausend-
jahnge Reiwch): * The Millennial Kingdom, at Madrnd, generally
known as The Garden of Earthly Delights | . . . ]’ (ibid.: 2).
That a title that refers to a political-theological theme—
the Kingdom—should be closely associated in this way
with Adam’s dwelling place in the earthly paradise 1s
nevertheless not something to be taken for granted.
It is of this theological paradigm—the Garden of
Eden which, while it appears from the very beginning in
an eminent position in theological reflection, has been
tenaciously displaced to the margins of the tradition of
Western thought——that the present study proposes to trace
a bnief genealogy. While the Kingdom, with its economic-
trinitarian counterpart, has indeed never ceased to influ-
ence the forms and structures of profane power, the
Garden, despite its constitutive political vocation (it was
‘planted’ in Eden for the happy habitation of humanity),
has remained substantially alien to it. Even when, as has
happened many times, groups of people have sought to
draw from it the inspiration for a model of decisively het-
erodox community, the dominant strategy has always been
vigilant to neutralize its political implications. And yet, as
Fraenger’s hypothesis suggests, not only is it not possible
THE KINGDOM AND THE GARDEN / 3
to separate the Garden from the Kingdom, but they are
on the contrary so frequently and so intimately intertwined
that it is likely that precisely a study of their intersections
and their divergences would wind up reshaping to a sig-
nificant extent the cartography of Western power.
1.2. The history of the word ‘paradise’, which sounds so
familiar to us, is a succession of loans from one language
to another, as if the foreign term were for some reason
always held to be untranslatable or else one wanted at
every cost to avoid its obvious equivalent. The Greek term
paradeisos, which Latin transcribes as paradisus and which
appears for the first time in Xenophon, is in fact, according
to the lexicons, a calque of the Avestic pairidaeza, which
designates a spacious walled garden (painn means ‘around’
and daeza ‘wall’). It 1s possible that, in recalquing the Iranian
term instead of using the Greek word for ‘garden’, kepos,
Xenophon—as specialists still do today, when they leave
untranslated exotic terms from the foreign language in
which they are experts—meant to show oft his knowledge
of Persian affairs, which he seems to have cared a great deal
about. It is certain, in any case, that he could not imagine
that his Greek-Iranian neologism was destined to furnish
to Christian theology one of its essential technical terms
GIORGIO AGAMBEN / 4
and to the imagination of the West one of its most persist-
ent fantasies. In that sort of ethnographic novel that is the
Cyropaedia, he calls paradeisos the garden 1in which Astyages,
the grandfather of Cyrus, hunted wild animals. Having
become king, Cyrus ordered his satraps to plant some
paradersot, so that the nobles of his retinue, by going hunt-
ing, may train in combat, ‘for he considered hunting the
best preparation for war [ . . . ] and every time he was con-
strained to remain in his palace, he would hunt the animals
that were in his paradeisos’ (Cyropaedia 7.1.34—8). Even if we
should not forget that, in its first appearance in the Greek
language, paradise has to do with hunting and war, it is
rather in the QOeconomicus, a work that had wide diffusion in
Greek culture, that Xenophon describes a paradeisos more
similar to what would become the Western paradigm of
the Garden. As it is related by the Spartan Lysander, Cyrus
the Younger had shown him his paradeisos in Sardis in
which the trees were planted at uniform distances in per-
fectly straight lines, with such geometrical harmony and
such ‘variety and sweetness of scents that accompanied
them as they walked’ that Lysander had exclaimed: ‘I
admire you, Cyrus, for so much beauty, but I admire even
more the one who planned and arranged all this.” ‘I
planned and arranged all these trees,” Cyrus responded to
THE KINGDOM AND THE GARDEN / 5
