Is the Reformation an event? Do we need to understand what happened at its inception in order to ... more Is the Reformation an event? Do we need to understand what happened at its inception in order to understand our contemporary debates? Can such a reconstruction perhaps give us conceptual tools for trying to understand what we might mean by "suspension of the law" or by the idea of a comic subjectivity beyond the comic as carnevalesque, understood simply as a reversal of the given symbolic order? The following study argues that in Martin Luther's reformatory breakthrough a site appears in which the subject is shown to be irreconcilably split due to its constitution through language. In this very split a potentiality appears -not of reconciliation or of reuniting opposites in a new or higher unity or One, but of a kind of suspension. Without taking this site into account, any attempt to try to reconstruct the emergence of such a possibility will fail -whether it applies the purely formal analysis of a "Pauline" subjectivity of truth, as does Alain Badiou, or whether it tries to inscribe this site into the emergence of a comic subjectivity, e.g., in Dante, as does Giorgio Agamben. If one wants to understand and engage in contemporary discussions of subjectivity, universality, or of the problem of exception; or, relating to both philosophy proper as well as to the cultural field, issues such as undeadness or hauntology, it will prove to be necessary to reconstruct and engage the Reformation as a genuine event, a site where a potentiality emerges which needs to be re-constructed. The following study is part of a larger project which attempts to affirm that there is a break in the history and thought of the West that bears the name of the Reformation. Having the heritage not just of the Jewish tradition, as does Paul, but also of the Aristotelian-Christian tradition as its point of departure, it does not simply count as a repetition, more or less successful, of the Pauline moment. It is a genuine site, which needs to be taken into account.
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Papers by Felix Ensslin