“Since the being most proper to humankind is being one’s own possibility or potentiality, then and only for this reason (that is, insofar as humankind’s most proper being—being potential—is in a certain sense lacking, insofar as it can not-be, it is therefore devoid of foundation and humankind is not always already in possession of it), humans have and feel a debt. Humans, in their potentiality to be and to not-be, are, in other words, always already in debt; they always already have a bad conscience without having to commit any blameworthy act.

“This is all that is meant by the old theological doctrine of original sin. Morality, on the other hand, refers this doctrine to a blameworthy act humans have committed and, in this way, shackles their potentiality, turning it back toward the past. The recognition of evil is older and more original than any blameworthy act, and it rests solely on the fact that, being and having to be only in its possibility or potentiality, humankind fails itself in a certain sense and has to appropriate this failing—it has to exist as potentiality.”

—Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, pp. 42–3

In Agamben’s use of the terms, then, ‘original sin’ doesn’t name anything evil at all, evil being “the reduction of the taking-place of things to a fact like others” (p. 14), or in its specifically human aspect, the attempt to found our own existence in or as the power of (‘actualized’) being (pp. 30–1). In other words, for Agamben, the only human evil is the denial that our existence is only ever possible existence. Original sin, on the contrary, only names the “debt” in which human beings characteristically find themselves, as ‘lacking’ fully realized existence, which “failure” is in fact a good.

This corresponds to Agamben’s broader contention in this book that the good always consists in a self-grasping of evil, and that “truth is revealed only by giving space to non-truth” (p. 12). Those theses rest on the same equivocation in the concepts of evil that appear in the above quote: the “evil,” “failure,” or “non-truth” that the good and truth must include is the (im)potency and incompleteness of being-such-as-it-is (i.e., whatever being, or quodlibet ens). But that incompleteness—or better, because it brings out Nancy’s voice and Blanchot’s, the unworking—is of course a good according to Agamben.

This is also the context within which it is necessary to understand his claim that “ethics has no room for repentance” (p. 43). It doesn’t mean there is no evil that must be avoided or even (possibly) renounced, but that repentance is always a matter of establishing oneself beyond impotent existence. Repentance belongs, in Nancy’s terms, to the pursuit of immanence (viz., the attempt to produce one’s own essence).

As nature gives to each person an absolute power over all its members, the social pact gives to the body politic an absolute power over all of its members, and it is this very power which, directed by the general will, bears the name of sovereignty. (Du contrat social II.iv)

But now I’m in the middle of Rousseau’s Social Contract, and his language fits Nancy’s criticisms possibly even better. Here’s a passage from I.vi:

In an instant, in place of the particular person of each contractee, this act of association [the declaration of the social pact] produces a moral and collective body composed of as many members as the assembly has voices, which receives from this very act its unity, its common moi, its life and its will. This public person, who is thus formed by the union of everyone else, in other times took the name of City, and now takes that of Republic or of body politic…

There are at least two points of Nancy’s critique that stick against Rousseau better than they do to Christianity:

1. Christian theology doesn’t speak quite as unambiguously of the person of Christ replacing the particular Christian as Rousseau does of the Republic replacing the natural person (though it wouldn’t be hard to make the case that a very similar dynamic is in play).

1. Rousseau’s Republic is explicitly “immanent” in Nancy’s sense, in that it claims to be the product of human beings determining their own essence, whereas becoming a member of Christ is supposed to be a matter of surrendering the claim to determine our own essence.