Agamben's book is yet another offering in an ever growing list of books on Christian Theology and specifically Saint Paul. What this book endeavors to argue is that Paul was the first in the tradition of thought called Messianism. Agamben claims to give a close reading of Romans in order to theorize what Messiantic time meant for Paul. Interestingly, Agamben only offers a "close" reading of the opening line of Romans and then argues that this opening line contains Paul's entire theory of Messianism in it. Of course the argument is flimsy, and Agamben must be aware of this too, because he fills the rest of his book with citations to other Pauline epistles. He, at least, gives the opening line of Romans a word by word reading. But this too leaves much to be desired as he takes poetic license with the words themselves. For example, he argues that an entire Church tradition has been aimed at erasing the word Messiah from Paul's letters thus when Paul writes "Christos," it is a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew Messiah. True enough. But then he himself attempts the same feat: for example, he reads the Greek "dynameis" as "potential" rather than the more logical "power." Of course this fits in with another of his books entitled "Potentialities." I suppose Agamben is interested in erasing "power" from the pauline epistles. After much arguing, Agamben demonstrates the relevance of Paul's messianism by using it to read a poem. If Pauline Messianism is supposed to be important, I would think it should have implications for politics and society, not simply reading a poem. In the end, Agamben's Paul turns out to be some academic who was interested in philology, not in creating the church. This book takes the radicalness out of Paul, just as his other books take the radicalness out of Walter Benjamin.
Interestingly, many books are being written on Paul. Each of these book have the same argument: Paul is important for today, and we must read him provocatively, which is code for: read him as if he were not a believer in Jesus. It turns out that all of these books--Agamben's included--are more interested in taking Jesus out of Paul. I am still waiting for the truly provocative book on Paul to come out that would argue: we must read Paul as a fanatic believer in Jesus.