Martin,

I wanted to get back to you on the Agamben.

Like you, I'm ambivalent about A.'s coming community. I'm drawn to the speculative form of his book, each chapter attempting both philosophical description of a current state of affairs (focusing on post-'89 senses of relation/belonging/identity) and speculation on possible futurities, or ways of thinking future possibilities, hidden by congealed perceptions of our present state. In this sense, the "Halos" chapter is emblematic of the book as a whole; Benjamin's conception of the redeemed world to come as identical to this one, only minutely displaced in its particulars, seems congenial to Agamben because it holds out the promise of an alternative way of viewing potentiality itself -- not as a determination by present conditions, but as a freeing-up of the logic of individuation-by-identification. Chips of messianic time, glinting in the crud of status-quo identities?