ABSTRACT
If Agamben sees literature as a ‘laboratory’, he also sees it as a space in which some of the most pressing ethical questions can be explored. Indeed it is the literary, the poetic, that he turns to in his attempt to plot a new space for ethics. In what follows I will introduce Agamben’s intervention in the post-war field of ethics through his exploration of Auschwitz and the problem of bearing witness in Holocaust narratives. From this we move on to the idea of profanation which emerges in Agamben’s work as a means of thinking about the logic of separation that, originating between the divine and the profane spheres, has been eroded under capitalism. His call to ‘profane the unprofanable’ is linked again to the task of the coming generation. The precise temporality that has underpinned Agamben’s politics is then explored in a discussion of the messianic, the time of the now, and confirms that the true space of ‘ethics’ that search for an ethos is always engaged for the present.
