In the previous chapter, the key term in relation to violence was Benjamin's violence as a ‘pure means’ or – in Agamben's terms – as a pure mediality, or, again, as a recent text reiterates, as a ‘“politics of pure means”’ (2018a: 80). Mediality would supposedly evoke the appearance as such of the medium. The latter approach is – unlike Bataille's – opaque, not transparent. It can be an object to be thought about and reflected upon. As was indicated in the Introduction, violence as mediality is a violence without an object – without a victim. This differentiates Agamben on violence from Bataille and Girard, for whom violence and victim are inseparable. In a formulation that has relevance for understanding the status of the image in Agamben's political theory, it is said that ‘mediality without end is in some way active because in it the means shows itself as such’ (82; emphasis added). Thus, the image in the Agamben universe, shows itself as such. Like violence, it, too, is a ‘pure means’. What, precisely, might be the consequences of this?

In response, we investigate Agamben's thesis in The Kingdom and the Glory (2011a) that the human has evolved as the ‘Sabbatical animal’ (as inoperativity) within the milieu of ‘acclamation’, the milieu of the mediatisation of public opinion in a ‘society of the spectacle’ – or, equally, of the image. Media and public opinion (acclamation) are inextricably bound together in the articulation of glory. The undoubtedly political implications of this are only given indirectly. At the forefront of Agamben's deliberations is theology and the concept of ‘economy’ as contained the notion of oikonomia as ‘a government of men’ (2011a: xi). These theological roots will be considered in some detail in what follows.

Agamben refers to Guy Debord and the ‘Society of the Spectacle’ (= society of the image) in a number of places (see Agamben 2005a: 78–83, 1998: 10, 2016: xv–xix, 2000: 73–89), but it is Kingdom and the Glory (2011a) and especially its detailed analysis of the Christian Trinity,4 where Christ glorifies the Father, that is particularly significant for deepening our understanding of Agamben's approach to the image. The analysis of the Trinity leads on to the idea of glory at the ‘centre of the political system’ (256) and to the image as pure mediality (pure means) that becomes the modern incarnation of glory.