and radical political theory, and in recent years, his work has had a
deep impact on contemporary scholarship in a number of disciplines in
the Anglo-American intellectual world. Born in Rome in 1942, Agamben
completed studies in Law and Philosophy with a doctoral thesis on the
political thought of Simone Weil, and participated in Martin
Heidegger's seminars on Hegel and Heraclitus as a postdoctoral
scholar. He has taught at various universities, including the
Universities of Macerata and Verona and was Director of Programmes at
the Collège Internationale de Paris. He has been a Visiting Professor
at various universities in the United States of America, and was a
Distinguished Professor at the New School, University in New York. He
caused a controversy when he refused to submit to the "biopolitical
tattooing" requested by the United States Immigration Department for
entry to the USA in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Agamben's work does not follow a straightforward chronological path of
development either conceptually or thematically. Instead, his work
constitutes an elaborate and multifaceted recursive engagement with
the problems introduced into Western philosophy by the highly original
and often enigmatic works of Walter Benjamin, most notably in his book
on German trauerspiel, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, but also in
associated essays and fragments, such as his "Critique of Violence."
This is not to say that Agamben is not influenced by, nor engaged
with, a number of other canonical or contemporary figures in Western
philosophy and political, aesthetic and linguistic theory. He
certainly is, most notably Heidegger and Hegel, as well as the
scholarship that follows from them, but also Aby Warburg's iconography
(Agamben worked at the Warburg Institute Library in 1974-5), Italian
Autonomism and Situationism (especially Guy Debord's influential
Society of the Spectacle), Aristotle, Emile Benveniste, Carl Schmitt
and Hannah Arendt amongst others.. Beyond this philosophical heritage,
Agamben also engages in multilayered discussions of the Jewish Torah
and Christian biblical texts, Greek and Roman law, Midrashic
literature, as well as of a number of Western literary figures and
poets, including Dante, Holderlin, Kafka, Pessoa, and Caproni to name
but a few. This breadth of reference and the critical stylistics it
gives rise to no doubt contribute to the appearance of intimidating
density characteristic of Agamben's work. Even so, Agamben's
engagement with these figures is often mediated by his deep conceptual
and thematic debt to Benjamin (he served as editor of the Italian
edition of Benjamin's collected works from 1979 to 1994) evident in
his central focus on questions of language and representation, history
and temporality, the force of law, politics of the spectacle, and the
ethos of humanity.
1. Language and Metaphysics
As Agamben indicates in the 1989 preface to the English translation of
Infancy and History, the key question that unites his disparate
explorations is that of what it means for language to exist, what it
means that "I speak." In taking up this question throughout his work,
and most explicitly in texts such as Infancy and History, Language and
Death, and most recently, The Open, Agamben reinvigorates
consideration of philosophical anthropology through a critical
questioning of the metaphysical presuppositions that inform it, and in
particular, the claim that the defining essence of man is that of
having language. In taking up this question, Agamben proposes the
necessity of an"experimentum linguae" in which what is experienced is
language itself, and the limits of language become apparent not in the
relation of language to a referent outside of it, but in the
experience of language as pure self-reference.
Published in Italian in 1978, Infancy and History constitutes one of
Agamben's earliest attempts to grasp and articulate the implications
of such an as experience of language as such.. Consisting of a series
on interconnected essays on concepts such as history, temporality,
play, and gesture, Infancy and History provides an importance entrance
to Agamben's later work on politics and ethics, particularly in the
eponymous essay of the edition on the concept of infancy understood as
an experiment of language as such. In this, Agamben argues that the
contemporary age is marked by the destruction or loss of experience,
in which the banality of everyday life cannot be experienced per se
but only undergone, a condition which is in part brought about by the
rise of modern science and the split between the subject of experience
and of knowledge that it entails. Against this destruction of
experience, which is also extended in modern philosophies of the
subject such as Kant and Husserl, Agamben argues that the recuperation
of experience entails a radical rethinking of experience as a question
of language rather than of consciousness, since it is only in language
that the subject has its site and origin. Infancy, then,
conceptualizes an experience of being without language, not in a
temporal or developmental sense of preceding the acquisition of
language in childhood, but rather, as a condition of experience that
precedes and continues to reside in any appropriation of language.
Agamben continues this reflection on the self-referentiality of
language as a means of transforming the link between language and
metaphysics that underpins Western philosophical anthropology
inLanguage and Death, originally published in 1982. Beginning from
Heidegger's suggestion of an essential relation between language and
death, Agamben argues that Western metaphysics have been fundamentally
tied to a negativity that is increasingly evident at the heart of the
ethos of humanity. While this collapse of metaphysics into ethics is
increasingly evident as nihilism, contemporary thought has yet to
escape from this condition. Agamben seeks to understand and ultimately
escape this collapse through a rigorous philosophy of the experience
of language suggested in Infancy and History. In his analysis of
Heidegger and Hegel, Agamben isolates their reliance upon and indeed
radicalization of negativity, by casting Da and Diese as grammatical
shifters that refer to the pure taking place of language.. Here,
Agamben draws upon the linguistic notion of deixis to isolate the
self-referentiality of language in pronouns or grammatical shifters,
which he argues do not refer to anything beyond themselves but only to
their own utterance (LD, 16-26). The problem for Agamben, though, is
that both Hegel and Heidegger ultimately maintain a split within
language – which he sees as a consistent element of Western thought
from Aristotle to Wittgenstein – in their identification of an
ineffability or unspeakability that cannot be brought into human
discourse but which is nevertheless its condition. Agamben calls this
mute condition of language "Voice," and concludes that a philosophy
that thinks only from the foundation of Voice cannot deliver the
resolution of metaphysics that the nihilism toward which we are moving
demands. Instead, he suggests, this is only possible in an experience
of infancy that has never yet been: it is only in existing "in
language without being called there by any Voice" and dying "without
being called by death" (LD 96) that humanity can return to its proper
dwelling place or ethos, to which it has never been and from which it
has never left.
One further dimension of Agamben's engagement with Western metaphysics
and attempt to develop an alternative ontology is worth mentioning
here, since it is one of the most consistent threads throughout his
work. This is the problem of potentiality, the rethinking of which
Agamben takes to be central to the task of overcoming contemporary
nihilism. Citing Aristotle's proposal in Book Theta of his
Metaphysics, that "a thing is said to be potential if, when the act of
which it is said to be potential is realized, there will be nothing
im-potential ("that is, there will be nothing able not to be," (in HS,
45) Agamben argues that this ought not be taken to mean simply that
"what is not impossible is possible" but rather, highlights the
suspension or setting aside of im-potentiality in the passage to
actuality. This suspension, though, does not amount to a destruction
of im-potentiality, but rather to its fulfilment; that is, through the
turning back of potentiality upon itself, which amounts to its "giving
of itself to itself," im-potentiality, or the potentiality to not be,
is fully realized in its own suspension such that actuality appears as
nothing other than the potentiality to not not-be. While this relation
is central to the passage of voice to speech or signification and to
attaining toward the experience of language as such, Agamben also
claims that in this formulation Aristotle bequeaths to Western
philosophy the paradigm of sovereignty, since it reveals the
undetermined or sovereign founding of being. As Agamben concludes,
'"an act is sovereign when it realizes itself by simply taking away
its own potentiality not to be, letting itself be, giving itself to
itself'" (HS 46). In this way then, the relation of potentiality to
actuality described by Aristotle accords perfectly with the logic of
the ban that Agamben argues is characteristic of sovereign power,
thereby revealing the fundamental integration of metaphysics and
politics.
These reflections on metaphysics and language thus yield two
inter-related problems for Agamben, which he addresses in his
subsequent work; the first of these lies in the broad domain of
aesthetics, in which Agamben considers the stakes of the appropriation
of language in prose and poetry in order to further critically
interrogate the distinction between philosophy and poetry. The second
lies in the domains of politics and ethics, for Agamben's conception
of the destruction of experience and of potentiality directly feed
into an analysis of the political spectacle and of sovereignty. These
also necessitate, according to Agamben, a reformulation of ethics as
ethos, which in turn requires rethinking community.
2. Aesthetics
In Language and Death, Agamben raises the question of the relation of
philosophy and poetry by asking whether poetry allows a different
experience of language than that of the "unspeakable experience of
Voice" that grounds philosophy. From a brief reflection on Plato's
identification of poetry as the "invention of the Muses," Agamben
argues that both philosophy and poetry attain toward the unspeakable
as the condition of language, though both also "demonstrate this
asunattainable." Thus rejecting a straightforward prioritization of
poetry over philosophy, or verse over prose, Agamben concludes that
"perhaps only a language in which the pure prose of philosophy would
intervene at a certain point to break apart the verse of the poetic
word, and in which the verse of poetry would intervene to bend the
prose of philosophy into a ring, would be the true human language"
(LD, 78). This thematic subsequently drives Agamben's contributions to
aesthetics, and in doing so, the distinction between philosophy and
poetry grounds a complex exercise of language and representation,
experience and ethos, developed throughout his works in this area and
designed to surpass the distinction itself as well as those that
attend it.
Agamben's first major contribution to contemporary philosophy of
aesthetics was his acclaimed book Stanzas, in which he develops a
dense and multifaceted analysis of language and phantasm, entailing
engagement with modern linguistic and philosophy, as well as
psychoanalysis and philology. While dedicated to the memory of Martin
Heidegger, whom Agamben here names as the last of Western philosophers
within this book, also most evidently bears the influence of Aby
Warburg. Agamben argues in Stanzas that to the extent that Western
culture accepts the distinction between philosophy and poetry,
knowledge founders on a division in which "philosophy has failed to
elaborate a proper language…and poetry has developed neither a method
nor self-consciousness" (S, xvii). The urgent task of thought, and
particularly that which Agamben names "criticism," is to rediscover
"the unity of our own fragmented word." Criticism is situated at the
point at which language is split from itself—in for instance, the
distinction of signified and signifier and its task is to point toward
a "unitary status for the utterance," in which criticism "neither
represents nor knows, but knows the representation" (S, xvii). Thus,
against both philosophy and poetry, criticism "opposes the enjoyment
of what cannot be possessed and the possession of what cannot be
enjoyed" (S, xvii).
In order to pursue this task, Agamben develops a model of knowledge
evident in the relations of desire and appropriation of an object that
Freud identifies as melancholia and fetishism. In this, he also
questions the "primordial situation" of the distinction between the
signifier and the signified, to which Western reflections on the sign
are beholden. He concludes this study—which encompasses discussion of
fetishism and commodity fetishism, dandyism, the psychoanalysis of
toys, and the myths of Narcissus, Eros and Oedipus amongst other
things—with a brief discussion of Saussurian linguistics, claiming
that Saussure's triumph lay in recognizing the impossibility of a
science of language based on the distinction of signified and
signifier. However, to isolate the sign as a positive unity from
Saussure's problematic position is to "push the science of the sign
back into metaphysics." (S 155) This idea of a link between the notion
of the unity of the sign and Western metaphysics, is in Agamben's
view, confirmed by Jacques Derrida's formulation of grammatology as an
attempt to overcome the metaphysics of presence that Derrida diagnoses
as predominant within western philosophy from Plato onwards. Yet,
Agamben argues that Derrida does not achieve the overcoming he hopes
for, since he has in fact misdiagnosed the problem: metaphysics.
Metaphysics is not simply the interpretation of presence in the
fractures of essence and appearance, sensibility and intelligibility
and so on. Rather; rather, the origin of Western metaphysics lies in
the conception that "original experience be always already caught in a
fold…that presence be always already caught in a signification" (S
156). Hence, logos is the fold that "gathers and divides all things in
the 'putting together' of presence" (S, 156). Ultimately, then, an
attempt to truly overcome metaphysics requires that the semiological
algorithm must reduce to solely the barrier itself rather than one
side or the other of the distinction, understood as the "topological
game of putting things together and articulating" (S 156).
It is in the framework established here then that Agamben's next work
in aesthetics, The Idea of Prose, might be said to achieve its real
importance…. Published in Italian in 1985, The Idea of Prose takes up
the question of the distinction between philosophy and poetry through
a series of fragments on poetry, prose, language, politics, justice,
love and shame amongst other topics. This enigmatic text is perhaps
especially difficult to understand, because these fragments do not
constitute a consistent argument throughout the book. In the light of
the foregoing though, it is possible to say that what Agamben is doing
is performing and indeed undermining a difference between poetry and
philosophy by breaking apart the strictures of logos. In bringing into
play various literary techniques such as the fable, the riddle, the
aphorism and the short story, Agamben is practically demonstrating an
exercise of criticism, in which thought is returned to a prosaic
experience or awakening, in which what is known is representation
itself.
3. Politics
The most influential dimension of Agamben's work in recent years has
been his contributions to political theory, a contribution that
springs directly from his engagements in metaphysics and the
philosophy of language. Undoubtedly, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and
Bare Life is Agamben's best-known work, and probably also the most
controversial. It is in this book that Agamben develops his analysis
of the condition of biopolitics, first identified by Michel Foucault
in the first volume of his History of Sexuality series and associated
texts. In this volume, Foucault argued that modern power was
characterized by a fundamentally different rationality than that of
sovereign power. Whereas sovereign power was characterized by a right
over life and death, summarized by Foucault in the dictum of "killing
or letting live," modern power is characterized by a productive
relation to life, encapsulated in the dictum of "fostering life or
disallowing it." For Foucault, the "threshold of modernity" was
reached with the transition from sovereign power to biopower, in which
the "new political subject" of the population became the target of a
regime of power that operates through governance of the vicissitudes
of biological life itself. Thus, in his critical revision of
Aristotle, Foucault writes that "for millennia, man remained…a living
animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern
man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being
in question" (HS1 143).
Agamben is explicitly engaged with Foucault's thesis on biopower in
Homo Sacer, claiming that he aims to "correct or at least complete"
it, though in fact he rejects a number of Foucault's
historico-philosophical commitments and claims. Suggesting that
Foucault has failed to elucidate the points at which sovereign power
and modern techniques of power coincide, Agamben rejects the thesis
that the historical rise of biopower marked the threshold of
modernity. Instead, he claims that biopower and sovereignty are
fundamentally integrated, to the extent that "it can even be said that
the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of
sovereign power." (HS 6) What distinguishes modern democracy from the
Ancient polis then, is not so much the integration of biological life
into the sphere of politics, but rather, the fact that modern State
power brings the nexus between sovereignty and the biopolitical body
to light in an unprecedented way. This is because in modern
democracies, that which was originally excluded from politics as the
exception that stands outside but nevertheless founds the law has now
become the norm: As Agamben writes, "In Western politics, bare life
has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusions found the
city of men." (HS 7)
Several theoretical innovations inform this thesis, two of which are
especially important. The first is a re-conception of political power,
developed through a complex reflection upon Aristotelian metaphysics
and especially the concept of potentiality, alongside a critical
engagement with the theory of sovereignty posited by Carl Schmitt,
which is developed through Walter Benjamin's own engagement with
Schmitt.. The second innovation introduced by Agamben is his
provocative theorization of "bare life" as the central protagonist of
contemporary politics.
Of the first of these, it might be argued that the key motivation
within Homo Sacer is not so much an attempt to correct or complete
Foucault's account of biopolitics, as an attempt to complete
Benjamin's critique of Schmitt. In Political Theology, Carl
Schmitt—the German jurist infamous for joining the Nazi party and
becoming one of its strongest intellectual supporters—summarizes his
strongly decisionistic account of sovereignty by claiming that the
sovereign is the one that decides on the exception. For Schmitt, it is
precisely in the capacity to decide on whether a situation is normal
or exceptional, and thus whether the law applies or not—since the law
requires a normal situation for its application—that sovereignty is
manifest. Against this formulation of sovereignty, Benjamin posits in
his "Theses on the Philosophy of History" that the state of emergency
has in fact become the rule. Further, what is required is the
inauguration of a real state of exception in order to combat the rise
of Fascism, here understood as a nihilistic emergency that suspends
the law while leaving it in force.
In addressing this conflict between Schmitt and Benjamin, Agamben
argues that in contemporary politics, the state of exception
identified by Schmitt in which the law is suspended by the sovereign,
has in fact become the rule. This is a condition that he identifies as
one of abandonment, in which the law is in force but has no content or
substantive meaning—it is "in force without significance." The
structure of the exception, he suggests, is directly analogous to the
structure of the ban identified by Jean-Luc Nancy in his essay
"Abandoned Being, in which Nancy claims that in the ban the law only
applies in no longer applying. The subject of the law is
simultaneously turned over to the law and left bereft by it. The
figure that Agamben draws on to elaborate this condition is that of
homo sacer, which is taken from Roman law and indicates one who '"can
be killed but not sacrificed." According to Agamben, the sacredness of
homo sacer does not so much indicate a conceptual ambiguity internal
to the sacred, as many have argued, as the abandoned status of sacred
man in relation to the law. The sacred man is "taken outside" both
divine and profane law as the exception and is thus abandoned by them.
Importantly, for Agamben, the fact that the exception has become the
norm or rule of contemporary politics means that it is not the case
that only some subjects are abandoned by the law; rather, he states
that in our age, "we are all virtually homines sacri." (HS 115).
As provocative as it is, understanding this claim also requires an
appreciation of the notion of "bare life" that Agamben develops from
the Ancient Greek distinction between natural life—zoe—and a
particular form of life—bios, especially as it is articulated in
Aristotle's account of the origins of the polis. The importance of
this distinction in Aristotle is that it allows for the relegation of
natural life to the domain of the household (oikos), while also
allowing for the specificity of the good life characteristic of
participation in the polis—bios politikos.. More importantly though,
for Agamben, this indicates the fact that Western politics is founded
upon that which it excludes from politics—the natural life that is
simultaneously set outside the domain of the political but
nevertheless implicated inbios politicos. The question arises, then,
of how life itself or natural life is politicized. The answer to this
question is through abandonment to an unconditional power of death,
that is, the power of sovereignty. It is in this abandonment of
natural life to sovereign violence—and Agamben sees the relation of
abandonment that obtains between life and the law as "originary"—that
"bare life" makes its appearance. For bare life is not natural life
per se—though it often confused with it in critical readings of
Agamben, partly as a consequence of Agamben's own inconsistency—but
rather, it is the politicized form of natural life: neither. Neither
bios nor zoe, bare life emerges from within this distinction and can
be defined as "life exposed to death," especially in the form of
sovereign violence. (cf. HS 88)
The empirical point of conjuncture of these two theses on the
exception and on the production of bare life is the historical rise of
the concentration camp, which, Agamben argues, constitutes the state
of exception par excellence. As such though, it is not an
extraordinary situation in the sense of entailing a fundamental break
with the political rationality of modernity, but in fact reveals the
'"nomos of the modern'" and the increasing convergence of democracy
and totalitarianism. According to Agamben, the camp is the space
opened when the exception becomes the rule or the normal situation, as
was the case in Germany in the period immediately before and
throughout World War 2. Further, what is characteristic of the camp is
the indistinguishability of law and life, in which bare life becomes
the "threshold in which law constantly passes over into fact and fact
into law" (HS 171). This indiscernability of life and law effectively
contributes to a normative crisis, for here it is no longer the case
that the rule of law bears upon or applies to the living body, but
rather, the living body has become "the rule and criterion of its own
application" (HS 173) thereby undercutting recourse to the
transcendence or independence of the law as its source of legitimacy.
What is especially controversial about this claim is that if the camps
are in fact the "nomos" or "hidden matrix" of modern politics, then
the normative crisis evident in them is not specifically limited to
them, but is actually characteristic of our present condition, a
condition that Agamben describes as one of "imperfect nihilism."
Importantly, in addition to this, Agamben argues that the logic of the
"inclusive exclusion" that structures the relation of natural life to
the polis, the implications of which are made most evident in the
camps, is perfectly analogous to the relation of the transition from
voice to speech that constitutes the political nature of "man" in
Aristotle's account. For Aristotle, the transition from voice to
language is a founding condition of political community, since speech
makes possible a distinction between the just and the unjust. Agamben
writes that the question of how natural bare life dwells in the polis
corresponds exactly with the question of how a living being has
language, since in the latter question "the living being has logos by
taking away and conserving its own voice in it, even as it dwells in
the polis by letting its own bare life be excluded, as an exception,
within it" (HS 8). Hence, for Agamben, the rift or caesura introduced
into the human by the definition of man as the living animal who has
language and therefore politics is foundational for biopolitics; it is
this disjuncture that allows the human to be reduced to bare life in
biopolitical capture. In this way then, metaphysics and politics are
fundamentally entwined, and it is only by overcoming the central
dogmas of Western metaphysics that a new form of politics will be
possible.
This damning diagnosis of contemporary politics does not, however,
lead Agamben to a position of political despair. Rather, it is exactly
in the crisis of contemporary politics that the means for overcoming
the present dangers also appear. Agamben's theorization of the "coming
politics"—which in its present formulation is under-developed in a
number of significant ways—relies upon a logic of "euporic" resolution
to the aporias that characterise modern democracy, including the
aporia of bare life (P 217). In Means without End, he argues for a
politics of pure means that is not altogether dissimilar to that
projected by Walter Benjamin, writing that "politics is the sphere
neither of an end in itself nor of means subordinated to an end;
rather, it is the sphere of a pure mediality without end intended as
the field of human action and of human thought" (ME 117). In
developing this claim, Agamben claims that the coming politics must
reckon with the dual problem of the post-Hegelian theme of the end of
history and with the Heideggerian theme of Ereignis, in order to
formulate a new life and politics in which both history and the state
come to an end simultaneously. This "experiment" of a new politics
without reference to sovereignty and associated concepts such as
nation, the people and democracy, requires the formulation of a new
"happy life," in which bare life is never separable as a political
subject and in which what is at stake is the experience of
communicability itself.
4. Ethics
Given this critique of the camps and the status of the law that is
revealed in, but by no means limited to, the exceptional space of
them, it is no surprise that Agamben takes the most extreme
manifestation of the condition of the camps as a starting point for an
elaboration of an ethics without reference to the law, a term that is
taken to encompass normative discourse in its entirety. InRemnants of
Auschwitz, published as the third instalment of the Homo Sacer series,
Agamben develops an account of an ethics of testimony as an ethos of
bearing witness to that for which one cannot bear witness. Taking up
the problem of skepticism in relation to the Nazi concentration camps
of World War II—also discussed by Jean-Francois Lyotard and
others—Agamben castsRemnants as an attempt to listen to a lacuna in
survivor testimony, in which the factual condition of the camps cannot
be made to coincide with that which is said about them. However,
Agamben is not concerned with the epistemological issues that this
non-coincidence of "fact and truth" raises, but rather, with the
ethical implications, which, he suggests, our age has as yet failed to
reckon with.
The key figure in his account of an ethics of testimony is that of the
Muselmann, or those in the camps who had reached such a state of
physical decrepitude and existential disregard that "one hesitates to
call them living: one hesitates to call their death death" (Levi cited
in RA 44). But rather than seeing the Muselmann as the limit-figure
between life and death, Agamben argues that theMuselmann is more
correctly understood as the limit-figure of the human and inhuman. As
the threshold between the human and the inhuman, however, the
Muselmann does not simply mark the limit beyond which the human is no
longer human. Agamben argues that such a stance would merely repeat
the experiment of Auschwitz, in which the Muselmann is put outside the
limits of human and the moral status that attends that categorization.
Instead then, the Muselmann indicates a more fundamental indistinction
between the human and the inhuman, in which it is impossible to
definitively separate one from the other, and in that calls into
question the moral distinctions that rest on this designation. The key
question that arises for Agamben then, is whether there is in fact a
"humanity to the human" over and above biologically belonging to the
species, and it is in reflection upon this question that Agamben
develops his own account of ethics. In this, he rejects recourse to
standard moral concepts such as dignity and respect, claiming that
"Auschwitz marks the end and the ruin of every ethics of dignity and
conformity to a norm….The Muselmann…is the guard on the threshold of a
new ethics, an ethics of a form of life that begins where dignity
ends" (RA 69).
In order to elaborate on or at least provide "signposts" for this new
ethical terrain, Agamben returns to the definition of the human as the
being who has language, as well as his earlier analyses of deixis, to
bring out a double movement in the human being's appropriation of
language. In an analysis of pronouns such as "I" that allow a speaker
to put language to use, he argues that the subjectification effected
in this appropriation is conditioned by a simultaneous and inevitable
de-subjectification. Because pronouns are nothing other than
grammatical shifters or "indicators of enunciation," such that they
refer to nothing other than the taking place of language itself, the
appropriation of language in the identification of oneself as a
speaking subject requires that the psychosomatic individual
simultaneously erase or desubjectify itself. Consequently, it is not
strictly the "I" that speaks, and nor is it the living individual:
rather, as Agamben writes, "in the absolute present of the event of
discourse, subjectification and desubjectification coincide at every
point and both the flesh and blood individual and the subject of
enunciation are perfectly silent." (RA 117)
Importantly, Agamben argues that it is precisely this non-coincidence
of the speaking being and living being and the impossibility of speech
revealed in it that provides the condition of possibility of
testimony. Testimony, he claims, is possible only "if there is no
articulation between the living being and language, if the "I" stands
suspended in this disjunction" (RA, 130). The question that arises
here then is what Agamben means by testimony, since it is clear that
he does not use the term in the standard sense of giving an account of
an event that one has witnessed. Instead, he argues that what is at
stake in testimony is bearing witness to what is unsayable, that is,
bearing witness to the impossibility of speech and making it appear
within speech. In this way, he suggests, the human is able to endure
the inhuman. More generally then, testimony is no longer understood as
a practice of speaking, but as an ethos, understood as the only proper
"dwelling place" of the subject. The additional twist that Agamben
adds here to avoid a notion of returning to authenticity in testimony,
is to highlight the point that while testimony is the proper dwelling
place or "only possible consistency" of the subject, it is not
something that the subject can simply assume as its own. As the
account of subjectification and desubjectification indicates, there
can be no simple appropriation of language that would allow the
subject to posit itself as the ground of testimony, and nor can it
simply realise itself in speaking. Instead, testimony remains forever
unassumable.
This also gives rise, then, to Agamben's account of ethical
responsibility. Against juridical accounts of responsibility that
would understand it in terms of sponsorship, debt and culpabililty,
Agamben argues that responsibility must be thought as fundamentally
unassumable, as something which the subject is consigned to, but which
it can never fully appropriate as its own. Responsibility, he
suggests, must be thought without reference to the law, as a domain of
"irresponsibility" or "non-responsibility" that necessarily precedes
the designations of good and evil and entails a "confrontation with a
responsibility that is infinitely greater than any we could ever
assume…" While it may seem as if Agamben is leaning toward a
conception of ethical responsibility akin to Emmanuel Levinas'
conception of infinite responsibility toward the absolute Other, this
is not wholly the case, since Agamben sees Levinas as simply
radicalising the juridical relation of sponsorship in unexpiatable
guilt. In distinction from this, Agamben argues that "ethics is the
sphere that recognizes neither guilt nor responsibility; it is… the
doctrine of happy life" (RA 24).
5. Messianism
Clearly then, the conception of politics and of ethics that Agamben
develops converge in the notion of "happy life," or what he calls
"form-of-life" at other points. What Agamben means by this is
particularly unclear, not least because he sees elaboration of these
concepts as requiring a fundamental overturning of the metaphysical
grounds of western philosophy, but also because they gesture toward a
new politics and ethics that remain largely to be thought. What is
clear within this though is that Agamben is drawing upon Benjamin's
formulation of the necessity of a politics of pure means and,
correlative to that, his conception of temporality and history, which
taps a deep vein of messianism that runs through Judeo-Christian
thought. This vein of messianism emerges in Agamben's thought in a
number of formulations, particularly those of "infancy," "happy life"
and "form-of-life," and the notion of "whatever singularities." What
is also common to all these concepts is a concern with the figuration
of humanity at the end of history, a concern that Agamben develops in
discussion of the debates between Bataille and Kojeve over the
Hegelian thesis of the end of history.
In the concept of "happy life" or "form of life," Agamben points
toward a new conception of life in which it is never possible to
isolate bare life as the biopolitical subject, which, he argues ought
to provide the foundation of political philosophy. As he states,
The "happy life"on which political philosophy should be founded
thus cannot be either the naked life that sovereignty posits as a
presupposition so as to turn it into its own subject or the
impenetrable extraneity of science and of modern biopolitics that
everybody tries in vain to sacralize. This "happy life" should be
rather, an absolutely profane "sufficient life." that has reached the
perfection of its own power and its own communicability – a life over
which sovereignty and right no longer have any hold (ME 114-115).
Happy life will be such that no separation between bios and zoe is
possible, and life will find its unity in a pure immanence to itself,
in "the perfection of its own power." In this then, he seeks a
politico-philosophical redefinition of life no longer founded upon the
bloody separation of the natural life of the species and political
life, but which is beyond every form of relation insofar as happy life
is life lived in pure immanence, grounded on itself alone. This
conception of a "form of life" or happy life that exceeds the
biopolitical caesurae that cross the human being is developed in
reference to Benjamin's conception of happiness as he articulates it
in "Theologico-Political Fragment," a short text in which he paints a
picture of two arrows pointing in different directions but
nevertheless reinforcing each other, one of which indicates the force
of historical time and the other that of Messianic time. For Benjamin,
while happiness is not and cannot bring about the redemption of
Messianic time on its own, it is nevertheless the profane path to its
realization – happiness allows for the fulfilment of historical time,
since the Messianic kingdom is "not the goal of history but the end
(TPF 312). Drawing on this figuration, Agamben appears to construe
happiness as that which allows for the overturning of contemporary
nihilism in the form of the metaphysico-political nexus of biopower.
This debt also brings into focus Agamben's reliance on the Benjaminian
formulation of communicability as such, or communicability without
communication, a thematic which emerges more strongly in Agamben's
somewhat anomalous essay published as The Coming Community, in which
he develops the notion of "whatever singularities." It is here that
Agamben most explicitly addresses the rethinking of community that his
early analyses of language and metaphysics suggested was required. In
taking up the problem of community, Agamben enters into a broader
engagement with this concept by others such as Maurice Blanchot and
Jean-Luc Nancy, and in the Anglo-American scene, Alphonso Lingis. The
broad aim of the engagement is to develop a conception of community
that does not presuppose commonality or identity as a condition of
belonging. Within this, Agamben's conception of "whatever singularity"
indicates a form of being that rejects any manifestation of identity
or belonging and wholly appropriates being to itself, that is, in its
own "being-in-language." Whatever singularity allows for the formation
of community without the affirmation of identity or "representable
condition of belonging," in nothing other than the "co-belonging" of
singularities itself. Importantly though, this entails neither a
mystical communion nor a nostalgic return to a Gemeinschaft that has
been lost; instead, the coming community has never yet been.
Interestingly, Agamben argues in this elliptical text that the
community and politics of whatever singularity are heralded in the
event of Tianenmen square, which he. He takes this event to indicate
that the coming politics will not be a struggle between states, but,
instead, a struggle between the state and humanity as such, insofar as
it exists in itself without expropriation in identity.. Correlatively,
the coming politics do not entail a sacralization of humanity, for the
existence of whatever singularity is always irreparably abandoned to
itself; as Agamben writes, '"The Irreparable is that things are just
as they are, in this or that mode, consigned without remedy to their
way of being. States of things are irreparable, whatever they may be:
sad or happy, atrocious or blessed. How you are, how the world is—this
is the irreparable…."(CC 90)
Agamben returns to this thematic within a critical analysis of the
definition of man as the being that has language in his recent book,
The Open. Agamben begins this text with reflection on an image of the
messianic banquet of the righteous on the last day, preserved in a
thirteenth- century Hebrew Bible, in which the righteous are presented
not with human heads, but with those of animals. In taking up the
rabbinic tradition of interpretation of this image, Agamben suggests
that the righteous or "concluded humanity" are effectively the
"remnant" or remainder of Israel, who are still alive at the coming of
the Messiah. The enigma presented by the image of the righteous with
animal heads appears to be that of the transformation of the relation
of animal and human and the ultimate reconciliation of man with his
own animal nature on the last day. But for Agamben, reflection on the
enigma of the posthistorical condition of man thus presented
necessitates a fundamental overturning of the metaphysico-political
operations by which something like man is produced as distinct from
the animal in order for its significance to be fully grasped. Agamben
concludes this text—which is pragmatically an extended reflection on
the Bataille-Kojeve debate—with the warning that what is required to
stop the "anthropological machine" is not tracing the "no longer human
or animal contours of a new creation," but rather risking ourselves in
the hiatus and central emptiness that separates the human and animal
within man. Thus, for Agamben, "the righteous with animal heads…do not
represent a new declension of the man-animal relation," but instead
indicates a zone of non-knowledge that allows them to be outside of
being, "saved precisely in their being unsavable" (TO, 92). This
articulation of the unsavable reiterates a number of Agamben's
previous comments on redemption and beatitude and provides some
clearer articulation of his resolution of the dilemma of the
post-historical condition of humanity as distinct from those of his
precursors. But how Agamben will develop this resolution and the
ethico-political implications of it in large part remains to be seen.
6. References and Further Reading
* Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community, tr. Michael Hardt,
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993; La communità che
viene, Einaudi, 1990. (CC)
* Agamben, Giorgio. Language and Death: The Place of Negativity,
tr. Karen E. Pinkus and Michael Hardt, University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 1991; Il linguaggio e la morte: Un seminario sul luogo
della negatività, Giulio. Einuadi , 1982. (LD)
* Agamben, Giorgio. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture,
tr. Ronald L. Martinez, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis,
1993; Stanze: La Parola e il fantasma nella cultura occidentale,
Giulio Einuadi, Turin, 1977. (S)
* Agamben, Giorgio. The Idea of Prose, tr. Michael Sullivan and
Sam Whitsitt, SUNY Press, Albany, 1995; Idea della prosa, Giangiacomo
Feltrinelli, Milano, 1985.
* Agamben, Giorgio. Infancy and History, Verso, London, 1993;
Infanzia et storia, Giulio Einuadi, 1978 (IH)
* Agamben, Giorgio. Language and Death: The Place of Negativity,
tr. Karen E. Pinkus, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1991; Il
linguaggio e la morte: Un Seminario sul luogo, Giulio Einuadi, 1982.
* Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. tr.
Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998; Homo
sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, Giulio Einuadi, 1995. (HS)
* Agamben, Giorgio. The Man without Content, tr. Georgia Albert,
Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1999; L'"uomo senza contenuto,
Quodlibet, 1994.
* Agamben, Giorgio. The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, tr.
Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1999.
Categorie Italiane: Studi di poetica, Marsilio Editori, 1996. (EP)
* Agamben, Giorgio. Potentialities: Collected Essays in
Philosophy, ed. and tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford University
Press, Stanford, 1999. (P)
* Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz, tr. Daniel
Heller-Roazen, Zone Books, New York, 1999; Quel che resta di
Auschwitz, (RA)
* Agamben, Giorgio. Means without End: Notes on Politics, tr.
Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 2000; Mezzi sensa fine, Bollati Boringhieri, 1996. (ME)
* Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal, tr. Kevin Attell,
Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2004; L'aperto: L'uomo e
l'animale, Bollati Boringhieri, 2002 (TO)
* Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception, tr. Kevin Attell, The
University of Chicago Press, Chicago; 2005; Il Stato eccezione,
Bollati Boringhieri, 2003. (SE)
* Agamben, Giorgio. "Theologico-Political Fragment," Reflections:
Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, tr.
Edmund Jephcott, Schocken Books, New York: 1978, 312. (TPF)
* Benjamin, Walter. "Critique of Violence," Reflections: Essays,
Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, tr. Edmund
Jephcott, Schocken Books, New York: 1978, 277-300.
* Benjamin, Walter. "Theses on the Philosophy of History"
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn, Fontana, 1973.
* Foucault, M. History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction,
tr. R Hurley, Penguin, London: 1981.
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