Giorgio Agamben 0203855736, 041545168X, 0415451698, 9780415451680, 9780415451697, 9780203855737

Citation preview

GIORGIO AGAMBEN

Giorgio Agamben is one of the most important and controversial figures in contemporary Continental philosophy and critical theory. His work covers a broad array of topics from biblical criticism to Guantánamo Bay and the ‘War on Terror’. Alex Murray explains Agamben’s key ideas, including:    

an overview of his work from first publication to the present clear analysis of Agamben’s philosophy of language and life theories of ethics and ‘witnessing’ the relationship between Agamben’s political writing and his work on aesthetics and poetics.

Investigating the relationship between politics, language, literature, aesthetics and ethics, this guide is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the complex nature of modern political and cultural formations. Alex Murray is lecturer at the Department of English, University of Exeter. He has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and philosophy. He is a founding editor of Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy.

ROUTLEDGE CRITICAL THINKERS Series Editor: Robert Eaglestone, Royal Holloway, University of London

Routledge Critical Thinkers is a series of accessible introductions to key figures in contemporary critical thought. With a unique focus on historical and intellectual contexts, the volumes in this series examine important theorists’:    

significance motivation key ideas and their sources impact on other thinkers

Concluding with extensively annotated guides to further reading, Routledge Critical Thinkers are the student’s passport to today’s most exciting critical thought. Also available in the series: Louis Althusser by Luke Ferretter Roland Barthes by Graham Allen Jean Baudrillard by Richard J. Lane Simone de Beauvoir by Ursula Tidd Homi K. Bhabha by David Huddart Maurice Blanchot by Ullrich Haase and William Large Judith Butler by Sara Salih Gilles Deleuze by Claire Colebrook Jacques Derrida by Nicholas Royle Michel Foucault by Sara Mills Sigmund Freud by Pamela Thurschwell Antonio Gramsci by Steve Jones Stephen Greenblatt by Mark Robson Stuart Hall by James Procter Martin Heidegger by Timothy Clark Fredric Jameson by Adam Roberts

Jean-François Lyotard by Simon Malpas Jacques Lacan by Sean Homer F.R. Leavis by Richard Storer Emmanuel Levinas by Seán Hand Julia Kristeva by Noëlle McAfee Paul de Man by Martin McQuillan Friedrich Nietzsche by Lee Spinks Paul Ricoeur by Karl Simms Edward Said by Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia Jean-Paul Sartre by Christine Daigle Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick by Jason Edwards Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak by Stephen Morton Paul Virilio by Ian James Slavoj Žižek by Tony Myers American Theorists of the Novel: Henry James, Lionel Trilling & Wayne C. Booth by Peter Rawlings Theorists of the Modernist Novel: James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson & Virginia Woolf by Deborah Parsons Theorists of Modernist Poetry: T.S. Eliot, T.E. Hulme & Ezra Pound by Rebecca Beasley Feminist Film Theorists: Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis and Barbara Creed by Shohini Chaudhuri Cyberculture Theorists: Manuel Castells and Donna Harroway by David Bell For further information on this series visit: www.routledgeliterature. com/books/series

GIORGIO AGAMBEN

Alex Murray

First published 2010 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2011. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

© 2010 Alex Murray All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Murray, Alex, 1980Giorgio Agamben / Alex Murray. – 1st ed. p. cm. – (Routledge critical thinkers) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Agamben, Giorgio, 1942- 2. Philosophy, Italian–20th century. I. Title. B3611.A44M87 2009 195–dc22 2009037238 ISBN 0-203-85573-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-45168-X (hbk) ISBN10: 0-415-45169-8 (pbk) ISBN10: 0-203-85573-6 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-45168-0 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-415-45169-7 (pbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-203-85573-7 (ebk)

CONTENTS

Series editor’s preface Acknowledgements

ix xiii

WHY AGAMBEN?

1

KEY IDEAS 1 Language and the negativity of being 2 Infancy and archaeological method 3 Potentiality and ‘the task of the coming philosophy’ 4 Politics – bare life and sovereign power 5 The homeland of gesture – art and cinema 6 The laboratory of literature 7 Bearing witness and messianic time

9 11 22 33 56 78 95 116

AFTER AGAMBEN

132

FURTHER READING

138

Works cited Index

144 148

SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

The books in this series offer introductions to major critical thinkers who have influenced literary studies and the humanities. The Routledge Critical Thinkers series provides the books you can turn to first when a new name or concept appears in your studies. Each book will equip you to approach a key thinker’s original texts by explaining their key ideas, putting them into context and, perhaps most importantly, showing you why this thinker is considered to be significant. The emphasis is on concise, clearly written guides which do not presuppose a specialist knowledge. Although the focus is on particular figures, the series stresses that no critical thinker ever existed in a vacuum but, instead, emerged from a broader intellectual, cultural and social history. Finally, these books will act as a bridge between you and the thinker’s original texts: not replacing them but rather complementing what they wrote. In some cases, volumes consider small clusters of thinkers, working in the same area, developing similar ideas or influencing each other. These books are necessary for a number of reasons. In his 1997 autobiography, Not Entitled, the literary critic Frank Kermode wrote of a time in the 1960s: On beautiful summer lawns, young people lay together all night, recovering from their daytime exertions and listening to a troupe of Balinese musicians. Under their blankets or their sleeping bags, they would chat drowsily about the gurus of the time … What they repeated was largely hearsay; hence my lunchtime suggestion, quite impromptu, for a series of short, very cheap books offering authoritative but intelligible introductions to such figures.

x

SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

There is still a need for ‘authoritative and intelligible introductions’. But this series reflects a different world from the 1960s. New thinkers have emerged and the reputations of others have risen and fallen, as new research has developed. New methodologies and challenging ideas have spread through the arts and humanities. The study of literature is no longer – if it ever was – simply the study and evaluation of poems, novels and plays. It is also the study of ideas, issues and difficulties which arise in any literary text and in its interpretation. Other arts and humanities subjects have changed in analogous ways. With these changes, new problems have emerged. The ideas and issues behind these radical changes in the humanities are often presented without reference to wider contexts or as theories which you can simply ‘add on’ to the texts you read. Certainly, there’s nothing wrong with picking out selected ideas or using what comes to hand – indeed, some thinkers have argued that this is, in fact, all we can do. However, it is sometimes forgotten that each new idea comes from the pattern and development of somebody’s thought and it is important to study the range and context of their ideas. Against theories ‘floating in space’, the Routledge Critical Thinkers series places key thinkers and their ideas firmly back in their contexts. More than this, these books reflect the need to go back to the thinkers’ own texts and ideas. Every interpretation of an idea, even the most seemingly innocent one, offers you its own ‘spin’, implicitly or explicitly. To read only books on a thinker, rather than texts by that thinker, is to deny yourself a chance of making up your own mind. Sometimes what makes a significant figure’s work hard to approach is not so much its style or the content as the feeling of not knowing where to start. The purpose of these books is to give you a ‘way in’ by offering an accessible overview of these thinkers’ ideas and works and by guiding your further reading, starting with each thinker’s own texts. To use a metaphor from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889– 1951), these books are ladders, to be thrown away after you have climbed to the next level. Not only, then, do they equip you to approach new ideas, but also they empower you, by leading you back to the theorist’s own texts and encouraging you to develop your own informed opinions. Finally, these books are necessary because, just as intellectual needs have changed, the education systems around the world – the contexts in which introductory books are usually read – have changed radically,

too. What was suitable for the minority higher education systems of the 1960s is not suitable for the larger, wider, more diverse, high technology education systems of the twenty-first century. These changes call not just for new, up-to-date introductions but new methods of presentation. The presentational aspects of Routledge Critical Thinkers have been developed with today’s students in mind. Each book in the series has a similar structure. They begin with a section offering an overview of the life and ideas of the featured thinkers and explain why they are important. The central section of each book discusses the thinkers’ key ideas, their context, evolution and reception; with the books that deal with more than one thinker, they also explain and explore the influence of each on each. The volumes conclude with a survey of the impact of the thinker or thinkers, outlining how their ideas have been taken up and developed by others. In addition, there is a detailed final section suggesting and describing books for further reading. This is not a ‘tacked-on’ section but an integral part of each volume. In the first part of this section you will find brief descriptions of the thinkers’ key works, then, following this, information on the most useful critical works and, in some cases, on relevant websites. This section will guide you in your reading, enabling you to follow your interests and develop your own projects. Throughout each book, references are given in what is known as the Harvard system (the author and the date of a work cited are given in the text and you can look up the full details in the bibliography at the back). This offers a lot of information in very little space. The books also explain technical terms and use boxes to describe events or ideas in more detail, away from the main emphasis of the discussion. Boxes are also used at times to highlight definitions of terms frequently used or coined by a thinker. In this way, the boxes serve as a kind of glossary, easily identified when flicking through the book. The thinkers in the series are ‘critical’ for three reasons. First, they are examined in the light of subjects which involve criticism: principally literary studies or English and cultural studies, but also other disciplines which rely on the criticism of books, ideas, theories and unquestioned assumptions. Secondly, they are critical because studying their work will provide you with a ‘tool kit’ for your own informed critical reading and thought, which will make you critical. Third, these thinkers are critical because they are crucially important: they deal with ideas and questions which can overturn conventional understandings of the world, of texts, SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

xi

xii

SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

of everything we take for granted, leaving us with a deeper understanding of what we already knew and with new ideas. No introduction can tell you everything. However, by offering a way into critical thinking, this series hopes to begin to engage you in an activity which is productive, constructive and potentially life-changing.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A book of this nature is not the product of personal insight, but of intellectual community. Innumerable people have helped me to grasp parts of Agamben’s thought. While I take full responsibilities for all the errors that may be found in these pages, the following ought to take their share of any successes: Nick Heron, Justin Clemens, Thanos Zartaloudis, Robert Eaglestone, Alysia Garrison, Jessica Whyte, Nick Vaughan-Williams, Catherine Mills, Regenia Gagnier, Jason Hall, Kate White, Arne de Boever, William Watkin and Julian Wolfreys. I also thank Polly Dodson, Emma Nugent and all at Routledge.

WHY AGAMBEN?

For Giorgio Agamben (1942–) our contemporary world is characterised by a waning of the classical idea of politics, a vulgar culture of the spectacle and a continual erosion of the rights we believe characterise our idea of ‘the human’. Yet Agamben’s critique is not that of a nihilistic cynic, nor is it lacking in historical depth. In fact Agamben’s thought is characterised by the depth it provides in thinking through our contemporary moment, and on the importance that it places on imagining that world anew. In that sense it is critical in the best possible way, undertaking a radically open critique of the contemporary that refuses to accept our problems as ‘new’ or the present as unable to be radically altered. Agamben’s voluminous body of work covers fields as various as contemporary Continental philosophy, poetics, Holocaust literature, Biblical textual criticism, cinema studies, medieval literature, legal philosophy – both ancient and modern – the philosophy of language, commentary on Italian and world politics, theories of friendship, art and aesthetics, the history of philosophy, as well as speculative critical writing which utilises the form of the fragment. Yet while this expansive terrain might seem intimidating, this book suggests that Agamben’s work forms a unified body emerging from a concern with language, an understanding of which can transform our practices as critics and readers. Yet as I suggested his thought is unrelentingly

2

WHY AGAMBEN?

contemporary. No matter what Agamben is discussing, from ancient Greek philosophy, to Medieval poetry or the contemporary society of the spectacle, his work is always seeking to deactivate the apparatuses of power in the interests of a ‘coming community’ which is both present, but perhaps unrealised. Most people will have come to Agamben through his account of homo sacer (sacred/holy man) and biopolitics that has provoked vociferous attacks amongst some commentators. This aspect of Agamben’s work is concerned with the nature of Western legal and political systems, and suggests that control and domination remain at their core. One of his most radical contributions to recent philosophy is his method of mapping what he terms the ‘biopolitical’ function of Western law and politics. While we will deal with this at length later on in Chapter 4, Agamben traces the split between zoe- (life) and bios (qualified life) in ancient Greek notions of the political, identifying in the exclusion of zoe- from the political sphere the ways in which politics has a problematic relationship with bare or naked life. Agamben traces – from Aristotle and ancient Greece, through to Roman law, English ideas of habeas corpus, to the concentration camps of National Socialism and the contemporary plight of refugees – the inclusive exclusion of bare life from the political and the fragility of all people living under a political system whose main function, he suggests, is to politicise and control forms of life. When the American Patriot Act was passed by the US Senate on 26 October 2001, erasing the legal status of the terrorist suspect – opening the biopolitical Camp Delta at Guantánamo Bay and introducing a permanent state of exception in which the president could suspend the rule of law at any time if he deemed national security to be at risk – Agamben demonstrated that these events were tied to an internal contradiction in the Western political and legal system and in many ways mirrored previous ‘states of exception’ such as the suspension of the rule of law in 1933 under National Socialism. These claims have often been taken out of context, yet they are consistent with Agamben’s understanding of language and can be read as a manifestation of the ways in which power circulates in language. This notion of power circulating in language raises the question of how one can use language in opposition to its manipulation and control. The answer for Agamben is tied to the idea of disrupting the logic of languages of power and instead exposing

the ‘taking place’ of language. Any act of ‘resistance’ is not to emerge from outside of existing institutions, but is to be located in the very contradictions of the present, and is a resistance that involves challenging the contemporary place of language ‘whose hypertrophy and expropriation define the politics of the spectacular-democratic societies in which we live’ (MwE: x). Therefore Agamben does not propose a prescriptive politics for the future, but the urgent importance of political ‘tactics’ in the present. Agamben, in an interview, endorsed Karl Marx’s statement in a letter to Arnold Ruge, ‘You won’t say that I hold the present too high, and if I do not despair of it, it is only because its desperate situation fills me with hope’ (Marx, as quoted in ‘I am’: 123n). For Agamben it is through an understanding of the crisis, of the contradictions inherent in systems and structures, that one can understand how to bring them to a grinding halt. This process, tied as it is to representation and language, is able to be found in a complex array of phenomena in Agamben’s thought. It is precisely the ability of philosophical thought to illuminate the connections and passages between disparate forms of thought. Agamben then allows for a methodological approach that can bring new understandings of both cultural production (film, literature) and political events (the ‘War on Terror’, the French Revolution) through a means of grasping the threads that link heterogenous elements in both our past and present. This methodology, explored repeatedly throughout this book, can provide ways of viewing both the past and the present with a critical perspicacity. TWO AGAMBENS? So Agamben’s work is both critical of the contemporary, yet undertakes that critique strictly with an eye to a ‘coming community’. These two elements – the critical interrogation and the radical openness – have recently been outlined by Agamben’s near-contemporary, the Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri (1933–). On the one hand his thought is characterised by a ‘negative critique’ that according to Negri has defined all post-war thought. Negri suggests that all critical thinkers in the Continental tradition – following in the wake of the Second World War – have attempted to escape from the ‘dialectical’ forms of totalising thought that characterised many philosophical systems such as Marxism. This rejection was necessary after the horrors of the WHY AGAMBEN?

3

4

WHY AGAMBEN?

Holocaust and the lack of faith in the narratives of progress and development that drove Modernity. It is characterised by attempts to deconstruct the systems and structures of thought that lead to abuses of power and domination. On the other hand, there is the Agamben who is interested in the radical potential of language to undo these forms of domination, an active model of resistance that sees forms of analysing language as key to disruption. As Negri states, ‘There are in fact two Agambens. The one holding onto an existential, fated and horrific background, who is forced into a continuous confrontation with the idea of death; the other seizing (adding pieces, manoeuvring and building) the biopolitical horizon through an immersion into philological labour and linguistic analysis’ (Negri 2003). How the two halves work together – and whether they are in fact two halves – will remain at the forefront throughout this book as we seek to uncover the possibilities that these two different threads hold when thinking through a range of critical endeavours. In the first chapter I present Agamben’s work on language as representative of a ‘negative’ foundation through his engagement with Heidegger, before moving in Chapters 2 and 3 to Agamben’s more ‘productive’ moments in which through an interruption of the very idea of the dialectic or binary he introduces inoperativity, potentiality and the coming community. These are designed to give the reader a sense of the ‘structure’ of Agamben’s thought, allowing them to grasp the ways in which he utilises a number of philosophical entry points, namely the work of Heidegger and Benjamin, to approach a number of diffuse areas which will be explored in the remaining chapters: politics, literature, art and cinema and ethics. It should be noted here that Heidegger and Benjamin seem to be the sources for perhaps these ‘two Agambens’, the former negative, the latter positive. Yet as we will see throughout there is never a clear sense that the two dialectical opposites that Negri posits are truly in opposition. It is between Benjamin and Heidegger that Agamben’s thought develops, not, as was apocryphally suggested, that Benjamin was discovered as the negation or antidote to Heidegger (see Deladurantaye 2000: 8). The falseness of this opposition between Heidegger and Benjamin is indicative of the dialectical analysis of Negri. As this book goes on, it should become clear that these ‘two halves’ are only apparent. Instead it is necessary to think the work as a whole in which any critical moment must ultimately be linked to the radical potentiality of the coming community.

THE QUESTION OF LANGUAGE In order to grasp the overall unity of Agamben’s thought it is worth exploring its fundamental premise: that the human is defined – and constantly being redefined – by its ‘faculty’ for language. The simple fact that humans have language, according to Agamben (drawing on thinkers such as Heidegger, for whom ‘language was the house of being’), is crucial to understanding who and what we are. Yet what is language? How does it work? If man has language, how does he experience it? What is our relationship to language? Can we have an experience that is prior to language, and if so can it be expressed in any other fashion than through language? What is the relationship between language and, say, images? Perhaps it might be useful to break Agamben’s reflection on language into three interconnected yet distinct parts: 1 Language is somehow essentially connected to Being, therefore the object of philosophy. These philosophical concerns are about ideas of the ‘essence’ of language and how it constitutes our being in the world; 2 Language is manipulated by those in power, and is therefore the object of politics. There is no politics, properly speaking, outside of forms of language-use. Here Agamben explores how government and the law use and manipulate language to create and reinforce their power, but also how representation and the use of language can be the means of challenging that power; 3 Language is the medium for creative expression, and is therefore the object of literature. The use and development of language in poetry and prose constitutes a re-articulation of how we experience language. Ontology, politics and literature, and the relationships between them, are therefore the crucial topics of Agamben’s work. This list should give us a sense of the different ways in which a philosophy of language can then reach out into other areas. The relationship between these three areas – philosophy, politics/law, literature – also serves to collapse the traditional boundaries between them. Arguably what emerges in Agamben is a move towards a ‘poetics’, a form of thinking that is not tied to the limitations given to these areas, instead moving beyond the entrapment of thought. In an intellectual environment characterised WHY AGAMBEN?

5

6

WHY AGAMBEN?

by ‘interdisciplinary’ research, and the increasing fluidity of the borders between traditional spheres of knowledge, Agamben’s work is a powerful resource for those attempting to draw different fields together. Yet it will become apparent throughout this book that the joining of different forms of knowledge is hardly conducive to a pragmatic academic practice. Agamben has been very heavily criticised, in particular by those in political philosophy, for introducing critical practices into disciplines in which they usually do not reside. For instance, in dense discussions of political philosophy Agamben will often turn to literary texts to provide an intervention in a debate. In many senses Agamben can ‘justify’ this discipline jumping precisely because his work has a stable base around a philosophy of language. For example he makes statements which – through this basis in a philosophy of language – blur the borders between diffuse disciplines: ‘The question is not so much whether poetry has any bearing on politics, but whether politics remains equal to its original cohesion with poetry’ (IH: 164). Yet as I suggested such propositions find their functional place in Agamben’s work, using literary figures and artistic examples to intervene in a diverse series of debates, but also to destabilise the critical assumptions that may colour the dominant understanding of what philosophy may be. This practice has raised the ire of critics who argue that ‘politics’ or ‘social reality’ shouldn’t be placed on the same plane as ‘literature’ (see Ross 2008: 11). This misunderstanding often proceeds from the unorthodox nature of Agamben’s work which doesn’t proceed in a traditional ‘philosophical’ manner (concerned with the claim to truth of statements about being in the world). But more importantly Agamben’s theoretical programme refuses to adhere to some sort of academism: it is a project that extends the potentiality of critical thought beyond the journals and monographs that characterise our contemporary ‘intellectual’ culture. REPRESENTABILITY An important part of Agamben’s work, and a common way in which it is mis-read, is its attention to representability. Agamben’s work attempts to demonstrate an idea, such as the nature of ‘potentiality’, through the structure of the texts, their ‘architecture’, their ways of representing, perform a certain argument about representation. This form of representation is determined by Agamben as ‘criticism’. What does ‘criticism’ achieve? While it is a complex idea it can be simplified as a style of

writing that is concerned with an attempt to explore and perform its thesis through a form of presentation. Where some forms of philosophy might move through forms such as syllogism or logical proposition, Agamben’s work is often circuitous, and fragmented. This book should then be approached as a conceptual map, outlining key concepts and concerns of Agamben’s work. But those concepts need to be seen as being played out in the presentation of the text itself. This method of presentation is matched by Agamben’s model of reading, his process of exploring and excavating texts from across disciplines and media, finding in these fragments a form of philosophy. As he states, ‘Philosophy has no specificity, no proper territory, it is within literature, within art or science or theology or whatever, it is this element which contains a capability to be developed. In a sense philosophy is scattered in every territory. It is always a diaspora, and must be recollected and gathered up’ (Agamben ‘WP’). Agamben then gathers up the various threads of thinkers, artists and writers to create a philosophical ‘mosaic’. While this mosaic has a basis in the philosophy of language it finds its ‘philosophy’ everywhere. In the following chapters I introduce a number of key writers from whom Agamben draws his own constellation: Martin Heidegger (1899–1976), Walter Benjamin (1892– 1940), Michel Foucault (1926–84), Aby Warburg (1866–1929) and Franz Kafka (1883–1924). Together they are hardly exhaustive of Agamben’s sources, yet these key figures can give the reader a sense of how Agamben himself reads, how he utilises the work of others. The importance of seeing philosophy as ‘scattered’ in every territory is not just in the reach of Agamben’s work, but in the process of ‘recollecting’ and ‘gathering up’. This process is one that works to destabilise the hegemonic forms of political and social control in the present. This genealogy of the forms of oppression and violence of the present is performed with an eye not to ‘returning’ to a past, but of rendering the structures of the present inoperative by tracing their features through to an originary point, working to deactivate the ‘darkness’ of the present through tracing its shadows in the past. Whether that be in ancient Greece or the early modern period, whether it be through the analysis of philosophical treatises, political tracts or poetry, it is done in the name of what Agamben terms the ‘coming community’. Realising this coming community is the challenge that Agamben’s thought offers us, a challenge not to be taken lightly.

WHY AGAMBEN?

7

KEY IDEAS

1

LANGUAGE AND THE NEGATIVITY OF BEING

If this book is to make a single claim about Agamben’s work it will be the centrality of a philosophy of language to his thought. If we are to understand the ways in which Agamben understands areas such as politics, ethics or even film, we need to see his thought as emerging out of his interest in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, philology and linguistics. In this chapter we will move through some of Agamben’s central texts to understand how he uses key categories such as the voice, deixis and ontology to conceptualise the relationship between the human, language and thought. In doing so we will see that in positing the human as the site of language, and of tying the negative foundation of Being to that very capacity for language, Agamben produces a complex yet coherent philosophical foundation upon which we can begin to read his work, a work in which the production of negativity is tied to an originary division that needs to be examined in order to be deactivated. AGAMBEN AND HEIDEGGER, A STARTING POINT As I suggested in the introduction, Agamben has a very close relationship with the German phenomenologist Martin Heidegger. Agamben attended Heidegger’s seminars at Le Thor, in Provence, in 1966

12

KEY IDEAS

and 1968 and his book Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture is dedicated to Heidegger in memoriam. Beyond these personal links, Agamben’s work repeatedly bears the trace of Heidegger’s thought. Heidegger’s philosophy is based around a concern with the essence of Being, a strand of philosophy known as ontology. Other philosophies might ask such questions as, What is the best way to live? What is human happiness? How do we attain knowledge? These sort of questions dominated philosophy circles in Germany during the nineteenth century, but for Heidegger they failed to actively think about the essence of thought, which was the question of Being. Being designates the idea of thought, the clear and pure condition of thinking that is sought by philosophy but rarely grasped. Heidegger saw this Being as an activity, performed by mankind, or Dasein, who attempts to illuminate the idea of Being: ‘This entity which each of us is himself and which includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its Being, we shall denote by the term Dasein’ (1978: 27; 7). While Heidegger’s work presents us with an unfamiliar critical vocabulary, we can identify certain elements of his thought that are important for Agamben. Firstly, Heidegger is concerned with the foundation of thought and Being. Like Heidegger, Agamben begins with these most fundamental questions posed by philosophy, and his entire body of work follows his own process of addressing them. Secondly, Heidegger saw Being in a state of concealment, and that philosophy had to explore this state by consistently questioning its own foundations of thought. Agamben also sees philosophy as part of this process, and his own thought seeks to explore the concealment of Being, largely through the question of language. Thirdly, Heidegger conceptualised mankind as the animal that has both a sense of its own mortality, as well as the faculty for language. This fundamental insight is of key importance for Agamben and is the focus for his important study Language and Death: the Place of Negativity. Fourthly, Heidegger sees language as a ‘monologue’: ‘it speaks solely and solitarily with itself ’ (Heidegger 1993: 397). Simultaneously, language refers to nothing else except itself. As he seemingly tautologically states, ‘Language is – language, speech. Language speaks’ (Heidegger 1971: 191). Yet the space in and through which language must speak is the ‘human’ (although what this category means in Heidegger remains ambivalent). Therefore we have an experience of language but are fundamentally removed from it. This paradox – that language speaks to and of itself, yet also

speaks through man – is perhaps the most important interrelation between Agamben and Heidegger. It is also important that both see philosophy as a ‘way to language’ or a ‘path’ that can lead us to ‘the dwelling place for the life of man’ (Heidegger 1971: 193). Having a grasp of the abstract structure of a language is not enough to understand it; instead it must be grasped in thought. There are many differences in this precise interrelationship between Agamben and Heidegger’s reflections on language, only some of which I will cover below, but for now we can take this idea of language speaking to and of itself, but through the human, as the starting place for Agamben’s thought. To clarify this idea of the relationship between mankind and language I will turn to a short, yet important essay of Agamben’s entitled ‘Experimentum Linguae’. In it Agamben poses a question, which he asks elsewhere, and which guides his own research: Is there a human voice, a voice that is the voice of man as the chirp is the voice of the cricket or the bray is the voice of the donkey? And if it exists, is this voice language? What is the relationship between voice and language, between pho-ne- and logos? And if such a thing as the human voice does not exist, in what sense can man still be defined as the living being which has language? The questions thus formulated mark off a philosophical investigation. (Agamben IH: 3–4)

We should be able to see straight away the links between Heidegger’s questioning of man’s relation to language and Agamben’s concern with the voice. The donkey or the cricket in not having an abstracted language seem to have their own ‘voice’, or a direct way of communicating. Mankind can only use language, yet that language is unnatural, something learnt. Therefore language doesn’t belong to us. We don’t ‘own’ it, yet we consistently and constantly use it. What this creates is a strange ‘negativity’ at the heart of existence. This negativity is fundamental in that all aspects of human existence stem from the fact the human being is defined by that which it has but does not have. The negativity of language is the paradox that emerges from the split between language and voice, and governs all of Agamben’s work. He wants to explore how we come to have it and if there is a possibility of overcoming it. LANGUAGE AND THE NEGATIVITY OF BEING

13

14

KEY IDEAS

READING LANGUAGE AND DEATH Agamben’s most sustained analysis of this negativity is the book Language and Death: the Place of Negativity. The following section is long and can be a little dense, but rewarding if one wants to read Agamben’s body of work as a body, to understand how his broader ideas emerge. The book begins with a quote from Heidegger that identifies man as the being with the faculty of language and mortality. Heidegger claims that this ‘essential relation between death and language flashes up before us, but remains unthought’ (as quoted in Agamben LD: xi). Agamben then proceeds to read the history of Western philosophy, largely through the figures of Heidegger and the great German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) from this perspective. For Agamben the idea of man as both mortal and possessing language is related to what he sees as the fundamental negativity of metaphysics. This branch of philosophy posits that there needs to be principles of reality that transcend any one idea of how the world is, providing ‘first principles’ upon which one can begin to think about the nature of being. It often suggests there is something absent in the relation between mankind and the world, a void, or for Agamben a ‘place’ of negativity. Agamben’s claim is that metaphysics, and even its critique in Heidegger and Hegel, needs to create a negative space within which to base its account of the world. This negative space begins in Hegel’s and Heidegger’s works in the terms ‘this’ and ‘there’, respectively. In Heidegger’s great work Being and Time, he asserts that Dasein, his figure of thinking Being, must bring its own ‘there’ with it. It is only because Dasein has its own ‘there’ that it can exist. This is contained in its name which Agamben translates as ‘Being-the-there’, which suggests that the Da (there) is what removes the human from Sein (Being). We are always attempting to uncover Sein, but are unable to do so because we are located (‘there’ names the place or space from which we exist). As Agamben states, ‘there is something in the little word Da that nullifies and introduces negation into that entity – the human – which has to be its Da’ (LD: 5). So the human becomes the place of negativity itself, condemned to not have access to Sein because of the negative place from which it must speak. The ‘this’ in Hegel is, according to Agamben, also the negative place from which thought starts. Agamben provides an idiosyncratic

interpretation of Hegel which begins with an obscure poem written by Hegel at the age of 26. This poem, about the classical Greek Eleusian mysteries, suggests that mankind can only contemplate the ‘language of angels’ by first experiencing the ‘poverty of words’. This paradox suggests that to understand the essence of language we can only access it by recognising that words essentially fail; language is a poor substitute for some sort of voice. From this unusual starting place Agamben goes on to suggest that Hegel’s exploration of philosophy The Phenomenology of Spirit (1977), starts from a negative proposition or space, which Agamben finds in the term ‘this’. In The Phenomenology Hegel proceeds through a number of different philosophical accounts of making sense of the world, including consciousness, self-consciousness, Reason, Spirit and religion, before ending with the final concept of absolute knowing. Yet his system must contain all previous systems as his own attempt to ‘understand Spirit’s insight into what knowing is’ must be seen as the synthesis of all other forms of thought that preceded it. Agamben then takes the first form of knowing the world, sense-certainty, as his starting point for looking at the negative in Hegel. Sense-certainty is for Hegel the most basic and unsophisticated means of making sense of the world. It posits, as the name suggests, that we can be certain that our immediate sensual impression of the world is true and accurate. Let us take an object, for example. Sense-certainty would suggest that the This (the object I see, feel, hear, etc.) is grasped in its entirety by my impression of it, and therefore sense-certainty seems to be the most concrete and reliable form of knowledge. Yet as Hegel goes on to demonstrate we can only speak of the object, grasp our sense-certainty through an abstraction; that is, language. In asking the question, ‘What is the This?’, we have already lost the object and instead of speaking of it we speak of language alone. We cannot express sense-certainty because language, in not expressing what we mean, has grasped the universal quality (the negative). Essentially language belongs to consciousness and therefore speaks of itself, yet cannot locate that self in the senses. As Hegel suggests, ‘the sensuous This that is meant cannot be reached by language’ (as quoted in Agamben LD: 13). What this means is that language ‘guards the unspeakable by speaking it, that is, by grasping it in its negativity’ (LD: 13). It seems to be of primary importance for Agamben that negativity takes place in the term This. So why is it important that this negative ground to language takes place in the terms ‘There’ in Heidegger and ‘This’ in Hegel? The LANGUAGE AND THE NEGATIVITY OF BEING

15

16

KEY IDEAS

answer is related to the linguistic category of deixis, a key term in Agamben’s philosophy of language. Deixis is the name for the series of pronouns that we use in everyday speech, such as I, you, he, she, there, this, etc. These terms only make sense if they indicate something or relate to something. Take the word this. If I don’t refer to anything in particular the word is meaningless. Unless I say ‘this apple’, relating to, or indicating an object, then I’m uttering an empty word. Simultaneously what does it mean to say ‘I’? This pronoun is certainly the most important for Agamben as its function is to designate nothing other than language is taking place. Agamben draws here upon the French linguist Emile Benveniste (1902–76) to explain the function of the I. As Benveniste asks, ‘What is the reality to which I or you refers? Only a “reality of discourse” that is something quite singular. I can only be defined in terms of “locutions” not in objective terms … I signifies “the person who utters the present instance of the discourse containing I” ’ (as quoted in Agamben LD: 23). The term therefore only has its meaning in speech, in language, and indicates nothing more than the simple fact that language is taking place, the ‘event’ of language. It is for this reason that the nature of the first-person pronoun becomes so problematic in twentieth-century literature. Perhaps we can think here of Beckett for whom the pronoun ‘I’ becomes, in his late work, so problematic. Its emptiness, its inability to contain anything more than the taking place of language marks it out as simultaneously meaningless and an index of death. Beckett’s late prose piece Company is indicative of the impossibility of ‘I’ representing anything other than an empty location: ‘Use of the second person marks the voice. That of the third the cankerous other. Could he speak to and of whom the voice speaks there would be a first. But he cannot. He shall not. You cannot. You shall not’ (Beckett 1982: 6). In Beckett’s fragmented prose we see the impossibility of escaping these shifters, yet their ultimate emptiness. Beckett presents these pronouns as language, communicating the inability of language to communicate, allowing its inherent negativity to emerge. THE VOICE So how does this category of the shifter relate to ideas of negativity and Agamben’s inquiry into whether the human has a voice? The shifter, in referring to the ‘taking place’ of language, has a complex

relation to voice. For Agamben the idea of a voice should not be understood as simply sound. If we understood the meaning of every sound we would never have to acquire language. Instead we are always trying to convert sound into meaning, taking phonemes, the sounds we hear, and making them into signifiers (words) and then deriving from them a meaning. The voice, according to Agamben, is what has to be removed in order to develop a meaning, for language to make sense. This process places us at a remove from any voice, creating an essential void at the heart of language and speech. Agamben now refers to this process, embodied in the taking place of language, as the Voice (now capitalised to distinguish from the voice we cannot have access to). For Agamben the Voice is no longer voice, yet is not exactly meaning, it is the simple act of language that for Agamben is the basis of both Being and time. To have Being (in the sense that Heidegger distinguished it), we must have a form of consciousness, one that only exists at the moment we have a sense of presence (we can think about ourselves as located in time). For Agamben the Voice gives us both these as in signifying that language is taking place now, it creates time and articulates the consciousness of Being. So according to Agamben the Voice is the ‘supreme shifter that allows us to grasp the taking place of language, appears thus as the negative ground on which all ontology rests, the originary negative sustaining every negation’ (LD: 36). In the figure of the Voice we can see the fundamental crux of Agamben’s philosophical perspective: all investigation of Being, all forms of constructing meaning – through their relationship to language – are founded on a seemingly inescapable negativity. After having grounded the negative in Heidegger and Hegel, and then having introduced the category of the Voice, Agamben goes on to explore the Voice in these two thinkers as ‘the originary negative articulation’ (LD: 37). While I can’t explore this analysis in depth here, Agamben demonstrates that for Hegel the voice dwells in the Absolute, yet has ‘vanished’ if it is ever spoken. In Heidegger the split between language and Stimme (the voice in German) reverberates in the Stimmung (mood) of anxiety faced by Dasein as it realises it has no true voice. For Agamben what results is another Voice, which takes place only in silence. This is seemingly the horizon of Agamben’s interpretation of the place of language in thought: that it obscures and removes any immediate voice we may have had and replaces it with another Voice which can only communicate a silence, or as Agamben – using LANGUAGE AND THE NEGATIVITY OF BEING

17

18

KEY IDEAS

Heidegger’s term – refers to it – sigetics. Having painted this fundamentally and seemingly inescapable negativity at the heart of thought and being, Agamben turns to the Provençal poetry of the twelfth century to ask whether there we can uncover ‘another experience of language that does not rest on an unspeakable foundation’ (LD: 66). Why the Provençal poets? As I suggested in the introduction, Agamben’s work is characterised by explorations of etymology and medieval and classical texts, finding in the obscure works of the past ways and means of reconstructing and explaining the problems of the present. Here the Provençal poets are presented as writing on the cusp when poetry was still concerned with the topics, the ancient rhetorical practice whereby poetry was constructed utilising the rhetorical ‘places’ of language, considering language itself as already given, and the more modern notion of poetry as expressing a lived reality. Agamben then proceeds to examine two poems, demonstrating how these still present the ‘originary event of its own word as nothing’ (LD: 74). The analysis of these two poems is complex and demonstrates the importance of close reading in Agamben’s work, yet a summary is beyond the scope of this chapter. Needless to say Agamben’s investigation suggests that poetry struggles, as does philosophy, to conceptualise the place of language as anything other than a negativity. At this point it is worth providing a brief note on the relationship between poetry and philosophy for Agamben. We will return to this relationship again and again throughout this book as it remains crucial for an understanding of how Agamben conceptualises his own critical practice. In Language and Death it is perhaps somewhere in-between these two discourses that his call for humanity to discover a new ethos, or dwelling place, should be sought: ‘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 world, 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 description is purposefully enigmatic and is one of a series of gestures Agamben makes to an alternative to the negativity he has uncovered at the heart of Being. As I indicated in the introduction, and as we will see repeatedly throughout this book, Agamben’s ‘solution’ to the problem he sets up is purposefully non-prescriptive. Here Agamben’s allusion to the collapse of the distinction between these two practices is coupled with a turn to poetry in his conclusion.

The penultimate section of the book suggests that one way of thinking beyond the ‘horizon’ of metaphysics is to begin a ‘liquidation’ of the mystical foundation of our entire culture. The problem with a mystical foundation, as we shall see below in relation to the discussion of infancy, is that it places a negative form (silence) at the heart of Being. According to Agamben we always seek to return towards the point at which the voice emerges, namely the origins of language. Yet ‘return’ in Agamben is never a nostalgic attempt to return, or a positing of an impossible return which will remain necessary. Instead Agamben seeks to enter into the point at which a negative foundation may have emerged and in doing so to undo that very foundational void for the present. Agamben’s notion of ‘return’ is then one without a temporal return to a past, but instead an uncovering of a ‘language which is not marked by negativity and death’ (LD: 95). Again, this language is only gestured towards, never described. Instead Agamben concludes this section with two poems, one by Paul Klee (1879– 1940), the German artist and critic, the other by his Italian contemporary, the poet and translator Giorgio Caproni (1912–90). Both of these poems talk of a return to a place where one has never been and that has never existed. I quote here the Caproni: I returned there where I never had been. Nothing had changed from how it was not. On the table (on the checkered tablecloth) half–full I found the glass which was never filled. All had remained just as I never left it. (quoted in Agamben LD: 98)

This image of returning to a space we never knew is designed to be indicative of how we can imagine a sense of returning to a land of language we have never known, yet which seems uncannily familiar. We should keep this image in mind throughout as we proceed; in particular when we encounter the messianic in Chapter 7 we shall see a similar idea of encountering a space that has changed totally and not at all. In the final excursus of the book, Agamben introduces the sacred, or sacer, a term and a figure that will recur repeatedly throughout his LANGUAGE AND THE NEGATIVITY OF BEING

19

20

KEY IDEAS

work, and become the focus for his most controversial work, Homo Sacer. I mention this here as it demonstrates how the later ‘political’ works are already anticipated in the earlier works on language, and the necessity to read his body of work as a whole. In Language and Death the sacer emerges as the foundation of human community which, according to Agamben, is essentially groundless. It therefore requires practices and rituals to give it a solidity. For Agamben that comes with an originary exclusion (we have community because something can exist outside, and that which is not included we can use to measure ourselves against). This process is embodied in sacrifice, which, in taking someone outside the society, reveals that there is a threshold, or a ‘zone of indiscernibility’ to use Agamben’s phrase between outside and inside: if someone can be excluded, all of us are potentially excludable. Agamben posits – outside of this sacrificial violence – as well as the nothingness with which he equates it, ‘social praxis itself, human speech itself, which have become transparent to themselves’ (Agamben LD: 106). It is with this idea of a social praxis and speech that Agamben concludes his work, contained in his brief, almost poetic, Epilogue, dedicated to Caproni. Here the closing lines state the principle of Agamben’s new ethical community: ‘so language is our voice, our language. As you now speak, that is ethics’ (LD: 108). The ambivalence here – do we ‘speak’, read or think these final lines? – is important here. The division between these practices needs to be absolved, worn away, in order to encounter ethics. After a long and complex analysis of the negativity at the heart of philosophy, Agamben has seemingly called us beyond that, into the realm of thought, language, life that lies beyond. As we will see in the following chapter this ‘coming community’ is one that emerges out of a rejection of the very inclusive/ exclusive logic that grounds identity, calling instead for a ‘whatever being’ whose relationship to language is not one of ontological negativity. SUMMARY As we have seen in this chapter language lies at the heart of Agamben’s perspective on the function of philosophy. All of his work will emerge out of this sense that there is something irresolvably split at the heart of the human, usually language, and that we construct our world by simultaneously attempting to cover up the split (giving meaning to

words, the human), yet also relying on that split to construct narratives and stories that can explain our own existence. This sense of a split or opposition will recur throughout Agamben’s body of work, yet will always be accompanied by, and attempt to return to, the very crux of that division, to understand the nature of its beginning in order to render it inoperative. Encountering the negativity at the heart of language becomes the process of tearing away the empty jargons of our contemporary political life, exposing them through presenting the taking place of language and through attempting to find a space in which to move beyond that fundamental negativity.

LANGUAGE AND THE NEGATIVITY OF BEING

21

2

INFANCY AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL METHOD

The gesture beyond the negativity at the end of Language and Death will be repeated in a number of Agamben’s works, both occasional essays and longer works. In this chapter we will encounter questions of what may have the potentiality to exist beyond this negativity through an exploration of infancy and experience. In exploring infancy we begin to see the ways in which Agamben’s philosophy of language becomes transformed into a philosophy of history, but it is a productively destructive movement which seeks to undermine both terms through the introduction of a philological method that seeks to deactivate or render inoperative both historical narratives and philosophical foundations. This philological method is later re-articulated as an archaeological method, one that allows us to follow the movement of his thought from a grounding in language and linguistics, through to the introduction of the coming community in Chapter 3. INFANCY One of the ‘figures’ that Agamben explores in his attempt to move beyond the negative impasse of a work such as Language and Death is that of infancy, certainly one of the most elusive of Agamben’s concepts, yet necessary for an understanding of how he begins to conceptualise what he will refer to elsewhere as ‘the coming community’.

If we think back to what Agamben said about the pronoun ‘I’, we can recall that it grounds the human being in language, yet that grounding is often exposed as arbitrary, and the ‘I’ without any other referent than the taking place of language. We can only seem to have experience and to understand it through the use of language (if we didn’t conceptualise our world through language how could we organise our experience of it?). Agamben is concerned with how the development of modern subjectivity (the sense that we are autonomous individuals) is predicated on language: we need to say ‘I am’ to conceptualise the fact that we indeed are. Yet for Agamben the modern experience of being a subject entails what he refers to as a ‘destruction of experience’. An exploration of the modern poverty of experience was famously provided by Walter Benjamin in his essay, ‘The Storyteller’, on Nikolai Leskov. For Benjamin the First World War was the event in which the broader destruction of experience brought about under modernity was grasped: For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but for the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body. (Benjamin 1968: 84)

Agamben, following and extending Benjamin’s claim, declares that the experience of modern life has left us unable to truly ‘experience’. Now this seems counter-intuitive – we all have ‘experiences’ every day (I’m experiencing writing a book) – yet for Agamben this is not the core of experience, which is more about how we experience language. Agamben wants to compare the banality of modern experience to previous forms in which through community and the transmission of cultural knowledge we experienced language as alive and living through us. What lived was the authority invested in language. Not an imposed authority but the ‘power of words and narration’. Think for instance of folk memory. The repetition of story and song across generation gave words a real power, ‘hence the disappearance of the maxim and the proverb, which were the guise in which experience INFANCY AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL METHOD

23

24

KEY IDEAS

stood as authority. The slogan, which has replaced them, is the proverb of humankind to whom experience is lost. This does not mean today that there are no more experiences, but that they are enacted outside the individual’ (IH: 17). This might appear to be a conservative or even nostalgic view, but it is hardly the case. Instead Agamben sees in the demise of the old experience ‘the germinating seed of future experience’ (IH: 17). In order to explore the destruction of experience and the possibility of a new form of experience it is essential for Agamben to explore the nature of modern subjectivity. The common narrative of modernity presents us as modern subjects who are no longer contained by a transcendental understanding of the world (for example the Christian idea of a God who can order and control the world and potentially redeem us). Instead modern science and philosophy, through a process of reasoning, are able to reorder the world so that we experience it as individuals, not explain it away through the existence of a God, or some other force. The freedom granted to us by reason enables us to consider ourselves as the subject of consciousness: we have a conscious, active way of engaging with the world. But Agamben suggests what we have is language mediating that engagement with the world. Therefore the ‘destruction of experience’ is a result of not realising that the essence of ‘experience’ is not consciousness, but language. So why is this important, and how does it relate to the ideas we explored in relation to the Voice? The best way of thinking about this is through infancy. What Agamben means here is not the period of infancy in our ordinary everyday sense, so stop thinking babbling babies. Instead what he means is something like the ‘experience’ of language as such. It is therefore not something we ‘go back’ to, some utopian point prior to having language. In fact that idea of a place prior to language needs to be discarded as it would rest on having an idea of an ‘event’ prior to language, when it is only because we have language that we can have an event, and therefore have history. What it needs to be replaced with is an understanding that any ‘origin’ has to be incorporated into the very experience of language, we ‘get back’ to nothing, but uncover what is there at the core of language. Again we see this idea of investigating the moment in which a critical problem in the present – that of language – emerges. Infancy here is an attempt to name that which grounds the separation of mankind from language which leads to the impossibility of ‘experience’ and should

not be confused with any attempt to ‘return’ to some point prior to such a separation. Experience is the limit of language – the point at which something occurs that we struggle to formulate into words. This is, if you like, the return or perhaps more appropriately the flash of infancy, the point at which we recall that there was something prior to language and that language struggles to ‘explain’ this. As Agamben states, ‘the very fact that infancy exists as such – that it is, in other words, experienced as the transcendental limit of language – rules out language as being in itself totality and truth’ (IH: 58). This means that language does not always equate with, nor is it reducible to, the rules and systems that govern it. It doesn’t mean we cannot have truth, but that language is not the direct and scientific means of attaining it; instead the relationship between language, infancy and truth is a constructed one that shifts and changes. However, the most primary feature of infancy is that it reveals, and is the source for, the split between language and discourse/speech. The meaning of language is never timeless or pure; there is never a word that retains the same meaning over time. How we use language must modulate as we, the human, are the site of language moving into speech, discourse. This movement of language into discourse is figured by Agamben as being both within and without of the human. It might help here to turn to his scientific analogy to grasp this a little less abstractly. Agamben describes human language as ‘split at its source into an endosomatic and esosomatic sphere’ (IH: 65). In biology endosomatic pertains to a device/ feature which an animal uses as part of its own body. So let us say that for a bird the claws are endosomatic. Esosomatic on the other hand pertains to a feature or tool extraneous to the body of the animal. So a spade used by a human is esosomatic. If we carry Agamben’s exploration forward language is something that we both use as if it originated in our consciousness, yet it is at its source the most artificial and imported of tools. Infancy then is the name for this split, for the fact that language is both markedly foreign yet so familiar. In that way infancy of course names the negativity at the heart of the speaking being that we encountered in the previous chapter. Yet it is the placement of infancy as the split, the division, the in-between that is not strictly tied to its foundation that can allow Agamben to think of an idea of experience that can appropriate infancy once more through the appropriation of language as experience. INFANCY AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL METHOD

25

26

KEY IDEAS

In understanding the human as the site of language it is important to understand the technical terms from Benveniste that Agamben utilises here: semiotic and semantic. The semiotic is the science of signs. It is the idea of language as a group of words, signifiers, that we can all understand. You see the word, recognise it, read it. The semantic is, if you like, the meaning of language, it need not be recognised, but must be understood. Semiotics is usually the level of a sentence. It has a meaning which can be translated more or less effectively into another language. The problem with the semantic is that it is not universal and has the potential to not be translated into another language. To use a common example, the French have two words for the English term river: rivière and fleuve (the second designating a river that flows into the sea). While I can easily translate the meaning of fleuve into English, I fail to translate it semiotically, there is no direct substitute. One could think of many cases in which even a language like English fails to translate directly between different parts of the world. The American word ‘root’ means to support (We’re rooting for you guys), yet in Australia it’s a crass slang-word for copulation. Therefore to import the semiotic sign from one culture into another doesn’t guarantee that the semantic meaning will follow. So to summarise, every time we use the semiotic terms we turn them into semantics for an instant before they fall back into language. Infancy is Agamben’s name for the in-between of that process that allows us to be the point at which we can make the shift from ‘pure language’ to the semantic. Analogously it also makes us the point at which we can see the transition from ‘myth’ into ‘history’ and the possibility for a critical mythology. Agamben sees myth, in the way it was formulated by the French Structural Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), as the illusion that we can still attain pure language, that we can reach back into something like a language of nature. Myth, like infancy, is a point between the semiotic and semantic, but it is not the same as infancy. Myth attempts to convert the semantic, or discourse, into a realm of ‘pure’ language, of the semiotic where infancy performs the opposite movement, a process that gives us history as it takes language into the plural meanings of the semantic. If history is about change, then history can be read as the changes, shifts in language that occur over time. So if myth produces the illusion of a return to something like a pure language, and history is produced by denying a pure language,

then what is a critical mythology? The answer comes in the form of transforming myth through philology. Philology is the branch of knowledge dealing with the structure, historical development, and relationships of languages as well as the historical study of the phonology and morphology of languages. It is also known as historical linguistics. Agamben, in the short essay ‘Project for a Review’, outlines a ‘critical mythology’ as a process of exploring, from the perspective of philology, the ways in which practices and rituals can be seen to morph across different time periods, the strange confluences that can be seen between seemingly separate times and places. This process can, according to Agamben, ‘awaken myth from its archetypal rigidity and its isolation, returning it to history. Its work of criticism produces an origin freed from any ritual character and any subjection to destiny’ (Agamben IH: 167). Here we have a clear definition of what Agamben’s focus on language and philology seeks to do with the categories of myth and history. In removing both origin and destiny, what we might think of as the ‘ends’ that obsess both history and myth, Agamben seeks to take away any notion of essence or base, instead seeking to unravel, through a concentration on language, both change and continuity. ARCHAEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD In order to grasp his understanding of the etymological task of a critical mythology, it may help to explore one of his more recent formulations of the problem, that of archaeology. Agamben’s thought is resistant to clear statements of methodology and intent. In ‘What is a Paradigm?’ he states of methodology and epistemology, ‘I don’t like these kind of problems, I always have the impression, as once Heidegger put it, that we have here people busy sharpening knives when there is nothing left to cut’ (‘WP’). Yet in a number of recent essays Agamben provides us with a firmer sense of how he approaches such questions. Agamben, as I have suggested, is a thinker concerned with tracing structures and apparatuses of thought (the French term Michel Foucault uses is dispositif), undertaking a genealogy of these in order to arrive at an understanding of their archaeology. How, you might ask, is this different from the study of history? Agamben is very clear that philosophical archaeology is about grasping the historical a priori. Agamben here is referring back to INFANCY AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL METHOD

27

28

KEY IDEAS

Immanuel Kant, who, in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), identified two different forms of knowledge: ‘we shall understand by a priori knowledge, not knowledge independent of this or that experience, but knowledge absolutely independent of all experience. Opposed to it is empirical knowledge, which is knowledge possible only a posteriori, that is through experience’ (1965: 43). Agamben takes this distinction and considers philosophical archaeology as a paradox in which one must try to explore the a priori of thought, yet thought is never empirical and cannot have origins except those bequeathed to it. So Kant can only map out the history of thought by thinking about the ends – i.e. an idea of ‘pure reason’ that is the goal of thought. So philosophy cannot reach back into the past and pinpoint an arche, a first principle from which the world develops, instead it can only grasp the history of thought by positing a structure of thought, conditions of possibility, from which it will explore the very nature of that thought. Agamben takes this paradox as the starting point, to some extent, for the task of his own critical philosophy. He will take a contemporary problematic, let’s say that of the refugee, and will think about the structures in which that problem emerges – in this case ideas of inclusion and exclusion in a political community and the nation state. In order to truly understand this phenomenon in the present, it is necessary to ask how it is that it came about. This means attempting to uncover the structure of the present by exploring its development backwards to a point of origin. So in the case of the refugee Agamben will, as I highlighted earlier, trace it back to the production of bare life in the split between zoe- and bios in Aristotle. This is the critical and negative part of Agamben’s thought that wants to explore the foundation of the present, so it is important that the archaeologist ‘retreats back toward the present’. The goal then has less to do with the nature of a past time than with the emergence of the present. As Agamben asks, ‘how should we understand this singular “archaeological regression” which does not try and retreat into the past, the unconscious and the forgotten, but go back to the point in which was created the dichotomy between conscious and unconscious, historiography and history (and more generally between all the binary oppositions which define the logic of our culture)?’ (Agamben PA: 222). The answer comes in trying to think the present from the very point of these splits, never to retreat in search of some nostalgic or authentic moment in the past, a prelapsarian point prior to the split. To think of a ‘before’ to the split would still be to be trapped in the very

logic of the split itself. In trying to think the point of emergence, according to Agamben, we can uncover ‘the self-revelation of the present as that which we had not been able to live or think’ (PA: 223). But there is no substance to that which we have not lived or thought – we cannot know it until we have lived or thought it. So the means of trying to realise this un-thought present is precisely about undertaking the forms of critical analysis that stem from this archaeological method. As Agamben suggests this is not like bringing into consciousness something repressed, but about ‘evoking the phantasy through the meticulous attentions of the genealogical inquiry, a matter of reworking it, of deconstructing it, of detailing it to the point of progressively eroding it and of making it lose its original rank’ (Agamben PA: 225). There is therefore a self-contained logic and structure to Agamben’s thought, although it is not immediately clear in his earliest works. Language as a source, or a means of viewing history, then becomes the basis for what we can term Agamben’s ‘philological’ method. As we shall see, in particular in the case of the Homo Sacer series, Agamben maps the history of concepts through the history of words/terms. The fact that we use a certain term in the contemporary world does not suggest that the meaning is fixed and constant. In tracing the etymology, or development of a word from, for instance, Latin, Agamben can demonstrate how our current meaning contains within it many past inferences and uses, some lost, some still strangely if secretly active. This process, as I suggested in the introduction and will demonstrate throughout, is about challenging the relationship between language and power. In realising that language shifts and develops in meaning we automatically refuse to accept and settle for any given meaning. The split between language and speech results in a state of flux that can always shift and challenge power, and the place where that site of challenge exists is the human, the ways in which we use and modify language. AGAMBEN AND DERRIDA This attempt to free language from the imperative to mean features repeatedly in Agamben’s work. It should also give us pause to reflect on the relationship between Agamben and Jacques Derrida. Derrida was one of the most famous and controversial thinkers of the twentieth century, with his ‘deconstructive’ method providing a radical challenge to philosophical tradition. Readers familiar with Derrida will INFANCY AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL METHOD

29

30

KEY IDEAS

have already seen in the glossing of Agamben’s relationship to Heidegger similarities with Derrida’s own thought, which has led some to focus on the affinities between their projects, yet there are striking differences which I will address here as a way of clarifying Agamben’s method (see also Thurschwell 2005; Mills 2008). Derrida, like Agamben, is deeply critical of Western metaphysics and what he terms its ‘logic of presence’. For Derrida Western thought has sought to routinely privilege speech over writing. According to Derrida speech, from Plato onwards, was seen as being more direct and immediate than writing. At the base of this was the implicit recognition that language has no fixed meaning, and speech, let’s say a regular conversation, offers more chance for clarification and the stabilisation of meaning, as one speaker can ask a question of another in order to arrive at mutual understanding. Writing was seen as being at a further remove from the real meaning in thought with lesser possibility for the development of shared, communicative meaning. For Derrida the binary opposition between speech and writing is one that, if we investigate the history of both, fails to hold. Derrida then posits a third term that refuses to fall back into the logic of the binary opposition. The most well known of these terms is différance. The words difference and différance have no audible distinction in French, in fact one can only differentiate between them through recourse to writing. Différance therefore works to disturb and disrupt the binary opposition and can thus stand in for the perpetual absence of fixed meaning in language. Yet importantly for Derrida différance can never become a word or a concept that will stand in for a new mode of approaching the topic as it should never solidify into a determinant meaning, yet instead must remain iterable: in order for my ‘written communication’ to retain its function as writing, i.e. its readability, it must remain readable despite the disappearance of any receiver, determined in general. My communication must be repeatable – iterable – in the absolute essence of the receiver or of any empirically determinable collectivity of receivers. Such iterability – (iter, meaning ‘again’, probably comes from itara, ‘other’ in Sanskrit, and everything that follows can be read as working out of the logic that ties repetition to alterity) structures the mark of writing itself, no matter what particular type of writing is involved. (1982: 315)

Derrida rejects a focus on speech and instead chooses to explore the history of writing. This ‘grammatological’ project is one that Agamben cites at several key moments and explores its philosophical method. In particular Agamben wants to explore the Derridean trace and the problem of language. As Agamben states, ‘the concept of the “trace” names the impossible sign to be extinguished in the fullness of presence and absolute presence … the signifier always in position of the signified’ (TTR: 103). Deconstruction is a process of following the trace, of using this mark as the starting point for a process of unravelling an opposition. In that way the trace and its function is the ‘origin of sense’, yet is obviously unstable and never absolute. It suggests that sense is based upon an infinite and cyclical play in which meaning never coheres. As Derrida states in Of Grammatology, ‘The trace is in fact the absolute origin of sense in general. Which amounts to saying once again that there is no absolute origin of sense in general. The trace is the différance which opens appearance and signification’ (1976: 65; italics in original). Derrida’s work then seeks to follow the trace as a form of destabilising all sense, denying the return to any ossified foundation for thought. This is Derrida’s attempt to overcome the metaphysics of presence that he claims underpins philosophy by turning from the signified (meaning), to the signifier (word), undermining the Saussurean position. For Agamben this is a false movement, and the trace as a critical methodology has not exactly taken us ‘back’ beyond the originary split between word and meaning that is the basis of metaphysics. Agamben’s argument is that we should not take the trace, or différance, as the basis for undermining the Signifier/signified (S/s) distinction. Derrida’s attempt to focus on the ‘metaphysics of writing and the signifier’ can hardly hope to be the transcendence of the ‘metaphysics of presence and the signified’, instead just inverting it. Agamben suggests that ‘The algorithm S/s must therefore reduce itself simply to the barrier (/) but in this barrier we should not see merely the trace of a difference, but the topological game of putting things together and articulating’ (S: 156). So where Derrida’s deconstruction seeks to undermine binary oppositions through the play of the trace, Agamben’s seeks to undermine through a method of presenting the barrier or in-between between the binaries. The primary difference in my mind is a temporal and political one: Agamben sees the undermining of metaphysics in a ‘putting together’ which is always immanent, whereas deconstruction is an unravelling that is always INFANCY AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL METHOD

31

32

KEY IDEAS

infinite. Where Agamben attempts to explain, for instance, the negativity at the heart of language in order to overcome it in the contemporary, deconstruction will attempt to highlight the deferral and difference inherent in the present through the trace. Agamben’s claim is that grammatology should not be about ‘the infinite deconstruction of a text’ (P: 218–19) or ‘infinite deferment’ (TTR: 104), but should seek to ‘deactivate’ in order to open on to an ethics of potentiality that we will encounter in Chapter 3. SUMMARY Agamben explores infancy as a means of trying to confront the problem of negativity he explored in Heidegger. Infancy is the foundation of the split between language and discourse/speech, and Agamben wants to construct a critical method capable of exploring human history as one of division, of a split. In encountering the problem of infancy we also encounter experience, more specifically the experience of language which Agamben suggests is at the core of the problem of modern subjectivity. This method developed from his philosophy of language is then repeated throughout his work in different forms, such as archaeology. While this project might have parallels with Derrida’s deconstruction it differs in its temporality which is immanent and concerned with the political task of the coming community.

3

POTENTIALITY AND ‘THE TASK OF THE COMING PHILOSOPHY’

The critical moment in Agamben’s thought and his attempt to address the negativity inherent in language is in many ways the preparation for what he terms ‘the task of the coming philosophy’. This chapter will outline this task through an exploration of three key terms: potentiality, inoperativity (or unworking) and the coming community. Taken together these terms outline the direction in which Agamben’s thought unfolds. Importantly they are not a ‘goal’, something to be attained, but processes and practices that, when put into operation, will open up the space for new ways of conceptualising politics and ethics. And all of them are tied to an understanding that language is the space in which these new forms of politics and ethics can take place and challenge the capture of language in modern politics. DIALECTICS In order to grasp the nature of Agamben’s attempt to ‘unwork’ systems and structures of thought that we encountered in the previous chapter through archaeology, it is necessary to provide a brief introduction to dialectics and binary oppositions. While Agamben wants to ultimately reject, or challenge, these binary structures, it is crucial that we understand the tradition against which he’s working. Without a knowledge of that tradition we cannot grasp the ways in which his

34

KEY IDEAS

method is a response to the Western philosophical tradition. Agamben wants to render the production of dialectical relations inoperative, attempting to explore and deactivate them in order to make them unworkable. This process is one that makes philosophical claims, but is also a critical method. Dialectics has a long history, initially used in ancient Greek philosophy as a rhetorical term to designate a certain style of argumentation. In modern thought it took on a more specific meaning in Immanuel Kant’s philosophy where it was used to describe the ways in which science struggled to explain previously religious or transcendental concepts, which Kant believed to be irresolvable. For Hegel modern rationality was more than capable of grasping these previously transcendental terms through a dialectical progression until it ended with the ultimate synthesis of all dialectical struggle, Absolute Spirit. Karl Marx then took up Hegel’s dialectics to theorise the development of man through the stages of history which would result in communist Utopia. While all these versions are very different, they all form the intellectual background that Agamben is alluding to when using the dialectical method. Dialectics proceeds by putting forward a thesis, which is countered with an antithesis, the process resulting in a new synthesis (through argumentation we resolve opposing positions by creating a new agreed position which has synthesised the previous two). This basic argumentative structure was used by Hegel and Marx to account for historical progression. It is important here that we note the importance of the Russian philosopher Alexandre Kojève in propagating a certain understanding of Hegelian dialectics. Kojève gave a series of talks in Paris in the 1930s which were later published as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit’. In the lecture series and in the ensuing publication, Kojève presented a largely materialist version of Hegel in which the search for the theological totality of Absolute Spirit was replaced by a more materialist idea of ‘the End of History’, which according to Agamben sought to ‘flatten out the messianic’ (TTR: 101). The lecture series was attended by some of the most important thinkers in France at the time including Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and was to affect the reading of Hegel in France, as well as America, for two generations. For Kojève’s Hegel, human history had been one of conflict in which peoples had struggled with one another for recognition, or more specifically a desire for that recognition. This was most famously

manifest in the master–slave dialectic in which humans struggle with one another for recognition, resulting in one party forcing the other through power into a position of subservience, recognising them as masters. However, this position is satisfactory for no one: the masters don’t want to be recognised as great by their inferiors, and of course slaves are never happy in their position as inferior. So the struggle between these parties for recognition continues, the conflict driving forward human history. It is also worth noting here that Kojève’s materialist recapitulation of Hegel through the master–slave dialectic produces an emphasis on the idea of work and its relationship to power, an important element when we turn to the ‘inoperativity’ that will govern Agamben’s approach to the dialectic. While this is a rudimentary understanding of dialectics, it should give us the basis for understanding how Agamben uses and subverts its structures in his own thought. The fact that dialectics opposes one force/form with another to account for the development of history is important. This is a binary form of thought which creates a somewhat mechanistic and limited perception of history, human relations, etc. It is also teleological, meaning that it puts forward a ‘telos’, a goal to which it strives, Absolute Spirit, the End of History, Utopia, etc. Teleological models of thought want to explain the past with an eye to a future, whereas Agamben wants to understand the past in order to open up radical possibility for the present. Agamben uses these binary or dialectical structures to characterise a whole range of different phenomena. Yet he suggests that there are often ‘original’ or foundational splits which will proceed to characterise the movement of a particular dialectical progression. Agamben will then identify something that is ‘produced’ by that split in the present, a production that would seem antithetical to the phenomena in question, working his way back, genealogically from the present, to uncover the unlikely corruption of the dialectic at a foundational moment. So Agamben is then a thinker of the dialectic, in that he uses a dialectical understanding of the history of ideas, plotting the development of concepts. Yet he is hardly an advocate of a teleological understanding of history, never attributing positive qualities to this forward movement. As I suggested in the introduction he explores the structure and architecture of ideas only with the goal of undermining them in order to realise a new present. It is not because Agamben favours a dialectical method as he believes it will bring about a new ‘THE TASK OF THE COMING PHILOSOPHY’

35

36

KEY IDEAS

future, as Marx or Hegel had in their respective ideas of the ‘End of History’. On the contrary it is only because our culture is dominated by binaries that Agamben seeks to use them to structure his critical methodology. Whereas his debt to Heidegger is located in exploring foundational structures of thought – in particular the idea that ‘language is the house of being’ – we can see his disruption of structures as driven far more by his debt to Walter Benjamin. WALTER BENJAMIN AND THE AGAMBENIAN METHOD Walter Benjamin is, as I have mentioned before, a strong influence on Agamben’s thought, and an exploration of his understanding of philosophical method and his understanding of history are essential for grasping Agamben’s thought. Benjamin was born in 1892 in Berlin to a middleclass Jewish family. He studied at universities in both Freiburg and Berlin, which culminated in his dissertation – written in 1919 and published in 1920 as a monograph – entitled ‘The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism’. This dense and (relatively) dry piece of work is an examination of the middle period Romantic writing of the Jena circle, focusing around the fragments of Novalis and in particular Friedrich Schlegel that were published in the Athenaeum journal. Benjamin’s essay plots the emergence of these ideas as a response to Fichte’s philosophy, arguing that the Romantics, in developing a philosophy focused on the fractured, infinite, yet redemptive form of the self, open up the possibility for a form of perpetual criticism and self-reflection that was to have ambiguous possibilities for both philosophy and cultural production. The notion of a fulfilled infinite is arguably important for Benjamin’s later conception of history, along with Agamben’s own work. In fact Agamben mentions the Jena school on numerous occasions and there is work to be done on exploring Agamben’s debt to German romanticism. Following this piece of academic scholarship, Benjamin went on to write a second thesis on the Trauerspiel, or German mourning play of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From this relatively conventional starting point, Benjamin produced a work of astonishing originality, casting a wide-philosophical gaze over the nature of baroque art and its relationship to history. Benjamin was advised by his mentors not to submit the dissertation as it would surely be failed in the traditional and conservative academy. Benjamin then left the university

system and turned his hand to journalism and a wide-ranging form of cultural criticism. This radical work of literary criticism, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, holds an often unrecognised place in Agamben’s body of work. Many commentators are keen to explore Agamben’s debt to Benjamin through the important essay ‘Critique of Violence’ and his final work ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. Yet in terms of method and the much larger questions of the task of a critical philosophy, Origin must stand as a key text for looking at this relationship. Its central importance for Agamben is its critical method, and to provide a brief account of this method will help to explain some of the striking characteristics of Agamben’s work. Agamben is unequivocal on its importance: For the Jena group, which attempted through the project of a ‘universal progressive poetry’ to abolish the distinction between poetry and the criticalphilological disciplines, a critical work worthy of the name was one that included its own negation; it was, therefore, one whose essential content consisted in precisely what it did not contain. The European critical essay in the present century is poor in examples of such a genre … there is strictly speaking perhaps only a single book that deserves to be called critical: the Ursprüng des deutschen Trauerspiel of Walter Benjamin. (S: xv)

But what would it mean for a critical work to include its own negation? Agamben claims that criticism is produced by the split between poetry and philosophy (which we will explore further in Chapter 6). Criticism’s goal is to provide a negation of itself by contributing to a realisation of language as communicating nothing more than itself. If you recall the model of philosophical archaeology outlined in the previous chapter, the goal of true criticism is to deactivate the moment of the split (between poetry and philosophy) on which it is based. So a critical work seeks to uncover the nature of that split in order to negate the very idea of criticism. Benjamin’s book is notoriously unruly and this unruliness comes, to a large extent, from its form. Agamben himself notes that even though difficult it is one of the most important: ‘this is surely the least popular of Benjamin’s works, but it is perhaps the only one in which he fulfilled his most profound intentions’ (S: 139). Benjamin conceptualises the work as a mosaic, one in which the individual pieces, ‘THE TASK OF THE COMING PHILOSOPHY’

37

38

KEY IDEAS

let us say the sentence, has to be seen as part of a whole. However, that cannot be achieved by an attempt to grasp the abstract, but through the form of presentation. To simplify this it is like reading a Virginia Woolf novel. If someone asked you what happened in Mrs Dalloway – i.e. the narrative movement at an abstract level – the book would seem to be hardly profound, most likely dull (lady prepares for a party). But it is through the representation, through her use of language, punctuation, metaphor, etc., that you can grasp a much larger ‘meaning’ behind her work. It is represented rather than told. Benjamin evokes a difference between knowledge and truth. Knowledge uses method to ‘acquire’ its object in consciousness. It is about grasping something by applying a particular method – it works on something rather than emerges from it. Truth instead seeks ‘selfrepresentation’ and is ‘immanent’. This term is a complex one, but it emerges from Kant where he distinguishes immanent from transcendental principles: the former is in the realm of something present in the universe, the latter lies beyond it and is presupposed in order to account for experience. So a transcendental principle is one which posits a guiding principle outside of the object it seeks to understand, immanent is within it. So if Benjamin’s method is immanent then it does so by presenting truth in the text itself, not through an abstract governing principle. So in a sense there can be no ‘key’ to Benjamin’s work, as it is not traditional philosophy. Nor, like poetry, can it hope to grasp language without knowing why. Instead it must, through the presentation (sentences, structures), reveal the truth of the text. As Benjamin asserts on the nature of the treatise: Its method is essentially representation. Method is a digression. Representation as digression – such is the methodological nature of the treatise. The absence of an uninterrupted purposeful structure is its primary characteristic. Tirelessly the process of thinking makes new beginnings, returning in a roundabout way to its original object. This continual pausing for breath is the mode proper to the process of contemplation. For by pursuing different levels of meaning in its examination of one single object it receives both the incentive to begin again and the justification of its irregular rhythm. Just as mosaics preserve their majesty despite their fragmentation into capricious particles, so philosophical contemplation is not lacking in momentum. (1998: 28)

The ‘capricious particles’ of the mosaic are a little like Agamben’s own, often fragmentary, reflections in works such as The Idea of Prose. The tangential nature of much of Agamben’s work – of which, I noted in the introduction, commentators such as Ross are so critical – is therefore completely integral to the Benjaminian form of criticism that Agamben undertakes. At stake here is not just a writing process. It is also a matter of reading, for if one cannot take refuge in the logical presuppositions of the text, the text must always be in a process of being written because each reading produces a new text. This perhaps explains Benjamin’s use of the term immanent to describe the emergence of truth in the work. It is within the work and can always emerge from it, but cannot be given. George Steiner summarises the way in which Benjamin treats primary texts: ‘the true critic-understander, the reader whose reading underwrites the continued life of the page before him, enacts his perceptions, creating an elucidatory, enhancing counter-statement to the primary text’ (Steiner in Benjamin 1998: 21). This form of ‘true’ criticism thus enacts rather than explains, represents rather than presents. This idea of an immanent representation should be kept in mind for the reader who approaches Agamben’s body of work. Without an awareness of it you risk trying to impose analytic models onto the text rather than allowing them to emerge from it. This explains, perhaps, why so many critics have read Agamben out of context, forcing him into hermeneutic frames from outside rather than trying to grasp the movement of his work from within. AGAMBEN AND HISTORY Along with a certain critical methodology and style, Agamben draws on Benjamin’s important theorisation of history. This discussion provides a consolidation on the idea of history in relation to philosophical archaeology and experience that we covered in the previous chapter. History has long been considered as a continuum that extends forward, reaching towards an infinite point of progress. History must therefore always look back to the past from the present, with the particular constitution of the present creating the means of looking back at the past. It is this model which is at the root of the phrase ‘history is always that written by the victors’. For Benjamin, and for Agamben, this is a model of history which fails to explore the foundations of historical knowledge, or historiography more generally, and ‘THE TASK OF THE COMING PHILOSOPHY’

39

40

KEY IDEAS

simply explores the past through the hegemonic logic of the present and must be undone in order to realise potentiality, to help us return to a new present. Benjamin’s model of ‘brushing history against the grain’ was developed prior to his work on Romanticism and the Trauerspiel. The outline of his alternative historiography was put forward in Benjamin’s first published piece ‘On the Life of Students’ (1915). It is a striking and succinct statement of Benjamin’s critical method in its nascent stages and deserves to be quoted at length: There is a view of history that puts faith in the infinite extent of time and thus concerns itself only with speed, or lack of it, with which people and epochs advance along the path of progress. This corresponds to a certain absence of coherence and rigor it demands on the present. The following remarks, in contrast, delineate a particular condition in which history appears to be concentrated in a single focal point, like those that have traditionally been found in the utopian images of the philosophers. The elements of the ultimate condition do not manifest themselves as formless progressive tendencies but are deeply rooted in every present in the form of the most endangered, excoriated and ridiculed ideas and products of the creative mind. The historical task is to disclose this immanent state of perfection and make it absolute, to make it visible and dominant in the present. This condition cannot be captured in terms of the pragmatic description of the details (the history of institutions, customs, and so on); in fact it eludes them. Rather, the task is to grasp its metaphysical structure, as with the messianic domain or the idea of the French Revolution. (1996: 37)

This passage dramatises Benjamin’s understanding of an ‘alternative’ approach to history. It is important here that it is not so much about the past, but about the present. This is no dry and formal historicism that seeks to uncover the past for the purposes of restoring an ‘accurate’ historical record. It is instead a matter of ‘grasping’ the structure of history, but a structure that is contained in the apparatuses of power that are often occluded by historical narrative. But this ‘grasping’ is not the ultimate point of the exercise, rather there is an immanent ‘disclosure’ in the present that Benjamin’s method is meant to uncover. This description of a critical methodology is one strikingly similar to Agamben’s that I outlined earlier in the discussion of archaeology. Yet in order to grasp the similarities, but also some of

the differences between the two, it is necessary to explore Benjamin’s philosophy of history in a little more depth. In the final years of his life Walter Benjamin became increasingly occupied with his project on the Parisian arcades, working on it relentlessly, with the working notes stretching out to fill numerous notebooks and thousands of pages. At the same time he was also developing the messianic elements of his philosophy of history. The Arcades Project, in its published form, is about 3,000 fragments, largely made up of quotations from philosophical, historical, fictional and economic sources, interspersed with Benjamin’s own theoretical reflections. The text is then divided into convolutes, organised around themes, the most important of these for our discussion being Convolute N, entitled ‘On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress’. It is here that Benjamin develops his famous formulation of the dialectical image. The Arcades Project, and Convolute N in particular, is intimately linked to Marx’s materialist conception of history. As Benjamin asserts, ‘Marx lays bare the causal connection between economy and culture. For us, what matters is the thread of expression. It is not the economic origins of culture that will be presented, but the expression of the economy in its culture’ (1999: 460). The extent to which Agamben follows Benjamin’s materialist conception of history is debatable. While Agamben has certainly drawn from the methodology that Benjamin utilises, his relationship to the Marxist materialism that underpins Benjamin is more problematic. For Marx history was to be grasped not by the structure of thought, but by the material conditions under which people exist. As Marx states in The German Ideology, ‘Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, religion, or anything one likes. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is determined by their physical constitution. In producing their means of subsistence men indirectly produce their actual material life’ (1998: 37). This means then that mankind’s existence is based upon activity, on creating the material conditions of its existence. As Marx states, ‘Life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is therefore the production of material life itself.’ The role of philosophy is then to maximise the conditions whereby this action can be experienced in the most sensuous, the most meaningful way. It also means that philosophy has to turn its attention, not to abstract concepts of thought, but ‘THE TASK OF THE COMING PHILOSOPHY’

41

42

KEY IDEAS

to the actual historical existence of man. As Marx’s infamous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach states, ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’ The focus of Marx’s thought is then the analysis of Man’s material condition, and how he has developed and improved that material condition in relation to nature. Marx’s historical analysis then became an analysis of the material conditions of all people, and history became a process in the advancement of those conditions, of workers taking their history into their own hands. The goal of such a model of history was to enable Man to free himself from the tyranny of the past. Yet as Marx understood this was not easy as history controls and determines our thought. As he states in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just as they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time honoured disguise and this borrowed language. (Marx, with Engels 1983: 398)

Marx’s sense of freeing the present from an enslavement to the past was taken up by Benjamin, and in a modified form by Agamben. But whereas Benjamin had sought to ground his understanding of history in the material traces of the past, Agamben works resolutely in the structures – political, ontological, epistemological, juridical, etc. – that work above and beyond those material conditions. The precise interrelation between Agamben, Marx and Marxism more broadly is certainly a topic that requires far more exploration (see de Boever: 2009). Suffice to say that Agamben’s Benjamin is given particular inflections that reveal as much about Agamben’s method and philosophical foundations as they do about Benjamin’s. Yet beyond the materialism of Benjamin’s understanding of history, there is a focus not just on the method of exploring the past, but on the representation of that past in the present. It is the representation

of that past and the form of the dialectical image that provides perhaps the most important intersection for Agamben’s reading of Benjamin, a focus that is indicative of Benjamin’s broader method, as discussed above. For Benjamin it is not merely grasping these processes but their presentation. Benjamin famously asserted, ‘method of this project: literary montage, I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse – these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them’ (1999: 460). Intrinsically linked to this mode of presentation is the relationship between past and the present. For Benjamin we are the product of a certain tradition, one of manifold possibilities that have arisen. The role of the dialectical historian is to awaken the present out of that tradition by presenting to it the ways in which it had arrived at that point, and how certain moments in history have been denied. So The Arcades Project becomes an attempt to discover in the past a continuum in the development of the political economy and the role of the phantasmagoric commodity within that economy in order to highlight the many flaws of the modes of production and consumption. As Tiedemann asserts, ‘Benjamin discovered the signature of the early modern in the ever more rapid obsolescence of the inventions and innovations generated by a developing capitalism’s productive forces’(1999: 932). The implementation of this philosophy of history would be a moment of realisation that comes with the dialectical image. As Benjamin asserts: It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill … Only dialectical images are genuine images … and the place where one encounters them is language. ‘Awakening.’ (1999: 462)

This passage embodies many elements of Benjamin’s philosophy of history, and the term ‘awakening’ perhaps crystallises both the method and goal of his project. It is also important here that language is the place where one uncovers dialectical images. The notion of the dialectical image working to bring a dialectic to a standstill is of central importance in appreciating the ways in which Agamben uses the dialectical method. While Benjamin, for the most part, concentrates his ‘THE TASK OF THE COMING PHILOSOPHY’

43

44

KEY IDEAS

own method to the study of history, Agamben utilises this idea of bringing dialectically opposed forces to a standstill in a far broader sense. The dialectical image can therefore be the moment in language, visual representation, a juridical situation, etc., in which one can see these oppositions, casting their lights upon one another, and crucially rendering them inoperative. INOPERATIVITY While there are many examples of dialectical opposites being brought to a standstill throughout Agamben’s oeuvre, I will focus on one here, that of the man/animal distinction. This opposition is crucial for Agamben as it directs an idea of the human which not only underpins our relation with animal ‘others’ but has worked to determine or naturalise some anthropological qualities as innate, covering over the power relations inherent in doing so. In his short book, The Open, Agamben begins with a dialectical image of sorts, a miniature from a thirteenth-century Hebrew Bible in which after the Day of Judgement the righteous are represented with animal heads. Using this obscure image, Agamben goes on to explore the ways in which the ‘anthropological machine’ of Western thought has always sought to privilege the human over the animal. For Agamben the very anthropological definition of homo sapiens is a ‘machine or device for producing the recognition of the human’ (O: 26). This machine must, according to Agamben, simultaneously exclude and include, rendering both the human and the inhuman, man and animal, as not in opposition, but governed by the same logic that seeks to define them. While this may seem a little oblique, it will become clearer in Chapter 4 when we examine Agamben’s figure of homo sacer, which is governed by the same logic of exclusive inclusion. But the point to notice here is that this machine of a binary opposition between human life and animal life does not strictly produce either. Instead it produces a third form of life, bare life, which destabilises the machine. It is important here that Agamben doesn’t advocate a third term that will be placed beyond this division. Instead he invokes the idea of a standstill: ‘That neither must man master nature, nor nature man. Nor must both be surpassed in a third term that would represent their dialectical synthesis. Rather, according to the Benjaminian model of a “dialectic at a standstill” what is decisive here is only the “between”, the interval or, we might say, the

play between the two terms, their immediate constellation in a noncoincidence.’ Yet as Agamben goes on to say, this is ‘something for which we perhaps have no name’ (O: 83). The question for Agamben in such instances is how one is able to ‘deactivate’ the machines, or in another sense how one is able to identify this between, to draw attention to it. It is not a matter of choosing animal life or human life, but of attempting to render the machine inoperative, to stop it from working. One of the key terms that we will encounter again and again for this stopping of ‘machines’ is inoperativity, or inoperosità in Italian. The term is translated more literally as idleness or inactivity, yet neither meaning conveys the strange sense of passivity that accompanies the potential for activity. The term has a near translation in French, désoeuvrement, one that Agamben uses in tandem with inoperativity in The Open and then again in The Time That Remains. The term also has the meaning of idleness, but it is notoriously difficult to translate (see Franchi, 2004). Its use in post-war philosophy stretches back to Alexandre Kojève and Georges Bataille who debated its meaning in the 1950s. It was then used by the French novelist and philosopher Maurice Blanchot. Désoeuvrement’s translation into English was given an extended discussion by Pierre Joris in the preface to Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community. There is no English word that truly conveys the sense of the French, and Joris suggests, somewhat amusingly, that ‘the puritan impulses of Anglo-American culture’ block ‘the very possibility of a positive, active connotation to be attached to the notion of an absence of work’ (1988: xxiv). As we can see it is an inversion of the word ‘oeuvre’ or body of work, so it would seem to be a non-work, or an unworking, inertia, lack of work. Bruce Baugh, in French Hegel, uses the term ‘poetic undoing’ to translate the term from Bataille’s essay on Surrealism, and I think it is important not to lose sight of the properly literary form that désoeuvrement and inoperativity take (2003: 76). Yet there is also, for Jean-Luc Nancy as well as Agamben, a properly ‘political’ form of désoeuvrement. As Nancy states, ‘the community takes place of necessity in what Blanchot has called désoeuvrement … the community is made up of the interruption of the singularities, or of the suspension singular beings are. It is not their work, and it does not have them as it works, not anymore than communication is a work … Communication is the unworking of the social, economic, technical, ‘THE TASK OF THE COMING PHILOSOPHY’

45

46

KEY IDEAS

institutional work’ (quoted in Joris 1988: xiv). This passage is alive with associations, and might make us think of the silent relationship Agamben has to the Autonomia movements in Italy in the 1970s. But it does allow us to think how dominant, hegemonic forms of work (and we should not think of labour here, but of a more general sense of work as a production, a making, an action that can be applied to systems more than individuals) can be undone, and about the political possibilities of undoing. The proliferation of meanings all point to a tension between activity and passivity, one that is key for Agamben. It would seem that in aligning désoeuvrement with inoperativity he is pointing to the term’s ambiguity, that it has the potential for both action and inaction. But proceeding with concrete examples of ‘inoperativity’ from outside Agamben’s own body of work is problematic. There is a temptation to ascribe the term ‘inoperativity’ to the workers’ movement in Italy in the 1970s, or alternatively to the politics of the Situationist International in May ’68. However, one should proceed cautiously. Agamben’s work is not that of a historian – as he makes explicit in ‘What Is a Paradigm?’ (2002, ‘WP’) – and he is reticent to outline and identify ‘real’ historical instances. ‘Examples’ in Agamben’s body of work are far more likely to emerge from philosophical, political and religious texts. There are a number of reasons for this particular methodology that I have highlighted in the introduction and in this chapter, but it is worth keeping in mind that there is an importance in inoperativity retaining an immanence, never passing into actuality. POTENTIALITY Closely linked to the non-working or unworking of inoperativity is Agamben’s theme of potentiality. In short potentiality is the principle that one always has the potential to do something, but whether one does it or not is another matter. Agamben investigates its philosophical history in order to outline the way in which suspending between the potential to do and not to do can disrupt forms of authority and control. Aristotle first formulated potentiality in opposition to actuality, an opposition which has been of tremendous importance for Western thought. Agamben wants to suggest that potentiality takes

two forms, and one is a key driving concept of humanity and governs the relentless move towards ‘imposing its power over the whole planet’ (Agamben P: 177). However, Agamben is careful to outline how, in Aristotle, there are two sorts of potentiality, namely the generic and the specific. The generic can apply to all of us: the child has a potential to acquire language. The specific relates to someone having a specific set of attributes/skills which will allow for the potential to do: the architect has the potential to build. The difference, Agamben notes, is that the child has to become altered, acquire a function it is initially without, whereas someone who has a skill has the potential to use it. The specific is then a potential to do something as much as it is NOT to do something, the potential not to pass into actuality. If we wanted to take this split between the generic and specific a little further, and to draw it back into Agamben’s work on language, we can begin to see the dynamic power of not doing, of not passing into actuality. Language, as Agamben suggests, is not something we can willingly acquire or that we naturally inhabit, on the contrary it is something we must take on. So the fact of having language is general, but the use of language enters into the realm of the specific. It is perfectly possible to refuse to speak or to use language in a way that doesn’t allow it to communicate, that renders it inoperative. For Agamben it is precisely this inoperativity or impotentiality that defines the human. As he states: Other living beings are capable only of their specific potentiality; they can only do this or that. But human beings are the animals who are capable of their own impotentiality. The greatness of human potentiality is measured by the abyss of human impotentiality. (P: 182)

Agamben provides an iconic image for symbolising this potentiality, namely thought as an empty writing tablet. Isidore of Seville described Aristotle as having ‘dipped his pen in thought’. This corresponds with Aristotle’s image in De Anima of the nous (intellect) as ‘like a writing tablet on which nothing is actually written’. The important feature of this image is that thought is not a thing, it is never rendered in concrete forms, can never pass into actuality, become static. This link with writing is hardly coincidental as it speaks directly to the previous ‘THE TASK OF THE COMING PHILOSOPHY’

47

48

KEY IDEAS

chapter of this book in which it became clear that the goal of all writing was to express nothing but itself. But that could hardly mean expression alone, yet cannot mean an absence of language. Language is then caught in a paradox: how can it express itself yet not express through signification? The answer is then the double negative of potentiality. As Agamben states, ‘Potentiality, which turns back on itself, is an absolute writing that no one writes: a potential to be written, which is written by its own potential not to be written, a tabula rasa that suffers its own receptivity and can therefore not notwrite itself ’ (P: 216). Writing, or language more broadly, is about drawing attention to these paradoxes, showing language through a series of absences, the absence of meaning, the communication of communication, rather than the illusion of communication itself. Agamben concludes that potentiality is not ‘annulled’ in the movement to actuality, but instead is saved in actuality and can always remain as a dynamic potential to do, and not to do. This principle of im/potentiality means that nothing remains static or fixed in Agamben’s view. The greatest of potentialities must remain fluid, dynamic and in a process of ‘becoming’ to borrow the terminology of Gilles Deleuze. So what does this potentiality look like? A central figure, or exemplar of potentiality, that Agamben returns to again and again is Bartleby, the scrivener from Herman Melville’s (1819–91) short story. Bartleby works as a scribe in a legal office on Wall Street. When asked to undertake a number of tasks, apart from copying documents (such as comparing documents, or running an errand to the post office), he responds ‘I would prefer not to’. While this response enrages his employer, Bartleby remains steadfast in his response to all entreaties to perform any task beyond that of copying. As the story progresses Bartleby even begins to refuse copying, causing his employer (who importantly symbolises the law) so much consternation he is forced to quit his offices and move to another building. The new tenants find Bartleby in the same position and he again repeats the phrase ‘I would prefer not to’ when asked by them to leave the offices. He is eventually arrested as a vagrant and put in prison where he ‘prefers not to’ eat and at the close of the story the narrator informs us of his death. Bartleby’s response is importantly not a refusal, it is simply a preference. Bartleby could, if he wished, undertake this task, yet he prefers not to. We may want to recall here that inoperativity is not about

outright destruction, but about deactivation, and Bartleby’s preference is very much about deactivating the structure of the law. Eventually Bartleby refuses to write at all, undertaking no activity. He causes so much consternation for his employer that he is forced to quit his offices, yet Bartleby remains, his obstinate preference continuing until he is removed as a vagrant and locked in prison. In his essay ‘Bartleby, or On Contingency’, Agamben suggests that Bartleby’s response is the epitome of potentiality. If we recall our earlier discussion of potentiality, it is always the potential to not do, as well as to do. As Agamben states, ‘the formula that he so obstinately repeats destroys all possibility of constructing a relation between being able and willing … It is the formula of potentiality’ (P: 235). Through the figure of Bartleby, Agamben is able to provide us with a relatively straightforward example of what this philosophical claim ‘looks like’ through turning to a literary ‘experiment’ to illustrate potentiality. And as Arne de Boever has suggested we can read Bartleby’s ‘I would prefer not to’ as an index of ‘inoperative power’, that is the ability to disrupt the function of power by refusing to either obey or reject it, that runs throughout Agamben’s body of work. The place these literary figures hold will become clearer in Chapter 5 when we look in more depth at Agamben’s work on Kafka. Suffice to say that it is of vital importance that Bartleby’s utterance retains an ambivalence and works to disrupt the logic of the legal world which can tolerate (through punishment and process) outright dissent, yet is left in ruins when potentiality stalls in its passage through to the actuality that the law needs to operate upon. Perhaps it is worth reflecting on the end of Melville’s story in which our narrator hears a report that Bartleby had once worked in the Dead Letter Office in Washington. Our narrator speculates that it was this particular role that left Bartleby’s acute preference: ‘Conceive of a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters, assorting them for the flames?’ (Melville 2003: 47). Agamben notes that our narrator’s initial attempts to pathologise Bartleby’s actions are way off the mark. For Agamben it is the final image of Bartleby that underpins the logic of potentiality: Sometimes from out of the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring – the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity – he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; ‘THE TASK OF THE COMING PHILOSOPHY’

49

50

KEY IDEAS pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death. (Melville 1995: 47).

Potentiality is always about the potential to not do, but also about the potential to not be written, if we reflect on the image of the writing tablet. The dead letter office is indicative of potentiality: it is the letters not sent, ‘the cipher of joyous events that never took place. What took place was instead the opposite possibility’ (Agamben P: 269). It is for this reason that ‘every letter is in this sense a “dead letter”’. In this sense Bartleby marks potentiality not in terms of what could happen, but what never happened. This marks Bartleby as ‘a new Messiah’ but one who comes not ‘like Jesus to redeem what was, but to save what was not’ (P: 270). As we will see in Chapter 7 salvation in Agamben’s understanding of the Messianic is never a matter of return to a past but an attempt to save what has never happened, ‘saved in being irredeemable’ (P: 271). THE COMING COMMUNITY Potentiality, to do and not to do, is the basis for the realisation of what Agamben terms ‘the coming community’. The coming community may take on the appearance of a ‘horizon’ to Agamben’s thought, but as should have become clear in the discussion of potentiality there is no ‘end’ or telos to Agamben’s thought, there is only the condition for the possibility of potentiality which will always be a form of means, never moving into actuality, finding an end. Perhaps a closer look at the Italian may help: La comunità che viene. The problem with the translation of ‘coming’ is that in English it is the action of the verb ‘come’ but also a participle with no clear tense, suggesting both drawing near, approaching, ‘The coming summer looks to be wet’ as well as arrival and advent, ‘Johnny is coming over’. So ‘coming community’ can give the impression of a community which draws near in the future which can lead to a misreading of it as a perpetual futurity (think here of Agamben’s criticism of deconstruction as ‘infinite deferment’). Viene is in Italian the third-person singular present indicative of the verb ‘venire’ and che is a relative pronoun or a conjunction. So a more accurate, if clumsy, English title is ‘the community which/that comes’, capturing

the present tense and avoiding any futural connotations. For Agamben it is a community that is always in the process of coming, is here in the present, yet whose potential hasn’t been grasped. The ‘coming community’ is then a way of referring to or naming the collective potentiality of beings, a possible form of human belonging which will result in a dwelling, to which Agamben gives the name ethos. Yet the coming community is ‘unpresupposable’ which means that it has no real attributes, no concrete conditions. Instead Agamben provides us with a series of statements on this coming community which make clear that it emerges from within the paradoxes and problems of our own time. The coming community is immanent to our own troubled context and should not be seen as a form of utopian thought, a thought of the future, to which we have to aspire. The idea of community suggests a form of belonging. A community is generally understood as a group of people with shared attributes who come together to form a loose collective: ‘the academic community’; ‘the Jewish community’; ‘the footballing community’; etc. Very rarely do these people actually know one another, but are brought together by an assumed shared identity, or a common character. The ‘coming being’ which will form a new model of community is without belonging except for belonging itself. This being which Agamben calls ‘whatever being’ will belong to nothing except itself. There will be no forms of identity, no reduction of a self to a subset of collective existence, but a refusal to undergo any attribution. It is here that Agamben suggests the ‘example’ might help us to grasp the form of non-identity in the coming community: ‘neither particular nor universal, the example is a singular object that presents itself as such, that shows its singularity’ (1993, CC: 10). In doing so it is unable to be taken into one community, instead it always exists ‘beside itself ’ ‘without being tied to any property, by any identity’. The formlessness of the example is important as it explains precisely why Agamben’s community and the whatever beings that make it up must be ‘unpresupposable’. If they were to be given any attribute they would immediately return into that idea of belonging that ‘obliges knowledge to choose between the ineffability of the individual and the intelligibility of the universal’. Instead the coming being is ‘such as it is’ (CC: 1). To exist with an ‘indifference’ to common forms of belonging and to fall neither into a singularity of identity nor the emptiness of universalism is the condition of the being that will usher in the coming community. ‘THE TASK OF THE COMING PHILOSOPHY’

51

52

KEY IDEAS

The unpresupposable nature of the coming community can make it difficult to grasp. One cannot point to an action and say ‘yes, this represents the coming community’. For that reason any examples of direct political action are problematic. Yet it may be of use here to look at the relationship the community has to communication, and Agamben’s suggestion of how the contemporary condition of global capitalism makes the coming of this community more of a possibility than ever before. Agamben attributes to this community an ‘inessential commonality, a solidarity that in no way concerns an essence. Taking place, the communication of singularities in the attribute of extension, does not unite them in essence, but scatters them in existence’ (CC: 19). As Agamben suggests, a commonality is also about a form of communication, and it is perhaps at the level of communicability that we can see the basis for this coming community. The language, or more importantly the communication (since it will not be necessarily linguistic), of the coming community is one that will not communicate meaning, speak to certain values, etc., but will instead communicate communicability itself. The dominant relationship between language and community is that a group of people must share a common tongue in order to engender fellow feeling. This is a modern idea that is tied to the birth of the nation state and the rise of ‘languages-in-power’. There was a need to turn the dialects and vernaculars into languages of ‘fellow-feeling’, hence standardised English as a means of bringing together disparate parts of the ‘Union’ that had shared little or no commonality. Perhaps we can take John Stuart Mill’s (1806–73) statement of the importance of language and nationality from 1861 as indicative. Here the great philosopher of liberalism outlines how language is key to the primary level of government: ‘Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist’ (1996: 41). Agamben’s work recognises the interrelatedness between language and the modern idea of politics: ‘we do not have … the slightest idea of what either a people or a language is … nevertheless, all of our political culture is based on the relation between these two notions’ (MwE: 66). Agamben suggests that there is no longer any substance to the idea of a people, and it is now simply ‘an empty support of state identity’ (67). His conclusion reveals that such languages are ‘jargons’

that work to hide the ‘pure experience of language’. It is that pure experience that will be the basis for the new community, the basis for its communicability. It is worth here noting the importance of Guy Debord (1931–94), the political theorist and ‘leader’ of the avant-garde movement, the Situationist International, for Agamben’s understanding of the ‘coming community’, and for his politics more generally. While we will return to Debord in our discussions of cinema in Chapter 5, Debord’s profane attempt to undermine the ‘society of the spectacle’, as he dubbed post-war capitalism, remains an often unrecognised influence on Agamben’s work (see Murray 2008). Debord suggests that the spectacle only offers us an illusion of freedom and choice: we enter into it, yet we have little or no means of altering it. It works to desubjectivise us, forcing us to acquiesce to its all-encompassing logic. As Debord suggests, ‘The spectacle is by definition immune from human activity, inaccessible to any projected review or correction. It is the opposite of dialogue’ (1995: 17). The fact that there is no possibility of ‘dialogue’ with the spectacle means for Debord, as well as Agamben, that there can be no negotiation with the spectacle. As Agamben states in his ‘Marginal Notes on Commentaries on Society of the Spectacle’, ‘Debord’s books constitute the clearest and most severe analysis of the miseries and slavery of a society that has extended its dominion over the whole planet’ (MwE: 73). Agamben’s critique of the planetary petit bourgeoisie speaks directly to Debord and his assertion that the ‘ “historic mission to establish truth in the world” can be carried out neither by the isolated individual nor by atomized and manipulated masses, but – only and always – by the class that is able to affect the dissolution of all classes’ (1995: 154). This class without classes should be seen as analogous to Agamben’s coming community. Agamben, as I suggested in the introduction, sees the transformation of the present as immanent to it. And the immanent arrival of the coming community is not suppressed or prevented by the contemporary, but instead is made possible by it. As we have seen in the case of inoperativity it is the very unworking of the system that allows for its overcoming. It is the dominance of the ‘planetary bourgeoisie’ that has, according to Agamben, created the ‘opportunity unheard of in the history of humanity’ for the creation of the singular beings of the coming community. A planetary petit bourgeoisie suggests that the previous forms of class struggle are over, and we are now left with a ‘THE TASK OF THE COMING PHILOSOPHY’

53

54

KEY IDEAS

singular class that seeks to erase forms of social identity which has led to a destruction of the illusion of previous forms of identity: That which has constituted the truth and falsity of the peoples and generations that have followed one another on the earth – differences of language, of dialect, of ways of life, of character, of custom, and even the physical particularities of each person – has lost any meaning for them and any capacity for expression and communication. In the petty bourgeoisie, the diversities that have marked the tragicomedy of universal history are brought together and exposed in a phantasmagorical vacuousness. (CC: 64)

The removal of localised forms of belonging and the creation of a homogenous global culture is often decried by those who see in it the destruction of the past. One response is to return to forms of localism and national identities, folk custom and local dialect in order to protect a ‘false identity’ of the past. It should be clear by now that Agamben is not a thinker who posits a return to origin, or in any way valorises the past, and in the face of ‘humanity moving towards destruction’ (65), he sees the possibility of a ‘singularity without identity’ emerging. The emergence of a coming community is not something however that will occur in and of itself. Instead it must be brought about, and this, Agamben reminds us again and again throughout his work, is ‘the political task of our generation’ (65). SUMMARY Agamben’s thought, while based in a philosophy of language and metaphysical concerns which focus upon forms of negativity, extends out to consider far more ‘productive’ forms of challenging the paradoxes his thought identifies. We can see this through the ways in which he attempts to expose the ‘inoperativity’ of binary systems. This form of ‘interruption’ is drawn, to some extent, from the work of Walter Benjamin whose work attempted to identify those points where the tensions between dialectical opposites had become most strained. Agamben also takes from Benjamin a mode of presentation, a stylistics that sees the ‘truth’ of the work as immanent to it but not expressed. This sense of immanence can clearly be seen in Agamben’s use of Aristotle’s idea of potentiality in which one has the potential to

both do and not do. Agamben suggests that potentiality is at the heart of the ‘coming community’, the form of non-identity that he suggests can emerge from within the paradoxes of the contemporary. In outlining Agamben’s vision of an ‘inoperative’ politics and a coming community we can see more clearly the ways in which his thought offers its own possibilities for rethinking politics.

‘THE TASK OF THE COMING PHILOSOPHY’

55

4

POLITICS – BARE LIFE AND SOVEREIGN POWER

As I suggested in the introduction to this book, it is primarily his series of works known as Homo Sacer that have brought Agamben’s work to international prominence. These works, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life; Remnants of Auschwitz; The State of Exception and the as yet untranslated Il Regno e la Gloria (The Kingdom and the Glory), explore what Agamben has designated the ‘biopolitical’ nature of modern life by tracing its emergence in the juridical and political traditions of the West. In this chapter we will move through the complex critique of the political that underpins Homo Sacer, at the same time examining how this work of ‘political philosophy’ is tied to Agamben’s earlier work on language. The Western political tradition has according to Agamben, split life into two categories, zoe- (the biological fact of having life) and bios (political or qualified life). For Agamben this process leads to a production of ‘bare life’, an inbetween of the two categories that marks the limit point of politics. In doing so Agamben calls into question the very principles of Western democracy, a critique which only gained in power in the light of the ‘War on Terror’ and the emergence of ‘biopolitcal’ practices and ‘spaces of exception’ in Guantánamo Bay. AGAMBEN AND FOUCAULT In order to understand Agamben’s critique of sovereign power and articulation of the place of bare life, it is necessary to first provide a

brief introduction to the term ‘biopolitics’ and to the work of Foucault more generally. Agamben takes this term (often interchangeable with biopower) from the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1926–84), one of the most famous intellectuals in post-war France whose books on public health, sexuality and the prison system have left a significant impact across the social sciences and humanities. His relationship to Agamben, like that of Benjamin and Heidegger which we have explored previously, is complex. While Heidegger and Benjamin provide something like a ‘foundation’ to Agamben’s thought, Foucault plays an equally important place in raising questions of methodology. Agamben’s publications on methodology which have appeared relatively recently (covering the terms archaeology, paradigm and dispositif) have been made with direct reference to the work of Foucault, and a brief discussion of them here may help to clarify Agamben’s relationship to Foucault. Foucault’s work is concerned with the exploration of systems and structures of thought, or with epistemology, that branch of philosophy that explores how we come to have knowledge. Foucault’s early work was a systematic account of the ways in which the organisation of knowledge shifted and changed over time. The goal therefore was not to plot the history of a society through an analysis of its political systems, war and conflict, victory and loss, but instead to look at a ‘deeper’ understanding of how society produced knowledge. In his essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ Foucault outlines how this process is not just about tracing a line of descent, but is also about exploring the present as produced by a series of shifts, changes, traces: Genealogy does not resemble the evolution of a species and does not map the destiny of a people. On the contrary, to follow the complex course of descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents, the minute derivations – or conversely, the complete reversals – the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have no value for us; it is to discover that truth or being does not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents. (1977: 81)

Importantly for Foucault these explorations are not about a search for ‘origin’ but are instead an attempt to uncover the complexity of POLITICS – BARE LIFE AND SOVEREIGN POWER

57

58

KEY IDEAS

historical relations in the traces of what can no longer be seen. In doing so it was possible to see how present systems of understanding and knowing ourselves developed in ways that may now seem deeply problematic. Genealogy then is about exploring the present state, attempting to understand its development and therefore to challenge its dominant logic. This genealogical method is also given the name of archaeology, and Agamben often uses the two terms interchangeably, although they remain unclearly distinct in Foucault’s body of work. Within the context of Agamben’s understanding of politics we can see the value of this genealogical method. The traditional idea of the relation between power and politics is that they are concerned with the juridical and institutional use of authority and control that are seen to have identifiable outlets of control – the police, the army, the judiciary, etc. So power is visible and is usually linked to punishment and security: the state exercises power when an equilibrium is threatened (we could think here of the army that can be deployed to control civil unrest, or an intelligence agency that monitors terrorists, trying to prevent crime in order to maintain security). For Foucault this common understanding of power didn’t take into account the ways in which modern politics had come to use techniques of control and manipulation to subjugate our bodies, invading every aspect of our lives. Power is therefore not simply a visible or spectacular response to unrest or its potential, but the use of techniques and technologies of control. WHAT IS ‘BIOPOLITICS’? Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Foucault explored the more obvious forms of power and domination in works such as Madness and Civilization and Discipline and Punish. These works, exploring the development of modern psychiatry and the rise of modern penal institutions respectively, were groundbreaking attempts to understand modern forms of power, which Foucault claimed had differed from previous historical periods. However, towards the end of his life Foucault was to refine and complicate these analyses with a move towards examining biopower. Foucault first coined the term in his study The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge, where he explored how in modern politics the state attempted to exert control over entire populations. No longer was it a matter of controlling those who

threatened the stability of the state, but of controlling everyone. Foucault identified the body as the site where this power was exerted. There are many examples he utilises, including the move from the ‘Territorial State’ to the ‘State of Population’. The move that Foucault describes is that away from security being the attempt by a sovereign nation to protect, and in many cases increase, its territory through using force to control both internal and external threats. In this model of power the state doesn’t care about the populous as long as it pays tax and remains docile. Foucault argues that in the modern period we move to a model whereby the state tries to control the population through technologies of power. For instance the nation’s health now becomes a concern of sovereign power. A healthy population is a controlled population, and the institutionalisation of medicine, the use of vaccination, the move towards curing and preventing disease, rather than excluding the unhealthy, marks the coming of a state that is concerned with the body as the site of power. Here the monitoring of the population through the social sciences of observation and modelling represents the far more benign, yet also far more insidious, use of power. As Foucault states, The endeavour, begun in the eighteenth century, to rationalize the problems presented to governmental practice by the phenomena characteristic of a group of living human beings constituted as a population: health, sanitation, birth-rate, longevity, race … It seems to me that these problems cannot be dissociated from the framework of political rationality within which they appeared and developed their urgency … In a system anxious to have the respect of legal subjects and to ensure the free enterprise of individuals, how can the ‘population’ phenomenon, with its specific effects and problems, be taken into account? On behalf of what, and according to what rules, can it be managed? (1997: 74)

It is important to note here that for Foucault, as well as for Agamben, power is not wholly negative. These technologies have provided real benefits, yet at the same time great evil, as Foucault noted: ‘at once it becomes possible both to protect life and to authorize a holocaust’ (as quoted in Agamben HS: 3). This biopolitical nature of the modern state is, according to Foucault, a new development, and this is crucial as Agamben will suggest that, on the contrary, biopolitics is not strictly modern. In Foucault’s account the ancient Greeks POLITICS – BARE LIFE AND SOVEREIGN POWER

59

60

KEY IDEAS

had seen politics as separate from mankind’s life. Politics calls into question the idea of life, in fact politics has to exclude life from its sphere in order to pursue the ‘good life’. For Foucault the inclusion of life into the political constitutes the modern idea of the political, marking a radical break from previous political traditions. Agamben’s account of biopolitics is one that he offers as a corrective to Foucault’s. As he states in Homo Sacer: The Foucauldian thesis will then have to be corrected, or at least completed … The decisive fact is that, together with the process by which the exception becomes the rule, the realm of bare life – which is originally situated at the margins of the political order – gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe-, right and fact enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction … When its borders begin to be blurred, the bare life that dwelt there frees itself in the city and becomes both subject and object of the conflicts of the political order, the one place for both the organization of state power and emancipation from it. (HS: 9)

In short Agamben claims that modern biopolitics represents not a break with the classical idea of politics that underpins Western society, but instead ushers in the point at which an exclusive inclusion becomes manifest. Agamben claims that the category of life (zoe-) was not excluded from the classical sphere of the political (bios). Instead Agamben turns to the sovereign exception, claiming that it is in the figure of the sovereign or the king that we can see the ways in which it is always possible to remove a figure (the king) from the sphere of the political (the king is not subject to the same laws and regulations as his citizens). Agamben then suggests that this exception works at the other end of the political order in which it becomes possible to exclude a citizen from the city, taking away their political rights so it is no longer illegal for him to be killed. This figure, which Agamben identifies as homo sacer, or sacred man, is the paradigm of politics. Agamben can thus provide a genealogy or a counter-history of Western politics through the figure of homo sacer, suggesting that the modern figure of the refugee, as well as the prisoner in the concentration camp, represent the limit point of politics, and ask us to call into question the future of the institutions through which we attempt to achieve the ‘good life’.

ZOE , BIOS, BARE LIFE Before we progress to looking at how Agamben tells the narrative of homo sacer, it is essential we are clear on the meaning of some of the terminologies central to the book: zoe-, bios, bare life. Zoe- is life. Simply, it is existence. Mankind, gods and animals all share zoe- – it is indistinct and vital. It is also unqualified, and this is key for Agamben. It exists prior to language and community and is therefore the substance out of which we emerge. Bios is, if you like, what emerges from that substance. As humans we go beyond zoe-, reaching into the sphere of bios where we attempt to construct life beyond zoe-, a collective and qualified life. The space of bios is the polis, the collective political space which was the basis of ancient Greek ideas of democracy. It is of vital importance that we note zoe- is, for Agamben, prelinguistic, and that bios is linguistic. If we recall our earlier discussion of language, we can map zoe- onto the realm of the voice, or infancy. Agamben does not suggest that infancy is a state to which we can return, no more than we can hope to return to a pre-political world beyond the polis, before bios. Instead his concern is with how the split between bios and zoe- – as in the split between the voice and language – produces a space of both the negative and, through rendering it inoperative, a radical potential. Bare life (or in Italian nuda vita, also translated as naked life) is what is produced by the split between zoe- and bios. Zoe- is not bare life. While they may seem to be similar, and at times they can even seemingly be conflated in Agamben’s text, they share radically different attributes. It might help here to discuss the category of life. If zoe- is life, and bios is qualified or political life, any attempt to qualify life, through attributes such as ‘good’ or ‘bare’, is a move away from zoe-. Therefore bare life exists in the realm of the political and results from the fact that zoe- entered the polis at its very conceptualisation. As will become clear in what follows, bare life represents both a crisis of the political, along with its potential undermining from within. It is this space of the in-between that, as we have seen, characterises Agamben’s thought. POLITICS – BARE LIFE AND SOVEREIGN POWER

61

62

KEY IDEAS

THE LOGIC OF SOVEREIGNTY In order to outline bare life as a product of the polis, it is necessary for Agamben to look at the sovereign exception in depth. Here Agamben is heavily influenced by the German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt (1888–1985). In recent years, and to some extent as a result of Agamben’s work, Schmitt has become an important figure in political philosophy. Schmitt was responsible for writing a number of important works that justified and explained the National Socialist Party’s actions in Germany during the 1930s. Schmitt famously declared that the exception in politics was in fact the rule. As he stated in his important book Political Theology, ‘The exception is more interesting than the regular case. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything: it confirms not only the rule but also its existence, which derives only from the exception. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become more torpid by repetition’ (2005: 15). This insight is the key to Agamben’s indictment of politics. For Agamben the exception is not a complete exclusion from the political sphere, but is instead ‘taken outside’ as its etymological root from the Latin ex-capere reveals. Because the exception is not excluded, but is in fact included, it means that at the heart of the political order is the elusive and ambivalent figure of the sovereign exception. The sovereign can declare a ‘state of emergency’, effectively suspending some of the rules of law and placing himself in the position of the judiciary. We might want to think of recent examples in the United States, when after September 11th, President George W. Bush invoked emergency powers in the interest of national security. In doing so he suspended the normal functioning of law. It was as if in order to maintain the normal running of the country it became necessary to suspend the juridical order, the process by which laws are made, passed and put into operation, placing such powers in the hands of the president. As Agamben states of such processes in The State of Exception, ‘The fact is that in both the right of resistance and the state of exception, what is ultimately at issue is the question of the juridical significance of a sphere of action that is itself extrajuridical’ (SE: 11). The point here is that the juridical can be taken over by that which lies outside of it. This of course means that in the state of exception the rule of law is suspended in order to protect it, thus

creating an inclusive exclusion, whereby that which is outside the rule of law (sovereign power) is brought inside the rule of law, yet remains outside of it. The complex process of inclusion and exclusion at play here calls into question the very idea of the law. If the law is the abstract independent body of rules and practices that exists in the name of our collective protection, then for it to be invaded by a partisan political power is a threat to the very existence of a body whose legitimacy is based upon independence. Agamben’s exploration of the sovereign exception goes beyond simply identifying the inclusive exclusion that operates here. More importantly he suggests that the exception creates the ‘very space in which the law is able to have validity’ (HS: 19). The State of Exception is thus a ‘threshold’ space, to use Agamben’s favoured term, between the outside and the inside, which validates both. In order for law to work it must create an ‘inside’ – what is within the juridical and political process – and what is outside that space. That there is a space beyond the law – i.e. both beyond its protection but also beyond its prosecution (the spaces occupied by both homo sacer and the sovereign) – gives the inside of the law meaning. In fact Agamben suggests, following Schmitt, that Law is a ‘dead letter’ without the exception. It is in ‘the very life of men’, according to Schmitt, that the exception is able to transform the law from an inert series of principles to a performative and effective form of control. Yet for Schmitt that transformation was one that took place through the action of the sovereign, a sovereign decision. In the debate between Benjamin and Schmitt on the State of Exception that Agamben recreates, he sides with Benjamin in the assertion that in it, exception and norm have entered a zone of indistinction. The rule of the exception thus becomes indistinguishable from the rule of law. What had become accepted in the First World War as the exceptionable suspension of the rule of law in times of political crises was now to permeate the law itself. While Agamben locates the modern sovereign exception in the First World War, the Third Reich and in our contemporary political situation, he also attempts to place it into a much longer history. As I suggested earlier Agamben believed that Foucault’s project of investigating biopower had failed to effectively explore the roots of modern power. In Agamben’s body of work the sovereign exception is instead operative at a number of decisive points. As I suggested in the introduction and in Chapter 1, Agamben’s work is marked by POLITICS – BARE LIFE AND SOVEREIGN POWER

63

64

KEY IDEAS

genealogy and philology, an attempt to trace concepts by mapping their development – both structural and linguistic – across historical periods. Accordingly, Agamben finds the sovereign exception stretching back to Pindar, the ancient Greek lyric poet. In this movement he also locates the sovereign exception in the medieval period and in Roman law. THE PRODUCTION OF HOMO SACER A large part of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is a genealogy of bare life through a tracing of the figure of homo sacer to the present day. Agamben turns to ancient Roman law to investigate the constitution of sovereignty which he sees as being intrinsically bound up in the production of political bare life. He focuses on a paradox in ancient Roman law, the figure of homo sacer. Agamben details how this ‘sacred man’ could be condemned to death by law, but could not be sacrificed, having his political ‘life’ removed, able to be killed at will without the threat of retribution or punishment. Agamben quotes Pompeius Festus on the meaning of the homo sacer: The sacred man is the one whom the people have judged on account of a crime. It is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide; in the first tribunitian law, in fact, it is noted that ‘if someone kills the one who is sacred according to the plebiscite, it will not be considered homicide.’ This is why it is customary for a bad or impure man to be called sacred. (HS: 71)

Sacrifice in Roman law was also a form of ritual punishment or purification which was not the same as a death penalty. Agamben notes that these purification rites were still part of a religious legal sphere, yet homo sacer cannot be treated in the same way. Homo sacer belongs to God in that he is unsacrificeable and somehow already sacred: ‘Life that cannot be sacrificed and yet may be killed is sacred life’ (HS: 82). So the death of homo sacer is neither sacrifice nor homicide, leaving him simultaneously included and excluded from both the religious and legal spheres (we will return to this idea of the sacred sphere never being completely removed from the earthly

or profane in Chapter 7). Agamben then notes, and it is one of the key arguments of Homo Sacer, that the figure of homo sacer shares a similar structural position as the sovereign, both being part of a ‘double exclusion’, a ‘zone of indistinction between sacrifice and homicide’ (HS: 83). To grasp the process whereby the sovereign and homo sacer share similar structural places as both inside and outside the law, Agamben introduces the idea of the ban/abandonment, which he locates in the work of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (1940–). If the sovereign exception takes homo sacer outside then homo sacer, like the sovereign, is taken outside the law by the law. Being excluded from the law should not be seen as being somehow ‘outside’ or ‘beyond’ the law. Instead one can be no more ‘within’ the law when one is denied it. Therefore abandonment is the state of being left on the threshold between inside and outside. Agamben sees the ban then as the ‘potentiality of the law to maintain itself in its own privation, to apply in no longer applying’ (HS: 28). The sovereign ban then is a form of relation naming the very fact that the function of sovereign power reduces the sovereign to the same liminal state as sovereign power, ‘the force of attraction and repulsion that ties together the two poles of the sovereign exception’ (HS: 110). Homo sacer is then the ‘human victim’ who is captured in the sovereign ban, revealing that the production of bare life is the ‘originary activity of sovereignty’. The force of this claim is that there is the potential for any and all of us to be one of these liminal figures: ‘the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns’ (HS: 84). It is this position of the potential for all those subjected to legal order to be faced with the possibility of exclusion (through inclusion) from political life that has been the most controversial of Agamben’s claims. Whereas Foucault’s work had maintained, albeit silently, a ‘vanishing point’ that never quite reconciled ‘juridico-institutional and the biopolitical models of power’ (HS: 6), Agamben suggests that it is the absence of this continuum at work that resulted in Foucault’s misunderstanding of the nature of the biopolitics in modern totalitarian states. Agamben’s contention is that in tracing the genealogy of the two figures of the sovereign exception and homo sacer through to their originary structural point, we are now in a position to understand the nature of the concentration camp and the capture of POLITICS – BARE LIFE AND SOVEREIGN POWER

65

66

KEY IDEAS

life under fascism. Agamben plots the development of modern homo sacer, beginning with the introduction of the writ of habeas corpus in England in 1679. In Latin the term means ‘present the body’ and was a summons to those who held a prisoner in custody to bring him before the court and prove their authority for holding him. It is considered one of the fundamental principles of the Western legal tradition, namely that one is allowed a fair trial by jury. He claims that this is the first instantiation of modern biopolitics, the point at which the body becomes clear as the site of the legal. The introduction of corpus instead of homo as the object of the legal injunction is, according to Agamben, proof that the body was now not simply politicised, but the basis of a new modality of the political. Agamben claims that what comes to light in habeas corpus is the continuing production of homo sacer, except this time with the difference that the sacred man is no longer whole or complete: ‘modern democracy does not abolish sacred life but rather shatters it and disseminated it into every individual body, making it what is at stake in political conflict’ (HS: 124). Now there is always already a trace of sacred life in the declaration of the sovereign political subject. To be the free subject of modern Western liberal democracy means, for Agamben, to be potentially reduced to the corpus, the body, stripped of rights and protection. The next stop in Agamben’s genealogy of modern homo sacer is the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789, the document often celebrated as the foundation stone of modern democracy. Yet for Agamben it represents instead the point at which homo sacer enters into its modern incarnation as tied to a sovereign state and territory, ‘the originary figure of the inscription of natural life in the juridico-political order of the nation state’. While the Declaration establishes the notion that all men are ‘born with inalienable rights’ Agamben is quick to identify that the very fact that men are ‘born’ with these rights ties those same rights to the nation, with the word being derived etymologically from nascere, or being born. The result is that ‘bare, natural life’, the fact of being born, is already incorporated into the fabric of the political structure. Men now become members of a collective sovereign that is based on its ability to declare the very fact of being born, zoe-. Life has now become political and in doing so there is no essential value that can be placed on life except for it either being incorporated or not in a political field.

THE CAMP, REFUGEES AND THE POLITICS OF DEATH It is of vital importance that Agamben sought to uncover, even if very briefly, the figure of homo sacer lurking in the heart of the two principles – habeas corpus and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man – that underpin the modern discourses of law and politics respectively. The importance is that it allows Agamben to demonstrate that the principles that would be invoked in a defence of the Western politico-juridical tradition are already captured in the production of bare life. He is now in a position to put forward his most radical example of homo sacer – that of the concentration camp as nomos (or the space of the political) and of the refugee and concentration camp prisoner as homo sacer. In doing so Agamben has neatly tied the political principles of Western civilisation and the inalienable freedoms of modern mankind to the most horrific events of the twentieth century. In what follows we will trace his reading of modern homo sacer to see how Agamben can claim that modern politics is in a ‘lasting eclipse’ and to glimpse something like the productive or alternative notion of ‘politics’, or more accurately community, that Agamben tentatively posits. The figure of the refugee is one of the clearest examples of homo sacer and the sovereign exception that exist in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The refugee reveals the ways in which the spaces of sovereign power and the sovereign exception operate with a ruthless efficiency to define the life of its citizens from others. Agamben states that the refugee is a limit concept that radically calls into question the fundamental categories of the nation-state, from the birth–nation to the man–citizen link, and that thereby makes it possible to clear the way for a long-overdue renewal of categories in the service of which bare life is no longer separated and excepted, either in the state order or in the figure of human rights. (HS: 134)

Seeing the refugee as homo sacer allows for a clear understanding of the place that these figures of bare life hold in the contemporary political context. Instead of being the exceptional figures – those few who are without the rights of a citizen – they call into question POLITICS – BARE LIFE AND SOVEREIGN POWER

67

68

KEY IDEAS

the entire idea of human rights, of the ways in which a state or territory can include a member as part of a community, and can subsequently always exclude them. The idea of ‘human rights’ is then a façade. As Agamben suggests in his short essay ‘Beyond Human Rights’, they become untenable as a principle when one witnesses a human being reduced of all relations ‘except for the specific fact of being human’. If we all have inalienable ‘human rights’ it simply means that all of us are reducible to a mere bodily existence, that like refugees we can be excluded, abandoned by the sovereign state, reduced to bare life. The most striking case of citizens of a state having their rights removed, being reduced to their bodily or bare life, is the concentration camps set up in National Socialist Germany under Hitler. Jewish people, along with Gypsies, political prisoners and other marginalised groups, were taken to these camps, spaces that were excluded from the rule of law, having their rights as citizens of the nation taken away by the exercise of sovereign power. Jews taken to the concentration camp were importantly stripped of their German (and other) national identities, becoming stateless people in a space that had been excluded from the laws of the nation state. In the concentration camps the laws of the state no longer existed as these became spaces of exception, controlled by the exercise of sovereign power yet without the rights and recourse to law that are made available to citizens of the nation state. Those residing in the camps were completely without political life, instead were bare life, nothing but the bodies in which they were condemned to live. In the concentration camp Agamben sees all the hallmarks of a complete biopolitical space, the ultimate point at which the sovereign exception creates the space for a complete destruction of political subjects, replacing them with a form of complete physical and biological control. Agamben details programmes such as the VPs (Versuchspersonen, which he translates as human guinea pigs). The VPs were subjected to excessive air-pressure, drinking of salt-water, extensive immersion in ice-cold water. They would then be monitored and examined at length by scientists and physicians so as to ascertain the limits to which they could push their own soldiers without adverse effects. Here they represent nothing to the sovereign except as pure bare, biological life, and reveal the limit-point of biopolitics.

FIGURING BIOPOLITICS IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD The figure of the concentration camp prisoner, or in the post-war period the stateless refugee, are undoubtedly powerful, carrying with them associations and forms of cultural memory that make them loaded. And it is inevitably their prominent place in Agamben’s body of work that has led to many vociferous interrogations and reductive summations. One of the most common is ‘Agamben states we are all potentially stateless refugees/homo sacer’. It is true that this statement is not exactly absent from Agamben’s texts, and isn’t – strictly speaking – a misreading at all. As Agamben states in the conclusion of Homo Sacer: Sacredness is a line of flight still present in contemporary politics, a line that is as such moving into zones increasingly vast and dark, to the point of ultimately coinciding with the biological life itself of citizens. If today there is no longer any clear figure of the sacred man, it is perhaps because we are all virtually homines sacri. (HS: 114–15)

It cannot have been lost on readers thus far that the idea of the camp as a space of sovereign exception, and of the sovereign suspension of law, have a dramatic resonance with recent events in global politics. The ‘post9/11’ world is a markedly different place, we are told, to that which has come before. The ‘War on Terror’ is unlike any other war before it: waged on an enemy that is unknowable, fought on a truly global level in which potentially everywhere is the theatre of war, and projected to be interminable, without temporal limits, a war ‘we’ cannot ever have claimed to have ‘won’. This brave new world demands new measures for new protections against a new threat. This language of novelty suggests that old ideas of rights are not enough to protect us, which has led to a repeated erosion of our rights apparently in order to protect those very rights and principles. The strength of Agamben’s work on politics is that it can identify in our current ‘state of exception’ a logic which is far deeper. While many are debating the effectiveness of these measures to protect our human rights, Agamben can point to a discourse of exceptionality and biopolitics which has a long and complex tradition. Agamben’s short book State of Exception was published in Italian in 2003 and English in 2005 and arrived at a time in which many were POLITICS – BARE LIFE AND SOVEREIGN POWER

69

70

KEY IDEAS

beginning to explore his critique of Western politics as a means of understanding phenomena such as Guantánamo Bay and the extradition procedures which governed it. The book begins with a discussion of the increasingly murky space between the juridical order and life, the increasing power of the juridico-political apparatus to use the ‘state of exception’ to call into question the universal nature of the rule of law in increasingly troubling ways. As he states, ‘The immediately bio-political significance of the state of exception as the original structure in which the law encompasses living beings by means of its own suspension emerges clearly in the “military order” issued by the president of the United States on November 13, 2001, which authorised the “indefinite detention” and trial by military commissions (not to be confused with the military tribunals provided for by the law of war) of non citizens suspected of involvement in terrorist activities.’ Agamben goes on to state, ‘what is new about President Bush’s order is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally un-nameable and unclassifiable being’ (SE: 3). Yet the novelty Agamben demonstrates is only apparent when one places it in a genealogy of previous ‘states of exception’, including France during the revolution, the permanent state of exception declared by President Poincaré in World War I, and of course Hitler’s suspension of the Weimar Constitution in 1933. As a new development in the history of the state of exception, the status of those held at Guantánamo Bay asks for comparisons with these previous precedents and Agamben is forthcoming: ‘the only thing to which it could possibly be compared is the legal situation of the Jews in the Nazi Lager [camps], who, along with their citizenship, had lost every legal identity’ (SE: 4). The anecdotal power of comparing any contemporary instance with the Holocaust is clear, yet in order to do ‘justice’ to Agamben’s work it is worth recalling that he doesn’t make such claims lightly and they are underpinned by a clear articulation of the structural logic he sees at work within the contemporary. THE WAR ON TERROR AND THE VIOLENCE OF THE STATE There has been a great deal of work in the study of international politics to explore the ways in which our contemporary moment is producing ever-increasing disintegrations of the principles upon which

our political systems are governed. Let us perhaps look at an example. The shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in Stockwell tube station, South London, in July 2005 was a timely reminder of the dangers that face innumerable people in the ‘War on Terror’ that defines our contemporary geopolitics. Menezes was shot by anti-terrorist officers having boarded an underground train. He was believed, at the time, to be Hussein Osman, a suspect in the series of failed bombings that had taken place earlier that day across the London transport network, which were believed to have been directly linked to the 7th of July bombings two weeks earlier in which over 52 Londoners died and over 700 were injured in four separate attacks on tube trains and a bus. Menezes, a Brazilian citizen, had no connection with any terrorist activities and it did appear to be a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The London Metropolitan Police chief referred to it as a ‘tragic mistake’. Nick Vaughan-Williams argues that this incident should not be read as a ‘mistake’ and instead needs to be seen within the broader horizon of post-9/11 security policy. The shoot-to-kill policy that was introduced for the Metropolitan special operations group seven months prior to the shooting was the key decision in what later became the event of Menezes’ death. Whereas a suspect would usually be stopped, questioned and if life was thought to be at risk shot in the upper body previously, after this point a terrorist suspect should be shot in the head as suspects may very well have a bomb strapped to their body. Menezes was shot seven times in the head and once in the shoulder. The attempt to render this a tragic mistake obscures the fact that this was an episode in which government policy created the legal space in which it became justifiable to kill in order to protect national security, to take a life in order to protect life. While this is the logic that operates under the rules of war, the fact that it happened in one of the world’s most populous cities, to a completely innocent man, is indeed worrying. For Vaughan-Williams the 25th of July 2005 represents a situation in which ‘the very mechanisms intended to protect life ended up not only threatening it but also ultimately destroying it’. In that way it was part of the ‘innovative ways in which, temporally and spatially, attempts are made by sovereign power to reproduce and secure the politically qualified life of the polis’ (2007: 186). The benefit of Agamben’s work for the analysis of such contemporary political and politicised events is obvious. Agamben’s theorisation of the state of exception allows Vaughan-Williams POLITICS – BARE LIFE AND SOVEREIGN POWER

71

72

KEY IDEAS

to posit Menezes’ shooting as part of a much longer tradition of producing bare life in order to secure ‘forms of sovereign political community’, while at the same time demonstrating that there is something fundamentally ‘new’ about what is happening, namely the ‘location and method of the production of bare life’ (2007: 191). The extent to which this is indeed ‘new’ would, given Agamben’s methodological overview, be contestable. It might represent another manifestation of the biopolitical, but it is one that is tied to previous forms, and it is that linking to previous phenomena – in particular the Holocaust – that gives Agamben’s work on the contemporary such force. THE FIGURE OF THE REFUGEE One of the clearest cases in which a sovereign exception works to reinforce the political community, while simultaneously creating bare life, is that of refugees. Agamben has written at length on the refugee, and it is no great surprise that his work has been taken up by those working in law, political geography and migration studies. The circulation of displaced people around the world has been a dominant feature of global politics from the outbreak of World War I. The refugee marks, in Agamben’s diagnosis, the decline and erosion of the modern nation state and therefore becomes the embodiment of the dissolution, the space in which the state attempts to shore up its integrity in the face of its collapse. The stateless person is therefore the vision of a new and coming politics, an example of the move towards ‘whatever being’. As Agamben states, ‘it is even possible that, if we want to be equal to the absolutely new tasks ahead we will have to abandon decidedly, without reservation, the fundamental concepts through which we have so far represented the subject of the political … and build our political philosophy anew starting from the one and only figure of the refugee’ (MwE: 16). Having at its heart the refugee, the stateless persons whom governments struggle to accommodate, suggests a politics that is both radically unfamiliar, but also unquestionably contemporary. Yet it is clearly the diagnostic elements of Agamben’s work on refugees that have had a significant impact in the study of refugees. The history of Australia is one of displaced peoples attempting to forge a new life in a new land (or at least what the right-wing ideologues would have us believe). Its history is one of migration (not to mention cultural genocide), from the convicts of the early nineteenth century to those of the

mid-late Victorian period who came to start new lives away from the poverty of Europe, to those fleeing war-torn countries in the aftermath of the Second World War, and later the Vietnam War. Yet from the 1990s onwards Australia began to heavily police its borders and to make the legal route to migration far more difficult. This was of course further increased and strengthened in the wake of September 11th, when the Howard government’s rhetoric of national security was used to justify any number of draconian immigration practices. One of the most distinctive features of these practices was the creation of offshore detention centres in which illegal immigrants were ‘processed’. This would usually involve a boatload of refugees being intercepted by the army or coastguard and being taken to Papua New Guinea or Christmas Island where their claims for refugee status would be examined. Under international law anyone landing on Australian soil claiming refugee status has the right to asylum, but the Australian government denied refugees the chance to land on Australian soil and claim this right. Illegal migrants were therefore deemed to not qualify as refugees. In a sense then those who arrive via boat are made illegal and cannot hope to succeed in their claim for asylum. Part of Australia’s northern edges and outlying islands became, under Australian law, not part of Australia for the purposes of asylum, creating spaces of exception. The ‘zone of indistinction’ points clearly to the fragility of the nation state, and to the erosion of its sovereignty which can only be shored up with a draconian reinforcing of sovereignty that, in the process, reveals its strange processes of exclusive inclusion. Prem Rajaram Kumar and Carl Grundy-Warr have used Agamben’s work on homo sacer to analyse irregular migrants in Australia, Malaysia and Thailand. For them the activities of the Australian government cohere almost perfectly with Agamben’s examination of the political and juridical production of bare life. As they state, ‘this bringing in of the ostensibly excluded into the system of the nation-state serves to cohere the bounds of the Australian polity while pre-emptively consigning asylum seekers to a depoliticized “bare life”’ (2004: 48). Yet within the discourse of migration studies there is always an eye to policy, and Rajaram Kumar and Grundy-Warr assert that their study of the irregular migrant as homo sacer is designed to ‘draw policy makers’ attention to this fundamental and yet ignored space or condition of politics’ and that ‘the instigation of a cosmopolitan sense of community and responsibility must … come from the state’ (2004: 59–60). This is a complete misunderstanding of Agamben’s larger POLITICS – BARE LIFE AND SOVEREIGN POWER

73

74

KEY IDEAS

critical project, yet is set to appear as the dominant ‘use’ of Agamben’s work in the broader humanities and social sciences. An understanding of the broader structure of Agamben’s work and his exploration of the ‘political task’ of rendering power inoperative should make clear the danger of this sort of misreading. BIOPOLITICAL TATOOING And finally we can turn to Agamben’s own interventions in the contemporary world of biopolitics, his refusal to travel to the USA. In 2004 Agamben was due to give a series of lectures and seminars at New York University. Agamben cancelled this tour and on 10 January 2004 he published an article in the French newspaper Le Monde which sought to justify his refusal. At issue here is what Agamben termed the ‘biopolitical tattooing’ that those entering the USA are forced to undergo. This includes undergoing data registration and having fingerprint and retina scans taken. Agamben claims that this development represents a much wider ‘attempt to accustom citizens to supposedly normal and humane procedures and practices that had always been considered to be exceptional and inhumane’ (‘B’: 168). The normalisation of these exceptions and violations of human liberty are clearly, for Agamben, symptomatic of a development that, if left unchecked, could hold unforeseen consequences. Agamben hopes that his example will be followed by fellow European intellectuals in an attempt to register this protest. It is necessary to identify these measures as extreme and to highlight the fact that they are precisely the limit-point, the threshold of a new development in biopolitics, not a banal inconvenience to the international traveller. Agamben’s short article condenses and simplifies his own work on biopolitics, and it is perhaps unsurprising that he traces the biopolitical tattooing in the airports of the USA to the condition of Jewish prisoners in the concentration camps. Yet at the same time he defends his own thesis, stating that it was philosophical and not historical, and claiming that he is ‘not concerned with the amalgam of phenomena that need to be kept separate’. It is therefore logical to proceed by asserting that the tattooing of concentration camp prisoners was considered ‘normal’. The potential normalisation of current procedures therefore needs to be seen as symptomatic of a broader biopolitical configuration, one that if not arrested will quickly turn an exceptional

activity into a banality as it seeks to capture human life in more and more authoritarian ways. As Agamben concludes, ‘the biopolitical tattoo imposed upon us today when we want to travel to the United States is the baton of what we might accept tomorrow as the normal way of registering into the mechanism and the transmission of the state if we want to be identified as good citizens’ (‘B’: 169). POLITICS AT THE ‘ECLIPSE’ The striking nature of Agamben’s critique of contemporary politics, and the uptake of that critique in a number of fields, can lead to an obscuring of what we may consider to be its truly ‘political nature’. For many secondary commentators there is a tendency to either endorse the critical efficacy of the model or to highlight its methodological shortcomings, as we will see in the final chapter of this book. Yet many are unwilling to entertain seriously Agamben’s rejection of the Western political tradition. Yet the very moment of critique, it should not be forgotten, is action in and of itself. As Agamben stated in the conclusion to State of Exception: To show law in its non-relation to life and life, in its non-relation to law means to open up a space between them for human action, which once claimed for itself the name of ‘politics’. Politics has suffered a lasting eclipse because it has been contaminated by law, seeing itself, at best, as a constituent power (that is violence that makes law), when it is not reduced to merely power to negotiate with the law. The only truly political action however is to sever the nexus between violence and law. (SE: 88)

This definition of a political action that suggests the overcoming of a paradox so monumental through an action so subtle is disturbing to those who wish to find themselves with a politics that is tangible, a cause whose badge they can wear upon their lapel, an action that can yield instant, if empty, results. That is not Agamben’s politics. In conclusion to this chapter it is worth drawing attention to the broader role of language within Agamben’s work on homo sacer in particular, and politics more generally. In the introduction to Homo Sacer, Agamben is explicit that language is of vital importance to the foundation of bare life. In fact it is language that allows the grounds for POLITICS – BARE LIFE AND SOVEREIGN POWER

75

76

KEY IDEAS

politics in general. The construction of human community is based upon language and on dwelling in the polis. The living being has language by becoming distanced and displaced from an original voice. So the movement into the polis is about the exclusion of bare life: it is necessary to cast bare life out of the polis in the same way it is necessary to remove oneself from the voice that precedes language. Yet the exclusion of both bare life and of the voice is illusory. They are always reincorporated in being the negative foundation of politics and language that plague both. So the political task of developing politics beyond bare life is intrinsically linked to developing a language that isn’t trapped by a negative relation to the voice. Both of these tasks are intrinsically tied for Agamben, and the most valuable political action is one based in an undoing of the dominant languages of power. In his essay ‘Languages and People’, Agamben suggests that a challenge to the biopolitical forms of the modern state can only exist ‘by breaking at any point the nexus between the existence of language, grammar, people and state’ (MwE: 70). This process of breaking dominant languages of power is crucial to providing the way towards the coming community, rendering inoperative the linguistic machine on which modern politics is based. It is important that in examining the negative or critical moment of Agamben’s thought we remember the politics of the coming community which will always be the horizon of his work. SUMMARY Agamben provides a critical interrogation of contemporary concerns by undertaking a complex genealogy into the relationship between life and politics in the Western tradition. Returning to Aristotle he suggests that the separation of life into zoe- (unqualified life) and bios (political life) ended up creating bare life, that is life that is excluded from the political system, yet paradoxically included in it, in that the life of this figure, homo sacer, can be killed without bringing about any charge of murder. Yet this same ‘inclusive/exclusion’ logic applies to the sovereign himself who is able to declare the rule of law, yet exclude himself from its judgement. Agamben is then able to plot the development of the production of bare life and the sovereign exception from ancient Rome through to habeas corpus, the French Revolution, the concentration camps of the Second World War, the plight of stateless refugees and finally to the internment of suspects in

the War on Terror in Guantánamo Bay. Agamben’s deeply negative portrait of the Western political tradition thus calls for its overcoming and the emergence of a new understanding of life which is not captured by violence.

POLITICS – BARE LIFE AND SOVEREIGN POWER

77

5

THE HOMELAND OF GESTURE – ART AND CINEMA

While the importance of language for Agamben has become evident throughout this book, it should also be seen as a theory of representation more broadly, one in which a general aesthetic – to which, as we have seen, Agamben often gives the name ‘poetics’ – can work to disrupt and arrest the uses of that medium by calling into question the dominant logic that governs it. And as we have seen from previous chapters, this representation is always done with a focus on ‘the political task of the coming generation’. From his first book on art and subjectivity, through to his theorisation of advertising and pornography, Agamben has sought to examine the image in various manifestations. In what follows we will trace Agamben’s account of modern aesthetics as a form of atemporal nihilism through to his exploration of ‘gesture’ as the basis of cinema. This movement is made through recourse to the work of Aby Warburg who conceptualised Western art not as ‘images’ but as something like a series of stills in a giant roll of film. From Warburg we will turn to Agamben’s engagement with the cinema of Guy Debord in which we see the potential for a destabilisation of the current spectacular forms of mediatised culture. Of particular importance here is the idea of representation and representability, having the potential to rupture the homogenous narratives of history and to reveal to us instead the potentiality of gesture.

ART AND MODERNITY Agamben provides his own understanding of modernity as a point in which there was a fundamental shift in collective practices, knowledges and identities. These shifts are never, however, as radical as they at times appear as in the case of biopolitics which, contra Foucault, was not truly modern, but was instead inherited in the classical form of politics. It was simply in modernity that it took on an accelerated form. In 1970 Agamben published L’Uomo senza contenuto in Italian, which was republished in 1994 in Italian before being translated into English as The Man without Content in 1999. As Agamben’s first published monograph, it provides evidence of the continuity his thought has maintained from this early period. Yet we should also be clear that it is not as fully developed as his later work. Here he posits modernity as a more fundamental rupture or break, one that needs to be overcome and to ‘reacquire’ an original condition. We should therefore be wary as we proceed through a discussion of Agamben on art that the expression of the nihilism of modern art will be tempered in his later work. It is also important to make a distinction here between nihilism and negativity. When Agamben invokes the term nihilism (a rejection of prevailing moral and religious beliefs) he does, as we will see, in reference to Friedrich Nietzsche. This nihilism should not be confused with the negativity we encountered in Chapter 1 which is clearly more ontological and foundational than the modern nihilism we see here. But for the early Agamben ‘modern’ art is constituted of a rupture in the relation between art, the spectator and the artist. The development of the modern notion of ‘taste’, and of aesthetics mediating the relationship between viewer and object, works to obscure the origin of the artwork, and of our ‘experience’ of art. Yet for Agamben the nihilism of modern art provides the condition for art to ‘reacquire its original stature’, to once again become meaningful in and of itself, instead of acquiring meaning through the limited discourses that prescribe our experience of art. The central problem addressed by Agamben here is the development of modern aesthetics whose gaze has, in attempting to uncover an idea of disinterested beauty (in the tradition of Immanuel Kant attempting to find a criteria of judgement in looking at a work of art that can answer the question ‘is this beautiful?’), also led to a passionate, deeply interested idea of the work of art, one that is self-reflexively concerned with THE HOMELAND OF GESTURE

79

80

KEY IDEAS

the position of the artist rather than with the spectator. As Agamben reminds us the move to the modern idea of disinterested aesthetic judgement is one that would have seemed ridiculous to those in the ancient world. For instance, Plato famously cast the poets and artists out of the city, the supposedly ideal community, as they were considered to have the potential to destroy it. As Agamben states of the ancient, and in particular Platonic, model of art, ‘the power of art over the soul seemed to him (Plato) so great that he thought it could by itself destroy the very foundations of the city; but nonethetless, while he was forced to banish it he did so reluctantly’ (MC: 4). The ‘divine terror’ induced by art for Plato has today been transformed into something quite different. Agamben will go on to suggest that it is now the artist who has the most moving and impassioned experience of art, pouring himself into the object, with it becoming measurable not by aesthetic categories but its relation to the ‘spiritual health’ of the artist. While our distance from the Platonic notion of art is exemplified in the complete ineffectualness of art to arouse something like a ‘divine terror’, the inability of art to represent a unified image is symptomatic of the modern movement away from the originary purpose of art. Agamben turns to the medieval Wunderkammer (literally cabinet of wonder and a distant relation to the ‘cabinet of curiosities’) as emblematic of a premodern understanding of the work of art. The principle was that paintings were included with a whole range of natural and cultural objects, such as manuscripts, unicorn horns, stuffed birds, canoes, etc. Often these would be the collection of a king that would be placed in the exhibition room, a ‘sort of microcosm that reproduced, in its harmonious confusion, the animal, vegetable and mineral macrocosm’ in which ‘individual objects find their meaning only side by side with others, between the walls of a room in which the scholar could measure at every moment the boundaries of the universe’ (MC: 30). These cabinets provided a mirror of the larger, divine concept of the world. Here art is designed to reflect the world, and can do so not as an individual object, but in accordance with a larger, more unified world view. As Agamben notes there is a profound non-relation between this idea of art and that of the modern museum or gallery. As he states, ‘the work of art is no longer, at this point, the essential measure of man’s dwelling on earth, which, precisely because it builds and makes possible the act of dwelling, has neither an autonomous sphere nor a particular identity, but is a compendium and reflection of the entire human world. On the contrary

art has now built its own world for itself ’ (MC: 33). Art, in having built its own world, is unable to reach out beyond the world of the artist. The two phenomena which define modern art for Agamben, ‘aesthetic judgement’ and ‘artistic subjectivity without content’, can be seen as denying these two ‘originary elements’ of the work of art, namely its ability to communicate without aesthetic judgement and the unity between art and world. These questions with which Agamben begins his study of art are, if silently, concerned with the Romantic idea of art. Romanticism is a response to the philosophical and aesthetic problems raised by the enlightenment. The freedom to engage with art in an ‘objective’ sense, attempting to apply rational ideas of aesthetic judgement (rather than those infused with religious or political meaning), led to a freedom and autonomy for the artist, feeling no need to provide any justification as they once had. What this unleashed was a process of perpetual self-reflection on exactly what the idea of art meant, and of the artist. Artists now became obsessed with the work and its relation to the self rather than with the world outside of the work of art. This move to a ‘Romantic’ world view brings about a quest for ‘authentic’ experience, and a focus on the artist as the person who has the unique ability to still have such experiences. This narrative is rather common in academic practice, but in engaging it, Agamben’s broader question is if we can or should want the work of art to ‘reacquire its original stature’ (MC: 6). Within this question lies the larger one of Agamben’s relation to Romanticism. The split between on the one hand objective aesthetic criteria, and on the other the self-absorbed world of the artist, through the lens of ‘taste’, becomes a driving tension in Agamben’s account of modern art. The development of taste, as opposed to a visceral and immediate response, is curious, tied, as I mentioned, to the development of enlightenment rationality. Taste becomes a collective measure of a response to art that can be ratified and regulated. Gazing at a work of art becomes an occasion on which the spectator can practise his/her ‘good taste’. This good taste however ends up dovetailing with its opposite. As Agamben asks, ‘how is it possible that our taste is divided between objects as incompatible as Duino Elegies [dense and experimental poetry by the writer Rainer Maria Rilke] and Ian Fleming’s novels?’ (MC: 19). The answer lies in the way in which we no longer respond to something intrinsic in the artwork, but with an eye to collective consumption. We fail to isolate a kernel in the work of art that contains its qualities. In our world of crass THE HOMELAND OF GESTURE

81

82

KEY IDEAS

entertainment and spectacle we can see precisely this phenomenon in which the bad taste of us, the viewers, is reflected in the works of art we consume. There is no reason for us to consume these works, and often it is inexplicable, yet we do so as we are not responding to the work, but to the different structures that provide us with the comfort and security of knowing that we share similar (bad) ‘taste’. Taste in effect destroys judgement, making it impossible to look at the work itself, instead seeing it through the collective ideals of others. There are no shortages of examples in our contemporary culture of appreciation through enforced taste. Turn on the television any night of the week to witness the denigrating spectacles that we profess to enjoy. So what happens to the artist in this world of shared bad taste? Agamben suggests that he removes himself from the world of his viewers. As he states: The artist, faced with a spectator who becomes more similar to an evanescent ghost the more refined his taste becomes, moves in an increasingly free and rarefied atmosphere and begins the voyage that will take him from the live tissue of society to the hyperborean no-man’s-land of aesthetics. (MC: 16)

Agamben’s book will then set itself the task of tracing the figure of the artist through this no-man’s-land, uncovering the ways in which the vocation of the artist has become transformed from one of artisanal creativity to idle emptiness. This emptiness is derived from the split between the creative-formal principle and content. In short the artist has aligned him/herself with the formal pursuit (exploring the medium) over content, and is thus left attempting to find his/her content in the formal features of the aesthetic: His condition, then, is that of a radical split; and outside of this split, everything is a lie … The artist is the man without content, who has no other identity than a perpetual emerging out of the nothingness of expression and no other ground than this incomprehensible station on this side of himself. (MC: 55)

The image of the artist as empty, without content, is a potent one, accounting for the Romantic obsession with self-reflexivity, as well as twentieth-century art’s drive to annihilate the figure of the artist. This

is taken to its logical conclusion in pop-art in which the artist becomes producer, the product reproducible and only through the framing of taste (being put into galleries, winning the Turner Prize, fetching astronomical sums at auction) separable from the detritus of the broader culture. Both can be seen as two sides of the same coin, with both trapped in an image of art where the institutionalised nature of ‘taste’ and the split between art and world have led art into a state of nihilism. In doing so Agamben will plot the relationship between modern aesthetics and European nihilism. As we saw earlier, nihilism is the name given to a complete emptying out of values, a denial that one perspective or approach can or should be celebrated or shared. This lack of values, this emptying out of criteria of judgement famously, for Friedrich Nietzsche, took two forms – passive and active. The passive form was symptomatised by decline or decadence, a weakness of will that could be identified in modern Christianity. The other form, active nihilism, was characterised by a strengthening of a ‘will to power’, a vitalism and activity that provide a potential for rejuvenation. In Agamben’s reading the first form of modern, passive nihilism needs to be overcome by the second. This overcoming means a nihilism that seeks to shatter and destroy the very institutions of art and aesthetics, to unleash a dynamism that can return art to its originary purpose. These discussions of ‘returning’ to an ‘originary’ purpose are clarified to some extent in the conclusion to The Man without Content in which Agamben links an overcoming of art to Walter Benjamin’s work on history. As we have previously seen, Benjamin’s work is of vital importance in the development of Agamben’s oeuvre, and here we witness an early engagement with the messianic. A returning of art to its originary purpose is figured here as something like the advent of messianic time. The destruction of cultural transmissibility, which Benjamin saw as a dominant feature of modernity, has led, in Agamben’s reading, to the creation of aesthetics. Art, literature, and culture more generally, are no longer the space in which a culture is able to transmit its own history. The fracturing between the form and content that has led to this lack of transmissibility needs to be sutured in order for mankind to ‘appropriate his historical space, the concrete space of his action and knowledge’ (Agamben MC: 114). Instead Agamben suggests that this is the point at which art must approach the realm of myth, turn history into myth. This will bring art to a point in which the object and the THE HOMELAND OF GESTURE

83

84

KEY IDEAS

means of transmission are unified. This is importantly not a return to the previous mythic ideal that art had detached itself from in modernity, but to a new ‘poetic process’ in which ‘art succeeds in opening the very space in which he [man] can take the original measure of his dwelling in the present and recover each time the meaning of his action’ (MC: 114). Art then must be part of a ‘poetic process’, a poetics that provides us with a broader representational form that works to undo the schisms of modernity and prepare the ground for a future community. In the concluding moments of The Man without Content we see the emergence of what will later be reformulated as inoperativity and the ‘poetics’ that will feature in his later work. TOWARDS GESTURE: AGAMBEN AND WARBURG If Agamben is willing to turn to positive, that is productive moments, in his critique of art, the critical practice of the German art historian and cultural critic Aby Warburg (1866–1929) provides an image of art history that is not trapped in the reductive logic of modern aesthetics. In 1975 Agamben spent a year scouring the library of the Warburg Institute in London, researching for the book that would later be published as Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. This research emerged as heterodox to his research on Benjamin, both writers covering uncannily similar terrain at the same crisis point of Western history. In Warburg, Agamben discovered a specifically aesthetic, or image-based, manifestation of what he was to find in the linguistics of Emile Benveniste and in the critical project of Walter Benjamin. We can see Agamben’s study of Warburg as providing a break of sorts with his earlier work, namely The Man without Content. While Agamben hardly provides an elaborate and prolonged engagement with Warburg’s work, it provides a vital link between his early work on art, discussed above, and his later work on cinema and broader archaeological (or genealogical) method. As Agamben states in a later ‘Postilla’ (in 1983) to his essay on Warburg (1975), ‘what continues to appear as relevant in his work is the decisive gesture with which he withdraws the artwork (and also the image) from the study of the artist’s conscious and unconscious structures’ (Agamben P: 102). Here the image, which would often be read from a psychological perspective – for instance looking to uncover a latent desire of

the artist in the structure of an image – is now read from a historical perspective, as part of a historical montage rather than as isolated instances, placing images together in order to draw out unusual confluences. Warburg wanted to explore the potential for uncovering an iconographic history of Western art that didn’t pay attention to the auratic and isolated space of the aesthetic object, but instead saw these images as part of a much larger constellation. Instead of examining the psychology of the painter, or the fixity of the image, he attempted to account for the movement between images. He called his science of art history Mnemosyne, the Greek word for memory, with its guiding principle an attempt to ‘map’ European culture, uncovering moments in which the image emerged into something like a memory trace of the past. The method was placing like images next to each other to find both similarities and divergences, to allow different meanings to flicker up as they were gazed upon. Warburg described this as ‘an art history without text’ and it was comprised of 40 canvases and 1,000 photographs which he arranged according to an idiosyncratic sense of affinity and featured Renaissance masterpieces next to photographs of female golfers and advertisements for a steamship company. It was a similar principle to his organisation of his massive library, based upon the principle of the ‘good neighbour’ in which the solution of a problem was not based in the book you were searching for but in the one next to it (Agamben P: 204n). These principles of organisation helped Agamben develop a generalised theory of the image, moving from seeing the artwork as revealing the emptiness of the self-absorbed artist, to the image as part of a larger historical canvas. The image, when construed not in isolation, but as part of a still from the giant film of history, can work to dislocate and disrupt the empty and predictable narratives of art history. The history of art, like history more generally, is tied to reductive and linear forms of organisation: there is a narrative that details how art changes and develops over different periods, and the role of the art historian is to order. Yet if we recall Benjamin and Agamben on history, this form of creating a continuum limits the possibility of alternate voices being heard, of unusual links being made. An imagistic art-history, in the form outlined by Aby Warburg, would create a far more dynamic and fluid history of art. As Agamben states in ‘Notes on Gesture’: THE HOMELAND OF GESTURE

85

86

KEY IDEAS Even the Mona Lisa, even Las Meninas could be seen not as immovable and eternal forms, but as fragments of a gesture or as stills of a lost film wherein only they would regain their true image. And this is so because of a certain kind of litigatio, a paralyzing spell we need to break, its constitution at work in every image; it is as if a silent invocation calling for the liberation of the image into gesture arose from the entire history of art. This is what in ancient Greece was expressed by the legends in which statues break the ties holding them and begin to move … Cinema leads images back to the homeland of gesture. (MwE: 55–6)

Here we can see how an ‘imagistic’ theory of art leads directly into a reading of cinematic texts. Whereas the schema put in place in The Man without Content attempted to move towards a theory of art history as ‘rupture’, the imagistic theory of art posits the artwork as always already ruptured, a series of fractured images that conceptualises the history of art that is almost like a long movie, in which the artwork is a still. Phillipe-Alain Michaud has recently demonstrated the cinematic quality of Warburg’s thought. The reception and continuation of Warburg’s work has been dominated by a traditional examination of the symbolic within the Renaissance. Yet for Michaud the dominant feature of Warburg’s thought was movement – the way in which the artwork tried to capture the subject in action. Simultaneously it was also a movement towards the idea of looking at history as a montage. Michaud is therefore able to demonstrate that Warburg’s thought is one that ushers in the cinematic moment: ‘Warburg opened art history to the observation of bodies in motion at the very moment the first images capable of representing them became diffused.’ Michaud goes on to suggest that in nascent cinema, as in Warburg, we see ‘the gradual transmission of figures in motion to the animistic reproduction of the living being’ (2004: 39). Here the ability of cinema to reproduce the fluidity of the body with difference is key, as is the way in which the eye becomes trained to capture the body in gesture. GESTURE The notion of gesture is key in mapping Agamben’s movement from art to cinema, and will also provide us with a clearer understanding of how the movement into biopolitical modernity is linked so intricately with the

development of film. This will be of importance as we explore the ways in which Agamben suggests that those mediated forms of advertising and pornography have the potential to usher in the new body of the coming community. The essay ‘Notes on Gesture’ is of significant importance in Agamben’s corpus. It appears in three distinct versions, including a version on Kommerell and another on cinema which will be our focus here. As Deborah Levitt has suggested, the essay provides a genealogy of gesture which has striking parallels to Agamben’s genealogy of modern biopolitics (2008: 194). The essay presents the movement from the study of the human gait by Gilles de la Tourette in 1886 through to Eadweard Muybridge’s snapshots of the body in motion, the birth of silent film and the high modernism of Proust and Rilke. As Levitt suggests we can label this period from 1886 to 1933 as the birth of Agamben’s biopolitical modernity in media, the point at which he asserts ‘the Western Bourgeoisie had definitely lost its gestures’. So what are gestures? It is important here to maintain a distinction between gestures in the plural and the idea of gesture. Gestures designate the previously held sense of cohesion in human motion and movement, a sense of embodiment and communicability. Their decline is the breakdown of psychological interiority through observation and control. We could usefully suggest that the loss of gestures falls into three parts: 1 The loss of the bourgeois subject as whole, coherent. The process of subjectivation that is part of the illusion of identity becomes eroded through the fragmentation of self – desubjectivation – brought about by the biopolitical technologies of modernity. 2 The loss of the aura of the image. No longer do we see images as whole and complete, capturing gestures, they are now stills from a fractured film. 3 The loss of the idea of a natural language – something that is whole and complete and intrinsically linked to meaning. We now experience language as expropriated from us. Yet gesture is in opposition to the false unity that underscores gestures. The ‘loss’ of gestures is a loss of false unity and an interrogation of the cracks that emerge is essential in the idea of rethinking the nature of the medium anew. Gesture is the process of making a means visible as such. By this it is the demonstration of mediality and moves beyond aesthetics, language and subjectivity into the realm of ethics and politics. THE HOMELAND OF GESTURE

87

88

KEY IDEAS

The starting point for Agamben’s essay is Gilles de la Tourette’s study of the gait, how people walk. Two years before that (1884) Tourette had diagnosed a motor deficiency, now known as Tourette’s syndrome, in which he began to notice the strange array of ticks and ‘spasmodic jerks’ whose proliferation, Agamben noted, had resulted in a ‘generalised catastrophe of the sphere of gestures’ (MwE: 51). The loss of gesture is not, as it might seem, that there was a generalised outburst of strange walking patterns, as if the entire population had lost control of its gestures. On the contrary the loss of gestures is about the loss of grasping the body as an embodied, experienced whole. For Agamben the technologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries need to be seen as changing the way we perceived our own selves, our bodies. The rise of scientific methods for measuring and observing meant we began to see the human body as minute movements, taking on the gaze of observation. Modernity’s observational gaze, the desire to measure, understand, control is tied intrinsically to the rise of film. The German philosopher of technology Friedrich Kittler has demonstrated how the nascent forms of the moving image in the nineteenth century emerged out of the study of anatomy (2003). The cinematic gaze of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries needs to be seen in relation to the scientific observations of modernity. Agamben is hardly suggesting we should want to return to previous forms of ‘experiencing’ our bodies as whole and unified, but instead to think of the new possibilities of gesture. The structure of ‘gesture’ is seen as an in-between to the categories of act and production which seeks to render inoperative the false opposition between means and ends. In traditional utilitarian philosophy, there was always a question over whether the ends justified the means. Could one justify violence as a means if the ends were noble enough? Politics is often seen as the sphere in which the means/ends relation is played out. This can be mapped onto Aristotle’s distinction in the Nichomachean Ethics between production (poeises) and action (praxis). Agamben turns to the Roman scholar Varro (116–27 BC) who introduces a third concept – gesture. As Agamben states, ‘if producing is a means in view of an end and praxis is an end without means, the gesture then breaks with the false alternative between ends and means that paralyzes morality and presents instead means that, as such, evade the orbit of mediality without becoming, for this reason, ends’ (MwE: 57). So gesture is not means moving towards a goal, or a rarefied

sphere of pure ends. Instead it shatters both of these: ‘Gesture is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such’ (italics in original, MwE: 58). Importantly even though Agamben uses ‘gesture’ in relation to film, he is insistent on the relationship between gesture and language. Whereas the loss of authority in language that marked the destruction of experience is tied to a loss of gestures, ‘gesture’ in language represents the movement towards demonstrating language as such, language as the communication of a communicability. As Agamben states, ‘if we understand the “word” as the means of communication, then to show a word does not mean to have at one’s disposal a higher level … it means, rather, to expose the word in its own mediality, in its own being a means without any transcendence’ (MwE: 59). So what might a linguistic gesture look like? While we will examine the possibility of using Agamben’s work on language for the study of literature in the following chapter, I will briefly turn to James Joyce’s Ulysses to demonstrate the possibility of thinking language as gesture. In the ‘Circe’ episode Joyce is utilising the form of the play script to examine the possibilities of revitalising language following its disintegration in ‘Oxen of the Sun’. Early in the episode Stephen Dedalus states, ‘So that gesture, not music, not odours, would be a universal language, the gift of tongues rendering visible not the lay sense but the first entelechy, the structural rhythm’, to which Lynch replies, ‘Pornosophical philotheology’ (Joyce 1992: 564). Joyce was very interested in the thinking of gesture as a ‘universal language’ and was reputed to have attended the lectures of Marcel Jousse, the French linguist, who, now largely forgotten, published in 1930 an important book called The Oral Style, along with the posthumously published lectures Anthropology of Gesture (1974). If we think of Stephen’s call for gesture as a universal language being related to a certain physical rhythm that ties into the structural rhythms of oral language, then Lynch’s interjection is something more like gesture as a gag, or an exposure of language in and of itself. The portmanteaus invite the reader to decipher, but are ultimately useless in terms of the meaning they illicit. Instead this presentation of language without meaning is far closer to the exposure of gesture as ‘the word in its own mediality’. But gesture’s radical potentiality is revealed not in any specific or limited area, but as the name for an intersection, a threshold that must be utilised as the basis of rethinking the very foundations of ethics and politics anew. Gesture therefore works as inoperativity: THE HOMELAND OF GESTURE

89

90

KEY IDEAS Gesture is the name of this intersection between life and art, act and power, general and particular, text and execution. It is a moment of life subtracted from the context of individual biography as well as a moment of art subtracted from the neutrality of aesthetics: it is pure praxis. The gesture is neither use value nor exchange value, neither biographic experience nor impersonal event: it is the other side of the commodity that lets the ‘crystals of their common social substance’ sink into the situation. (MwE: 80)

This idea of subtraction from the false wholeness of identity or the falseness of the image as unity is the key to gesture. In biopolitical modernity forms of subtractions are routinely performed on us by media technologies and governmentality. Gesture is the name for the harnessing of the collapse of subjectivity and aesthetics, and cinema is the aesthetic space in which this is most possible. AGAMBEN ON CINEMA Agamben’s work on cinema is on one hand a response to the theory of cinema put forward by Gilles Deleuze, and on the other an exploration of Guy Debord’s theorisation of the ‘society of the spectacle’ along with his experimental cinematic works. Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) was an influential French philosopher and a regular interlocutor for Agamben on a series of philosophical questions. His work on cinema has been very influential, arguing that cinema offers us new ways of ‘seeing’ by creating images that are not dependent on the human eye. More importantly, in Deleuze’s theorisation of the ‘time-image’, cinema becomes the space in which we can see time presented, while in the ‘movement-image’ cinema is the space in which through cinematic effect (camera angles, etc.) human life is seen anew. For Deleuze it was necessary to propose a new theory of the image that was able to think through cinematographic concepts. As Deleuze states, ‘the cinema seems to us to be a composition of images and of signs, that is pre-verbal intelligible content (pure semiotics) whilst semiology of a linguistic inspiration abolishes the image and tends to dispense with the sign’ (2008: xi). While I don’t have the space to enter into Deleuze’s attempt to explore ‘cinematographic concepts’, Agamben, in ‘Notes on Gesture’, attempts to distance himself from Deleuze, suggesting that Deleuze’s theory of the ‘movement-image’ relies too heavily on a mythical

archetype of the image, one which Agamben claims misses the fundamental fractured nature of the image in Modernity. Deleuze’s image is too idealised and too complete, lacking the sense of rupture and dislocation that for Agamben is the essence of the imagistic. Agamben’s notion of cinema as rupture is given its most complete exposition in a short lecture about the cinema of Guy Debord. Debord’s films are made up of largely sampled (or, to use his French term détourned) images, taken from advertisements, films and news footage. Placed in random order, these clips are accompanied by Debord’s voice-overs, readings of his own theoretical works. The goal here is to create a fractured cinema in which the images of the mediatised world are ripped from their context and placed in a montage, with the idea that unusual constellations can emerge. In this short essay on Debord’s cinema, Agamben identifies two ‘transcendental conditions of montage’: stoppage and repetition. Repetition is linked here to memory and to a particular form of historical awareness. Agamben suggests that the media attempt to take images and control their narrative uses, imbuing them with a meaning that leaves us, the viewers, impotent: ‘we are given a fact before which we are powerless. The media prefer a citizen who is indignant but powerless. That is exactly the goal of the TV news. It’s the bad form of memory’ (Agamben ‘DR’: 316). Repetition on the other hand presents images with a sense of possibility and potentiality. The process of being repeated means that they become freed from their meaning. A piece of TV footage repeated in a different context is no longer given a circumscribed meaning, instead it becomes possible to ask questions of how this meaning was possible in the first place, and of whether any other meaning can emerge. The image thus becomes imbued with life, and we as spectators must undertake the role of construction, or reconstruction, which frees it, and us, restoring ‘possibility’. Stoppage, the second condition, is the power to interrupt. Agamben suggests that this links cinema to poetry as opposed to prose, with which its narrative style is often compared. As we will see later in our discussion of literature, poetry is differentiated from prose by enjambment, which is the carry-over to a following line in which rhythm and content can become destabilised. Poetry is then, for Agamben, a ‘hesitation between sound and meaning’, and Debord’s cinema evinces a similar disruption of meaning. In poetry the form (rhythm, poetic technique) can be placed at odds with the ‘meaning’, analogously. Agamben will describe ‘cinema, or at THE HOMELAND OF GESTURE

91

92

KEY IDEAS

least a certain sort of cinema’, as ‘a prolonged hesitation between image and meaning’ (Agamben ‘DR’: 317). However, it is important to note that Debord’s cinema is not completely removed from the world of contemporary media that is both the source of its images and the object of its critique. Agamben describes the effect of Debord’s cinema as one in which the means, the medium, is made visible. Here the illusion, the suspension of reality asked for in the viewer by cinema, is removed (we may want to think here of Bertolt Brecht’s Epic Theatre in an analogous fashion in which the acting, set design, etc., all work to destroy the empathy inherent in the tragic model of theatre). This sense of cinema’s ultimate task being to expose its own illusory nature is repeated again in a fragment from Profanations entitled ‘The Six Most Beautiful Minutes in the History of Cinema’. The clip that Agamben refers to is a relatively unknown extract from Orson Welles’ incomplete film of Don Quixote. In this version Don Quixote and Sancho Panza find themselves in modern America (1950s). The scene Agamben refers to takes place in a cinema in which Sancho Panza is watching a film with a young girl, while Don Quixote stands to the side. Once the film begins Don Quixote, roused into action by the violence in front of him, feels compelled to perform his Quixotic duty and attacks the cinema scene, slashing at it until there is a gaping hole in the screen and we can see the frame upon which the screen is hung. Quixote’s attack on the screen is of course a chivalric attempt to protect a young lady, revealing a gap between image and reality that Quixote cannot see. But it is hardly as if Agamben is suggesting that Quixote’s attack is a metaphor for how we should destroy the illusion of cinema. Agamben asks the question, following his account of the scene, ‘What are we to do with our Imaginations?’ (Pr: 93). For Agamben we must realise that the young girl we hope to save, Quixotic in our imaginings, can never love us. Our imagination must be exposed as ‘empty and unfulfilled’ in order that we can begin to reconstruct a new form of image, a new poetics that denies imagination as a distortion of the here and now, as cinema so often is. Agamben provides one contentious instance in which he gives an example of this shattering of illusion. He cites the moment in Bergman’s film Monika when the movie star suddenly stares directly into the camera, that is, directly at us. Agamben points out that this technique is now perfectly banal as we have become so used to it from pornography and advertising. What pornography and the fashion model in advertising show us is that there are always more

images behind each image, hence their emptiness, and Agamben returns to the image of the pornstar staring into the camera on a number of occasions as encapsulating what we will explore later as profanation. Agamben claims that pornography is now unprofanable and it is the task of cinema to attempt the profaning of the unprofanable. Agamben in The Coming Community offers us an image of the body in these forms as one which can lead us to a new way of regarding the self: What was technologized was not the body, but its image. Thus the glorious body of advertising has become the mask behind which the fragile, slight human body continues its precarious existence … Advertising and pornography, which escort the commodity to the grave like hired mourners, are the unknowing midwives of this new body of humanity. (CC: 50)

Agamben here is echoing Benjamin who, in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction’, identified cinema as the space in which cinematic effects could give birth to a new way of seeing the human body: ‘evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye – if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man’ (Benjamin 1968: 239). What advertising and pornography do is to empty out media images, to show them in their falseness and emptiness, however unwittingly. We are constantly exposed to the frailty of the human body as the mask created by the image of the spectacular body is further separated from the reality. On the other hand Debord’s cinema takes the image and presents it as an image, allowing us to see the medium, to stop the illusion of cinema, and of art, in its tracks. It is in this process that we can begin to see cinema as both a political and ethical medium, rather than as an aesthetic one. SUMMARY Agamben’s work on art began as an attempt to chart a form of modern nihilism whereby art had lost its power to move, as well as its ability to create a relationship to the world around it. He isolated the development of modern taste, along with the increasingly solipsistic nature of the artist, as indicative of art’s nihilism and emptiness, and THE HOMELAND OF GESTURE

93

94

KEY IDEAS

called, however obliquely, for art to become tied once again to human history. In turning to the work of Aby Warburg in the 1970s he refined his take on aesthetics by developing a theory of the image which turned away from any psychologising tendency, along with the analysis of art images in isolation, to look instead at human culture as one long reel of film. In turning to cinema he developed this idea of the image by examining the way in which cinema, through stoppage and repetition, forces us to look at the medium of film, interrupting its usual narrative function.

6

THE LABORATORY OF LITERATURE

It is hardly surprising that, for an author so concerned with the function of language, literature is a vital element of Agamben’s work. In fact it is difficult to think of a work by Agamben that does not, at some (usually decisive) point, turn to literary examples to help explicate a certain theoretical concern. Yet that is not to suggest that he simply draws creative works into his own texts in some attempt to allow him to ‘speak’ through them, and vice versa. Agamben has written extensively on Italian poetry, and on the relationship between poetry and prose, with Categorie italiane: Studi di poetica (1996) providing important readings of a number of Italian poets, most notably Dante (it was published in English under the more literaryneutral, and marketable, title The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics). This chapter will divide Agamben’s work on literature into four sections: 1 2 3 4

The relation between poetry, philosophy and criticism Figuring literature – Franz Kafka The split between poetry and prose Towards a poetics.

What unites all of these concerns is a conviction literature is not subservient to philosophical thought, but that literature becomes the

96

KEY IDEAS

space in which something like a truth can, if not be spoken, then at least gestured towards. POETRY/PHILOSOPHY/CRITICISM Agamben’s book Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (1977/ 93) begins with a refrain repeated throughout his body of work, namely that ‘poetry’ and ‘philosophy’ remain intrinsically connected. The connection here is that both fulfil the absent conditions of the other and that the split between them produces criticism. In thinking carefully about Agamben’s reading of literature it is worth attempting to see the links and connections between these three terms. For Agamben philosophy and poetry must confront their own negative symbiosis: the scission of the word is construed to mean that poetry possesses its object without knowing it, while philosophy knows its object without possessing it. In the West, the word is thus divided between a word that is unaware, as if fallen from the sky, and enjoys the object of knowledge by representing it in beautiful form, and a word that has all seriousness and consciousness for itself but does not enjoy its object because it does not know how to represent it. (S: xvii)

Agamben here is presenting a common philosophical perspective: namely that language struggles to mean what it says. In the common structuralist formula presented by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, language is divided between ‘signifiers’ (words) and ‘signifieds’ (the referent or object indicated by the word). Therefore words never ‘mean’ what they say, and our experience of language is one whereby we are always trapped with an inability to truly ‘speak’ (this should already take us back to ‘the voice’ and the ‘negative articulation’ that haunts the Heideggerean understanding of language that Agamben is so indebted to). Yet for Agamben something is produced through the modern split between poetry and philosophy, and that is the idea of criticism. As he goes on to note in Stanzas, ‘Criticism is born at the moment the scission reaches its extreme point’ and ‘it neither represents nor knows, but knows the representation’ (S: xvii). We can now see a familiar structure of a split producing a third term that remains in-between the first two, working to undo their logic.

Criticism, in ‘knowing the representation’, performs a certain representability, an enacting of language. Perhaps it might help to recall Chapter 3 in which I set out Agamben’s debt to Walter Benjamin, and his singular statement that Benjamin’s Trauerspiel was the only book that deserves to be called critical in the twentieth century. There I suggested that the ‘critical’ nature of Benjamin’s project was to be found in a method of representation. For Agamben Benjamin’s project was tied to that of Jena Romanticism in their attempt to develop a form of critical poetic practice in which the poetic fragment enacted a model of critical reflection. In his dissertation ‘The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism’, Benjamin argued that the Jena Romantics – Novalis and Schlegel – attempted to extend the thought of the philosopher Johann Fichte who had attempted to free the subject from needing to uncover the conditions for consciousness: it always already has the potential to be so. Yet as Benjamin states of Fichte: In reflection there are … two moments: immediacy and infinity. The first of these points the way for Fichte’s philosophy to seek the origin and explanation of the world in that very immediacy; yet the second obscures that immediacy and is to be eliminated from reflection by a philosophical process. Fichte shared with the early Romantics this interest in the immediacy of the highest knowledge. Their cult of the infinite, which is given its distinctive stamp … divided them from Fichte. (1996: 125)

Benjamin’s thesis, after reconstructing Fichte’s thought and the early Romantics’ divergence from it, turns to how Schlegel attempts to construct a system and form for this new Romantic thought: How, if at all, could Schlegel represent this immediate, yet infinite form of thought that was to be the basis of this philosophy? What Schlegel embarks upon is an attempt to mediate in form between the unity and totality on the one hand, and infinite fragmentation on the other. Schlegel was keen to reject the eidetic: constituting or having a vivid and persistent type of imagery, or memory, especially during childhood (Wordsworth, Symbolic). This form of thinking usually pertains to mystical and mythological and attempts to close down thought by leaving it open to a symbolic constitution, an attempt to grasp a complex whole through metaphor. Instead, according to Benjamin he finds an intuition of a THE LABORATORY OF LITERATURE

97

98

KEY IDEAS

systematic thought in language: ‘Terminology is the sphere in which his thought moves beyond discursivity and demonstrability. For the term, the concept, contained for him the seed of the system, it was nothing other than a preformed system itself ’ (1996: 140). In this complex formulation Benjamin stipulates that the linguistic form to his system results in the complexities of a totality being mirrored in the smallest form, the smallest fragment. Yet that fragment still functions within a broader system of language, an infinite expanse. Schlegel attempted to capture this system in the fragments that he produced in the journal Athenaeum. Here Schlegel was attempting to rethink how philosophy was to be written, a task that didn’t conceive of a split between thought and its representation. The manifestation of the fragment was to be in an understanding of precisely what criticism is. For Benjamin, as for the Romantics, criticism is the foundation of both thought and art. It is the self-reflexive awareness of the infinite. The awareness of the infinite nature of thought that Novalis and Schlegel developed from their reading of Fichte is also present in an understanding of the work of art. For the Romantics criticism exists not so much in the qualitative sense that we think of as critique (how ‘good’ is the object I’m evaluating?), but in a form of self-critique, a process of awareness that never allows a thought to reach a stable and ossified end. Instead criticism becomes a means that has no end. Critique therefore means that the work provides the criteria and potential for its own critique, and the work of poetry, of art, of philosophy had as its basis an infinite critical programme. The romantic concept of criticism emerged out of a response to the enlightenment, and in particular the Hegelian mode of critique. Here art is eclipsed by criticism as the process of measuring and qualifying overtakes the work, yet is the only reason that the work is still read. Criticism constantly unworks art, breaking it down in order to move beyond it. Thought and reflection emerge through a rejection of the authority of the artwork. As Benjamin states, ‘to be critical meant to elevate thinking far beyond all restrictive conditions that the knowledge of truth sprang forward magically, as it were, from insight into the falsehood of these restrictions … under the name of criticism the Romantics at the same time confessed the inescapable insufficiency of their efforts, sought to designate this insufficiency as necessary, and so finally alluded, in this concept, to its necessary “incompleteness of infallibility”, as it might be called’ (1996: 143). So criticism for

Benjamin, and I would suggest Agamben, is a form of critical engagement that denies knowledge can be attained through approaching an object, but instead that it emerges through the representational form. If we can return to the split between poetry and philosophy that produces criticism we can see how Agamben’s practice relates to both. He is not interested in ‘returning’ to a point at which the two opposing fields can be reunited. Instead he is seeking to explore the points where the medium and production of that split become most pronounced and to focus on what he terms an ‘erotics’ of the suspension between the two. Criticism is the name for the representation of that split. Yet what does that mean for the reading of literary texts? As I have suggested repeatedly, Agamben does not see a restriction as to where philosophical ideas emerge. This is largely due to the fact that philosophy knows its object (language) yet cannot grasp it. It is in the literary text that through language truth can emerge. So literature, as we will see below, is a ‘laboratory’ for ideas. Yet Agamben’s practice suggests that the proper critical method is not to profess knowledge about a literary text, but an attempt, through the medium of criticism, to represent its truth. So Agamben’s readings of literary texts are often oblique and require explication in order to render his method of reading clearer. So as we turn to Agamben’s Kafka I should make clear that the process of explication, my reading of Agamben’s Kafka, is not criticism in its Agambenian sense. For criticism is a carefully crafted ‘representation’ which will neither show nor grasp its object, but will instead represent it. AGAMBEN AND KAFKA Agamben’s work repeatedly makes use of literary characters and figures able to provide him with points at which some ‘truth’ is enacted through creative practice. He, like many critical theorists, constructs his own personal ‘canon’ of authors who can be generalised as predominantly European, male, writing in either the late medieval period, or the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and who struggle with questions of religion and faith. There are, of course, exceptions, but the majority of Agamben’s literary figures emerge out of these particular historical moments. One could divide these figures into roughly two types: the first are liminal and strange creatures that THE LABORATORY OF LITERATURE

99

100

KEY IDEAS

transcend certain divisions (man/animal, human/divine, etc.), enacting many of the threshold or ‘in-between’ states that, as we have seen, are so important for Agamben. He refers to this as ‘poetic atheology’, which can be read as the historical point (beginning with the great German poet Hölderlin), in which poetry is able to register the emptiness of subjectivity and the lack of a transcendental. As Agamben states: What characterises poetic atheology as opposed to every negative theology is its singular coincidence of nihilism and poetic practice, thanks to which poetry becomes the laboratory in which all known figures are undone and new, parahuman, or semidivine creatures emerge: Hölderlin’s half god, Kleist’s marionette, Nietzsche’s Dionysus, the angel and the doll in Rilke, Kafka’s Odradek. (EP: 91)

As we will see when we turn to the sacred and profane later in this book, Agamben finds in these non-subjects, what we might want to term ‘desubjectivised’ entities, an image of the undoing of our structured and imposed forms of subjectivity. They mark a point at which we no longer have recourse to religious forms of ‘transcendence’ or for that matter any form of certainty and grounding. It is of use here to investigate the creations of the Czech-German writer Franz Kafka (1883–1924), whose work is characterised by a strange otherworldliness, a feeling of paranoid helplessness at the hands of authoritarian power and a series of characters and figures that are distorted images of the human. His name, and many of his works, are scattered throughout Agamben’s body of work, from his earliest (The Man without Content), to his most recent essays (‘K’). Ever since his death in 1924, the small yet dense body of work left behind by Franz Kafka has been laboriously picked over by scholars. The first, and certainly most influential of Kafka scholars, Max Brod, initiated a theological mode of analysis that has proved dominant. In this reading Kafka’s world view is the result of his interest in theological and mystic questions that stem from his Judaism, and those relentlessly negative portrayals of authoritarian forces, as well as the subhuman figures and forms are all a result of something like a ‘negative theology’ that is said to underpin Judaic thought. For Agamben, this approach has sought to obscure the politics at work in Kafka, and at many points he expresses clear criticism of Brod and the school of interpretation that followed him.

Instead, Agamben’s Kafka is one whose critical trajectory begins with Walter Benjamin. Benjamin states quite clearly in his essay on Kafka that he should undoubtedly not be read from the perspective of either the natural or the supernatural, the theological or the psychoanalytic. Instead Benjamin suggests it is study that provides the ‘gate to justice’ in Kafka’s world, and that in the enigmatic figure of Sancho Panza we see something like an image of freedom. The subtleties and aporias of Benjamin’s reading retain an ambivalence, but the celebration of a form of study – in particular ‘the law which is studied but no longer practiced’ – is of importance here. Both the psychoanalytic and the religious readings of Kafka which Benjamin rejects are also forms of study, yet importantly they invest in something like a telos, a point beyond the present – the analysand cured, the coming messianic kingdom – upon which we can focus. To study the law with no possibility of practice, as Dr Bucephalus does in Kafka’s ‘The New Advocate’, is to divest the law of its power, to deactivate it. Yet for both Agamben and Benjamin, Kafka’s work is also shot through with the traces of messianic time, a feature that may seem incommensurable with a political reading. In Agamben’s body of work the process of rendering inoperative will provide the condition of possibility for the messianic. As both he and Benjamin claim in their readings of Kafka, the coming of the messiah, or more accurately for both of them messianic time (it functions outside of the theological and supernatural), something barely perceptible will have changed, ‘a slight adjustment made’ (Benjamin 2000; 811). To render inoperative is to pave the way for this ‘slight adjustment’, and it is therefore that we can begin to think about Kafka’s politics, a politics that is often understood as messianic, a term which we will explore in the next chapter. It is not a matter of finding in Kafka either a spiritual or a political world view, instead it is a question of seeing in his work an act of suspension, a non-working that is infused with a political significance. Odradek, one of these exemplary figures of poetic atheology, makes an appearance in Kafka’s series of tales A Country Doctor, and could best be described as an anthropomorphised bobbin, or a flat spool for thread with a wooden cross placed upon it. What seems like an odd domestic item is given a human attribute – speech. This short story or fragment (of little more than a page) relates the anguish that the creature gives the father of a family, who sees in Odradek a THE LABORATORY OF LITERATURE

101

102

KEY IDEAS

problematic disruption of that other central human quality (according to Agamben), mortality: Everything that dies has previously had some kind of goal, some kind of activity, and at this activity has worn itself away; in the case of Odradek that does not apply. Can it be, then, that he might one day still be rolling down the stairs, with ends of thread trailing after him, before the feet of my children and my children’s children? He obviously does no harm to anyone; but the idea that he might also outlive me I find most painful. (Kafka 1992: 177)

The life of this seemingly inanimate object triggers a number of associations with Agamben’s body of work. In addition to the resonances of his work on language, as well as on profanation, Odradek is also striking as an animated inanimate object. One of the few passing references to Odradek is in the title to a section of Stanzas, ‘In the World of Odradek: the Work of Art Confronted with the Commodity’. Odradek plays a largely silent role here, the tale barely analysed in the text itself, yet an image of a world in which the complex nature of commodity fetishism has transformed objects into far more than the sum of their material parts. Instead of us looking at an object and ascribing it a use value (this axe can help me cut down a tree and provide me with fuel and shelter and is therefore valuable), we grant commodities a value that far exceeds what we can do with them (I will save my hard-earned money for months to purchase a brand-name pair of shoes whose price far exceeds any use value). Odradek thus becomes a symbol for the modern age of the commodity in which, according to Marx, we ascribe a mystical or religious value to material objects. So Odradek is given a strange set of attributes, human (speech) as well as mystical (immortality) that mark an undoing and confusion of existing categories, leaving no ground – material, human, religious – on which to ground ourselves. Through one literary illusion we can see how a single figure can illuminate a number of Agamben’s theoretical concerns. It constitutes both a reading and transformation of a literary text, but importantly one that is never exhausted, always gesturing beyond the moment of its inclusion, forcing the reader into an active and critical engagement with both the literary figure and Agamben’s broader body of work. While Odradek is an example of the ‘poetic atheology’ of the literary figure, there is another category of literary figures in Agamben’s

work, those who engage in ‘experiments’. For Agamben literature is a laboratory in which ontological and ethical problems can be explored. As Agamben explains: Not only science, but also poetry and thinking conduct experiments. These experiments do not simply concern the truth or falsity of hypotheses, the occurrence or non-recurrence of something, as in scientific experiments; rather they call into question Being itself, before or beyond its determination as true or false. These experiments are without truth, for truth is what is at issue in them. (P: 260)

Kafka again provides the source for two of the most important of these experiments, both of which revolve around attempts to render the law inoperative. The first is the strategy of the man from the country in Kafka’s short parable ‘Before the Law’, which also appears in The Trial. The story, about the man from the country who spends his life waiting at the door to the law to gain admittance from the doorkeeper, was famously interpreted by Derrida as being wholly about ‘an event that does not happen’, which reveals that the doorkeeper keeps nothing, that the door opens onto nothing. Yet for Agamben this is only seemingly about nothing, and it is a mistake to regard the man from the country as a victim of the illusion of law. Instead for Agamben the door’s openness constitutes the power of the law, and the goal is to have it shut. As he states, ‘it is possible to imagine that the entire behaviour of the man from the country is a complicated and patient strategy to have the door closed in order to interrupt the law’s being in force’ (P: 174). This strategy is a vital element of the messianic task that seems to constitute the horizon of Agamben’s inoperative politics. In his recent essay ‘K’, Agamben has sought to radically rework our understanding of the figure K and therefore of Kafka’s novels The Trial and The Castle through a complex examination of the dual meaning of the letter K. In ancient Roman law the kaluminator was someone who was a false accuser and would have the figure K branded onto their forehead in order to identify them, so dangerous were they to the legal system. According to Agamben, the protagonist of the novel must then be read as a self-accuser, and that ‘every man’ must be recognised as being in the same position as K. The trial brought upon one’s self THE LABORATORY OF LITERATURE

103

104

KEY IDEAS

through false self-accusation is of course the most pointless of all, as it renders the accusation null and void, the trial can only be an exercise in exposing something like the structural emptiness of the law. As Agamben states, ‘One understands, then, the subtlety of all self-slander, as a strategy that aims to deactivate and render inoperative the accusation, the implication that the law addresses to being’ (‘K’: 16). So his self-accusation, in exposing the law as system and structure rather than essence, allows him to ‘subtract’ himself from the law, entering it in order to prove its non-working. If K in The Trial subtracts himself, then the K of The Castle performs a no less inoperative function, that of disrupting the borders that give the law its jurisdiction. Agamben traces K here as a shorthand for kardo, which was a name given to a process of drawing up lines by Roman land surveyors. Agamben notes that land surveyors were of vital importance in Roman law as the law needs to have its own borders and barriers to operate. The kardo was used to measure out the space of the castrum, which means both castle and military encampment. K announces his occupation as ‘the establishment of boundaries’, which his own name confirms, suggesting that we must read his position as that of a land surveyor. Yet the village, as K is told, has no need for a land surveyor, it is already thoroughly mapped out. Instead, Agamben reads K as having come to rework the division between High and Low, the castle and the village. Yet it is not a supreme sovereign or theological power that is symbolised in the castle, and the relation to which K has come to challenge. Instead for Agamben it is the functionaries, those who place themselves as the barrier between high and low, who perpetuate the borders. This is why K is only ever to interact with those who are servants of the castle, never Count Westwest, whose existence is, in fact, non-existent. We can now see the dovetailing here with Agamben’s discussion of the law in The Trial. It exists on the condition that we believe it exists – the borders continue to function because we (the functionaries of the castle) continue to respect them. Agamben suggests that it is with the ‘fabrications’ of the divine that Kafka takes issue, not the divine itself. So those servants who fabricate the existence of the count, who give the castle its structural position by maintaining its privileged status, stand in for the borders themselves. Agamben’s concluding question underpins the importance of rendering inoperative all divisions – structural and physical – that dominate our conception of the law:

What might become of the high and the low, of the divine and the human, the pure and the impure, once the door (that is, the system of laws, written and unwritten, that regulate their relations) has been neutralised, what might become of that ‘world of truth’ to which the investigations of the canine protagonist of the story that Kafka wrote when he definitively interrupted the draft of the novel – this is what is given to the land surveyor just to catch a glimpse of. (‘K’: 26)

In this example we can clearly see how Agamben uses these characters (figures is a better word) to disrupt situations, to render forms of power inoperative. As Agamben makes clear ‘borders’ here are not physical but categorical, systems of regulation and separation, that K seeks to render inoperative. Yet the inoperativity of categories, such as divine and human, high and low, could arguably relate to the more passive form of inoperativity, a structural tension. Agamben’s new figures of ‘poetic atheology’ are, seemingly, not the same as K, as confirmed by the strange analogy Agamben makes in closing his essay – that of comparing K’s inoperativity to the ‘world of truth’ sought after by the protagonist in Kafka’s ‘Investigations of a Dog’. When read alongside a politics of inoperativity, this story raises a number of issues about the horizon of the inoperative, and of the forms of tactic or strategy that can emerge. The protagonist of Kafka’s short story is a dog that attempts to transcend his being, seeing it as limited and vulgar. Yet try as he might, and having glimpsed the possibility of another way of existing, he struggles to transcend his own animal desires and drives. As an anthropomorphic dog he is one of the parahuman, inoperative beings that Agamben celebrates. Yet in his failure he provides us with an important feature of a politics of inoperativity, not speech as in the case of Bartleby, but silence. The opening of the story introduces the failure, or at least the inability, to fundamentally change, ‘how much my life has changed, and yet how unchanged it has remained at bottom!’ The dog’s life undergoes its first change in his youth when he witnesses a group of dogs who are making a ‘terrible clamour’ which, paradoxically, is a form of silence: ‘they did not speak, they did not sing, for the most part they kept almost stubbornly silent, but from the empty air they conjured music.’ The silent music of these dogs, for the narrator, offers a glimpse of another image of the dog, as the narrator states: ‘these dogs were violating the law’. At first their THE LABORATORY OF LITERATURE

105

106

KEY IDEAS

violation of the law, their refusal to answer the call of another dog, infuriates and repulses the narrator, yet it sets in motion a questioning of the status of the dog, and a series of ‘scientific’ experiments, the goal of which is to negate animal desire. Yet the negation is one that is attempted alone as the narrator fails to communicate with his fellow dogs. He asks a series of hypothetical questions of himself that revolve around this lack of communication: ‘well then, declare it, not just in the form of questions but as an answer. If you speak out, who will be able to resist you? The great chorus of dogs will join in as if it had been waiting for this moment. Then you will have all the truth, all the clarity, all the admission that you desire. The roof of this lowly life that you speak so ill of will be raised, and all of us, flank to flank, will ascend to freedom on high. And even if we should not achieve that final goal, if things should become worse than before, if the whole truth should be more unendurable than the half, if it should be confirmed that the silent ones, as the preservers of life, are in the right, if the faint hope that we still possess should turn to utter hopelessness, yet speaking out is still worth the attempt, since the permitted way of life is no life you wish to lead. So why, then, do you reproach others with their silence, and keep silent yourself?’ Easy to answer: ‘because I am a dog’. (2002: 153)

So in resignation the dog submits himself to ‘silent research’, knowing that the dog race, and he as a dog, are incapable of change. The political overtones of this passage, as well as the religious, are impossible to avoid, the willed hope of change all reduced to silence by the fact that the dog cannot but be himself, that he cannot communicate, cannot find a community. He goes on, the lone figure: the only question one can ask of him is ‘how long can you bear it?’ To which he replies, ‘I shall probably hold out till my natural end; for the calm of age is an ever more effective antidote to disturbing questions. I shall probably die peacefully in silence, surrounded by silence, and I look forward to that almost with composure.’ It is also important to recall the end of The Trial: ‘the hands of one of the partners were already at K.’s throat, while the other thrust the knife into his heart and turned it there twice. With failing eyes K. could still see the two of them, cheek leaning against cheek, immediately before his face, watching the final act. Like a dog! He said: it was as if he meant the shame of it to outlive him’ (1983: 172). The rest of the story consists of an attempt

to deny food in order to transcend his own dog nature, an experiment that ends up failing when, on the verge of death, a hunting dog orders him to leave his hunting grounds. His own conclusion is that his experiments have been a failure, yet his scientific incapacity is centred around his own instinct for freedom which propels him. Our dog, as an atheological figure who conducts experiments, is exemplary of Agamben’s Kafka, a Kafka that has been both illuminated and rearticulated through the process of critique. POETRY AND PROSE While, as I have suggested, Agamben’s work provides us with ways of reading the literary texts as registers or indexes of critical and philosophical concerns, his study of literature is not to be seen as that of the opportunistic reader, scouring creative works for a dramatisation of critical paradigms. His work on poetics and poetry demonstrates a greater awareness of poetic form and literary history. While at many important moments Agamben’s work turns to poetry, often to demonstrate the potential to move ‘beyond’ certain philosophical impasses, it is always steeped in an understanding of poetic form. If we recall in Chapter 1, Agamben, in Language and Death, turns to the Provençal poets of the twelfth century to suggest a use of language that doesn’t rest on the ‘unspeakable foundation’ bequeathed to us by the Heideggerean tradition, he does so by examining rhetorical practice. Similarly in part three of Stanzas he provides extended readings of the medieval French poem Roman de la Rose, or his discussion of Arnault Daniel’s Sestina in The Time That Remains. However, attempting to summarise Agamben’s work on poetry from individual examples is difficult. Agamben may provide unambiguous statements on the importance of poetry, yet that does not mean that it is always read in the same way, or holds a repeated structural place. This is due, I want to suggest, to the relation in his work between poetry – which for this exercise we will identify with the verse tradition – and poetics, which, as we have seen briefly in discussions of cinema, is the name for a more general form of representation that has as its horizon a much broader vision of ethics and politics. It may appear on first glance that The End of the Poem has little relevance outside a particular Italian context. It emerged out of a series of discussions that Agamben had with the Italian writers Italo Calvino and Claudi Rugafiori in the 1970s in which they attempted to create a number THE LABORATORY OF LITERATURE

107

108

KEY IDEAS

of ‘Italian categories’ that could be used to examine the polar concepts that dominated Italian culture. This ‘programme’ was never completed and Agamben’s essays mark an attempt to grapple with a number of oppositions that dominate Italian poetry from Dante through to the twentieth-century poet Giorgio Caproni. While I cannot analyse all of the essays in detail, I will examine those moments that deal with the structure of poetry, in particular the relationship between sound and sense. The tension between sound and sense is, according to Agamben, integral for any understanding of the crisis that plagues the structure of poetry. Agamben’s central thesis is that poetry is only distinguished from prose by enjambment. This formal term describes when a sentence continues beyond a rhyming couplet, and therefore the meaning of the sentence is in tension with the metre of the rhyme. A passage of poetic prose, with internal rhythm and metre, can never have this tension. As Agamben states, ‘Poetry will then be defined as that discourse in which it is possible to oppose a metrical limit – which can, as such, also fall in the context of prose – to a syntactical limit; prose will be defined as the discourse in which this is not possible’ (EP: 34). Consider a poem such as William Butler Yeats’ ‘Adam’s Curse’. Here the metre could be rendered equally well in prose, yet the relationship between syntax – the sentences that carry over the line – and the metre of the poem create a tension in which the meaning of the words, and the syntax of language, are opposed to one another, marking it as a classic example of enjambment, and therefore poetic discourse: We sat together at one summer’s end, That beautiful mild woman, your close friend, And you and I, and talked of poetry. I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been naught. Better go down upon your marrow-bones And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather; For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world.’ (1992: 76)

Yeats’ enjambment forces a tension between the syntax and the form. Take ‘Better go down upon your marrow-bones/And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones/Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather’. Here the heroic couplet form is pitted against the meaning of the sentence. Without the third line the couplet would make little sense. The rhythm and meaning carry-over into that line working to expose the form’s constriction. It is therefore an exemplary illustration of Agamben’s thesis, following Paul Valéry, that poetry is the ‘hesitation between sound and meaning’. While this distinction is a common one in prosody (the science of versification), Agamben takes it further, arguing that poetry is plagued by its ‘end’, the point at which sound and sense will coincide. Because the identity of the poem as a discourse is entwined with perpetuating or prolonging the opposition between sound and sense, ‘the last verse of the poem is not a verse’. The end of the poem is then the point of ‘undecidability’ between poetry and prose and constitutes something like a ‘crisis’ of the poem in which ‘sound is about to be ruined in the abyss of sense’ (EP: 112–13). But for Agamben this is precisely what does not happen. Sound and sense do not coincide, instead the result can only be silence, an ‘endless falling’ in which poetry can, according to Agamben, finally fulfil its task: ‘the poem thus reveals the goal of its proud strategy: to let language finally communicate itself, without remaining unsaid in what is said’ (EP: 115). This enigmatic conclusion suggests that the goal of poetry is to expose the nature of language by drawing attention to its function as a ‘communication of a communicability’. Yet what exactly does this look like? The answer would be poetry that pushes language to points of tension through opposing sound and sense, or that attempts to expose the fragility of the poem itself. Examples of English language poetry in Agamben’s work are rare, with most of his examples coming from Italian, French and German. These poets include Paul Valéry, Dante, Giorgio Caproni, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Celan, Rainer Maria Rilke and Friedrich Hölderlin. However, at one point he does mention the American poet William Carlos Williams as someone who follows in the tradition of Poe, Mallarmé, etc. As Agamben states in Stanzas, ‘His Paterson is, THE LABORATORY OF LITERATURE

109

110

KEY IDEAS

perhaps, with The Age of Anxiety by Auden, the most successful attempt at the long poem in contemporary poetry’ (S: 54). While this might strike some readers as an odd choice, Agamben’s interest within the context in Stanzas is that of the Romantic obsession with the creation of the work rather than the work itself. For Agamben Williams is a poet for whom the impossibility of the work, and the reflection of that impossibility, comes to stand in for the work itself. As we can see Agamben is placing Williams in a lineage that stretches back to the Jena Romantics, whom I discussed earlier. Yet I would like to suggest that this reference to William Carlos Williams can provide more than an odd aside. If Agamben believes that enjambment is the poet’s attempt to retain the distinction between poetry and prose, then Williams is one of those poets who, instead, brings the tensions to a head. In order to demonstrate the poetic form that interests Agamben I will briefly provide a commentary on section 2 of Williams’ poem that Agamben highlights, Paterson. This long poem (some may use the term ‘epic’) is concerned with Williams’ home city of Paterson, New Jersey. For Williams, European poetic form had been limiting, forcing a constraining rhythm upon the poet that was removed from the immediacy of natural rhythms of American speech. For Williams a truly American poetry, a poetry that was able to speak of places such as Paterson, had to remove itself from the shackles of European poetic form and discover its rhythms amongst those that emerged naturally in the American accents. (It is instructive here to listen to the recordings of Williams reading out Paterson; see Williams nd.) Yet that is hardly to suggest that there is no poetic form in Williams. On the contrary it is a highly stylised poetry that exposes the minimal difference between poetry and prose, allowing poetry to communicate itself. Williams’ late poetry is characterised by experiments in layout and voice. There is a regular switch between what some may identify as free verse poetry and passages of prose. The poetry utilises varied placement in order to draw attention to the tensions of the voice and imposed form, yet it is in no way ‘free’. For Williams, the very idea of free verse was a contradiction in terms. Either it has rhythm or it does not, in which case it can hardly be designated poetry. So forms of internal rhythm appear in Williams’ poetry that work with surface meaning and syntax to produce a subtle tension that is able to reveal in language a communication of the word itself. While it may seem most logical that this type of poetry would take the form

of something like e.e. cummings’ infamous grasshopper poem, I would suggest that Agamben’s analysis of poets such as Caproni suggests something far more subtle. Take for example the following passage from Paterson:

(Williams 2000: 261–2)

If one was to remove all the line-breaks and spacing this passage could read like a piece of poetic prose, with its own internal rhythm and careful punctuation. Yet the spacing draws attention to the rhythm in ways that prose cannot, forcing us to ask if the irregular order of spaces places a stress on some words, isolating phrases and challenging the ‘meaning’ inherent on the syntactical level. There is also the possibility of reading it visually, that is down the page instead of across it. The tensions then become even more pronounced as the first visual line takes on an ambivalent meaning: is love salvaged from the descent of despair? Is it the descent or love that is ‘endless and indestructible’? No matter which way one chooses to order the poem, to place the metrical and syntactical limits, it is an experience of being made aware that language doesn’t mean in and of itself, but instead is only itself, trapped in an ‘endless’ descent, yet one that in its indestructibility is not apocalyptic. Instead it is glossolalic, and in being so imbued with a potential to mean, but also not to mean, epitomising a poetry in which language has drawn attention to its own taking place and its vitality, echoing Agamben’s own identification of the ‘endless falling’ that marks the idea of poetry. In his Autobiography, Williams provides the following striking comment on the role of poetry, inspired by a waterfall: ‘The Falls let out a roar as it crashed upon the THE LABORATORY OF LITERATURE

111

112

KEY IDEAS

rocks at its base. In the imagination this roar is a speech or a voice, a speech in particular; it is the poem itself that is the answer’ (1951: 392). This idea of the poem answering speech with ‘language itself ’ provides an appropriate metaphor for Agamben’s own work on poetry, and of language more broadly. The roar of the falls is symbolic of the voice, a voice to which we cannot have access. Poetry is the means of responding with language itself, communication without necessary meaning as the only answer to the deafening silence of the Voice. TOWARDS A POETICS As I have noted throughout this book, Agamben’s work on language, politics, art and film can be brought together as part of a unified and sustained philosophical project. I have already provided a number of definitions of poetics, yet suffice to say it is about a form of representation, a mode of drawing attention to the medium that one is attempting to engage. Thus anything can be ‘poetic’. In conclusion to this chapter on literature I want to suggest how we might be able to think about poetics in general through an engagement with the work of James Joyce, and by extension of prose literature in general. Joyce’s Finnegans Wake remains the book to which any true interests in English literature must at some point turn. Whether one professes disdain or the highest admiration, its destruction and reconstruction of the English language remains unparalleled. Finnegans Wake also plays a cameo role in Agamben’s work, and we can use Agamben’s brief analysis of it as a way into how his work can be of use in the study of English language prose works. In Infancy and History, Agamben’s exploration of ‘Experience’ turns in the final section to a question of language. At stake here is the (im)possibility of grasping deeply felt experience except through language. Agamben uses the German word Erlebnisse, which proves impossible to translate into English. It is not exactly the same as experience, but designates an experience that is deeply felt and ‘lived through’. Agamben’s essay on the destruction of experience is precisely about the destruction of these forms of passionately held experiences and their representation. The inability of the contemporary to ‘represent’ experience is captured for him by Joyce whose ‘lucidity consists precisely in having understood that the flux of consciousness has no other reality than that of the “monologue” – to be exact that of language. Thus in Finnegans Wake, the interior

monologue can give way to a mythical absolutism of language beyond any “lived experience” or any prior psychic reality’ (IH: 54–5). Agamben’s identification of Joyce’s book being language’s monologue is an important one. Finnegans Wake is famously made up of corrupted English, heavily utilising ‘portmanteau’ words. These are famously described by Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass where Alice asks Humpty Dumpty the meaning of the word slithy: ‘Well “slithy” means “lithe and slimy.” “Lithe” is the same as “active.” You see it’s like a Portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word’ (1998: 187). Joyce’s book takes up the portmanteau, along with phonetic writing, attempting to capture the rhythms of ‘speech’ in writing. The opening gives us some sense of the strangeness of Joyce’s new linguistic world: riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

The following sentence then contains a number of impenetrable portmanteau words such as: Wielderfight, penisolate, themselse, mumper all, tauftauf thuartpeatrick, kidscad regginbrow, etc. (Joyce 2000a: 3). The unreadability of this language forces us into a process of deciphering, a search for meaning. We know that this is the English language, and if only we could just reconstruct the words, translate it into ‘regular’ English it would make sense. This is one of the dominant ways of reading ‘the Wake’, and many commentators attempt to reconstruct a plot, setting and characters, or to produce an account of symbolic unity. In doing so they seem to suggest that not only is meaning and order possible, but it is in fact desirable. Agamben’s brief note on Finnegans Wake is a riposte to this kind of interpretive method. Agamben has little more to do than draw attention to the fact that this is language’s monologue (we may want to recall Heidegger’s statement on language speaking itself). Nothing more need be said. Agamben’s identification of Joyce’s writing as being a monologue of language is an attempt to move us away from a model of Saussurean linguistics in which we see language as only containing meaning in relation to other words: words do not mean in and of themselves. Agamben has aligned this model with that of Oedipus in ancient Greek myth, while Agamben wants to suggest a new model from the point of view of the Sphinx. In most versions of the story the Sphinx THE LABORATORY OF LITERATURE

113

114

KEY IDEAS

is a zoomorphic figure having a lion’s body and a woman’s head. She guards the entrance to the city of Thebes, and asks all travellers who wish to leave or enter a riddle and would strangle and devour those who were unable to answer. The riddle is purported to go something like this: ‘Which creature in the morning goes on two legs, at midday on two and three in the evening?’ Oedipus answers correctly – ‘Man, who crawls when he is born, walks upright when an adult, and with a cane as an old man’. Having been beaten the Sphinx casts herself from the high rock upon which she sat and died. Agamben’s claim is that Saussurean semiology has always posed language as a riddle, an enigmatic signifier that hides its signified. To embrace a semiology from the point of view of the Sphinx would be one that saw language not as hiding meaning, but as suspending the necessary drive towards meaning: What the Sphinx proposed was not simply something whose signified is hidden and veiled under an ‘enigmatic’ signifier, but a mode of speech in which the original fracture of presence was alluded to in the paradox of a word that approaches its object while keeping it indefinitely at a distance. (S: 138)

While Agamben himself remains enigmatic on the precise identification of this semiology – what it may look like, how it would signify at all – Joyce’s model in Finnegans Wake draws us into a situation of a word that approaches its object, yet keeps it at a distance. The object of language however is not to be read as a signified, but language itself, and in Joyce, as in Agamben, language is able to approach itself when the pattern of signification falls down, words stop meaning and start speaking, of themselves. The ‘enigmatic signifier’ of literature is something we must move beyond, opening up instead to the fulfilled emptiness of language itself. So does this mean that an Agambenian literature must by its very nature be experimental? Unreadable? Hardly, for as I have made clear poetics can be subtle, as long as it is drawing out of its medium an inherent inoperativity. Perhaps I can finish with another example from Joyce in which the exposure of language not signifying effectively is achieved with far more subtlety. The start of ‘The Dead’, the final story from Joyce’s Dubliners (2000b), is famously from the perspective of a domestic servant (175).

In this passage the narrator’s use of free-indirect discourse to capture Lily’s misuse of language provides a language that in its misuse exposes the medium of language itself. From the all too common misuse of the word literally, to the unfortunate adjective (wheezy) to the appalling syntax (‘It was well for her she had not to attend to the ladies also’) it is a passage that forces us to interrogate the medium, not the meaning. Joyce has obviously chosen to do so for a number of reasons. Firstly he wants to call into question the omniscient narrator that had dominated realist fiction by providing contrasting narrative styles (Lily and Gabriel) with no clear switch. Secondly he wishes to undermine the dominance of the written word which fails to do justice to the complexity and nuance of speech. Thirdly he wants to provide a fractured narrative voice in order to throw into relief the dramatic poetic beauty of the final scene in the story where Gabriel’s turgid and affected attempts at artistry give way to a unified and unifying narrative voice. Whether or not this is an example that completely accords with Agamben’s understanding of poetics, it should be clear that even in this relatively ‘conventional’ prose literature Joyce forces us into a position in which we treat language as in its own mediality, allowing language to speak for itself. He does so with an end that reaches beyond the text, using his own literature as a ‘laboratory’. SUMMARY Literature provides Agamben with a number of important moments. Firstly it allows him to call into question the relationship that poetry has to language which can allow him to posit a clearer definition of his own ‘critical’ practice. Secondly it provides him with a range of characters who are exemplary inoperative figures, allowing for a dramatisation of complex philosophical form. Thirdly, poetry’s attempt to continually distinguish itself from prose allows him to explore poetry’s relationship to the ‘voice’ covered over by language. Finally it provides the grounding for an understanding of the poetic, that broader system of representation that suspends the relationship between form and content in order to examine the medium of its transition.

THE LABORATORY OF LITERATURE

115

7

BEARING WITNESS AND MESSIANIC TIME

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. ETHICS Philosophy has many central questions, but fundamental to all branches is the question of the best way to live. From Plato’s Republic, to Locke and through to contemporary intellectuals such as Peter Singer, philosophy has been a process of seeking to explore and question what constitutes ‘the good life’. Even for Agamben’s contemporary Alain

Badiou who sees ethics as fundamentally limiting and evil, there is still a need to address the topic, if even negatively. Agamben’s first principle of ethics is to grasp that there is ‘no essence, no historical or spiritual vocation, no biological destiny that humans must enact or realize’ (CC: 43). Since there is no telos, origin or vocation, there is only the intrinsic potentiality of the human being, and uncovering that potential is the primary ethical task. The only evil for Agamben is therefore regarding potentiality as a threat that must be repressed. All forms of insistence upon the supremacy of actuality, attempts to instil and fix meaning must be rejected for Agamben. Yet this early discussion of ethics from The Coming Community is not the whole story. When moving the question of ethics through into the Homo Sacer series, Agamben’s understanding of ethics in those critical moments becomes a matter of understanding the foundation of human shame, which will again lead him to language and the problems of representation. So Agamben’s response to the question of the ethical task is complex and multifaceted, but one could usefully divide it into two: 1 Ethics, when faced with the question of the greatest evil, is not a matter of judgement or condemnation, but is a matter of attempting the impossible task of remembering and representing those to whom the greatest injustice was done. Therefore ethics is a question of history and language. 2 Ethics is the task of attempting to construct a new idea of community, and is therefore a matter of critique of the present systems and structures of power, as well as of thinking the conditions of potentiality in which this new ethos can emerge. Ethics is therefore a question of politics. While this is a reductive schematisation of Agamben’s approach to ethics, it does very clearly allow us to see that no part of Agamben’s body of work can be isolated from another. Any attempt to posit an ethics that is not at the same time political and tied to language as a philosophical question is fundamentally unethical. So in what follows, by necessity, there will be some amount of recapping of previous chapters which should serve as useful repetition in casting the different elements of Agamben’s thought that we have traced so far in a new light. While Agamben’s work, in following Michel Foucualt’s, has been concerned with exposing the exercising of governmental power in the BEARING WITNESS AND MESSIANIC TIME

117

118

KEY IDEAS

Western political tradition as we saw previously, it also observes the products of this sovereign power. In Agamben’s broader body of work these figures are vital in helping us trace a logic of sovereignty by looking at the liminal figures it produces such as homo sacer. Agamben’s notion of history and ethics is intrinsically tied to these liminal figures, who in their modern forms raise the most pressing of ethical questions. While ethics is often thought of as an openness towards those who are ‘other’ to us, Agamben reconfigures the discussion, posing ethics as the task of ‘bearing witness’ or ‘testimony’ to those who have suffered most cruelly at the hands of this exercise of sovereign power. AUSCHWITZ In order to map Agamben’s understanding of ethics it is necessary to provide some background to his intervention by exploring briefly the place of Auschwitz in contemporary thought. In contemporary philosophy and critical theory the Holocaust undertaken by the Nazi Party during the twentieth century is an inescapable ethical horizon. Anyone writing in its wake must ask how one can account for this most horrendous of events, as well as ask the question of how it is to be avoided in the future. Of all the evils perpetrated in this dark period of history, those that took place in Auschwitz – the systematic destruction of human life on such a huge scale – form a symbolic centre. As a true picture emerged during the 1940s and 1950s of the scale of the atrocities experienced there it became impossible to contemplate the ‘good life’, to engage in any intellectual activity without first facing the question of Auschwitz. The German philosopher Theodor Adorno famously stated ‘even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stages of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ (1981: 34). This statement underscores the gravity of the Holocaust: after the Second World War, for many, the only ethical and philosophical question one can ask is how to avoid the horror of the camp. Amongst the philosophical responses to the Holocaust, that of Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95) has been significant. Levinas, a Lithuanianborn Jew who attended seminars by both Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl, was a prominent figure in the post-war French intellectual

scene. He is primarily known for his work on ethics and ‘otherness’ or alterity. This work has been an important influence in a number of fields, from the philosophy of his near contemporary Jacques Derrida, to the fields of post-colonialism and critical legal theory. Levinas, who was interred as a prisoner of war, devoted much of his work to answering the question of how the phenomena of inter-subjective relations work. At the heart of this, for Levinas, was the importance of the call of the other, the ethical obligation towards others. Importantly this is not a verbal call, I don’t need to hear the other to feel the necessity to respond. So language for Levinas is always a form of response, I must respond to the other in order to have the basis for language. Therefore language and being are contingent on the presence of the other, and the ethical task is my responsibility to others, both in terms of the traditional idea of responsibility, but also of responding to their call. This form of being ‘face to face’ with others is Levinas’ attempt to stop ethics from becoming a means to some end (such as a collective idea of the good life), allowing ethics to become not simply means, but to deny the very idea of a transcendental principle beyond the experience of the other as self. Agamben’s work doesn’t engage with that of Levinas to any great extent, with the exception of a brief discussion of shame in Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, yet arguably provides a silent critique of the principles underpinning the Levinasian/Derridean account of ethics and their relation to the Holocaust. Agamben’s study Remnants of Auschwitz – the third volume of the Homo Sacer series – seeks to cover a modest territory in regards to the problem of ethics – that of witnessing. In the preface Agamben indicates that there has been a tendency to either oversimplify or obscure the question of Auschwitz: ‘Some want to understand too much and too quickly; they have explanations for everything. Others refuse to understand; they offer only cheap mystifications. The only way forward lies in investigating the space between these two options.’ While one could speculate as to those Agamben has in mind here, his goal is clear – to understand a small aspect of the Holocaust – the testimonials written by those who survived. Agamben describes this aim in a modest fashion: ‘For my own part, I will consider myself content with my work if, in attempting to locate the place and theme of testimony, I have erected some signposts allowing future cartographers of the new ethical territory to orient themselves’ (Agamben RA: 13). Yet this BEARING WITNESS AND MESSIANIC TIME

119

120

KEY IDEAS

modesty is only seeming, as Agamben suggests it is a ‘new ethical territory’ that he seeks to delineate, one that is tied not to a phenomenological account of the other, but to the question of language, bearing witness to the very idea of the human. Agamben’s book is on one level a straightforward study of Holocaust narratives. He notes simply that these are dominated by survivors who feel a certain shame, for having survived: they bear witness, but what to? They didn’t suffer the ultimate injustice – death – they instead survived and can never do justice to the experience of those who cannot bear witness. Bearing witness and the problems of doing so become the basis for Agamben’s intervention in ethical debates. Commenting on Sereny’s narrative of the camp Agamben states, ‘it marks the definitive ruin of his capacity to bear witness, the desperate collapse of “that darkness” on itself. The Greek hero has left us forever; he can no longer bear witness for us in any way. After Auschwitz, it is not possible to use a tragic paradigm in ethics’ (Agamben RA: 99). The end of the tragic as a model of representing ethics and the experience of suffering is fundamentally related to this impossibility of bearing witness. For Agamben bearing witness is a process that provides us with the ultimate shame that is at the basis of subjectivity. While it would be easy to interpret the narratives of writers such as Primo Levi and Robert Antelme as betraying guilt at surviving, Agamben contends that it is actually an experience of shame. For Agamben ethics is a properly philosophical space and guilt, in being tied to law, cannot be an ethical category. The law attempts to create normative principles, a legal norm that then translates to a moral code and an attempt to delineate between right and wrong. As Agamben states, ‘ethics is the sphere that recognizes neither guilt nor responsibility; it is, as Spinoza knew, the doctrine of the happy life. To assume guilt and responsibility – which can at times be necessary – is to leave the territory of ethics and enter that of law. Whoever has made this difficult step cannot presume to return through the door that has closed behind him’ (Agamben RA: 24). Agamben suggests that this is a result of legal principles being aligned with ethical principles in secular cultures, not as a legacy from Christianity. The legal aspects of guilt will become important as Agamben asserts that bearing witness is in fact an instance of not bearing witness, of not being able to testify to anything except the impossibility of testimony, therefore ethics is not in the realm of law, but elsewhere, in language.

The difficulty of bearing witness is essentially about the failure of language to communicate the experience of the camp. This does not though mean that Agamben would endorse Adorno’s famous pronouncement about the barbarity of poetry after Auschwitz. On the contrary Auschwitz brings into relief the necessity of poetry, or of poetics. If we recall the previous chapter and Agamben’s suggestion that politics and philosophy had to remain faithful to poetry, to the taking place of language, the ‘hesitation between sound and meaning’, then it is unsurprising that ethics is a question of language and not, as others may contend, law. The testimony is then to something unsayable. We should not scour the testimonies of survivors looking for some sort of meaning, for a nugget of ethical truth that could help us to understand, instead, for Agamben, we should look for the moment in which language breaks down, becomes inoperative and cannot bear witness to anything other than ‘that which does not have language’. Agamben gives numerous instances of camp survivor narratives that are anchored around language as inoperative, as not communicating meaning. One of the most striking is that of Primo Levi describing the babbling of Hubrinek, ‘a nobody, a child of death, a child of Auschwitz’. The child, on its death bed, repeatedly utters a word which, try as they might, those around can make no sense of. The word, transcribed by Levi as mass-klo or matisklo, functions for Agamben as being both inside and outside of language. If we recall Agamben’s call for a semiology not tied to the necessity for making words mean, then it soon becomes apparent how we are meant to read this word. Levi understood, Agamben suggests, that it was a word that should remain without definition, yet paradoxically Levi saw himself as ‘bearing witness through these words of mine’ to the memory of Hubrinek. The case of Hubrinek reveals for Agamben that ethics, bearing witness, is about registering the inability to bear witness to anything other than language: ‘The language of testimony is a language that no longer signifies and that, in not signifying, advances into what is without language, to the point of taking on a different significance – that of the complete witness, that of he, who by definition cannot bear witness’ (Agamben RA: 39). And it is the dead, the silent figures of the camp, that cannot bear witness. The most striking feature of Agamben’s commentary on the camp is the figure of the Muselmann, which is literally translated as ‘the Muslim’. The exact meaning of the term and its origin are obscure and there are a number of competing interpretations. Some claim it is BEARING WITNESS AND MESSIANIC TIME

121

122

KEY IDEAS

because these are figures who, suffering from extreme malnutrition, became the ‘living dead’ of the camps, physically disintegrated and mentally oblivious they scour the ground in search of food, giving, from afar, the impression of a Muslim man at prayer, hence the name. Yet for Agamben ‘the most likely explanation of the term can be found in the literal meaning of the Arabic word muslim: the one who submits unconditionally to the will of god’ (RA: 45). The power of these figures as ‘the ultimate witnesses’ is that they enter into a zone of indistinction between human and non-human. They are physically alive, yet are already dead, having resigned themselves to their fate. This recalls of course Agamben’s Homo Sacer, and it was in the book of that name that the Muselmann first appeared. As such the Muselmann embodies the way in which sovereign power works to produce forms of bare life. The Muselmann is the camp’s homo sacer. But whereas the initial volume of that series was concerned with looking at the production of bare life, this volume – III – looks instead at the problems of attempting to bear witness to these figures. As an ethical task this raises a number of questions: If the Muselmann is unable to talk then how can we understand his perspective? If, to be a Muselmann, one must die, then can they ever tell their own story? What sort of language could ever be used to allow these figures to speak without committing the violence of silencing them again? Agamben is forthright about the difficulty of answering these questions: ‘The Muselmann has neither seen nor known anything. This is why to bear witness to the Muselmann, to attempt to contemplate the impossibility of seeing is not an easy task’ (RA: 54). If we recall both our discussion of language and homo sacer, we can begin to see some of the broader philosophical questions that lie behind the figure of the Muselmann. As a form of homo sacer the Muselmann is that figure which is neither human nor inhuman. He represents the product of the biopolitical machine and therefore is indicative of its logic of inclusive exclusion. The Muselmann can then help to illustrate the paradoxes that govern the Western political tradition. Yet if the human is the site, the location of language – the speaking being – then how can language express the inhumanity of the Muselmann? We can see now that Agamben’s ethics is one of representation, and how the attempts to write the Holocaust are attempts to find a new language of ethics. The new language of ethics is one, arguably, of silence. It will be helpful to examine Agamben’s account of Robert Antelme’s memoir The

Human Race. Agamben focuses on a particular incident of a young man from Bologna who blushes when he is indiscriminately pulled out of a crowd to be shot. The seeming embarrassment of the young man seems at first unusual. Why on earth would one be embarrassed at being shot? For Antelme and those around him the pink in the face of the young man is read as a universal condition: ‘Ready to die – that, I think, we are; ready to be chosen at random for death – no. If the finger designates me, it shall come as a surprise, and my face will become pink, like the Italian’s’ (1992: 232). Agamben states that his blush ‘betrayed a limit that was reached, as if something like a new ethical material were touched upon in the living being. Naturally it was not a matter of fact to which he could bear witness otherwise, which he might also have expressed through words. But in any case that flush is like a mute apostrophe flying through time to reach us, to bear witness to him’ (RA: 104). It is by no means a moment of poetic conceit when Agamben equates the shame of the subject with the formality of language. For Agamben it is the act of failing to bear witness, of failing to communicate an experience as anything other than communication, that underlines this new conceptualisation of ethics. If we equate the human being as the speaking being, which so many philosophers and writers have done, then it is unsurprising that Agamben’s concept of shame as what lies at the limits of expression in language is also what lies at the limits of our concept of the subject, of the human. At the moment in which the flush of shame arises it is a shame not for anything that an individual has done, but the shame of having to die, of being destroyed so easily. As Agamben states, ‘the subject has no other content than its own desubjectification; it becomes witness to its own disorder, its own oblivion as a subject. This double movement, which is both subjectification and desubjectification, is shame’ (RA: 106). The relationship between shame and language, the movement from the flush of the young man from Bologna to the flying apostrophe, is one that, while complex, provides the essence of Agamben’s concept of a new ethics and also a provocation to the way in which we think about the act of writing. It may be of use here to briefly examine Agamben’s understanding of the relationship between subjectivation and desubjectivation. As I suggested in Chapter 4 Agamben, like Foucault, sees the apparatuses of biopower working to construct subjects, yet at the same time there is the possibility of the reverse happening, of desubjectivation. As BEARING WITNESS AND MESSIANIC TIME

123

124

KEY IDEAS

Agamben stated in an interview, ‘Today, it seems to me that the political terrain is a kind of battlefield in which two processes unfold: the destruction of all that traditional identity was (I say this, of course, with no nostalgia) and, at the same time, its immediate resubjectivation by the State – and not only by the State, but also by the subjects themselves’ (‘I am’, 116). Auschwitz is a moment of extreme desubjectivation, but also of resubjectivation, and it becomes an important space in which Agamben can explore both the processes of desubjectivation and the ways in which language can bear witness to this, to the deconstruction of the very utterance of the subject. To say ‘I’ to become the subject of enunciation is, for Agamben, the moment at which we can see most clearly the impossibility of bearing witness, in the same way that we saw in Chapter 1 it revealed the impossibility of subjectivity itself. Agamben suggests that this moment is absolutely without any substantiality and content other than its mere reference to the event of discourse. But once stripped of all extra-linguistic meaning and constituted as a subject of enunciation, the subject discovers that he has gained access not so much to a possibility of speaking as to an impossibility of speaking – or rather he has gained access to being always already anticipated by a glossolalic potentiality over which he has neither control nor mastery. (RA: 116)

It is the glossolalic potentiality that is Agamben’s new ethical language as it reveals the very essence of our being – the negative ground of the speaking being – as well as the moment in which we can see how a form of representability can interrupt this very negativity and bring about the conditions of possibility for the new idea of community that Agamben seeks. Ethics is an openness towards this new community, the making possible of potentiality through the use of the impotentiality of language itself. The true challenge of testimony is to ‘establish oneself in a living language as if it were dead, or in a dead language as if it were living’ (RA: 161). This attempt to bear witness through the presentation of language as language is, it should be clear, not simply a means of reading Holocaust literature. It is tied to a broader attempt to see in the desubjectivation of the biopolitical state the possibility for life beyond it.

PROFANATION If we recall our chapters on both language and politics, we will recall the importance of the sacred for Agamben. In Auschwitz the Muselmann revealed the limits of the sovereign exception and became one of the most striking instances of the function of sovereign power. Yet the sacred doesn’t always take the same forms of horrific bare life. In the society of the spectacle there is instead a logic of separation at work that is tied intrinsically to the sacred but its outcome is the banality of mass consumerism. But before we proceed to look at the idea of profanation it is worth recapping how homo sacer is at the mercy of a process of separation and exclusion, yet that process is inherently unstable. The sacred man is he who belongs to the gods, somehow removed from the profane world of human kind. So he is first subject to an act of separation between the two worlds. Yet he still remains within the profane world but is marked by his ‘irreducible residue of sacredness’. So he is removed from the laws of the profane world, meaning that he can be sacrificed because he already is the property of the gods. So homo sacer is not part of either world, he is instead the body upon which the division or distinction between the worlds is both worked upon and undone: ‘one part of the same consecrated victim is profaned by contagion and consumed by men, while another is assigned to the gods’ (Pr: 79). The importance of homo sacer is this logic of separation made apparent in one individual, a separation and distinction which reveals itself as constructed and fallible, not as natural and given. In his more recent study Profanations, Agamben goes further in his demonstration that sacrifice is the threshold that divides the sphere of the humans and the gods, the practice that produces the very division. But if sacrifice marks the movement from the sacred to the profane, then it is the point at which the distinction between the two can be rendered inoperative, returning what was once sacred back to the common use of mankind. Agamben gives the example of a sacrifice in which part of an animal will be transformed from the human to the divine sphere. To appease the gods it is necessary that part of the internal organs of the victim would be reserved for the gods, the rest consumed by human beings. But if human beings touched those organs then they would be returned to the human sphere, contaminated by it. So sacrifice as a threshold activity becomes the point at which separation and exclusion can occur, but it always has the potential to be returned to the sphere of the profane. BEARING WITNESS AND MESSIANIC TIME

125

126

KEY IDEAS

This should already strike us as a familiar Agambenian formula. Religion marks, for Agamben, an attention to the ways of ordering the relationship between the world of the human and that of the gods. Whereas some etymologies suggest religion stems from ‘religare (that which binds and unites the human and the divine)’, Agamben follows the etymology of relegere which he indicates is a scrupulousness in adhering to the separation of spheres (Pr: 74–5). Agamben’s etymology identifies the importance of study, or rereading, in maintaining a distinction and split between spheres. In opposition to the sacred sphere and its act of sacrifice, Agamben will celebrate the profane, which ‘means to open up the possibility of a special form of negligence, which ignores separation or, rather, puts it to a particular use’ (75). So instead of sacrifice which marks the path from one sphere to another, profanation seeks to return the sacred to common use through an understanding of the law. The process of examining the dogma of religion, the study of religion through the profane, is then a means of overcoming and exposing its logic. It is important then to note that Agamben is not a secular thinker as secularity leaves the structure and logic of the sacred intact within the profane sphere. Instead he wants to expose those points at which ‘the religious machine seems to reach a limit point or zone of undesirability, where the divine sphere is always in the process of collapsing into the human sphere and man always already passing over into the divine’ (Pr: 79). Agamben here is careful to maintain the relation between the sacred and the profane in a state of suspension. It is not a matter of rejecting the sacred sphere but of identifying the points at which the two clearly fail to separate in order to deactivate the separation itself. It is in that sense that there is a ‘residue of profanity in every consecrated thing and a remnant of sacredness in every profaned object’ (Pr: 78). So how can we see the sacred in the profaned and vice-versa? Agamben turns to Walter Benjamin’s argument that capitalism is essentially religious, that it uses the logic of guilt, but a guilt without atonement or redemption, a guilt that turns itself incessantly towards guilt. This is the precise logic of debt, pushing us towards a guilt that can never be escaped, that can only be met with more debt. Here then marks a distinction between the idea of religion as division between the sacred and the profane world. In fact capitalism as religion works towards a process of endless separation ‘that assails every thing, every place, every human activity in order to divide it from itself ’ (Pr: 81). This

logic of division is an essential part of commodification. In order to sell us consumer items capitalism has to separate them from us. We buy clothes, DVDs, shoes, in order to construct an identity, yet that identity, our sexuality, our bodies are now an ‘ungraspable fetish’ offered to us safe in the knowledge that we can never attain them, can never make use of them and will therefore be forever cursed to buy them again and again, in constant search for that which has been separated from us, a process that produces a guilt that induces us to buy more. This idea of separation and division is related distinctly to Guy Debord’s diagnosis of the post-war consumer culture as ‘the society of the spectacle’. As we saw in the discussion of film Agamben agrees with Debord’s diagnosis that we live in a world that is characterised by ‘a social relation between people that is mediated by images’ (Debord 1995: 12). Capitalism is a process of transforming property from the sphere in which men can have free use, to a point in which property has been removed from us to a separate sphere of consumption. This for Agamben explains our unhappiness as consumers: we are constantly consuming these products without any possibility of use, feeling constantly separated from them, and from ourselves. What capitalism has tried to enforce on us is the impossibility of profanation. In separating us from ourselves, leaving us without the possibility of use, we can no longer take the objects of our subjection and render them profane. Yet for Agamben this is only seeming, the ruse that capitalism wants to convince us of, and Agamben’s work suggests that there is a possibility, even a necessity, to uncover a means of discovering a ‘new use’ through the ‘profane defecation’ that allows us to play with the separations that divide us. It is important here that Agamben does not advocate an abolition of difference and separation but that we must instead learn to ‘deactivate the apparatuses of those differences in order to make a new use possible’ (Pr: 87). Here we can again see the ways in which Agamben works to take a division, between the sacred and profane, and to demonstrate how in our contemporary society it has become inoperative (by forcing a logic of separation that cannot be profaned) and to demonstrate the necessity to push that logic to its absolute conclusion (profane the unprofanable). It is this, that Agamben reminds us again and again, that is ‘the political task of the coming generation’ (Pr: 92).

BEARING WITNESS AND MESSIANIC TIME

127

128

KEY IDEAS

MESSIANISM Agamben’s invocation of the coming community, the coming politics, the coming generation raises the question of precisely what sort of temporal logic it will take. When will it happen? How will it happen? The absolute profanation that Agamben advocates will not only challenge the logic of separation he sees in capitalism, but will also prepare the ground for the new ethos that Agamben alluded to in Langauge and Death. As we saw in Chapter 3, potentiality and inoperativity are often linked in Agamben’s work to messianism. Agamben takes this term primarily from Walter Benjamin, finding in it a model for a redemptive politics. The term ‘messianism’ has long been debated in both Jewish and Christian theology, subject to a bewildering number of detailed commentaries which extract from the term numerous meanings. Perhaps we can take Werblowsky’s definition as the most succinct: The term messianism, derived from the Hebrew word masiach (‘anointed’) and denoting the Jewish religious concept of a person with a special mission from God, is used in a broad and at times very loose sense to refer to beliefs or theories regarding an eschatological (concerning the last times) improvement of the state of man or the world, and a final consummation of history. (as quoted in Fitzmeyer 2007: 5)

Jewish theology has, broadly speaking, two messianic traditions, both of which stem from the prediction by Rabbi Johanan in the Babylonian Talmud that ‘the son of David will come only in a generation that is either altogether righteous or altogether wicked’. The result of this ambiguity is a split between the redemptive and apocalyptic coming of the Messiah. From the ‘redemptive’ tradition comes a line of twentiethcentury thinkers who see in the theological concept of the messianic a theory of the historical and political that could come to redeem the modern world. The logic that accompanies messianic philosophy is that the world began with a glorious unity, before becoming split, or fallen, and needs to be brought together in order to either restore the original harmony, or to create a new unified world not anchored in the old divisions (their synthesis would still leave residues of the fallen world). A secular messianism emerged in German-Jewish thinkers such as Benjamin and Ernst Bloch, often tied to Marxism and seeing ‘redemption’ as something like a coming communist Utopia. So why a Jewish

‘redemption’ when clearly Christianity has its own notion of redemption and a long tradition of writers who explore the coming redemption of mankind? According to Walter Benjamin’s close friend, the Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem, there are substantial differences between the Christian and Jewish models. In Christianity, redemption is set to take place purely in the spiritual realm, ‘an event which is reflected in the soul, in the private world of each individual, and which effects an inner transformation which need not correspond to anything outside’. On the other hand Jewish redemption will be a very public affair, taking place on ‘the stage of history’ and must appear, must be seen (Scholem 1971: 1). This split between a redeemed individual and a redeemed world was an important one in the Judaic redemption becoming tied to Marxism in which a Universal redemption is the goal. But within Judaic ideas of messianism there are two further splits, which are key for beginning to understand some of the tensions in the work of both Benjamin and Agamben: the restorative and the utopian. According to Scholem the restorative turns its gaze to ‘the return and recreation of a past condition which comes to be felt as ideal … to the re-establishment of an original state of things and to a “life with the ancestors”’ (Scholem 1971: 3). The Utopian tradition however seeks to bring about something completely new, a world that never has existed. Yet these two tendencies are always coexisting, one touching the other, never quite one nor the other. We can categorise Benjamin’s messianism, and Agamben’s use of it, as the attempt to bring both together in equal measures, at a ‘standstill’ to destabilise each other. Agamben is clear that there is nothing nostalgic about any ‘restorative’ aspect of messianism. In fact messianism has a destructive character and will ‘restore’ the world to a point it has never known, to a new ethos which, if we recall the Caproni poem from Chapter 1 (p. 19), is both radically new and completely familiar. It is in the messianic that we can see the coming together of Agamben and Benjamin’s idea of history as attempting to plot those dominant structures and systems in order to bring about a new future in the present. In The Time That Remains, Agamben has further clarified the nature of the messianic, and of the political and ethical importance of the messianic ‘vocation’. It is in this text that the temporal dimensions of the messianic become further clarified: ‘the messianic vocation is a movement of immanence, or, if one prefers, a zone of absolute indiscernibility between immanence and transcendence, between this world BEARING WITNESS AND MESSIANIC TIME

129

130

KEY IDEAS

and the future world’ (TTR: 25). The key here is that the messianic will render the temporal distinction between present and future indiscernible. And perhaps unsurprisingly it is potentiality that is the key to this ‘vocation’. To be in the realm of the messianic is, like ethics, to be open to potentiality, and for the possibility of the ‘as not’. The biblical figure of St Paul is key for the reason that he seeks to suspend Jewish law by rendering it inoperative. The inoperativity of Paul introduces us to another key Agambenian term, the remnant. What Paul produces in his rendering inoperative of the Jewish law is a remnant, something which remains from the separation of the law but cannot be reducible to what has been separated. The important division here is that between Jew and non-Jew which produces a remnant. In theology the remnant was commonly understood as those who ‘survived the eschatological catastrophe’, the elected few who survive the final destruction. Yet Agamben rejects this apocalyptic messianism which posits a time after the end of time. Instead Agamben wants to suggest that the remnant is that which is always contained in relation to the messianic event, it is that which does not need to be saved as it is not of an eschatological time, but exists within regular time. In ancient Greek chronos signified chronological time, while kairos was some sort of time in-between. Agamben suggests that this opposition is, in relation to the messianic, a false one: ‘what we take hold of when we seize kairos is not another time but a contracted and abridged chronos’ (TTR: 69). The messianic thus opens up not in some time after time, but precisely within regular time. It is that remnant that exists in all time but needs to be brought about, grasped: The messiah has already arrived, the messianic event has already happened, but its presence contains within itself another time, which stretches its parousia, not in order to defer it but to make it graspable. For this reason, each instant may be, to use Benjamin’s words, the ‘small door through which the Messiah enters’. The Messiah always already had his time, meaning he simultaneously makes time his and brings it to fulfilment. (TTR: 71)

We are perhaps now in a better position to understand the temporality that underpins the messianic, but also of Agamben’s coming politics. The key to the deactivation of the law that Paul uncovers is that

it does not negate or annihilate, but renders inoperative. In doing so it manages not to create an end of time, an eschatology after which it must posit something else. Nor, on the other hand, does it allow the structures of the law to be returned to. It is therefore not a gaze towards a future, be it eschatological or one of infinite deferral, nor is it a return to the past. Instead it is a time that opens itself up to a new form of use, a new model of community and to a happy life. Happiness, Agamben stated in an essay on Benjamin, is achieved only when we experience what never happened. The temporality here is important and Agamben repeats the term in italics to emphasise its importance: ‘But this – what has never happened – is the historical and wholly actual homeland of humanity’ (P: 159). The fact that it has never happened means that it is always already happening. It is at that point that we encounter the ethical homeland of humanity that we encountered in Language and Death, and which underpins all of Agamben’s thought. SUMMARY Agamben approaches ethics as not the attempt to think through the relation to the other, but as an attempt to encounter the ‘homeland of humanity’ by turning towards the glossolalic potentiality of the human being. His encounter with Auschwitz and the testimonies of Holocaust survivors sees his attempt to think through the ways in which language can be used to represent not the impossibility of writing after the Holocaust, but of the necessity of using language to dismantle regimes of power. This opened up Agamben’s exploration of profanation, which he demonstrates is necessary to provide the destruction of the separation that drives capitalism and to render the world profaned, belonging to the sphere of human kind. The new use that opens up in profaning capitalism is analogous to the ways in which an understanding of messianic time will illuminate the power of deactivation. In Agamben’s analysis of St Paul we saw the production of the remnant, that which was not of chronological time or eschatological time, as opening up the space in which the coming community can uncover the true homeland of humanity.

BEARING WITNESS AND MESSIANIC TIME

131

AFTER AGAMBEN

There is an obvious contradiction in having a chapter entitled ‘After Agamben’ as he is very productive and will hopefully remain so for many years. Instead I would like to explore the ways in which Agamben has been taken up in the social sciences and humanities in order to highlight both the productive and negative uptake of his work. The chapter is then divided into two sections. The first will examine some representative cases of misreading in political philosophy. The second is more speculative and will hopefully crystallise the ways in which Agamben’s thought can help us to understand the contemporary therefore the true efficacy of his work. THE POLITICS OF READING AGAMBEN It is safe to say that Agamben’s work has made the biggest splash in the field of political philosophy. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life was published in 1998 in an English translation. A year later this was followed by a further four books and Agamben’s presence was quickly felt in a number of fields. Yet until recently that presence was unevenly spread in what can generally be determined political philosophy. While a number of the critics who wrote responses to Agamben’s work were in fields such as literary studies, comparative literature and legal studies, almost all were responding to the Homo Sacer series. There are of course exceptions, and readers could do worse than try the two early edited collections that came out on

Agamben, one a special issue of the journal Paragraph, vol. 25 (2002), the other of the now defunct Contretemps, vol. 5 (2004). These special editions, in not having a predetermined theme, are a little broader in their coverage of Agamben’s body of work than those that have followed. The first book of secondary criticism was Andrew Norris’ edited collection, Politics, Metaphysics and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Homo Sacer’. The collection featured a number of critical assessments of Agamben’s book by a range of scholars, many of whom provide useful interventions and commentaries. Yet to some extent these commentaries treat the Homo Sacer project in too much isolation from Agamben’s broader body of work. As this book has suggested there is a focus and a structure governing Agamben’s thought which gets lost if one is to focus on these later and more political works. The second volume of collected essays, On Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, edited by Matthew Calarco and Steven Decaroli, was broader in its coverage and included important essays by Antonio Negri, Dominick LaCapra and Paul Patton. Some of the essays, such as Catherine Mills’ on eugenics and biopolitics, provide important interdisciplinary interventions, while others seem to repeat a common accusation: Agamben is a political nihilist. In order to explore this claim, and to question its effectiveness, we should turn to Ernesto Laclau’s essay ‘Bare Life or Social Indeterminacy’. Laclau is a widely known Marxist political philosopher and, with Chantal Mouffe, wrote the influential study Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985). Laclau’s criticism of Agamben is based upon a critique of his genealogical or etymological methodology. As Laclau states, ‘reading his texts, one often gets the feeling that he jumps too quickly from having established the genealogy of a term, a concept or an institution, to determine its actual working in a contemporary context, that in some sense origin has a secret determining priority over what follows from it’ (2007: 12). For Laclau this is genealogy that falls into structuralism, and his structuralism is too rigid and he ends up being a teleological and structural thinker, precisely the sorts of approaches that a writer like Agamben abhors. Laclau then suggests that the conclusions that Agamben comes to are fundamentally nihilistic in that they deny the potentiality for structural diversity in the current political sphere and therefore deny the possibility of political action. This is captured for Laclau in the image of the concentration camp as the image of Western politics, about which he doesn’t mince his words: ‘by unifying the whole AFTER AGAMBEN

133

134

AFTER AGAMBEN

process of modern political construction around the extreme and absurd paradigm of this concentration camp, Agamben does more than present a distorted history: he blocks any possible exploration of the emancipatory possibilities opened up by our modern heritage’ (2007: 22). This position asserts that there is something fundamentally worthwhile in the juridico-political structure of the present and they should not be jettisoned because those extreme examples of its (biopolitical) fate are not intrinsically tied to its structure. For a thinker like Laclau our ‘modern heritage’ is one that is made up of both dominating forces, but also resistance to those forces, and a certain fluidity that allows them to never become ossified and truly hegemonic. Laclau and Mouffe sought to outline a Marxism that is capable of drawing from the social body a form of antagonistic politics which is able to harness the power of social movements and to be responsive to shifts and changes rather than dogmatic as ‘classical’ Marxism had been. They outline a call for a Marxism that is capable of ‘diluting’ itself ‘in that infinite intertextuality of emancipatory discourses in which the plurality of the social takes place’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 5). The image we get here then is of a radical openness to the idea of political strategy. Antagonistic politics must never claim that a system is totalising or incapable of change that can be made at the level of the social, rather than at the sovereign or state level. Yet as Agamben has made clear across his body of work, and I’ve suggested throughout, ‘strategy’ is a key part of his own work. It is precisely the idea of the coming community that gives Agamben’s work its power, and his critique of biopolitics its strength. As Agamben stated in a lecture on Debord and the Metropolis, ‘every thought, however “pure”, general or abstract it tries to be, is always marked by historical and temporal signs and thus captured and somehow engaged in a strategy and urgency’ (‘M’). Agamben’s work then, no matter how abstract, is always touched by his concern with the present. The reading of Agamben by Laclau is symptomatic of many ‘critiques’ of Agamben’s political position that have circulated in the past 10 years. The other direct criticism of Agamben’s position usually follows a counter-philology to Agamben’s which reveals the highly idiosyncratic nature of Agamben’s critical genealogies. Take Laurent Dubreuil for example. He highlights how Agamben follows Arendt’s particular understanding of the distinction between zoe- and bios and extrapolates from them a totalised understanding of the ancient Greek view of life. Dubreuil demonstrates the extent to which a particular

linguistic form here is allowed to step in and do an excessive conceptual work which must be understood as a highly politicised manoeuvre rather than a concrete historical grounding. As he states, ‘Agamben simplifies Aristotle’s texts and then dissolves them into the grandiose entity of “the Greeks”. Embedded in the unfounded argument from authority is a network of unspoken motives which we must expose, then denounce. Even while he anchors the entire “political existence” in language (logos), Agamben remains deaf to the semantic phenomena in tongue’ (Dubreuil 2006: 86). The argument here is that Agamben’s work privileges ‘the Greeks’ as the foundation of Western culture, yet in doing so wants to cover over the questions of power and authority that circulate in such a statement. The complexity of ancient Greek culture and the usage of language destabilises Agamben’s attempt to tie life comprehensively to political life. Dubreuil’s goal is to ‘affirm life outside of politics’ rather than capitulating to the idea that all life is trapped in biopolitics and that the only ground of resistance can be from within that order (Dubreuil 2006: 97). It would seem that Dubreuil has perhaps missed Agamben’s own celebration of life beyond biopolitical capture and the broader recourse to inoperativity in Agamben’s work. Somewhat less engaged, yet inevitable, are the emerging attempts to use the homo sacer paradigm and the interrogation of bare life as a means of reading any number of cultural, political and literary phenomena. As we saw in Chapter 4, there has been a utilisation of Agamben’s work to grasp the nature of contemporary biopolitical practices. These attempts to use Agamben as a diagnostic apparatus to uncover the complexities of the present political moment are important as long as they maintain a sense of rigour and use the examples they draw upon as a means of reflecting on Agamben’s practice, rather than just as an example of its efficacy. However, these forms of ‘practical’ interrogation are sure to be overshadowed by those critics wishing to draw Agamben into their own discursive fields in order to play ‘homo sacer spotting’. While I won’t single out any particular proponents of this methodology, it seeks to expose an author, an artist, a film-maker as representing the paradoxical nature of bare life in their work. The purpose here is of course a radicalisation of the author/ artist by demonstrating how wonderfully insightful they are in grasping the nature of the sovereign exception and bare life without having read Agamben. This sort of radicalisation by association is at best a AFTER AGAMBEN

135

136

AFTER AGAMBEN

critical re-examination of the author/artist under question, with its exploration and examination of Agamben immaterial, although it may provide productive interventions. At worst it is simply a faddish use of the next ‘big thing’ in critical theory, more grist to the mill of intellectual production that characterises contemporary academia. AGAMBEN, OUR CONTEMPORARY In order to conclude this book I would like to suggest that Agamben’s thought offers us far more than an academic debate over philology or political theory. Any attempt to read Agamben’s work as a diagnostic kit for intellectual problems comprehensively misses the point. In our culture of the spectacle, in which we consume our own subjection and turn a blind eye to the gross subjection of others, it is not hard to admit that politics has indeed entered a ‘lasting eclipse’. Yet as the hysterical circus of democratic elections in some countries has recently shown there is an emptying out of the category of left and right. The left is simply the ‘mask of the good democratic system’ while the right ‘points without scruple to desubjectification’ (Agamben WA?: 22). The previous idea of collective social subjects, actors, who can mobilise against, militate against a sovereign power has thoroughly lost out to the oikonomia, which in Agamben’s recent work has become the name for the form of government as self-replicating economy of administration. Oikonomia seeks to impose its will upon pure being, its processes of control and domination working to desubjectivise, to empty out the category of subjectivity in order to control it. Previous forms of oikonomia had been about the positive construction of subjectivation, yet for Agamben we live in a world in which subjectivation and desubjectivation have become ‘reciprocally indifferent’. Attempts to desubjectivise us through processes of observation and monitoring are routinely accepted by a populous whom Agamben describes as ‘the most docile and cowardly social body that has ever existed in human history’. Yet our docility hardly provides the apparatuses of the state with a sense of security, that we have become the ultimate ‘docile bodies’. It is, according to Agamben, hardly a paradox that ‘the harmless citizen of postindustrial democracies … who readily does everything that he is asked to do, inasmuch as he leaves his everyday gestures and his health, his amusements and his occupations, his diet and his desires, to be commanded and controlled in the

smallest details by apparatuses, is also considered by power – perhaps precisely because of this – a potential terrorist’ (WA?: 22–3). The fact that through biometric testing and surveillance the nation states of the world feel the need to suspect us all of being terrorists indicates the inoperativity of the apparatuses’ attempt to control us. This global governmental machine is leading us effectively towards catastrophe, one that we seem to mindlessly embrace. Yet this is not under any circumstances to be seen as some form of nostalgia, an attempt to celebrate the past and see our own period as one of decline. Instead we should see Agamben’s work as contemporary in the best way. His investigation of the past, its structures, logic, architectures, is done with an eye to their perpetuation in the present. To be contemporary means ultimately to see the ways the darkness of the present casts a shadow back into the past. Agamben’s work is then a tracing of the shadow, an attempt to see our own historical structures. So to be contemporary is, for Agamben, to face the past through the dark light of the present. Yet that process hardly leaves the present unchanged: ‘to be contemporary means in this sense to return to a present where we have never been’ (WA?: 51–2).

AFTER AGAMBEN

137

FURTHER READING

Most of Agamben’s work has been translated into English, although he has published a number of works recently which are currently being translated, so the list provided below is still to expand. Agamben’s body of work, as I have repeatedly suggested, is sprawling and diffuse. His work also rarely proceeds in a clearly argumentative or explanatory fashion, so it is difficult to advise a good book to start. However, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy provides a good range, both in terms of chronology and content, to give new readers a sense of Agamben’s style and method, while Means without End: Notes on Politics provides Agamben at his most lucid and direct and will allow for some clear preparatory reading before tackling the Homo Sacer series. To my mind Language and Death still remains an important entry point into Agamben’s work. It is here that Agamben sets out, to some extent, his approach to language and discusses important questions of foundation. While it is an abstract text and offers little to the reader unfamiliar with Heidegger, it is one that will provide readers with a strong foundation upon which to proceed. From there, there is no set path a reader should take. Much will depend upon individual interest, with some readers following politics, others literature. But for those at a loss I would suggest moving on to Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, then to Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, before proceeding to The Open: Man and Animal.

WORKS BY GIORGIO AGAMBEN Agamben, G. (‘B’) ‘Bodies without Words: Against the Biopolitical Tatoo’, German Law Journal 5, no. 2 (2004): 168–9. —— (CC) The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. A collection of short essays and fragments that outline Agamben’s notion of the ‘whatever being’ that will be the foundation for rethinking the idea of community. It is stylistically his most challenging book, yet essential for understanding the horizon of his thought. —— (‘DR’) ‘Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films’, trans. by Brian Holmes, in Tom McDonough (ed.) Guy Debord and the Situationist International, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002, pp. 313–20. —— (EP) The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. A series of essays on Italian poetry from Dante to Caproni. It is here that Agamben outlines his understanding of poetry as defined by an anxiety over fixing meaning by obliterating the tensions between the rhythmic and semantic elements in the ending of the poem. —— (HS) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Agamben’s most influential and well-known text, it undertakes a critique of Western juridico-political thought through an exploration of the paradoxes of sovereignty and those figures who are excluded from, yet included in, the political system. —— (‘I am’) ‘“I am sure that you are more pessimistic than I am … ”: An Interview with Giorgio Agamben’, Rethinking Marxism 16, no. 2 (April 2004): 115–24. —— (IH) Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron, London: Verso, 1993. Again, a collection of essays. The central essay, which shares the title of the book, is an important exploration of the idea of experience and its destruction in modernity. In particular it provides an engagement with Immanuel Kant and an instructive discussion of literature. FURTHER READING

139

140

FURTHER READING

—— (IP) The Idea of Prose, trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt, New York: State University of New York Press, 1995. An unusual and dense series of short essays and fragments that address both philosophical and literary texts, including important discussions of Kafka. —— (‘K’) ‘K’, in The Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life, edited by Justin Clemens, Nick Heron and Alex Murray, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008, pp. 13–27. —— (LD) Language and Death: the Place of Negativity, trans. Karen Pinkus with Michael Hardt, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. An idiosyncratic engagement with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and G. W. F. Hegel, this book sets out Agamben’s approach to the philosophy of language and the negative foundation of being which he attempts to think through and beyond. —— (‘M’) ‘Metropolis’, Lecture, 16 November 2006. The audio files can be found here: http://archive.globalproject.info/art-9966.html I quote from Arianna Bove’s translation: http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpagamben4.htm —— (MC) The Man without Content, trans. Georgia Albert, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Agamben’s first book, originally published in Italian in 1970. Here he explores the relationship between the work of art and the artist in modernity. It is notable for being written in a far more traditionally ‘philosophical’ style and is an important document in understanding the genesis of Agamben’s thought. —— (MwE) Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. A collection of essays, part of which are glosses on works that will emerge with more complexity in Homo Sacer. Also includes a version of Agamben’s important essay ‘Notes on Gesture’ and a reflection on Italian politics and media. —— (O) The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004.

A study of the anthropological foundations of Western thought with a key engagement with Heidegger. —— (P) Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans., edited Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. An important series of essays collected from across Agamben’s publishing career. Includes key essays on Aristotle, Benjamin and Melville. Also contains essays on Derrida and Deleuze and is important for understanding his relationship to that generation of thinkers he followed. —— (‘PA’) ‘Philosophical Archaeology’, trans. Giulia Bryson, Law and Critique (2009) 20 p. 211–231. —— (Pr) Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort, New York: Zone Books, 2007. A short collection of essays on a range of topics, with the central essay, ‘In Praise of Profanations’, providing a clear sense of the inoperative force of Agamben’s critical method. —— (RA) Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, New York: Zone Books, 1999. Part of the Homo Sacer series, this book attempts to rethink post-war ethics by exploring, not intersubjective responsibility, but representational forms of bearing witness. While it describes itself as simply a study of Holocaust memoirs it outlines a far broader understanding of ethics and its relationship to literature. —— (S) Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. One of Agamben’s most important books it is a wide-ranging critique of a number of critical paradigms, including structuralism. It is here that Agamben outlines his idea of a semiology which isn’t tied to the desire for meaning, which he claims has driven Western philosophy. It is also the clearest text in which Agamben engages with psychoanalysis, a methodology he maintains a critical relation to. —— (SE) The State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. A follow-up to Homo Sacer, this book produces a more in-depth discussion of the sovereign exception and is important for expanding on the place of Carl Schmitt in Agamben’s work. FURTHER READING

141

142

FURTHER READING

—— (TTR) The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the ‘Letter to the Romans’, trans. Patricia Daly, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. A detailed commentary on the figure of St Paul, this book provides a clearer picture of the messianic and messianic time and is an exemplary work of Agamben’s use of exegesis and philology. —— (WA?) What Is an Apparatus?, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. A very short collection of polemical essays. They provide an excellent example of Agamben’s engaged position in regards to contemporary events and a strong statement of the efficacy of his archaeological technique. —— (‘WP’) ‘What is a Paradigm?’, European Graduate School Lecture, 2002. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/agamben/agamben-what-is-a-paradigm-2002. html

SECONDARY WORKS ON AGAMBEN Agamben has only really come to prominence as a key thinker in contemporary thought in the past 10 years. A result of this relatively late arrival is that secondary criticism on Agamben is a little patchy and still yet to develop any clear patterns or key commentators. In addition to the works listed below there are a number of volumes in preparation, or very recently published. The three volumes of essays on Agamben and the three special issues of journals, while for the most part focusing – with a negative tone – on Homo Sacer, are diffuse in their engagements and readers should survey particular articles rather than general volumes if they intend to follow a particular line of inquiry in their research of Agamben. Specific essays that I have cited throughout the course of the book are listed in the works cited. MONOGRAPHS Deladurantaye, L. (2009) Giorgio Agamben: a Critical Introduction, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mills, C. (2008) The Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, Stocksfield: Acumen Press.

EDITED COLLECTIONS Calarco, Matthew and Decaroli, Steve (eds) (2007) On Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Clemens, Justin, Heron, Nick and Murray, Alex (eds) (2008) The Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Norris, Andrew (ed.) (2004) Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Homo Sacer’, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. JOURNAL SPECIAL ISSUES Bailey, Richard, McLoughlin, Daniel and Whyte, Jessica (eds) (forthcoming) Form of Life: Agamben, Ontology, Politics, Special issue of Theory & Event. Contretemps 5 (2004) http://www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/contretemps5.html Paragraph 25, no. 2 (2002). Ross, A. (ed.) (2008) The Agamben Effect, Special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 107, no. 1.

FURTHER READING

143

WORKS CITED

Adorno, T. (1955) ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, Prisms, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson and Samuel Weber, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Agamben, G. (Various dates) See ‘Works by Giorgio Agamben’, in Further Reading. Antelme, R. (1992) The Human Race, trans. Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler, Marlboro, VT: Marlboro Press. Baugh, B. (2003) French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism, London: Routledge. Beckett, S. (1982) Company, London: Calder. Benjamin, W. (1968) Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books. —— (1996) Selected Writings, vol. 1: 1913–26, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, trans. David Lachterman, Howard Eiland and Ian Balfour, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. —— (1998) The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne, London: Verso. —— (1999) The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. —— (2000) ‘Franz Kafka’, Selected Works, vol. 2, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, pp. 794–818.

de Boever, A. (2009) ‘Agamben and Marx: Sovereignty, Governmentality, Economy’, Law and Critique 20, no. 3: 259–79. Carroll, L. (1998) Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, London: Penguin. Debord, G. (1995) The Society of the Spectacle, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith, New York: Zone Books. Deladurantaye, L. (2000) ‘Agamben’s Potential’, Diacritics 30, no. 2: 3–24. Deleuze, G. (2008) Cinema I: The Movement Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, London: Continuum. Derrida, J. (1976) Of Grammatology, trans. G. Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. —— (1982) Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Brighton, UK: Harvester Press. Dubreuil, L. (2006) ‘Leaving Politics: Bios, Zoe-, Life’, Diacritics 36, no. 2: 83–98. Fitzmeyer, J. (2007) The One Who Is to Come, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Foucault, M. (1977) ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Donald Bouchard (ed.) Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. —— (1997) ‘The Birth of Biopolitics’, The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, vol. 1: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Paul Rainbow, New York: New Press. Franchi, S. (2004) ‘Passive Politics’, Contretemps 5: 30–1. Hegel, G.W.F. (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans A.V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, M. (1971) Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter, New York: Harper & Row. —— (1978) Being and Time, Oxford: Blackwell, 1978. —— (1993) Basic Writings, rev., exp. edn, edited by David Farrell Krell, Abingdon: Routledge. Joris, P. (1988) Translator’s preface to Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, Barrytown, NY: Barrytown/Station Hill Press. WORKS CITED

145

146

WORKS CITED

Joyce, J. (1992) Ulysses, London: Penguin. —— (2000a) Finnegans Wake, London: Penguin. —— (2000b) Dubliners, London: Penguin. Kafka, F. (1983) The Penguin Complete Novels of Franz Kafka, London: Penguin. —— (1992) Metamorphosis and Other Stories, edited, trans. M. Pasley, London: Penguin. —— (2002) The Great Wall of China and Other Short Works, edited, trans. M. Pasley, London: Penguin. Kant, I. (1965) Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, New York: St Martin’s Press. Kittler, F. (2003) ‘Man as a Drunken Town-Musician’, MLN 118: 637–52. Laclau, E. (2007) ‘Bare Life or Social Indeterminacy’, in Matthew Calarco and Steven Decaroli (eds) On Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso. Levitt, D. (2008) ‘Notes on Media and Biopolitics: “Notes on Gesture”’, The Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life, edited by Justin Clemens, Nick Heron and Alex Murray, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Marx, K., with Engels, F. (1983) Selected Works, vol. 1, Moscow: Progress Press. —— (1998) The German Ideology, New York: Prometheus. Melville, H. (2003) Billy Budd and Other Stories, London: Penguin. Michaud, P. (2004) Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes, New York: Zone Books. Mill, J. S. (1996) ‘Nationality’, in Nationalism in Europe, 1815 to the Present, edited by Stuart Woolf, London: Routledge. Mills, C. (2008) ‘Playing with Law: Agamben and Derrida on Postjuridical Justice’, South Atlantic Quarterly 107, no. 1: 15–36. Murray, A. (2008) ‘Beyond Spectacle and the Image: The Poetics of Guy Debord and Agamben’, in Justin Clemens, Nick Heron and Alex Murray

(eds) The Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,. Negri, A. (2003) ‘The Ripe Fruit of Redemption’, Review of Giorgio Agamben, The State of Exception, Il Manifesto – Quotidiano Comunista (26 July) (in Italian). Trans. Arriana Bove at: http://www.generation-online.org/t/ negriagamben.htm (accessed 12 Mar 2008). Rajaram Kumar, P. and Grundy-Warr, C. (2004) ‘The Irregular Migrant as Homo Sacer: Migration and Detention in Australia, Malaysia and Thailand’, International Migration 42, no. : 32–64. Ross, A. (2008) Introduction to The Agamben Effect, Special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 107, no. 1: 1–12. Schmitt, C. (2005) Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Scholem, G. (1971) The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, London: Allen & Unwin. Thurschwell, A. (2005) ‘Cutting the Branches for Akiba: Agamben’s Critique of Derrida’, in Andrew Norris (ed.) Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Homo Sacer’, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tiedemann, R. (1999) ‘Dialectics at a Standstill’, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, in W. Benjamin (ed.) The Arcades Project, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Vaughan-Williams, N. (2007) ‘The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes: New Border Politics?’, Alternatives 32: 177–95. Williams, W. C. (1951) The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, New York: Random House. —— (2000) Selected Poems, London: Penguin. —— (nd) ‘William Carlos Williams’, Pennsound, Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, University of Pennsylvania, website. http://www. writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Williams-WC.html Yeats, W. B. (1992) Collected Poems, edited by Augustine Martin, London: Vintage.

WORKS CITED

147

INDEX

Abandonment/Ban 65, 68 Actuality 46–50 Adorno, Theodor Wisengrund 118 Aesthetics 78–83, 87, 90, 94 Animal 12, 25, 44–45, 61, 100–101, 125 Apparatus 2, 27, 40, 123, 127, 135, 137 Archaeology 27–29, 32, 37, 58 Aristotle 2, 28, 46–47, 54–55, 88, 135 Auschwitz 118–21 Bartleby 48–50, 105 Benjamin, Walter 4, 23, 36–44, 57, 63, 83, 89, 93, 97–98, 126, 128–29, 130 Benveniste, Emile 16, 26, 84 Biopolitics 2, 57–62, 65–66, 68, 69, 74, 134–35 Bios 2, 28, 57, 60–61, 134 Bare Life 44, 61, 64, 65, 67, 72, 76, 135 Bush, George W. 62, 70 Camp 2, 67–70, 118, 121–22, 133–34 Commodity 43, 90, 93, 102 Communicability 52–53, 87 Coming Community 5, 7, 20, 34, 50–54, 76, 93, 117

Dante, (Dante Alighieri) 108, 109 Deactivate 7, 22, 34, 45, 49, 101, 104, 126 Debord, Guy 53, 90–92, 127 Deixis 16 Deleuze, Gilles 90–91 Derrida, Jacques 29–32, 103, 119 Enigma 114 Enjambment 91, 108–9 Ethics 20, 32, 87, 89, 107, 116–24, 130–31 Ethos 18, 51, 116, 117, 128 Example 51 Experience 5, 12, 18, 22–25, 28, 38, 53, 89, 90, 96, 111, 112, 120, 123 Experimentum Linguae 13 Foucault, Michel 27, 56–60, 63, 65 Gesture 86–90, 136 Happiness/Happy Life 131 Hegel, G.W.F. 14–15, 17, 34, 35, 98 Heidegger, Martin 4, 11–15, 17, 27, 36, 57, 110, 113, 118 History 27, 28, 39–43, 84, 85 Homo sacer 60, 64–66, 125, 132–33 Human Rights 68

Image 41, 43–44, 84–86, 87, 90–93 Impotential 47, 124 Infancy 23–26, 61 Inoperativity 4, 7, 22, 33, 34, 35, 44–47, 48, 53, 54, 61, 74, 84, 88, 103, 105, 121, 125

Pornography 87, 92–93 Potentiality 4, 32, 40, 46–50, 65, 89, 117, 124, 130 Praxis 20, 88 Profanation 93, 100, 102, 125–27 Prose 5, 18, 108, 109, 110

Joyce, James 89, 112–14

Redemption 129 Refugee 2, 67–68, 72–73 Remnant 119, 126

Kafka, Franz 99–107 Kant, Immanuel 28, 34, 38, 79 Kojeve, Alexandre 34, 35, 45

Marx, Karl 3, 34, 36–37, 102, 128 Means/Mediality 87–89 Melville, Hermann 48–49 Messiah/Messianism 19, 41, 50, 83, 101, 117, 128–31 Muselmann 121–22

Sacred 19, 60, 66, 69, 125–26 Sacrifice 20, 64, 125 Saussure, Ferdinand de 31, 96, 113–14 Schmitt, Carl 62–63 Scholem, Gershom 129 Semiotic/Semantic 26, 90 Shifter 16–17 Spinoza, Baruch 134 Sovereignty/ Sovereign Power 56, 59, 62–69, 104, 118, 125, 134, 135 Spectacle 53, 82, 90, 125, 127, 136 State of Exception 60, 63–64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 74, 135

Nancy, Jean-Luc 45, 65 Negri, Antonio 3–4 Nietzsche, Friedrich 79, 83, 114

Valéry, Paul 109 Voice 13, 16–18, 20, 24, 61, 76, 110, 112

Open/The Open 44–45 Oikonomia 136

Warburg, Aby 84–86 “War on Terror” 69–71 Whatever Being 20, 51, 72 Williams, William Carlos 109–10 Witnessing 118–24

Language 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 11–20, 23–27, 29–31, 47–48, 52, 54, 61, 75–76, 87, 89, 96, 99, 107–14, 117, 120, 121, 122, 124, 135 Law 2, 60, 62–65, 67–68, 69, 75, 101, 103–4, 120, 125, 130

Paradigm 27, 46 Passivity 45, 46 Paul, St. 130–31 Plato 30, 80 Poetic/ Poetry 5, 6, 18, 37, 84, 91, 96–97, 107–12, 113, 114

Yeats, W.B. 108–9 Zoe see Bios

INDEX

149