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abstract The article analyzes the ethical and political stakes in Giorgio Agambens The Coming Community. The book was first published in Italian in 1990 and was translated into English in 1993. It was then republished in Italian in 2001, with a short new apostil by the author that reaffirms its persistent and actual inactuality. In this text Agamben establishes the philosophical foundations of the long-lasting project started with the publication of Homo sacer (1995). Its republication in 2001 seems thus to reaffirm the politics of his analysis of the past fifteen years. The argument revolves around the analysis of the whatever singularity (qualunque in Italian, quodlibet in Latin) as the subject of the coming community, a singularity that presents an inessential commonality, a solidarity that in no way concerns an essence. Whatever must not be understood as indifference but, rather, as being such that it always matters. The ethical and political proposal consists in the call to adhere to this singularity without identity and representation in order to construe a community without postulates and thus also without subjects. The paradigm of this politics is identified in Nancys term inoperativeness (inoperosit), a messianic de-creation. The inoperative whatever is directed toward a politics che viene, -venir as distinct from futura, future: It implies in fact the renunciation of construing images of the futureutopia is the very topicality of things.
Utopian Studies, Vol. 23, No. 1, 2012 Copyright 2012. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
The thought of Giorgio Agamben has been often accused of being utopian. Antonio Negri, for example, branded Agambens core concept, naked or bare life, as a utopian escape1 and then identified in State of Exception (2003) a feverish utopian anxiety.2 Andreas Kalyvas accused his notion of politics of dissolving into an eschatological, utopian vision of social life, infused with strong theological and messianic overtones, which would make of it a particular version of political theology.3 And Dominik LaCapra found the strong separation of ethics and legal concepts in Remnants of Auschwitz (1998) an ecstatic, anarchistic Utopia and identified the core of Agambens thought in a blank, Utopian, messianic (post)apocalypticism.4 Agambens work has attracted other, and ever harsher, criticisms, which I will leave here aside, however, in order to analyze his relation to utopianism.5 Negri, K alyvas, and LaCapra voice a quite common unease for a political project that is deemed unrealizable, empty, even impolitic;6 utopia is here thus spelled as an impractical, idealistic scheme for social and political reform. A more precise definition is needed. At the end of his essay on Surrealism (1929), Walter Benjamin writes: For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors. The socialist sees that on finer future of our children and grandchildren in a society in which all act as if they were angels and everyone has as much as if he were rich everyone lives as if he were free. Of angels, wealth, freedom, not a and tracethese are mere images.7 In a piece written two years later, Der Charakter (1931), he insists that a radical, revolutionary polidestruktive tics must renounce optimistic, metaphoric contemplation: The destructive character sees no image hovering before him.8 Benjamin does not employ the term utopia; it is clear nonetheless that a political project founded on mereand optimisticimages of the future is the target of his harsh criticism. If political utopianism in fact originatedstrongly influenced by world travels and discoveries of new landsby situating a political however, another alternative in a spatial displacement (a nonplace that is, place), at least from the Enlightenment it assumed the character of a better future toward which a progressive politics should strive.9 If, following Benjamin, we define utopia as a political project construed around images of the future and rhetorically based on the syntagma as if (als ob), then Agambens project exudes an intrinsic and intense anti- utopianism. It is true that there is no explicit attack on utopia in his work and even that,
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1. Quodlibet
The Coming Community (La comunit che viene) was published in Italian in 1990, in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Tiananmen protests, and the dissolution of Eastern European socialism. However, more than a reflection on geopolitical changes, the book was a response to the political debate about the idea of community originated in France by the publication in 1983 of Jean-Luc Nancys essay The Inoperative Community, followed the same year by Maurice Blanchots response, The Unavowable Community, and again, three years later, by Nancys expansion of the earlier ideas in book form.11 At the center of the debate stood the notion of belonging and the question of an idea of community immune to exclusion, isolation, and violence. Whereas both Nancy and Blanchot approach the question from the Heideggerian perspective of Mitsein (being-together), Agamben takes a surprising route that leads to the disavowal of the very logic of belonging, identity, and representation.12 The argument of the book revolves around the notion of qualunque, which is the Italian translation of the scholastic Latin quodlibet and is rendered into English as whatever. The coming being, states the first sentence of the book, is the whatever being.13 Quodlibet, whatever but also
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any as in the expression any being, is the term that remains unthought in the definition of the transcendentals but conditions the meaning of all other considers singularity not in its indifference in regard to a common terms. It propriety but in its being as such (tale qual [CV, 9]); neither particular nor universal, neither individual nor generic, it refers rather to the singular and expresses a pure singularity. Pure singularity has no identity, Agamben states, it is omnivalent (CV, 14): It is not determined vis--vis a concept, but it is not simply undetermined either; rather, it is determined only through its relation to an idea, that is, to the totality of its possibilities (CV, 55). What Agamben calls idea is not that of the Platonic tradition but, rather, as he similarity or resemblance with no archetype (CV, 42; emphasis in the writes, a original), which thus severs any obligation to belonging.14 Its belonging, its being-such, is only relation to an empty and undetermined totality. The most common is what needs to be repeatedly approached and exposed, for the most common is only in its approach, its exposure, its coming. Whatever being is not its qualities; it is its exposure to all its qualities that each particular quality resays or re-calls.15 This way of eluding the antinomy of singularity and universalclearly exhibited in the example: An example is valid for all cases of ity is its genus and, simultaneously, is included among them. It is a singularity among others, but one that, since it stands for all others, cannot be valid particularity: Neither particular nor universal, the example is a sinin its gular object that, as it were, shows itself as such, shows its singularity (CV, original). The Greek term for it, para-deigma (like the 14; emphasis in the German, Bei-spiel), poignantly expresses this being that is always beside itself (para-, bei-), since the proper place for the example is always beside itself, in the empty space in which its unqualifiable and unforgettable life unfolds (CV, 14). The whatever singularities thus communicate only in the empty space of the example, being bound by no common propriety, having abandoned all identity. This issue is extremely important for the entire Homo sacer project, but it is also extremely ambiguous and controversial: After the Foucauldian Kehre, which finally produced Homo sacer, Agamben began working, like Foucault, with paradigms (homo sacer, naked life, the state of exception, the camp,the Muselmann, Christian oikonomia, etc.). In fact in Homo sacer this same argument about the example is rehearsed as symmetrical to the exception, whereby the exception constitutes an exclusive inclusion and the example, an inclusive
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Because if humanity, instead of seeking still a proper identity in the by now improper and meaningless form of individuality, managed to accede to impropriety as such, to make its being-such not an individual identity and propriety, but a singularity without identity, a common and absolutely exposed singularityif humanity could, that is, not be-such, in this or that particular biographical identity, but rather only be the such, its singular exteriority and its face, then humanity could accede for the first time to a community without postulates and without subjects, to a communication that would no longer know the incommunicable. (CV, 5253) This is for Agamben the political task of our generation, since, he writes in a somewhat apocalyptic tone, the survival of the human species depends on this new notion of community (CV, 53). The same toneharshly criticized by several readers21marks the very conclusion of Homo sacer, where Agamben prognosticates that unless we overcome the biopolitical impasse of our time, we will face an unprecedented biopolitical catastrophe.22 In both cases, the task involves an overcoming of the state and of the notion sovereignty, so that these remarks in The Coming Community can be read of as will be emphasized throughout the essayas an anticipation of the later critique of sovereignty developed in Homo sacer: Having no identity and no belonging, the whatever singularities cannot possibly build a societas; they disavow the logic and workings of representation and sovereignty. The state cannot tolerate such an antisovereign community without identity, without distinctions and separations, without boundaries and qualities; therefore, the whatever s ingularity . . . is the foremost enemy of the state (CV, 69).
2. Potentiality
The whatever singularity embodies in this sense what Leland de la Durantaye defines as the core idea of Agambens philosophy: potentiality.23 The whatever being presents always a potential character; it is in fact constituted by an infinite series of modal oscillations (CV, 21), But not in the mere sense of the potentiality of becoming actual: Properly whatever is that being which can not-be, which can its own impotence (CV, 33). The potency of not-being differs from that of being because there cannot simply be a passage
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Iconsider superfluous, since the notions of inoperativity and use, as will be shown below, better identify Agambens politics.30 Potential is therefore the first meaning of the coming of the new community: a community that has no being proper to itself except for its bordering on all its possibilities, without destiny and without essence, always expropriated, but as such inhabited by the impossibility of exclusion. Coming as never present in the first place, the pure possibility of any rela tion whatever.31 If identity, with the hypocrite fiction of the irreplaceability of the single, is opposed by the unconditional replaceability of the whatever singularity and all its potentialities, then the coming community is an absolutely unrepresentable community (CV, 24). There are no terms, concepts, or representational axioms that could claim to represent it.32 The whatever singularity as pure potentiality cannot be tied to classifying concepts, and everything can be an example, its own example, absolutely interconnected and absolutely replaceable. This argument is fundamental for the Homo sacer project, primarily because one of the core performances of sovereign power is not only to isolate and keep apart potentiality and act, not only to separate human beings from their potentiality, but also and more fundamentally to separate them from their impo tence.33 Moreover, in the new installments the whatever singularity is renamed and becomes that form-of-life (forma-di-vita) in which it is never possible to isolate naked life from its forms of life:34 A life that is political, that is, oriented toward the idea of happiness and integrated in a form-of-life, can be thought only from the emancipation . . . from all sovereignty. The question of the possibility of a nonstatist politics presents thus necessarily the form: Is it possible today, is there today something like a form-of-life, that is, a life for which living itself would be at stake in its own living, a life of potency?35 That is, the only way to move beyond biopolitics and the violent performance of sovereignty is to develop an alternative ontology founded on a pure potentiality that is not forced into an alternative with actuality and goes beyond every figure of relation.36
that being that as such always matters. Quodlibet as qual-si-voglia, what-so-ever but in the sense of whatever-one-wants, is in an original relation to desire. The -libet of quodlibet comes from the Indo-European stem *lib, which appears also in the Latin libere, libido, and libertas; in the German Liebe; and in the Russian lioubit (love). The whatever singularity as whatever-one-wants is lovable (amabile); the coming of the coming being is desire and awaiting. That the whatever singularities are lovable spells the fundamental ontological relation as a love of facticity and construes love as the core of the coming politics. Love is never directed to this or that propriety of the loved one, but it does not leave them aside either in the name of the generalness of the universal love. Love desires its object with all its predicates, its being such as it is (CV, 10; emphasis in the original). The lovable whatever is the singularity with all its proprieties, none of which, however, constitutes a difference. Indifference, that is, nondifference vis--vis the proprieties, is what identifies disseminates the singularities and makes them lovable (see CV, 2021). and This indifference to difference makes differenceand identity, inclusion, representation irrelevant:39 To see something simply in its being-thus: irreparable, but not for that necessary; thus, but not for that contingentthis is love (CV, 88). As for the Provenal poets, love is the experience of the taking-place of a whatever singularity (CV, 25). The political consequences are evident: The traits of a loved person are not unessential; their identity matters completely to love. But, in a sense, they also do not, for if the person changed slightly these traits, that would not matter to love. Love embraces who the loved one is but also who she is not, when she is what she is but also when she is not what she is. Love loves her whatever. Moreoverand this is the fundamental, political pointlove does not want to change the loved one or repair her, fix her. Love abandons the loved one to herself, to her absolute, lovable contingency.40 The themes of potentiality and love are brought together in a f undamental essay on the concept of love in Heidegger, La passione della fatticit (The Passion of Facticity), first delivered three years before the publication of The Coming Community and thus a sort of preparatory study.41 Agamben argues here, against a common assumption, that love, far from being absent from Sein und Zeit, constitutes, in a sense, its central issue. It is what characterizes the self-transcendence of the In-der-Welt-Sein (Being-in-the world), in which the Dasein is always already construed as opened to the world beyond all subjectivity (it is a Schon-Sein-bei-der-Welt, already-being-in-the-world, and this
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4. Ho Nyn Kairs
The irreparable also means, Agamben writes, that utopia is the very topicality of things (CV, 86), and this is the only passage of the book where
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utopia is ever mentioned. This passion of facticity, this lack of the sense of redemption, also determines the temporality of the coming community. The2001 Italian reedition of the book contains an apostil that reorients its scope in the direction taken by Agambens project from the publication of Homo sacer onward; or, rather, it emphasizes some of its traits that were, in the first edition, but a hypothesis (CV, 92) and confers them the more accentuated messianic overtones of the later work. A small clarification, confined to the suspension of two parentheses, makes a fundamental point: Coming does not mean future (CV, 92). The coming of the coming community is devoid of the tension toward something that lies ahead, in the future, devoid of a linear understanding of time that sees it as a cumulative progression.45 This coming has no teleological valences; it is like a letter with no addressee, with no destination (see CV, 12). The coming community is not a future one that we have to make. Its temporality is the interstitial time of waiting in which the notion of what-one-is-waiting-for is unimportant and irrelevant.46 Agamben has best illustrated this notion of time, fundamental for his whole project, in the book on St. Paul, The Time that Remains (2000).47 The technical expression used by St. Paul to designate the messianic time is ho nyn kairs, the time of now, which repositions the redemptive project from the future of the eschaton to the present of the messianic event.48 This is neither chronological time nor the time of prophecy turned toward the future, nor that of the apocalypses, the eschaton as the end of time; it is, rather, thetime of the end (TR, 63; emphasis in the original): What interests the apostle is not the last day, not the instant in which time ends, but rather that time that contracts and begins to end . . . or, if you want, the time that remains between time and its end (TR, 63). This time is not external to chronological time but, rather, a portion of profane time that is subjected to a contraction and is completely transformed; it is a rest, what remains between chronological time and the apocalyptic eschaton. To explain it, Agamben refers to an image: He tells the story, found in Plinius, of the contest that took place between Apelles and Protogenes about tracing the most sharp and perfect line. While the latter drew a line so thin that it did not seem drawn by human hand, Apelles further divided this line in the middle with a new, even thinner and sharper line. Messianic time is like Apelless line, a caesura that, by dividing the very division between chronological time and eschaton, introduces in it a rest exceeding the division itself (seeTR, 64). It is, importantly, the operative time that urges
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5. Shabbat
The politics that goes together with this messianic notion of time is not one of producing a new community, a new identity, race, class, people, nation, faith, world order, or earth; rather, it is one that Agamben calls inoperative. This term has become, at least from the publication of Homo sacer (1995), the pivot around which revolves the whole pars construens of his philosophical and political project. The concept is contained, in nuce, in Idea della politica (Idea of politics) in Idea of Prose (1985), which relates the condition of the forgetfulness, dwellers in limbo: Abandoned to the absence of God, to His they are unredeemably lost, but precisely this loss means that they have no destiny; they live like letters with no addressee, in the joy of an inestimable hope.51 Idea della politica is reproduced almost word for word in the chapter Dal limbo (From limbo) in The Coming Community, to represent the condition of the whatever singularities, indifferent to redemption because
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rredeemable but as such embodying that life, simply human, that survives the i end of the politico-theological machine (see CV, 1112). It is only in the 2001 apostil that Agamben renames this condition inoperativity: Not work, but rather inoperativity and de-creation are . . . the paradigm of the coming politics (CV, 92). It is in Homo sacer that Agamben articulates explicitly this theme: Inoperativity (inoperosit in Italian, but Agamben often uses the French word) translates the French term dsuvrement, which was first coined by Alexandre Kojve in a 1952 review of three novels by Raymond Queneau, Pierrot mon ami (1942), Loin de Rueil (1944), and Le dimanche de la vie (1952). Kojve argues that the three protagonists of the novels, whom he calls voyous dsoeuvrs (lazy rascals), embody in a sense the wisdom of man living after the end of history.52 The article provoked the sarcasm of Georges Bataille, who coined, in his correspondence with Kojve, the term homo queneulleusis (association of quenelle, a sort of dumpling, with Queneau). The Bataille Kojve querelle had a great impact on the following generation in France, and the term entered the philosophical debate, taking a central place in Nancys and Blanchots reflections.53 In Homo sacer, Agamben proposes a personal redefinition of dsuvrement: It cannot be merely read as the absence of work/activity (assenza di opera) or, as in Bataille, as a form of negativity that is sovereign insofar as it has no use (senza impiego); rather, it must be read as a generic mode of potentiality, which is not exhausted (like the individual or collective action, intended as the sum of individual actions) in a transitus de potentia ad actum.54 In Means Without Ends (1996), then, the argument takes the central place that it has retained in Agambens later works: Human beings as potential beings, as we have seen, have no proper ergon; they are argos, without opera, inoperative (inoperoso).55 Therefore, politics is what corresponds to the essential inoperosity of human beings, to the radical absence of work of human communities. There is politics because human beings are argos, not defined by any proper operationthat is: pure potential beings, who cannot be exhausted by any identity and any vocation.56 The theme of the coming politics is therefore to interrogate the essential inoperosity and potentiality without transforming them into a historical task, by simply assuming this exposition and this creative indifference to any task as a politics assigned to happiness. Again, this theme is central to the book on St. Paul. The messianic vocation (klesis), Agamben explains, consists precisely in the re-vocation
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This operation takes the name, in more recent texts, of profanation: Itimplies the neutralization of what is profaned, which loses its aura of sacrality and is restored to use. And the creation of a new use is possible only by deactivating an old use, by rendering it inoperative: The profanation of what is unprofanable is the political task of the coming generation.63 The new use takes the forms of study, play, and festivity.64 In State of Exception (2003), Agamben embraces Benjamins claim, made in the Kaf ka essay, that the law that is studied but no longer practiced is the gate to justice and thus the gate to justice is study.65 And this gate is opened by playing with the law, like children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use, but rather to free them from it for good.66 Play frees humanity from the sphere of sacrality, but without abolishing it: What was sacred is restored to a special use, different from the utilitarian form, which opens the gate for a new happiness.67 Play and inoperosity are brought together in festivity: The inoperosity that defines festivity (the Shabbat) is not mere inertia or abstention but, rather, sanctification, a peculiar modality of doing and living. Inoperosity coincides with festivity insofar as festivity consists in neutralizing and rendering inoperative human gestures, actions and works, and only this way making them festive.68 What defines festivity is not what is not done in it but, rather, the fact that what is done is not so different from what one does every other day but is freed and suspended from its economy, from the reasons and aims that define it during the weekdays.69 What potentiality, love, presentness, and inoperativity mean for a political project is a clear and emphatic rejection of any utopian projection into the future. Radical politics is usually based on imagining that something very different from this world is possible and that the possibilities of this new world lie in the future. To start all over, though, implies a de-cision, the drawing of lines and demarcations between the old and the new, the past and the future, and the violence that goes with it. For Agamben, to the contrary, it is in this world, in the present, that we have to uncover the potentialities for the new world, a supplementary world that exists already, in potential. The coming community already exists, here and now, we just need to take a little break from the world and let it come. And this implies rendering inoperativeand available for a new useall historical and utopian projects. Redemption is not opera, work, but, rather, a peculiar sort of sabbatical vacation from all the communities of the future, from everything about the future that demands a production, from all the demands of the future. Like Melvilles Bartleby,
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of the emancipative proposals coming from the Leftdifferent and diverse as they may behave been able so far to fathom a political alternative only in the identitarian form of a making, of a creating, which is consigned tothe futurist temporality of the new; in the end, they remain trapped within the utopian frame proposed by Benjamin: Their political project is characterized by, and limited to, images of the future, a bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors . . . mere images. Moreover, these proposals are unable (or unwilling, though Hardt, Negri, and iek belong here perhaps to a stigmatized minority) to escape the vicious circle of violence and retribution that encumbers the advent of a real alternative. Agambens proposal is of course problematic and debatable, but it certainly infuses political praxis with a real, revolutionary alternative that bursts open the Western political imaginary.
Notes
1. Antonio Negri, Il mostro politico: Nuda vita e potenza, in Il desiderio del mostro: Dal circo al laboratorio alla politica, ed. Ubaldo Fadini, Antonio Negri, and Charles T. Wolfe(Rome: Manifestolibri, 2002), 10. 2. Antonio Negri, Il frutto maturo della redenzione, Il Manifesto, July 26, 2003, 21. 3. Andreas Kalyvas, The Sovereign Weaver: Beyond the Camp, in Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agambens Homo Sacer, ed. Andrew Norris (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 116. 230
carlo salzani: Quodlibet 4. Dominik LaCapra, Approaching Limit Events: Siting Agamben, in Giorgio gamben: Sovereignty and Life, ed. Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (Stanford: A Stanford University Press, 2007), 155, 161. 5. For an intelligent overview of some of these criticisms, see Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 34551. 6. Cf., for example, Carlo Formenti, Immagini del Forse, Aut Aut: Rivista di filosofia e cultura 27172 (1996): 2227. 7. Walter Benjamin, Der Surrealismus: Die letzte Momentaufnahme der europaischen Intelligenz, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974ff.), 2(1): 308 (translated as Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia, in Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings [Cambridge: Belknap, 19972003], 2:216). 8. Walter Benjamin, Der destruktive Charakter, in Tiedemann and Schweppenhuser, Gesammelte Schriften, 4(1): 397 (The Destructive Character, in Jennings, Selected Writings,2:541). 9. Cf., among others, Bronislaw Baczko, Utopian Lights: The Evolution of the Idea of Social Progress (St. Paul: Paragon House, 1989). 10. Giorgio Agamben, Stanze. La parola e il fantasma nella cultura occidentale (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), xvi (trans. Ronald L. Martinez, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993]). In what follows, I will use my own translation of all of Agambens texts; when English translations are available, Iwill point them out but will refer to the pagination of the Italian editions. 11. See Maurice Blanchot, La communaut inavouable (Paris: Minuit, 1983; trans. The Unavowable Community [Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill, 1988]); and Jean-Luc Nancy, La communaut dsoeuvre (Paris: C. Bourgois, 1986; trans. The Inoperative Community [Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1991]). Other responses to the debate i nclude Benedict Andersons Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1993); Jacques Derridas Politiques de lamiti (Paris: Galile, 1994; trans. The Politics of Friendship [London: Verso, 2006]); and Jean-Luc Nancys follow-up in Etre singulier pluriel (Paris: Galile, 1996; trans. Being Singular Plural [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000]). 12. For a brief comparison among Nancys, Blanchots, and Agambens approaches, seede la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 15761. 13. Giorgio Agamben, La comunit che viene (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2001), 9 (trans.Michael Hardt, The Coming Community [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993]); hereafter cited as CV in the text. 14. Cf. Zafer Arcagk, Whatever Image, Postmodern Culture 13 (2003), http://www. iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.103/13.2aracagok.txt. 15. Cf. Thomas Carl Wall, Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999), 12425. 16. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (Turin: Einaudi, 1995), 2627 (trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998]). 231
carlo salzani: Quodlibet University Press, 2011]). In Remnants of Auschwitz, this lack of essence, this being that is pure potentiality, translates into the axiom, taken from Blanchot, that the human is the indestructible that can be infinitely destructed. See Giorgio Agamben, Quel che resta di Auschwitz. Larchivio e il testimone, Homo sacer, vol. 3 (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998; trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Remnants of Auschwitz [New York: Zone, 1999]). iorgio 29. Giorgio Agamben, Bartleby o della contingenza, in Gilles Deleuze and G Agamben, Bartleby, la formula della creazione (Macerata, Italy: Quodlibet, 1993), 76 (trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Bartleby, or On Contingency, in Agamben, Potentialities, 24374). Cf. Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben (Stocksfield, England: Acumen, 2008), 32. 30. Cf. Stefano Franchi, Passive Politics, Contretemps 5 (December 2004): 3041; and Wall, Radical Passivity. 31. Cf. Wall, Radical Passivity, 156. 32. Cf. Devadas and Mummery, Community Without Community. 33. See Giorgio Agamben, Idea del potere, in Idea della prosa (Macerata, Italy: Quodlibet, 2002), 5152 (trans. Sam Whitsitt and Michael Sullivan, Idea of Prose [ Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995]); Agamben, Homo sacer, 5256; Giorgio Agamben, Su ci che possiamo non fare, in Nudit (Rome: Nottetempo, 2009), 6770 (trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, On What We Can Not Do, in Nudities [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011], 4345). As de la Durantaye writes, The problem of potentiality is not a problem among others in Homo sacer; it is the problem that gives its logic, and its paradoxes, to all others. And as the reference to Bartleby makes clear, it involves thinking about potentiality in an unhabitual fashion (Giorgio Agamben, 233). 34. Cf. Colin McQuillan, The Political Life in Giorgio Agamben, Kritikos 2 ( July 2005), http://intertheory.org/mcquillan.htm; and Jenny Edkins, Whatever Politics, in Calarco and DeCaroli, Giorgio Agamben, 77. 35. Giorgio Agamben, Mezzi senza fine. Note sulla politica (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1996), 17 (trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000]). 36. Cf. Deranty, Agambens Challenge to Normative Theories of Modern Rights. 37. A note explains that this second, aphoristic part should be read as a commentary to 9 of Heideggers Sein und Zeit (Das Thema der Analytik des Daseins [The theme of the analytic of Dasein]) and to proposition 6.44 of Wittgensteins Tractatus (Nicht wie die Welt ist, ist das Mystische, sondern da sie ist [It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists]) (CV, 72). 38. Love is a theme that recurs, in a minor mode, in many of Agambens texts; see Idea dellamore [Idea of love], in Agamben, Idea della prosa, 41. But most of all love appears in the theory of knowledge to be found in Provenal love poetry, analyzed first in the chapter La parola e il fantasma [Word and phantasm], in Agamben, Stanze, 73150. Giorgio Agamben rehearses this theory in various posterior texts, from Categorie italiane. Studi di poetica (Venice: Marsilio, 1996; trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999]), to Profanazioni (Rome: Nottetempo, 2005; trans. Jeff Fort, Profanations [New York: Zone Books, 2007]), 233
carlo salzani: Quodlibet 53. The KojveBataille querelle about the end of history appears, in Agambens oeuvre, already in an excursus of Agamben, Il linguaggio e la morte, 6467; and takes a central place in two chapters of Giorgio Agamben, Laperto. Luomo e lanimale ( Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002), 1220 (trans. Kevin Attell, The Open: Man and Animal [ Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004]). The brief excursus in Il linguaggio e la morte discusses the motif of the sage at the end of history, and it can therefore be argued that d suvrement is here already contained in nuce, though Agamben adopted the term i noperativity only after his engagement with Nancy. 54. Agamben, Homo sacer, 71. 55. There is here a little problem in the translation from French into Italian and English: Whereas dsoeuvr is a deverbal, passive form, denoting dynamicity and, through the prefix de-, privation (meaning therefore deprived of ergon), the Italian inoperoso and the English inoperative are denominal, active forms, denoting static and, through the prefix in-, inversion (meaning therefore that has/presents/possesses no ergon). I owe this insight to Tommaso Detti. For a brief discussion of the translation of the term and its different uses in Queneau, Kojve, Bataille, Nancy, Blanchot, and Agamben, see Franchi, Passive Politics, 33ff. 56. Agamben, Mezzi senza fine, 109. 57. For a poignant critique of the philosophy of the als ob, see TR, 3842. 58. See also Agamben, Il regno e la gloria, 271ff. 59. See also ibid., 18485. 60. Significative is that, Agamben points out, Martin Luther translated St. Pauls katargesis as Af hebung, a term that was going to mark and determine the history of modern philosophy. See TR, 94ff. 61. Giorgio Agamben, Il corpo glorioso [The glorious body], in Nudit, 144. 62. Agamben, Il regno e la gloria, 274. 63. Giorgio Agamben, Elogio della profanazione, in Profanazioni, 106 (trans. In Praise of Profanation, in Profanations). 64. All these concepts, as Catherine Mills points out, must be related to an idea of politics as the suspension of the relation between means and ends and as the redefinition of human relations with objects (Philosophy of Agamben, 108). 65. See Giorgio Agamben, Stato di eccezione, Homo sacer, vol. 2/1 (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003), 8183 (trans. Kevin Attell, State of Exception [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005]); Walter Benjamin, Franz Kaf ka. Zur zehnten Wiederkehr seines Todestages, in Tiedemann and Schweppenhuser, Gesammelte Schriften, 2(2): 437 (trans. Franz Kaf ka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death, in Jennings, Selected Writings, 2:815). 66. Agamben, Stato di eccezione, 83. 67. See Agamben, Elogio della profanazione, 8687. Agambens interest in play comes of course from Benjamin and is present from his early works. Cf. the chapter Mme Panchkoucke o la Fata del giocattolo [Mme Panchkoucke or the toy fairy], in the second part of Agamben, Stanze, 6571; the chapters Il paese dei balocchi. Riflessioni sulla storia e sul gioco [The land of toys. Reflections on history and play] and Fiaba e storia. Considerazioni sul presepe [Fairy tale and history. Remarks on the crche], in Agamben, 235
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carlo salzani: Quodlibet 80. Walter Benjamin, In der Sonne, in Tiedemann and Schweppenhuser, Gesammelte Schriften, 4(1): 419 (trans. In the Sun, in Jennings, Selected Writings, 2:664). 81. de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 382. 82. On the notion of rest or remnant, see ibid., 298302. 83. See also Agamben, La passione della fatticit, 319. For Hlderlins quotation Der freie Gebrauch des Eigenes das Schwerste istsee Friedrich Hlderlin to Casimir Ulrich Boehlendorff, 4 December 1801, in Hlderlin, Smtliche Werke, 5:320.
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