What I am going to do in this paper is to analyze the concept of inoperativeness as it

appears in the work of Giorgio Agamben (). This concept plays a strategic role in both
the political and creative fields. However, I am going to focus on the political sphere to
show it as a key that seeks to open a new political paradigm. In order to analyze this
concept, I will attend Deleuze when he says that a concept has components, has a
history, has a becoming and refers to a problem (Deleueze). In this way, the task that
will guide my analysis will be basically to give account of the main and inseparable
components of the Agambenian concept of inoperativeness. In this regard, I’m going to
start by analyzing its recent history by focusing in the dialogue that Kojève and Bataille
had in the 50s. This historical account, as we will see, is going to allow me to find the
problematic in which this concept extracts its sense and also will allow me to initiate a
genealogy of the concept that will provide us with its components as appear in
Agamben.

A history of the concept, as appears in Agamben’s work, would lead us to examine at

least two strands: on the one hand, the debate between A. Kojève (1902-1968) and G.
Bataille (1897-1962), and its subsequent reception in M. Blanchot (1907-2003) and J. L.
Nancy (1940) and, on the other hand, to the radical Italian workers’ rights movements
of the 1960s and 1970s. Although1, what I will do here is to focus my analysis in the
first strand and particularly in the debate between Kojève and Bataille because, as
Frenchis remarks, here is where the primary sources of Agamben’s appropriation of the
term should be found. In this regard, the affinities that Agamben maintains latter with
Blanchot or Nancy could be readed as a derivation of this common source rather than a
close influence between them (Frenchis).

The concept's historical condensation and apparition, which does not mean that it had
not been brewing since long before until its manifestation, took place first in the work
of Kojève, in a review of the work of R. Queneau (1903-1976) called “Les Romans de
la sagesse” (1952), and also in the subsequent criticism of this analysis by Bataille. The
problem that engulfed both Kojève and Bataille was thinking the event of the
experience of life beyond the horizon of the Hegelian dialectic or, in other words, how
to interpret the end of history and the figure that man and nature would assume in the

1
For a further development of this strand see Mario Tronti, “La strategia del rifiuto” in Operai e capitale
(Torino: Einaudi, 1966), Virno, “Virtuosity and Revolution” or Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire
(Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000).
post-historical world, when the process of work and negation of the dialectic reached its
completion.

In order to understand the event this concept express or let us think, I’m going to start
by summarizing some points of Kojève’s thought. Kojève, one of the 20th century most
influential readers of G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), depicted Hegel’s Phenomenology of
Spirit (1807) as narrating the temporal work or task of dialectics as the transformation
of the non-human world into a human world. The motor this process, for Kojève, was
human desire. In this context, this “properly human desire” means, not to desire the
satisfaction of the appetite or the body (this would correspond to animal desire in this
account), but rather, means to desire “the Desire of the other”, that is, desire for
recognition of desire: “Desire is always a Desire of Desire” (Kojève, 1933-39: 14). Of
course, this determination of the meaning of desire comes from Kojeve’s account of the
dialectical conflict between master and slave in which two opposed desires or desiring
consciousnesses are confronted by the recognition of their superiority over the other and
the consequent submission of that consciousness that recognizes the other as superior.
Both recognize that they are immersed in a fight to the death, and this awareness is what
launches the struggle to a resolution, namely: there is a moment when in one of the
consciences the fear of death overpasses its desire to dominate. Then this consciousness
recognizes the superiority of the other and submits. Desire then appears as pure
negativity or negative negativity that does not leave the “given as it is”, but “destroys it,
if not in its being, at least in its form” (Kojève, 1933-39: 12). This process of negation,
that for Hegel and Kojève locates the beginning of History in the relation between
human beings, does not stop in the negation of other but continuous in the negation and
subjugation of the other non-human animal beings and the world (its resources). In this
sense, desire, as the engine whose task is the assimilation and subjection of the non-
human world (animal, vegetal, mineral…) into a human world, is seem as a negativity
compensation against the plenum of being: desire determines man in his being, or more
precisely, in the annulment of that being and its history.

According to Kojève, and his account of the dialectical conflict between master and
slave, it is the slave, by choosing a subordinated life of labor over death, accomplished
the task of dialectics culminating its process. The culmination of the whole process,
when there is nothing outside the dominion of the negating subject in which he or she
could find recognition implies the accomplishment of the dialectic work, and
corresponds to the end of history. This culmination, according to Kojève, has already
taken place, this is, after the First World War we are immersed in the end of history
because the historical work or task of humanity was something already completed. This
means that now, once we have accomplished the task of dialectics, the life of human
beings is the life of desire’s work.

For Kojève what disappears at the end of history was “Man”, understood as the subject
whose action negates the given (the Subject opposed to the Object (Kojeve…)) in order
to constitute its being, or in other words, the end of the history and consequently the end
of Man means the end of Action because there is nothing else to negate. This, for
Kojève, implies a state of “nothing left to do” and the returning of Men to its animal
form or praxis, the animalization of Men2. “Nothing left to do” does not mean a lack of
action but the lack of action that aims to actualize a task. Everything in this post-
historical sense would be actualized. If there is no task or end of the action, then the
separation of the subject counciousness with its object, separation that allows though,
and counciousness to appear, is reduced and the only action possible for the subject is
just pure action without meaning or sense, without thought involved in it. This means,
for this thinkers who, following a Cartesian line of thought understand the animals as
biological machines that human beings become animals in the sensense of being acting
like them. Then, the end of the history coincides with man’s becoming an animal again
and the disappearance of man in the proper sense (as the subject of negating action)
(O,6).

It is in this context in which the term inoperativity was coined. What Kojève identified
in his analysis of Raymond Queneau’s novels was examples of antiheroes living after
the closure of history (Kojeve 1952). Kojève found the figure of the voyou desoeuvré
(lazy rascal) as the satisfied and self-conscious Hegelian wise man with nothing left to
do. It is a figure who finds himself in the lack of a more or less historical or onto-
theological telos (Agamben), and therefore, she or he finds her/himself with no reason
for action because there are no historical ends to actualize. This has its political
implications as Frenchis notices:

In the political realm, they act in order to transform the ideal ends provided by the
metaphysical description of man into actuality by transforming or empirically negating

2
Nota a pie
 the given reality. Post-historical beings, being the rascals they truly are, just act with no
particular end in sight. Their life is pure self-contained action that does not receive its
meaning from a transcendent telos, but becomes, paradoxically, meaningful in its being
meaningless.(Frenchis)

Under this conditios I can now give a first definition of the meaning of the term
inoperativity (désoeuvrement) as appears in Kojève. In according to what we have seen
so far, inoperativity appears in his work as a state of “nothing left to do” given as pure
animal praxis or, in other words, being without negativity/work/task/action after the end
of history in a state of animality.

This state of nothing left to do in which the negativity reaches completion and its ending
is what lauches the discussion with Bataille, who wants to maintain this negativity in
order to think what the human being will do with it once the work of man is over. For
Bataille, the concept of désoeuvrement means the idleness of the negative, and not is
lack. In other words, for him life beyond dialectics would be a sovereign and useless
form of negativity without any task. Negativity in its pure form. But he moves a little bit
the locus or the plane in which the problem of the task of the human being after history
is situated. While Kojeve situates it in a crossroad of historical, ethical and political
planes, Bataille puts the emphasis on its ontological and above all ethical part, without
forgetting the other planes. In order to locate the planes in which Bataille situates the
problem of inoperativity, I think that we should follow him when he said that “every
problem, in a certain sense, is a problem of schedule. It implies a previous question:
What do I have to do (what should I do or what do I have interest in doing or what do I
want to do) here (in this world in which I have my human and personal nature) and
now?”3

For Bataille, human beings can only answer this question –the moral question par
excellence according to him– paradoxically, and it is this irresoluble paradox that our
answer to this question embodies, in what humanity consist of. The paradox is
composed by two responses: the first one affirms the here and now as an absolute goal,
as the immediate satisfaction of desire, without reserve and without delay; the second
answer remits and subordinates the here and now to a distant and future there, making
the present action a mere means to obtain a good or end that is considered highly

3
La experiencia interior, Taurus, Madrid, 1972, pág. 205.
desirable but that it is always beyond the present (Bataille…). It is important to
highlight here that the first answer would be identified as the proper of animals while
the second would be excluded to reasonable and mature men (of course woman here are
not part of the same story). We can notice in this contradiction the Hegelian, Marxist
and Kojèveian heritage, however, and this is the main difference with the formers,
Bataille does not promise a final reconciliation of the terms, a reconciliation that would
correspond to the end of history. But let me examine this more closely in order to
identify the remains of negativity after history that was, I think, the main engine of his
dispute with Kojève and the main source where Agamben finds the components of his
concept of inoperativity. (tienes que liarlo más con tu propuesta de lectura, estó así esta
copiado tal cual)

For Bataille, in continuity with Hegel, humanity emerges as a denial of animality. This
would be the first negation proper to the human beings. This means a negation of the
animality represented as immanence, or in other words, a negation of both the life in a
state of temporary immediacy (the animal always lives in an eternal present because it is
not aware of its finitude, that it must die, therefore it does not worry about the future)
and a total indistinction with respect to all other beings4. What interrupts this continuity
and indistinction of life is the transcendence of consciousness. Then, consciousness or
transcendence appears as a distance regarding other beings, and beings regarding
consciousness. It is what locates the object as opposed and subordinated to the subject.
What the consciousness instaurates then is a separation among beings, a subordination
of the means to the ends and of the present to the future. Counciouness is to be aware of
our own death, and then of our future.

This first movement of negation in which the counciousness emerges as a subordination

of the means to the ends and of the present to the future it is closely linked to the
appearance of work, of productive activity and the instauration of the law. The work
allows the subject-object contrast, making the human being becomes an object of itself.
In other words, it is what breaks and maintains the distance with respect to its intimacy
and immanence with the world, making the human being enter into a relationship of
strangeness and exteriority with the world and with himself (with his animality). What
the work demands is the denial of the immediate satisfaction of the desire,

4
It is not difficult to see here the conections with the concept of Zoe as developed by Agamben in, for
example HS.
subordinating the present to the future, to the distant ends that keep the human being in
subsistence. According to Bataille this movement immerses the humans in a never-
ending circle in which every end is related to, or is just a mean to another end. The
human being makes himself an useful gadget, a tool that subjects all of its actions to this
productive chain. The subject then appears as an object able to be known and used.

What causes the human being to reduce himself to the condition of a useful object,
subject to the logic of work and economic calculation, is the fear of death. In this sense,
the survival of the individual as well as that of the group achieved by the success of the
work depends on the prohibition of the immediacy of desire. This prohibition is
produced and reproduced by the instauration of laws that prohibit the sudden and
disorganized irruption of animal passions. Law appears in this context basically as a
twofold prohibition: prohibition of incest and prohibition of murder. The sex taboo and
murder taboo regulates birth and death5. Then law appears as an imposition that ensures
the survival of life, that invokes the fear of death, prevents the disorder of animal
passions and imposes the rationality of work (Bataille, 18).

According to this Hegelian view, on the one hand, the work is at the origin of all
knowledge: knowledge is intended to dominate the world as a totality of objects
external to the subject and susceptible to be manipulated by him with a view to an end.
And if we live now in the post history is because of this task has already done. On the
other, the law is at the origin of any legal and moral code which aims to regulate
relations between men and subordinate them to a supreme good or end. What the human
being obtains of this evocation of the death by the law and the work is a reduced life to
its subsistence condition, limited to reproducing itself with the only intention of lasting.
(19).

Here is when the second movement of negation appears. According to Bataille,

humanity negates the first negation incessantly, or in other words, life cannot stop
affirming the return of the repressed: its immanence with the world. The point for
Bataille then is recovering for the human the value of the denied animality. This double
negation that affirms animal immediacy reveals another dimension of human experience
without which unnecessary or uneconomical (such us like the taste for luxury objects,
cults and religious sacrifices, mourning processes, luxury monuments, wars, sports,

5
In this sense we have another concept which is important for Agamben: biopolitics.
games, parties, shows, artistic and literary creations, sexual activities not intended for
reproduction, etc.) activities would not be understood. Under this other side of the
experience, the desire is not stopped but it is immediately satisfied. This entails that the
external objects such as the body, energies, and actions cease to be useful, means for an
end, and became absolute ends. Under these circumstances, these objects are consumed
by the pleasure of their consumption without any economic calculation. What is
important of these objects now is their unproductive spending, their waste, and their
loss.

The last think I would like to say about Bataille in order to latter deal with Agamben’s
reception of the concept of inoperativity has to do with Bataille’s conception of
sovereignty.

Agamben.

There is a passage in Homo Sacer in which Agamben already shows all the components
of his conception of inoperativeness (in the conception concerns the political expression
of the concept):

Everithing depends on what is meant by “inoperativeness.” It can be neither the absence

of work nor (as in Bataille) a sovereign and useless form of negativity. The only
coherent way to understand inoperativeness is to think of it as a generic mode of
 potentiality that is not exhausted (like individual action or collective action understood
as the sum of individual actions) in a transitus de potential ad actum (hs 61-62).

What Agamben presents here is a concept that maintains the concept of work (task,
operatio, érgon, oeuvre) among its components (although modifying it as we will see),
while substituting the concept of negativity for the concept of potentiality to overcome
dialectics, and adds a new element derived from of the conjunction of the previous ones:
the concept of multitudo. What I would like to do now is to look more closely to all its
elements in order to analyze or show the changes and movements through which the
concept passes from its Kojèveian-Bataillean formulation to its transformation in
Agamben and also to evaluate its renewed consistency. I’m going to begin with the
notion of work, érgon.

Departing from the historical condensation and apparition of inoperativiness that we

have seen, Agamben traces the genealogy of the term, it’s becoming, coming back to
Aristotle in a text called “The work of Man” (2004). Here, in difference with its modern
or postmodern formulation, the problem was not how to interpret the fullness of the
human being at the end of history, but rather, the definition of the work of man as man.
It is important to notice here, as Agamben does that, this question concerns has a
decisive strategic importance “for on it depends the possibility not only of assigning
him a proper nature and essence, but also, (…) of defining his happiness and his
politics.” (Agamben,xx) The answer of this question then is what will define the object
and the subject of politics and ethics from a metaphysical perspective. In this sense, by
recurring to Aristotle, what Agamben is doing is, maintaining the planes in which the
problem arises, to emphasize the metaphysical part of it. The question then is: does the
human being has an essential work, task, labor or, in Aristotelian terms érgon, or, on the
contrary is essentially inoperative, argós?

It is important to notice here two thinks. On the one hand, the link between érgos and
enérgeia wich means literally “being at work”, the activity, the being-in-act and that
exist in functional opposition with dýnamis (“potentiality” or “possibility”). On the
other, that the opposite term or árgos means “not working,” “lacking érgon” or
inoperativeness (Agambenxx). It is for that reason that “work” in this context does not
mean just work in the sense of labor or in the sense of Kojeve or Bataille, but rather that
which defines the enérgeia, the activity, the being-in-act that is proper to human beings
(Agamben…)

Faced with the possible double response and with it the two excluding theses on the
work of man, Aristotle not only inaugurates the problem, but establishes a response or a
reading of it that inaugurates a political paradigm that lasted until the First World War
in political though. He was aware of that affirming the thesis that the human being was
árgos of his own, would entail also the affirmation of the lack of an enérgeia or a being
in act that could define their essence wich means that the human being would be a being
of pure potentiality, which no identity and no work could exhaust. Although, this
hypothesis was not inadmissible to Aristotle, he bet for the hypothesis that there is work
of humanity as humanity. He looked for human’s érgon first in the sphere of the
individual human activities such as playing the lyre, making shoes or sculting images
but he note early that these activities cannot exhaust the érgon proper to human beings.
That’s why he looked for human’s érgon in the sphere of life. As Agamben says, “the
individuation of the érgon of man comes about by working a series of caesurae in the
continuum of life” (Agamben). Aristotle divides life or the various senses of the term
“to live” (nutritive, sensitive, and practical-rational life) in order to isolate the most
general and separable one. While the nutritive life is shared with pants and animals and
the sensitive is shared with animals, the only life proper to human being is life that is in
act in accordance with logos. Then the “work of man” then could be defined as a certain
kind of life in act in accordance with logos or, in other words, as the activity that consist
in the actualization of the vital rational potentiality (Agamben). In this sense the
movement of Aristotle is quite similar to the one Bataille identifies as the first
movement of negation of life by the work and law. However while in Bataille is seem as
a metaphysical condition in Aristotle appears as an argumentative movement that aims
to isolate human life from life itself.

What Aristotle does with this identification is not only define and identify the object of
human ethics and politics, but to tie the ethical and political historical tasks with the
metaphysical task of the actualization of the human rational potentiality.

From here, Agamben extracts two consequences or two theses on politics that constitute
the heritage of Aristotle to western political though:
 1. Insofar as it is defined in relation to an érgon, politics is a politics of activity
[operosita] and not of inoperosita, of the act and not of potentiality.

2. This ergon, however, is ultimately a “certain form of life,” which is defined above all
through the exclusion of the simple fact of living, of bare life [i.e. of non-rational
(animal, vegetative) life.]. (Agamben)

In accordance to these two theses, Aristotle creates a paradigm of politics that thought
Western politic in the modern age as “the collective assumption of a historical task (a
ʻworkʼ) by a people or a nation. This political task coincided with a metaphysical task,
that is the accomplishment of man as living rational being.” (121) This paradigm,
ultimately, as we have seen with Bataille, is what causes the human being to reduce
himself to the condition of a useful object, subject to the logic of work and economic
calculation in the modern age. Or in other words, reduce or sacrifices their potentiality
as much as it can aiming to actualize its metaphysical task.

However, at the end of World War I this paradigm of the work enters into crisis when it
becomes evident for the nation-states that there no longer are historical tasks that can be
assigned. Nevertheless, trying to maintain this paradigm Western politics assigns itself
one last task: a reformulation of the biopolitical legacy of classical political philosophy.
Taking into account that the political (as the work of the human being as human being)
is drawn out of the living being through the exclusion of a part of its vital activity (zoê),
the single determination of Aristotle’s legacy is ultimately biopolitical. If there is no
way in modernity or postmodernist of defining the task of the human being then we
must assume the biological life as the last historical task. It is important to realize here
that the meaning of task or work maintains its negative force. It means the negation of
the nutritive and sensitive life or zoê that strategically maintains a politic paradigm.

The “work” of the living being in accordance with logos is the assumption and the care
of that nutritive and sensitive life on whose exclusion Aristotelian politics had defined
the érgon tou anthropou. (Agamben)

Agamben, who is fully aware of the implications of this Aristotelian political paradigm
that has at its base the assignment of tasks to human beings, looks for a change or to
arrive at another paradigm of politics. As we have seen, Aristotle, when gave birth to
the problematic of the task of the human being as human being, faced two options and
follow the one that depicted the human being as essentially having a historical and
metaphysical task. Agamben, in contrast, will took the second path, namely, the one
who assign no essential, historical task to the human being and depicted it as being
árgos, essentially inoperative.6

Maybe, the first and most important conceptual movement that Agamben does in order
to change the Aristotelian paradigm is to substitute the concept of negativity for the
concept of potentiality in the Aristotelian conceptualization. As we have seen,
negativity was, from the beginning, an elemental part of Aristotle’s formulation of the
task of the human being, it was that which denied life as such. This negativity was also
a fundamental element of the concept of désoeuvrement for both Kojève and Bataille as
we have seen. It is this change of elements in the construction of his concept of
inoperativeness that leads Agamben to a second reading of Aristotle, that is, to a second
genealogy of the term, which remains in the Aristotelian problematic but gives other
answers to it.

In this regard Agamben finds in Averroes and Dante this second genealogy. Both of
them departs from the Aristotelian problematic maintain the Aristotelian determination
of human perfection as the actualization of the rational potentiality and taking up his
opposition between man and plants and animals. The main difference is that both
emphasize the moment of potentiality as the specific characteristic of man: “what
specifically characterizes human logos, however, is that it is not always already in act,
but exists, first and foremost, only in potentiality” (Agamben).

Dante in his text Monarchy separates Aristotle conceptualization by broadening the

context of the definition of human specificity. Dante takes into account not only plants
and animals but also inanimate beings such as the elements or minerasl and supernatural
creatures (angels). Under these conditions, rational activity is no enough to identify the
proper characteristic or task of the humankind because is shared, according to Dante
with animals and angels. For Dante, as well as for Averroes, what defines human
rationality is now its potential character because, on the one hand, in the angels the
intelligence is pure act, without interruption and, on the other, the intelligence of the
animals is inscribed naturally in each individual. What differentiates human

6
that inoperativeness might form "the paradigm for the coming politics" (CC 93).
intelligence, then, is that it is always potentiall or possible thought, that is, thought is
“constitutively exposed to the possibility of its own lack and inactivity” (Agamben).

This change has very interesting implications. Since thought is essentially potential and
can reach the act from an “interpolation,” the work or actualization of man demands a
multitude. That is, what calls for the actualization of our potentiallity is to be immersed
in the irreducible plurality of the world. This has two consequences: the first one is that
the work of man requires a multitude to be actualized and this makes the multitude (and
not a people, a city, or a particular community) the subject of politics. I think that we
should consider, as E. Laclau () does, the idea of the multitude as the idea of an
unstructured whole in which different forms of antagonisms begin to proliferate
(laclau). In this regard, this concept that reemerges in the works of Hardt and Negri
during the 80s, could be traced back to the discussion between Hobbes and Spinoza.
Here, the term “multitude” is understood in opposition to the concept of “people”.
While for Spinoza it indicates a plurality that persists as such in the public scene, in
collective action, or in regard to common tasks without converging on one, for Hobbes
it refers to the state of nature. The people, for Hobbes it was appears after the multitude
once it leaves the state of nature and became a unified will. As we can see the difference
has to do with this unification of the wills and its determination in a collective task. In
contrast to it, the notion of multitude, as one of the elements of the concept of
inoperativeness, is that which evades political unity. As Hobbes pointed out, the
multitude is refractory to obedience and never transfers its own natural rights to the
sovereign. The multitude inhibits this transference by its plural nature, which means that
it is, according to Hobbes and P. Virno (), anti-state. For Hobbes it coincides with the
dangers that gravitate statehood, it is "the detritus that every so often can hinder the
march of the great machine" (Virno, 14) , which virtually contradicts the state monopoly
of the political decision.

The second consequence is that this immersion in irreducible plurality it does not reach
only the public sphere. That is, it situates the plurality of relationships not only with
respect to other human beings (public sphere) but also a constant communication with
the world that surrounds us, whether inanimate or non-human animal. As we have seen,
the Aristotelian paradigm was based on a negation or separation of life (zoê). This
separation, as Bataille showed, produced and reproduced by work and law had the
consequence of reducing life to its subsistence condition, limited to reproducing itself
with the only intention of lasting. This separation is questioned. But it is not questioned
by a second negation, as in the case of Bataille. It is questioned by the affirmation of our
non reducible immanence or the affirmation of potentiality non exhaustible by pure
human means. In other words, there is no more a denial or denegation of the animal life
that separates us from it, but a multiplicity of material and vital relationships in which
we are immersed and that force us to actualize our potentialities. This entails that the
allowed “external objects” such as the body, energies, and actions, as in the case of
Bataille, cease to be useful, means for an end, and became absolute ends, that is, it put
us out of the never-ending economic circle in which every end is related to, or is just a
mean to another end. From this point of view we can see that our potenciallity is not
dominated by external or internal factors but it is liberated. In other words, there are
potentialities that under the other paradigm could not have been liberated. So, summing
up, this notion of inoperativeness Bridge the gap (as much as it can) between Bios and
Zoe and, in doing so liberates potentialities that could not have been liberated otherwise.

What Agamben does by using his concept of inoperativeness is to take the problematic
of classical politics to another paradigm to another formulation, that is, a politics that is
equal to the absence of a work of man and not fall back into the former paradigm by the
assumption of a biopolitical task. For this reason, he brings Dante and Averroes into the
discussion as thinkers that conceives a politics that corresponds to the inoperativeness
of man or, in other words, a politics determined not “from the being-at-work of human
rationality, but from a working that exposes and contains in itself the possibility of its
own not existing, of its own inactivity” (Agamben). In order to do so, he points out we
should put the emphasis in the new subject of politic: multitude. And also we should
understand it as the figure of a working capable of expousing its inoperativeness and
potentiality in every task or work.

.
In the impossibility of defining a new "work of man," it is now a question of taking on
biological life itself as the last and decisive historical task.

Inoperativity in Agamben:

Idea of Prose

59

Homo Sacer

The theme of desteuvrement-inoperativeness as the figure of the fullness of man at the end of
history-which first appears in Kojeve's review of Queneau, has been taken up by Blanchot and
by Nancy, who places it at the very center of his work The Inoperative Community. Everything
depends on what is meant by "inoperativeness." It can be neither the simple absence of work
nor (as in Bataille) a sovereign and useless form of negativity. The only coherent way to
understand inoperativeness is to think of it as a generic mode of potentiality that is not
exhausted (like individual action or collective action understood as the sum of individual
actions) in a transitus de potentia ad actum.

Means without ends

politics is that which corresponds to the essential inoperativity of humankind, to

the radical being-without-work of human communities. There is politics because

human beings are argos – beings that cannot be defined by any proper operation

– that is, beings of pure potentiality that no identity or vocation can possibly

exhaust. (ME, 140)

The time that remains

Language and Death

Stanzas

Inoperative in others:

The components of the concept

is Nichomachean Ethics I, 7, 1097b22-1098a18, where Aristotle, on the way to providing a

definition of happiness as the supreme end of ethics and politics, examines what constitutes
ʻthe work of manʼ (to ergon tou anthropou).The standard English translation of this phrase is
ʻthe function of manʼ, but this rendering loses the most important part of the semantic content
of ergon Agamben relies upon, namely, the connection to ʻworkʼ as a product and as the action
that brings that product about, and the connection to energeia, i.e. to the ʻactʼ, as opposed to
dynamis, potency or potentiality. It is in this text that Agamben finds the root or rather the
crucial joint that allows the political machine of the West to function and which, therefore,
provides the preferred locus for its dislocation. Aristotle is discussing how to define the good
to be found in human life and begins with an analogy: as for the flutist, the sculptor, and every
craftsman, the good consists in their work (ergon) and in their activity (praxis), similarly, he
argues, what is good for man should be found in his work. Unless, he adds, we admit that the
cobbler and the carpenter have their own ergon but man doesnʼt. Unless, that is, we admit
that man was born without work, argos (Agamben notes in passing that desoeuvré is a perfect
translation of argos). Agamben sees in this possibility, and in Aristotleʼs negative answer to the
very serious question he had himself raised, the critical joint of the machine we have inherited.

Aristotle comes to the conclusion that the ʻwork of man’ is life according to the logos and that
the supreme good of man and therefore the goal of politics is the actualization of the rational
potency of life. Two consequences follow from this point, according to Agamben, two ʻtheses
on politicsʼ that Aristotle has left to Western political thought:

1) Politics is politics of activity, or rather of ʻoperosityʼ: it is the politics of an ergon,

because it is defined through a relationship to the work of man.
2) 2) This ergon of man is, in the last analysis, just a certain form of life which is primarily
defined on the basis of the exclusion of naked life, i.e. of non-rational (animal,
vegetative) life.

Agamben concludes his brief discussion with a refrain that is well-known to hisreaders:
“Consequently, in the modern age, Western politics has been thought as the collective
assumption of a historical task (a ʻworkʼ) by a people or a nation. This political task coincided
with a metaphysical task, that is the accomplishment of man as living rational being.” (121)
When, after WWI, this paradigm experiences a crisis and it becomes progressively clear that
there are no historical missions for the nation-states, the biological life of man becomes the
ʻultimate and decisive historical taskʼ. Biopolitics spectacle–are a direct consequence of the
Aristotelian foundation

The lethal machine now running on empty finds here–in the positive definition of the work of
man and the parallel definition of politics on the basis of energeia–its ultimate ground.
Jamming the machine, therefore, requires us to advance where Aristotle hesitated and to
claim the fundamental argia of humanity, its desoeuvrement.

how this desoeuvrement is to be thought. Here again we are confronted with an abundance of
possibilities, so much so, indeed, that the real problem seems to be where not to go while
seeking an analysis of the term. Just in Kojèveʼs works, for instance, we find a number of
different figures—the animal, the snob, the Japanese formal nihilist, the woman, etc.—which
are, in more than one instance, mutually contradictory.7

We may be tempted to think that the the critical advantage the voyou desoeuvré enjoys upon
its historical counterparts (it is an ʻitʼ, of course, since we are now in post-historical times) is to
be found in the the lack of finality or, to be more precise, in the lack of a more or less historical
or onto-theological telos. That is, the argument might go as follows: historical beings act in
order to brings about certain ends; in the political realm, they act in order to transform the
ideal ends provided by the metaphysical description of man into actuality by transforming or
empirically negating the given reality. Post-historical beings, being the rascals they truly are,
just act with no particular end in sight. Their life is pure self-contained action that does not
receive its meaning from a transcendent telos, but becomes, paradoxically, meaningful in its
being meaningless.

Its distinctive feature is to be completely absorbed in a series of perfectly playful actions: its
life is a game, is lived as a game, and it is only meaningful as such.8 here. At times Agamben
comes close to this version of desoeuvrement as ludic engagement, for instance in the
discussion of the pure means, ʻmezzo puroʼ in Means without End, where he claims that, in the
political arena, “the means without end is a game/play (gioco) with the law that frees it
completely from its canonical use.”9 However, it seems to me that he should resist this
particular interpretation, because it does not reach the core of the issue of desoeuvrement.
The problem is that the lack of (transcendent) finality is only derivatively important to the
argos, because the telos is just the actualization of the ergon, of work; it is the leading light
that directs its transformation from potency into act. The abolition of teleology which can be
achieved by a refiguration of the voyou as the being deprived of transcendent finalities leaves
the essential point of Aristotleʼs legacy untouched (according to Agambenʼs reading, of
course). That is, it still allows for the presence of an ergon of man.

What is required is not to abstract, but rather to extract the ergon from man (it is always a
man) in order to produce a purified argos.
We are finally in a position to introduce the notion of passivity. The opposition to the work of
man, and thus the argos, must be found by a detour through the terms that Aristotle links to
it—energeia, actuality, and its opposite, dynamis, potentiality. If the work of man, his ergon, is
ultimately connected to the notion of energeia, that is to man in his actuality, then the argos
is, conversely, the being of pure dynamis, and is therefore a potential being.

Agamben remarks that the potentiality of human beings is always the potentiality not to do
something

it. After having generalized his reading to Aristotleʼs treatment to sensation and perception
(see de An. 418b-419a1), Agamben moves on to Met. Theta 1 (1050b10) and remarks that if to
be potential means to be in relation to oneʼs own incapacity, to the potential not to be, then
what is potential is capable of both being and not being. He concludes that “the potential
welcomes not-Being, and this welcoming of non-Being is potentiality, fundamental
passivity.”12 Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999) 182.

Here I think we have reached our first conclusion: the being of desoeuvrement that is at stake
in the definition of the argos is to be found in potentiality as fundamental passivity, as
fundamental opening to non-Being. The voyou is not just inoperose, it is lazy, or rather it is
inoperose because it is lazy, and it is lazy because it is always capable, as a purely potential
being, of not-being, that is, of not-doing. The voyou welcomes not-Being and its fundamental
passivity is exposed in this welcoming. As I said above, it follows that the fundamental problem
of Agambenʼs thought—and I use the word here in the sense of Sache (des Denkens)—is
passivity. Or, to be more precise, it is the thought of desoeuvrement as passivity.

“Not work, but inoperosity and decreation, [that is, fundamental passivity] are the paradigm of
the politics to come (to come, does not mean future).”13 The politics to come (à-venir) will be
a passive politics. “Postilla 2001” to the Coming Community

The concept is contained, in nuce, in the “Idea of Politics” chapter in Idea of Prose, which
relates the condition of the dwellers in limbo; abandoned to the absence of God, to His
forgetfulness, they are irredeemably lost, but it is precisely this loss that means they have no
destiny, and they live like letters with no addressee, in the joy of an inestimable hope (IP, 77–8).
“Idea of Politics” is reproduced almost word for word in the “From Limbo” chapter in The
Coming Community, to represent the condition of the whatever singularities, indifferent to
redemption because irredeemable, but as such embodying that life, simply human, which
survives the end of the politico-theological machine (CC, 5–7). In the 2001 apostille to the
Italian re-edition of The Coming Community, Agamben renames this condition “inoperativity”
(Murray)

It is in Homo Sacer that Agamben articulates this theme for the fi rst time. “Inoperativity”
translates the French term désoeuvrement (Murray)

In Homo Sacer,

Agamben proposes a personal redefi nition of désoeuvrement; it cannot

be read merely as absence of work/activity (assenza di opera), nor, as in

Bataille, as a form of negativity which is sovereign in so far 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” (HS,

62). In Means Without End, the argument takes the central place that it

has retained in Agamben’s later works. Human beings as potential beings

have no proper ergon (work); they are argos, without opera, inoperative.

Therefore,

politics is that which corresponds to the essential inoperativity of humankind, to

the radical being-without-work of human communities. There is politics because

human beings are argos – beings that cannot be defi ned by any proper operation

– that is, beings of pure potentiality that no identity or vocation can possibly

exhaust. (ME, 140)

The theme of the coming politics is therefore to interrogate this essential

inoperativity and this essential 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.

Inoperativity is central to The Time That Remains. The messianic vocation

(klesis) consists precisely in the re-vocation of any vocation; however,

this re-vocation does not destroy or annihilate the factitious condition of

the world, but rather suspends it in the fi gure of the “as if not” (hos me,

come non): “it is not another fi gure, another world; it is the passing of

the fi gure of this world” (TR, 25; trans. modifi ed). Use [uso] is the form

that this deactivation takes: “to live messianically means ‘to use’ klesis;

conversely, messianic klesis is something to use not to possess” (TR, 26).

connotation; it does not constitute a new identity, but rather the

“new creature” is nothing but the use and the messianic vocation of the
old identity. The old identity is not replaced by a new one but only rendered

inoperative, and, in this way, opened to its true use. The key term

is here katargesis, which describes, in St Paul’s epistles, the “fulfi lment”

of the law at the arrival of the Messiah (see messianism); it comes from

the Greek argeo, and thus from argos, and means “I make inoperative, I

deactivate, I suspend the effi cacy” (TR, 95). Argeo translates also, in the

Septuagint, the verb that signifi es the Sabbath rest. The fulfi lment in the

use is thus désoeuvrement, and messianic potentiality is precisely that which

is not exhausted in its ergon, but that remains potential in a “weak” form.

Katargesis restores the works – the identities – to their potentiality by

rendering them inoperative.

What is rendered inoperative is an activity directed towards a goal, in

order to open it to a new use. This does not abolish the old activity, but

rather exposes and exhibits it.

The essential connection between potentiality

and inoperativity means that the sabbatical suspension, which, by rendering inoperative the
specifi c functions of the living being, transforms

them into possibilities, is the proper human praxis. This operation

takes the name, in more recent texts, of profanation; it implies the

neutralisation 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 new use takes the forms

of study, play and festivity. Study and play free humankind 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. Play and inoperativity are brought together in festivity;

inoperativity coincides with festivity in so far as festivity consists

in neutralising and rendering inoperative human gestures, actions and

works, and only in this way making them festive. What defi nes festivity

is not what is not done in it, but rather the fact that what is done is not

so much different from what one does every other day, but is freed and

suspended from its “economy”, from the reasons and aims that defi ne it

during weekdays. (murray)

the way in which Agamben uses the term is anything but negative. Agamben is led to the topic
of inoperativeness through examining the question of the purpose of mankind. Agreeing with
many contemporary philosophers that, “there is no essence, no historical or spiritual vocation,
no biological destiny that humans must enact or realize”CC

that, “there is in effect something that humans are and have to be…It is the simple fact of one’s
own existence as possibility or potentiality”.21 For Agamben, therefore, the potential nature of
human existence is the foundation of all moral and political actions.22 But how can human
potentiality translate into moral activity? And how is this potentiality related to
inoperativeness?

At a very basic understanding, for Agamben, “to be ‘inoperative’, it would seem, would be to
refuse to be an operative part of the state’s machinery”.25 However, the example of Bartleby
shows a more dynamic view of the inoperative that reaches beyond political action.
“Inoperativeness… represents something not exhausted but inexhaustible—because it does not
pass from the possible to the actual”.26

the inoperative, of “the other side of potentiality: the possibility that a thing might not come
to pass”.27 And because Bartleby never offers a reason for his refusal to work and never
actually denies the requests made of him, the authorities at hand are completely bewildered
as to how to deal with the scrivener.

Successful political action in the future, therefore, would be to embrace one’s potentiality and
declare oneself as inoperative within the sovereign structures of one’s society. (Balskus)

See Decreation in Balkus ()

katargeo - which Agamben posits derives from the adjective argos, meaning "inoperative, not-
at-work (a-ergos) , inactive", and which cornes to mean to make inoperative or deactivate.
Thus he suggests that "désoeuvrement" would be a good translation for Pauline katargein (TR:
101).

The effect o f the messianic law o f faith, then, i s not to destroy the (normative element) of
law, but to render it inoperative : as Agamben writes, " [t] he messianic is not the destruction
but the deactivation of the law, rendering the law inexecutable" (TR: 9 8 ) . In this context,
deactivation means that the potentiality or force of law is not realized or does not pass into
actuality, but is in ste ad given back to law such that the law is maintained in a state of
potentiality. This condition of suspension in potentiality is what Agamben appears to me an by
the fulfilment of law - the law is brought to its end in being rendered inoperative. Or, Only to
the extent that the Messiah renders the nomos inoperative, that he makes the nomos no-
Ionger-at-work and thus restores it to the state of potentiality, only in this way may he
represent its te/os as both end and fulfillment. The law can be brought to fulfillment only if it is
first restored to the inoperativity of its power. (Ibid. )

The notion of inoperativity and the closely related concept of désoeuvrement

or the unworked are central to Agamben's theorization of political

liberation. However, this is not to suggest that he sim ply reiterates a political

theology or poli tics of faith. Instead, he emphasizes the necessity of a

politics that renders the current biopolitical machine inoperative through

play and profanation. That is, he highlights the power of a relation to

things, concepts and ultimately law itself that desacralizes and p/ays with

things

play gives onto a new use : play releases objects

and ideas from the inscribed use within a given sphere and severs their

instrumental attachment to an end or goal. As Agamben writes, " [t]he freed

behaviour still reproduces and mimics the forms of the activity from which

it has been emancipated, but, in emptying them of their sense and of any

obligatory relationship to an end, it opens them and makes them available

for a new use" (ibid. : 8 5 - 6) .

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 Heeel, 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 desoeuvrement and inoperativity
take (2003: 76). Yet there is also, for Jean-Luc Nancy as well as Agamben, a properly 'political'
form of desoeuvrement. As Nancy states, 'the community takes place of necessity in what
Blanchot has called desoeuvrement ... 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, institutional work' (quoted in Joris 1988: xiv).
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 desoeuvrement with inoperativity he is pointing

to the term's ambiguity, that it has the potential for both action

and inaction.

that there is an importance in inoperativity retaining an

immanence, never passing into actuality. (muurrat texto otro)

He points out that the question Aristotle asks-usually translated "Is man naturally
functionless?" -would be more accurately rendered "Is man born without work [senzopera]
(argos)?" (PP, 365).6 Aristotle points to the examples of carpenters and tanners who in their
capacities as such have specific and defining work to do without which there would cease to be
carpenters or tanners-but would not, of course, cease to be men. What, Aristotle then asks, of
mankind as a whole? Do we have a specific task to complete, a select activity to exercise, set
work we must do or works we must accomplish?

Agamben's philosophy of potentiality evolves as an answer to this question. In its simplest

form, his response is no. For him, mankind has no millennia! or messianic task to complete, no
divinely ordained work that it must do, and no set function it must exercise. And it is this idea
that he presents in his discussions of potentiality and expresses through such curious figures as
Bartleby and such unfamiliar terms as inoperativeness. Just as, in his view, an authentic
individual vocation is without determinate content-

This does not, of course, mean that Agamben offers an apology for apathy, pessimism, or
indifference to mankind's present or future; and he is careful to note that such
"inoperativeness" must be understood with philosophical care. That mankind is "inoperative,"
as Agamben claims, does not mean that it is dysfunctional; it means only that it has no defined
or definable function. "The vocabulary of inoperativeness [inoperosita]," to which the Greek
term argos belongs, Agamben points out, "has in Greek no negative connotation whatsoever,"

If we have no collective vocation, the question becomes, what, individually and collectively, we
are to do.
The planes in wich the concepts is employed

(Political (see frenchi “beyond the muselman” y pssive politics I y ii) Creative, artistic,
literary)

Agamben provides an explicit link between politics and desoeuvrement through a reading of a
passage from Aristotleʼs Nicomachean Ethics that adds a few more details to his very allusive
discussions mentioned above.

When Agamben writes in his book The Coming Community that inoperativeness should be “the
paradigm for the coming politics”19,

See Decreation in Balkus ()

The positive importance of Kojève's thought is his introduction of the notion of

désoeuvrement, or inoperativity, into philosophy in a review of the work of Raymond
Queneau. This notion, which also points to the nub of the intellectual conflict between Kojève
and Georges Bataille, provides Agamben with a starting point for his own construal of
désoeuvrement as centrally concerning an understanding of potentiality

No single term in Agamben's writing is so easy to misunderstand as inoperativeness

[inoperosita] . In an afterword to The Coming Community Agamben suggests that
inoperativeness might form "the paradigm for the coming politics" (CC 93).

Its use in post-war philosophy stretches

back to Alexandre Kojeve and Georges Bataille who debated its

meaning in the 1950s. It was then used by the French novelist and

philosopher Maurice Blanchot.

The problems the conceps gisves an aswer to

History

potential: the voyou desoeuvré. The term was initially applied by Kojève to the protagonists of
three novels by Raymond Queneau—the most famous one being Le dimanche de la vie—which
contain three different avatars of the figure of the sage after the end of history. Kojèveʼs
interpretation of Queneau appeared in Critique, but was severely criticized by Bataille and
gave rise to an intense debate between them. (Frenchi)

Agamben refers to Bataille in one of the “digressions” of Language and Death, in all
the Homo Sacer installments, in Il tempo che resta, in Stato di Eccezione, etc
the expression voyou desoeuvré is a colloquial phrase perhaps closer to ʻlazy rascalʼ.

term that hovers between the most rarefied philosophical speculations of Blanchot, Nancy,
and Agamben himself, and the street language so dear to Queneau.

The excessive emphasis on the technical role that the concept plays in French thought and,
especially, in the work of Blanchot, may lead us to believe that is where Agambenʼs primary
sources are to be found. Instead, I would suggest that the terminological affinity between
Blanchot and Agamben does not point to a process of linear causality between the two but it is
more easily explained—not, perhaps, at the biographical level but at the theoretical one that
only concerns us here—as derivation from a common source. Namely, the debate among
Bataille, Queneau, and Kojève over the proper shape of the end of history in the early 1950s.
Whether the Agambenian use of desoeuvrement coincides with Blanchotʼs or, as the textual
evidence seems to suggest, diverges in virtue of a renewed attention to the homo quenellensis
Bataille once derided, is an issue that cannot be properly assessed here. What is clear,
however, is that everything, and not only in Agambenʼs thought, hangs on the interpretation of
the desoeuvrement of the voyou desoeuvré as he once remarked.5 (a careful reading of the
relevant texts in Homo Sacer, Stanzas, and Language and Death, among others, should pay
particular attention to the strategical role that this debate play in the overall discussion and, in
particular, to the crucial role that Queneauʼs paradoxical sages, his voyous desoeuvrés, play in
Agambenʼs assessment of that debate. For the relevant primary texts, see the references
mentioned below in notes 8 and 10.) (Frenchis)

Kojèveʼs suggestions are at the center of his epistulary debate with Bataille that Agamben

discusses in Language and Death. See also Agambenʼs extensive discussion of Lord Brummel

in Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Stanford: Stanford UP,

1993).

fi rst coined by Alexandre Kojève in the 1952 essay, “Les Romans de

la sagesse”, a review of three novels by Raymond Queneau, Pierrot mon

ami (1942), Loin de Rueil (1944) and Le Dimanche de la vie (1952). Kojève

argues that the three protagonists of the novels, whom he calls “voyous

désoeuvrés” (lazy rascals), embody, in a sense, the wisdom of man living

after the end of history. The article provoked a querelle with Georges

Bataille, which had a great impact on the following generation in France,

and the term entered the philosophical debate, taking a central place in

Jean-Luc Nancy’s and Maurice Blanchot’s refl ections. (murray)

To be "inoperative," it would seem, would be to refuse to be an operative part of the state's

machinery, and thereby echoes a popular slogan employed by radical Italian workers' rights
groups in the 1960s and 1970s: "Refuse to work!" This rallying cry was not made to advocate
laziness or the carefree joys of a dolce far niente, and its point was by no means to reject work
per se. In such movements, the idea of work retained its pride of place in the Marxist system of
values. The motto "Refuse to work!" was instead a rejection of the conditions under which
workers were being asked to work-an expression of the idea of a general strike, with its goal of
forcing the powers that be to recognize the rights of an increasingly dissatisfied body of
workers.16 (16. Michael Hardt (1996, 2) writes of this slogan that "it did not mean a refusal of
creative or productive activity but rather a refusal of work within the established capitalist
relations of production." On these workers' movements, see also Tronti 1980, 28-34.) Although
such a refusal to work is alluded to in Agamben's term, what he means by inoperativeness
extends well beyond the political present and, as he makes dear, denot denotes far more than
the practical possibilities available to a group of workers.

In the book that followed The Coming Community, Agamben gives a genealogy of the term
inoperativeness, and the first thinker it leads him to is Georges Bataille. Neither in Homo Sacer
nor in later treatments of the concept in The Time That Remains and The Open does Agamben
make any secret of the fact that his conception of inoperativeness owes much to Bataille's
desoeuvrement, in which the latter envisioned the most radical rejection of the utilitarian aims
of modern society and progressive thought. It seemed to Bataille that society and its dominant
modes of conceiving itself were increasingly focused on forming a homogenous body politic.
Desoeuvrement was the name he gave his response to this totalizing tendency and it was
through this that he sought forms of "negativity"-"negativity without employ" -that would
escape reabsorption by a dialectic of historical progress.17 (see Language and Death, 49ff
[65ff] .)Such negativity would be_ so radical and excessive that it would escape the forms of
social control, as well as, on a philosophical level, the centripetal orbit of the Hegelian
dialectic. In Bataille's own person and thought, desoeuvrement represented a commitment to
inactivity and excess, a refusal to contribute to the work (the oeuvre or oeuvres) of his society.
His search sent him into exoteric

communities such as the Surrealists, Contre-Attaque, and the College of

Sociology, as well as esoteric ones such as the infamous Acephale group. It

led him to plumb the possibilities of eroticism and ecstasy-experiences

that he saw as capable of escaping or eluding a universalizing conception

of individual and community experience. What Bataille glimpsed in

such extenuated states of mind and body, was not only a glimmer of

a possible communion, but also what he characterized as the revelatory

experience of desoeuvrement.

Agamben's own "inoperativeness" or desoeuvrement {he frequeQ.tly

employs the French term) is of a similar nature but also represents a fundamental
extension of the idea. It refers not only to a refusal to do the work

of a coercive society, but also to something quite different-an ontological

reflection on the modalities of being. In Homo Sacer Agamben writes

that "the only coherent way to understand inoperativeness is to think of

it as a generic mode of potentiality that is not exhausted (like individual

action or collective action understood as the sum of individual actions)

in a transitus de potentia ad actum" (HS, 62 [71]). Inoperativeness thus

represents something not exhausted but inexhaustible-because it does

not pass from the possible to the actual (transitus de potentia ad actum). This is an idea that
Agamben is intrigued to find in Bataille but that he

traces farther back-and to an unexpected place. Agamben claims that

Bataille's desoeuvrement as well as those of other, similar figures (such as

the voyou desoeuvre of Raymond Queneau and the "Shabbat of man" of

Alexandre Kojeve) were elements of "a posthistoric figure corresponding

to an absence of a truly human work [un opera veramente umana]" (PP,

366-67). In so doing he traces the idea back to Aristotle's considerations of

happiness and of mankind's collective vocation.

What the term inoperative stresses is the other side of potentiality:

the possibility that a thing might not come to pass. For Agamben, as for

Aristotle, potentiality conceived of as merely the potential-to-be is but half the story. An idea
of potentiality worthy of the name must also include a

potentiality that does not pass into act, that is truly potential in the sense

that it contains the possibility of not actualizing itsel£ It is for this reason

that Agamben stresses both "the potential to be" and "the potential to notbe,"

because, in his words, "only a potentiality [potenza] that is capable of

both potentiality and impotence [impotenza] is then supreme potentiality"

(CC , 36 [34] , translation modified).18 For Agamben, not only is this second

mode of potentiality not of less interest or importance than the first, but
it also is absolutely necessary for understanding potentiality's "originary

figure" (P, 182 [281]). For this reason Agamben finds that "politics is that

which corresponds to the essential inoperativeness of mankind," and it

is this idea that lies at the heart of much of his work (MWE, 140 [109] ,

translation modified; see also RG, 274ff).

Becoming
A genealogy of the concept, as appears in Agamben’s work, would lead us to examine
at least two strands: on the one hand, the debate between A. Kojève (1902-1968) and G.
Bataille (1897-1962), and its subsequent reception in M. Blanchot (1907-2003) and J. L.
Nancy (1940) and, on the other hand, to the radical Italian workers’ rights movements
of the 1960s and 1970s. Although the second line is quite interesting (decir algo
más)What I would like to do here is to focus my analysis in the first strand in general
and particularly in the debate between Kojève and Bataille because, as Frenchis remarks
here is where the primary sources of Agamben’s appropriation of the term should be
found. In this regard, the affinities that he maintains latter with Blanchot, could be
readed as a derivation of this common source rather than a close influence between
them (Frenchis).

The concept's historical condensation and apparition, which does not mean that it had
not been brewing since long before until its manifestation, took place first in the work
of Kojève, in a review of the work of R. Queneau (1903-1976) called “Les Romans de
la sagesse” (1952), and also in the subsequent criticism of this analysis by Bataille. The
problem that engulfed both Kojève and Bataille was thinking the event of the
experience of life beyond the horizon of the Hegelian dialectic or, in other words, how
to interpret the end of history and the figure that man and nature would assume in the
post-historical world, when the process of work and negation of the dialectic reached its
completion.

In order to understand the event this concept express or let us think, I’m going to start
by summarizing some points of Kojève’s thought. Kojève, one of the 20th century most
influential readers of G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), depicted Hegel’s Phenomenology of
Spirit (1807) as narrating the temporal work or task of dialectics as the transformation
of the non-human world into a human world. The motor this process, for Kojève, was
human desire. In this context, this “properly human desire” means, not to desire the
satisfaction of the appetite or the body (this would correspond to animal desire in this
account), but rather, means to desire “the Desire of the other”, that is, desire for
recognition of desire: “Desire is always a Desire of Desire” (Kojève, 1933-39: 14). Of
course, this determination of the meaning of desire comes from Kojeve’s account of the
dialectical conflict between master and slave in which two opposed desires or desiring
consciousnesses are confronted by the recognition of their superiority over the other and
the consequent submission of that consciousness that recognizes the other as superior.
Both recognize that they are immersed in a fight to the death, and this awareness is what
launches the struggle to a resolution, namely: there is a moment when in one of the
consciences the fear of death overpasses its desire to dominate. Then this consciousness
recognizes the superiority of the other and submits. Desire then appears as pure
negativity or negative negativity that does not leave the “given as it is”, but “destroys it,
if not in its being, at least in its form” (Kojève, 1933-39: 12). This process of negation,
that for Hegel and Kojève locates the beginning of History in the relation between
human beings, does not stop in the negation of other but continuous in the negation and
subjugation of the other non-human animal beings and the world (its resources). In this
sense, desire, as the engine whose task is the assimilation and subjection of the non-
human world (animal, vegetal, mineral…) into a human world, is seem as a negativity
compensation against the plenum of being: desire determines man in his being, or more
precisely, in the annulment of that being and its history.

According to Kojève, and his account of the dialectical conflict between master and
slave, it is the slave, by choosing a subordinated life of labor over death, accomplished
the task of dialectics culminating its process. The culmination of the whole process,
when there is nothing outside the dominion of the negating subject in which he or she
could find recognition implies the accomplishment of the dialectic work, and
corresponds to the end of history. This culmination, according to Kojève, has already
taken place, this is, after the First World War we are immersed in the end of history
because the historical work or task of humanity was something already completed. This
means that now, once we have accomplished the task of dialectics, the life of human
beings is the life of desire’s work.

For Kojève what disappears at the end of history was “Man”, understood as the subject
whose action negates the given (the Subject opposed to the Object (Kojeve…)) in order
to constitute its being, or in other words, the end of the history and consequently the end
of Man means the end of Action because there is nothing else to negate. This, for
Kojève, implies a state of “nothing left to do” and the returning of Men to its animal
form or praxis, the animalization of Men7. “Nothing left to do” does not mean a lack of
action but the lack of action that aims to actualize a task. Everything in this post-
historical sense would be actualized. If there is no task or end of the action, then the
separation of the subject counciousness with its object, separation that allows though,
and counciousness to appear, is reduced and the only action possible for the subject is
just pure action without meaning or sense, without thought involved in it. This means,
for this thinkers who, following a Cartesian line of thought understand the animals as
biological machines that human beings become animals in the sensense of being acting
like them. Then, the end of the history coincides with man’s becoming an animal again
and the disappearance of man in the proper sense (as the subject of negating action)
(O,6).

It is in this context in which the term inoperativity was coined. What Kojève identified
in his analysis of Raymond Queneau’s novels was examples of antiheroes living after
the closure of history (Kojeve 1952). Kojève found the figure of the voyou desoeuvré
(lazy rascal) as the satisfied and self-conscious Hegelian wise man with nothing left to
do. It is a figure who finds himself in the lack of a more or less historical or onto-
theological telos (Agamben), and therefore, she or he finds her/himself with no reason
for action because there are no historical ends to actualize. This has its political
implications as Frenchis notices:

In the political realm, they act in order to transform the ideal ends provided by the
metaphysical description of man into actuality by transforming or empirically negating
the given reality. Post-historical beings, being the rascals they truly are, just act with no
particular end in sight. Their life is pure self-contained action that does not receive its
meaning from a transcendent telos, but becomes, paradoxically, meaningful in its being
meaningless.(Frenchis)

Under this conditios I can now give a first definition of the meaning of the term
inoperativity (désoeuvrement) as appears in Kojève. In according to what we have seen
so far, inoperativity appears in his work as a state of “nothing left to do” given as pure

7
Nota a pie
animal praxis or, in other words, being without negativity/work/task/action after the end
of history in a state of animality.

This state of nothing left to do in which the negativity reaches completion and its ending
is what lauches the discussion with Bataille, who wants to maintain this negativity in
order to think what the human being will do with it once the work of man is over. For
Bataille, the concept of désoeuvrement means the idleness of the negative, and not is
lack. In other words, for him life beyond dialectics would be a sovereign and useless
form of negativity without any task. Negativity in its pure form. But he moves a little bit
the locus or the plane in which the problem of the task of the human being after history
is situated. While Kojeve situates it in a crossroad of historical, ethical and political
planes, Bataille puts the emphasis on its ontological and above all ethical part, without
forgetting the other planes. In order to locate the planes in which Bataille situates the
problem of inoperativity, I think that we should follow him when he said that “every
problem, in a certain sense, is a problem of schedule. It implies a previous question:
What do I have to do (what should I do or what do I have interest in doing or what do I
want to do) here (in this world in which I have my human and personal nature) and
now?”8

For Bataille, human beings can only answer this question –the moral question par
excellence according to him– paradoxically, and it is this irresoluble paradox that our
answer to this question embodies, in what humanity consist of. The paradox is
composed by two responses: the first one affirms the here and now as an absolute goal,
as the immediate satisfaction of desire, without reserve and without delay; the second
answer remits and subordinates the here and now to a distant and future there, making
the present action a mere means to obtain a good or end that is considered highly
desirable but that it is always beyond the present (Bataille…). It is important to
highlight here that the first answer would be identified as the proper of animals while
the second would be excluded to reasonable and mature men (of course woman here are
not part of the same story). We can notice in this contradiction the Hegelian, Marxist
and Kojèveian heritage, however, and this is the main difference with the formers,
Bataille does not promise a final reconciliation of the terms, a reconciliation that would
correspond to the end of history. But let me examine this more closely in order to

8
La experiencia interior, Taurus, Madrid, 1972, pág. 205.
identify the remains of negativity after history that was, I think, the main engine of his
dispute with Kojève and the main source where Agamben finds the components of his
concept of inoperativity. (tienes que liarlo más con tu propuesta de lectura, estó así esta
copiado tal cual)

For Bataille, in continuity with Hegel, humanity emerges as a denial of animality. This
would be the first negation proper to the human beings. This means a negation of the
animality represented as immanence, or in other words, a negation of both the life in a
state of temporary immediacy (the animal always lives in an eternal present because it is
not aware of its finitude, that it must die, therefore it does not worry about the future)
and a total indistinction with respect to all other beings9. What interrupts this continuity
and indistinction of life is the transcendence of consciousness. Then, consciousness or
transcendence appears as a distance regarding other beings, and beings regarding
consciousness. It is what locates the object as opposed and subordinated to the subject.
What the consciousness instaurates then is a separation among beings, a subordination
of the means to the ends and of the present to the future. Counciouness is to be aware of
our own death, and then of our future.

This first movement of negation in which the counciousness emerges as a subordination

of the means to the ends and of the present to the future it is closely linked to the
appearance of work, of productive activity and the instauration of the law. The work
allows the subject-object contrast, making the human being becomes an object of itself.
In other words, it is what breaks and maintains the distance with respect to its intimacy
and immanence with the world, making the human being enter into a relationship of
strangeness and exteriority with the world and with himself (with his animality). What
the work demands is the denial of the immediate satisfaction of the desire,
subordinating the present to the future, to the distant ends that keep the human being in
subsistence. According to Bataille this movement immerses the humans in a never-
ending circle in which every end is related to, or is just a mean to another end. The
human being makes himself an useful gadget, a tool that subjects all of its actions to this
productive chain. The subject then appears as an object able to be known and used.

9
It is not difficult to see here the conections with the concept of Zoe as developed by Agamben in, for
example HS.
What causes the human being to reduce himself to the condition of a useful object,
subject to the logic of work and economic calculation, is the fear of death. In this sense,
the survival of the individual as well as that of the group achieved by the success of the
work depends on the prohibition of the immediacy of desire. This prohibition is
produced and reproduced by the instauration of laws that prohibit the sudden and
disorganized irruption of animal passions. Law appears in this context basically as a
twofold prohibition: prohibition of incest and prohibition of murder. The sex taboo and
murder taboo regulates birth and death10. Then law appears as an imposition that
ensures the survival of life, that invokes the fear of death, prevents the disorder of
animal passions and imposes the rationality of work (Bataille, 18).

According to this Hegelian view, on the one hand, the work is at the origin of all
knowledge: knowledge is intended to dominate the world as a totality of objects
external to the subject and susceptible to be manipulated by him with a view to an end.
And if we live now in the post history is because of this task has already done. On the
other, the law is at the origin of any legal and moral code which aims to regulate
relations between men and subordinate them to a supreme good or end. What the human
being obtains of this evocation of the death by the law and the work is a reduced life to
its subsistence condition, limited to reproducing itself with the only intention of lasting.
(19).

Here is when the second movement of negation appears. According to Bataille,

humanity negates the first negation incessantly, or in other words, life cannot stop
affirming the return of the repressed: its immanence with the world. The point for
Bataille then is recovering for the human the value of the denied animality. This double
negation that affirms animal immediacy reveals another dimension of human experience
without which unnecessary or uneconomical (such us like the taste for luxury objects,
cults and religious sacrifices, mourning processes, luxury monuments, wars, sports,
games, parties, shows, artistic and literary creations, sexual activities not intended for
reproduction, etc.) activities would not be understood. Under this other side of the
experience, the desire is not stopped but it is immediately satisfied. This entails that the
external objects such as the body, energies, and actions cease to be useful, means for an
end, and became absolute ends. Under these circumstances, these objects are consumed

10
In this sense we have another concept which is important for Agamben: biopolitics.
by the pleasure of their consumption without any economic calculation. What is
important of these objects now is their unproductive spending, their waste, and their
loss.

The last think I would like to say about Bataille in order to latter deal with Agamben’s
reception of the concept of inoperativity has to do with Bataille’s conception of
sovereignty.

..

Multituf

Es el concepto de «multitudo». Este aparece sobre todo en el Tratado poUtico, la obra

más madura de Spinoza, pero es un concepto que alienta todo el entramado de su
filosofía. Ahora bien, es precisamente éste un concepto en el que la intensidad del
legado renacentista (el sentido de la nueva dignidad del sujeto) se conjuga en extensión:
esta nueva cualidad del sujeto se abre, pues, al sentido de la multiplicidad de los sujetos
y a la potencia constructiva que emana de su dignidad, entendida como totalidad -hasta
plantear el problema teorético y ético en el umbral de la co