why agamben is an optimist

Why Giorgio Agambenis an optimist

Sergei ProzorovUniversity of Helsinki, Finland

AbstractThe article takes Giorgio Agamben’s declaration of his optimism with regard to the possibilities ofglobal political transformation as a point of departure for the inquiry into the affirmative aspects ofAgamben’s political thought, frequently overshadowed by his more famous critical claims. Wereconstitute three principles grounding Agamben’s optimism that pertain respectively to thetotal crisis of the contemporary biopolitical apparatuses, the possibility of a radically differentform-of-life on the basis of their residue and the minimalist character of this transformation thatconsists entirely in the subtraction of existence from these apparatuses. While the first two prin-ciples are unproblematic in the wider context of Agamben’s work, the third principle introducesthe problematic of will that remains highly ambiguous in his philosophy. In the remainder of thearticle we address this ambiguity in an analysis of Agamben’s reading of Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scri-vener’ and conclude that Agamben’s optimism ultimately consists in the affirmation of absolutecontingency, beyond both will and necessity.

KeywordsGiorgio Agamben, biopolitics, contingency, exception, potentiality, sovereignty, will

Introduction

Despite the morbid themes of his writings and the perception of his work by his critics as

resigning us to despair and nihilism,1 Giorgio Agamben has repeatedly asserted his

optimism with regard to the possibilities of the ‘coming politics’. Although Agamben

is better known for his critical diagnostic of the contemporary global politics, all of his

books end on an affirmation of the possibility of a radically different form-of-life. In a

2004 interview, he has explicitly rejected any attribution of a ‘personal or psychological

pessimism’ to his work and proclaimed that his critical interlocutor was ‘more pessimis-

tic than he was’.2 In this article we shall use this declaration of optimism as a point of

Corresponding author:

Sergei Prozorov, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland 00014

Email: [email protected]

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departure for the inquiry into the affirmative aspects of Agamben’s political philosophy

which to date remain overshadowed by his staggering critical claims.

We shall reconstitute three principles of Agamben’s optimism about the possibility of

radical change in world politics. First, Agamben is optimistic because the intensification

of the contemporary global state of exception entails that we have nothing to lose from a

radical disruption of the existing political order, which has degraded into a combination

of a ‘killing machine’ of sovereignty and a meaningless ‘spectacle’ of global capitalism.

Second, insofar as the destructive nihilistic drive of the biopolitical machine and the

capitalist spectacle does all the work of emptying out positive forms-of-life, identities

and vocations, we literally do not have much to do to attain what Agamben calls a ‘happy

life’ that is wholly contained in existence as such, devoid of positive predicates. Third,

Agamben’s political thought is optimistic because this new form-of-life is no longer pos-

ited as a historical task, something to be attained in reformist or revolutionary praxis, but

merely calls for the subtraction of the subjects from the existing apparatuses, whereby

they reappropriate their own potentiality for ‘whatever being’. Thus, the passage from

the worst (nihilistic degradation of social life under the global state of exception and the

capitalist spectacle) to the best (the reappropriation of human existence from its confine-

ment in epochal projects) literally takes a single step.

We shall argue that as long as Agamben’s work is approached on its own terms, the

first two principles that inspire his optimism are unproblematic and account for the ori-

ginality of his work in the contemporary context of critical political theory. Nonetheless,

the third principle is rather more ambiguous and merits a more detailed critical consid-

eration. Demonstrating quite cogently why the current conjuncture in world politics

leaves us with nothing to lose and itself brings about the conditions for a ‘happy life’,

Agamben is reticent on the question of why this step from the worst to the best would

be taken by the subjects of contemporary societies. This problem is aggravated by Agam-

ben’s refusal to posit this step towards a happy life as a new task, a political project, in

relation to which one could talk about social mobilization, raising awareness, articulation

of particular interests into a (counter-)hegemonic constellation, etc., since all of the

above would contradict his ontological affirmation of ‘inoperosity’ (absence of work)

as an originary characteristic of the human condition. Thus, the suggestions of

Agamben’s critics that his political philosophy might benefit from a more appreciative

relation to law and political institutions or a more detailed consideration of immanent

resistance miss the point, as any such engagement would contradict Agamben’s

principled stance against politics as a project. The resolution of the problem of the ‘will

to subtraction’ must come from within the basic orientation of Agamben’s philosophy. In

the remainder of the article we shall elaborate this problem and reconstitute Agamben’s

solution to it through an analysis of his theory of potentiality that dispenses with both

will and necessity and draws resources for optimistic affirmation from nothing other than

pure contingency.

Nothingness or death

Both the supporters and the critics of Agamben’s political thought agree that his account

of the contemporary state of politics offers a staggering account of a total crisis of a

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global scope. In contrast to the tendency in today’s critical political thought to appreciate

differences, discontinuities, distinctions and diversity, Agamben presents a totalizing

image of the global state of exception, which appears bent on collapsing all differences

in the ‘zone of indistinction’, which is the privileged topos of Agamben’s writings.3

Among his more famous zones of indistinction are those between democracy and tota-

litarianism, violence and law, nature and culture, etc. In the logic of Agamben’s argu-

ment, our era of nihilism, which he dates back to the First World War, is marked by

the ultimate dissolution of these and other distinctions that grounded political orders and

the consequent vacuity both of the ideologies and the practices of western modernity that

were based on these distinctions. The contemporary condition that Agamben, following

Carl Schmitt, likens to a ‘global civil war’ is thus not a result of a malfunctioning, inef-

fectiveness, abandonment, or betrayal of any of the classical political paradigms but

rather a holistic crisis of occidental politics, which reveals the nullity of its foundational

distinctions that was there all along but was concealed by the relatively ordered character

of political life.4 In this holistic crisis there is literally nothing in our tradition that we can

rely on as a foundation for political transformation. Agamben’s political stance is there-

fore radically anti-strategic insofar as it explicitly renounces any involvement in the con-

temporary ‘apparatuses’ of sovereignty and governmentality for the purpose of, for

example, tactical alliances or reversals, playing one logic of power against the other,

internal subversion, etc.5 While the latter form of strategic intervention into the field

of power relations is most usually associated with Michel Foucault’s work, which

emphasized the plurality, diversity and reversibility of power relations that offer oppor-

tunities for immanent resistance, Agamben is inspired by a different, less widely dis-

cussed position of Foucault with respect to power, his ‘anti-strategic’ stance on

resistance, formulated in the context of the Iranian Revolution.6 Agamben explicitly

rejects any possibility of transforming power relations within the immanent logic of their

‘game’, since the game in question has long lost any recognizable meaning and is run-

ning on ‘empty’.

This totalized image of the global state of exception has been criticized as both hyper-

bolically excessive and internally contradictory. Paul Passavant has argued that

Agamben’s theory suffers from a contradictory concept of the state that also plagues

his affirmative vision of the ‘coming politics’.7 While Agamben is most famous for his

deconstruction of the logic of sovereignty that radicalizes Schmitt’s conception,8 he has

also, from his earliest work onwards, confronted the more dispersed, ‘governmentalized’

modes of power relations characteristic of late capitalism in the manner highly influ-

enced by Guy Debord’s work on the society of the spectacle.9 Against the argument that

this conjunction of sovereignty and governmentality in the analysis of late-modern

power relations constitutes a contradiction, we must recall that this duality of the con-

temporary apparatus of power is explicitly affirmed by Agamben himself, who, similarly

to Foucault’s claim for the indissociability of sovereignty, discipline and government,10

regularly insists that ‘the system is always double’.11 The inextricable link between the

two aspects of the contemporary social order consists in the nihilistic deployment of life

itself as a (post-)historical task. Both state sovereignty and the late-capitalist society of

the spectacle are biopolitical and thus permanently feed into each other. The contempo-

rary neo-liberal governmentality extends the operation of economic rationality to life

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itself, whereby life is conceived as a paradigmatic form of enterprise,12 and in this

manner expropriates the being-in-language that defines human existence and subjects

it to the laws of exchange-value or, in Agamben’s later works, ‘exhibition value’.13 Con-

versely, sovereign power expropriates the potentiality of human existence, transforming

it into the bare life that it then grounds itself in and applies itself to in the perpetual state

of exception. The state does nothing more than sustain the spectacle with its apparatuses

of security, while the spectacle does nothing more than perpetually produce the degraded

forms-of-life that sovereign power can apply itself to.

Yet, how can this claim about the mutual reinforcement of the sovereign state and the

society of the spectacle under the aegis of biopolitical nihilism ground any optimistic

disposition? It is precisely this totalized image that allows Agamben to claim that in the

contemporary situation there is nothing to lose from a total ‘halting of the machine’.14

On the one hand, Agamben refuses both the possibility of reforming or even revolutio-

nizing social life by re-engaging with sovereignty, e.g. through the political struggle for

hegemony along the lines of Laclau’s populism or the Habermasian formation of a more

inclusive political community through communicative action. Neither is there any point

in a Derridean deconstructive subversion of sovereignty in the name of the undeconstruc-

tible justice and ‘democracy to come’, which serves only to highlight the undecidability

at the heart of the law, which is essential to the latter’s existence.15 Since the state of

anomie is the constitutive outside of any nomos, it is bound to remain inscribed within

it irrespectively of the way the positive structure of order is transformed. The state of

exception and its product, the bare life of homo sacer, are not a ‘political problem’ to

be resolved within any positive system, but rather a problem of the political itself.16 Any

search for a more effective, ‘exception-proof’ positive order is entirely in vain, espe-

cially in today’s condition of nihilism, in which the vacuity of historical forms-of-life

has brought the sovereign ban to the foreground as the sole substance of politics.

On the other hand, Agamben considers it impossible to confront the logic of sover-

eignty from the terrain of the social, which is the strategy, for example, of Michael Hardt

and Antonio Negri, who posit the field of biopolitical production, defined by the post-

Fordist ‘immaterial labour’, as the site of possible resistance to the ‘sovereign bio-power’

of Empire, conceived as a purely negative, expropriating force in relation to the plenitude

and authenticity characteristic of the social ‘plane of immanence’.17 In contrast to this

approach, which unwittingly replicates the ‘state phobia’ that gave rise to the very neo-

liberalism that Hardt and Negri decry,18 Agamben is clearly aware of the degradation

of social life in the late-capitalist spectacle and insists on ‘[d]istinguishing between the

massive inscription of social knowledge into the productive processes (an inscription that

characterizes the contemporary phase of capitalism, the society of the spectacle) and intel-

lectuality as antagonistic power and form-of-life’.19 As we shall see, to the extent that the

spectacle can be a site of any transformation, it is only as a site of its own destruction.

Thus, Agamben rejects as illusory any attempt to find the locus of radical transforma-

tion either in the state and the legal system or in the immanence of social praxis, but,

rather than draw from this disillusionment the pessimistic conclusion about the impos-

sibility of an alternative politics, finds in it the possibility of a similarly total change,

which is no longer constrained by any institutional structures of the contemporary order,

but jams the entire biopolitical apparatus in both its statist and socioeconomic aspects.


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Simply put, the current dual structure of the sovereign ban, which destines us to the

possibility of violent death, and the nihilistic spectacle, which destines us to the vacuity

of biopolitical management, leaves us with an alternative ‘Nothingness or Death’, which

is really not much of a choice at all. Nonetheless, it is precisely the falsity of this alter-

native that liberates us from having to choose between different versions of nihilism and

enables us to probe the possibilities of forms-of-life outside the biopolitical apparatuses.

The ‘saving power’ of biopolitical nihilism

The second principle of Agamben’s optimism is best summed up by Holderlin’s phrase,

made famous by Heidegger: ‘where danger grows, grows saving power also’.20 Accord-

ing to Agamben, radical global transformation is actually made possible by nothing other

than the unfolding of biopolitical nihilism itself to its extreme point of vacuity. On a

number of occasions in different contexts, Agamben has asserted the possibility of a radi-

cally different form-of-life on the basis of precisely the same things that he initially set

out to criticize. Agamben paints a convincingly gloomy picture of the present state of

things only to undertake a majestic reversal at the end, finding hope and conviction in

the very despair that engulfs us.21 Our very destitution thereby turns out be the condition

for the possibility of a completely different life, whose description is in turn entirely

devoid of fantastic mirages. Instead, as Agamben repeatedly emphasizes, in the

redeemed world ‘everything will be as is now, just a little different’,22 no momentous

transformation will take place aside from a ‘small displacement’ that will nonetheless

make all the difference. While we shall deal with this ‘small displacement’ in the follow-

ing section, let us now elaborate the logic of redemption through the traversal of ‘danger’

in more detail.

It is evident that the danger at issue in Agamben’s work is nihilism in its dual form of

the sovereign ban and the capitalist spectacle. If, as we have shown in the previous sec-

tion, the reign of nihilism is general and complete, we may be optimistic about the pos-

sibility of jamming its entire apparatus since there is nothing in it that offers an

alternative to the present ‘double subjection’. Yet, where are we to draw resources for

such a global transformation? It would be easy to misread Agamben as an utterly utopian

thinker, whose intentions may be good and whose criticism of the present may be valid if

exaggerated, but whose solutions are completely implausible if not outright embarras-

sing.23 Nonetheless, we must rigorously distinguish Agamben’s approach from utopian-

ism. As Foucault has argued, utopias derive their attraction from their discursive

structure of a fabula, which makes it possible to describe in great detail a better way

of life, precisely because it is manifestly impossible.24 While utopian thought easily pro-

vides us with elaborate visions of a better future, it cannot really lead us there, since its

site is by definition a non-place. In contrast, Agamben’s works tell us quite little about

life in a community of happy life that has done away with the state form, but are remark-

ably concrete about the practices that are constitutive of this community, precisely

because these practices require nothing that would be extrinsic to the contemporary

condition of biopolitical nihilism. Thus, Agamben’s coming politics is manifestly

anti-utopian and draws all its resources from the condition of contemporary nihilism.

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Moreover, this nihilism is the only possible resource for this politics, which would

otherwise be doomed to continuing the work of negation, vainly applying it to nihilism

itself. Given the totality of contemporary biopolitical nihilism, any ‘positive’ project of

transformation would come down to the negation of negativity itself. Yet, as Agamben

demonstrates conclusively in Language and Death, nothing is more nihilistic than a

negation of nihilism.25 Any project that remains oblivious to the extent to which its

valorized positive forms have already been devalued and their content evacuated would

only succeed in plunging us deeper into nihilism. As Heidegger adds in his commentary

on Holderlin, ‘It may be that any other salvation than that, which comes from where the

danger is, is still within non-safety’.26 Moreover, as Roberto Esposito’s work on the par-

adox of immunity in biopolitics demonstrates, any attempt to combat danger through

‘negative protection’ (immunization) that seeks to mediate the immediacy of life through

extrinsic principles (sovereignty, liberty, property) necessarily introjects within the

social realm the very negativity that it claims to battle, so that biopolitics is always at

risk of collapsing into thanatopolitics.27 In contrast, Agamben’s coming politics does not

attempt to introduce anything new or ‘positive’ into the condition of nihilism but to use

this condition itself in order to reappropriate human existence from its biopolitical

confinement.28

Thus, while the aporia of the negation of negativity might lead other thinkers to res-

ignation about the possibilities of political praxis, it actually enhances Agamben’s opti-

mism. Renouncing any project of reconstructing social life on the basis of positive

principles, his work illuminates the way the unfolding of biopolitical nihilism itself pro-

duces the conditions of possibility for radical transformation. We can now see that the

state of total crisis that Agamben has diagnosed must be understood in the strict medical

sense. In pre-modern medicine, the crisis of the disease is its kairos, the moment in which

the disease truly manifests itself and allows for the doctor’s intervention that might

finally defeat it.29 For this reason, the crisis is not something to be feared and avoided

but an opportunity that must be seized. Similarly, insofar as the sovereign state of excep-

tion and the absolutization of exchange-value completely empty out any content of pos-

itive forms-of-life, the contemporary biopolitical apparatus prepares its self-destruction

by fully manifesting its own vacuity.

First, the sovereign ban no longer functions as a negative foundation of a positive

political order, manifested only in the exceptional occasions of revolt or coup d’etat, but

rather coincides with the latter completely, which entails the eclipse of the juridical state

form and its degradation into a ‘killing machine’ that destroys the very order it was

meant to protect.

[As] long as the two elements [law and anomie] remain correlated yet conceptually, tempo-

rally and subjectively distinct, their dialectic – though founded on a fiction – can neverthe-

less function in some way. But when they tend to coincide in a single person, when the state

of exception, in which they are bound and blurred together, becomes the rule, then the

juridico-political system transforms itself into a killing machine.30

Second, with respect to the society of the spectacle, Agamben argues that the invest-

ment of the human body by capitalist commodification does not merely subject it to the


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laws of exchange-value and transfer it into the ‘sacred’ (unusable) sphere but ultimately

frees it from a quasi-natural ineffability into a space of ‘perfect communicability’, thus

paving the way for the human reappropriation of one’s body as ‘truly whatever’:

To appropriate the historic transformations of human nature that capitalism wants to limit to

the spectacle, to link together image and body in a space where they can no longer be sepa-

rated, and thus to forge the whatever body . . . – this is the good that humanity must learn

how to wrest from commodities in their decline. Advertising and pornography, which escort

the commodity to the grave like hired mourners, are the unknowing midwives of this new

body of humanity.31

In a later work, Agamben generalizes this logic and transforms it into a basic ethical

imperative of his work: ‘[There] is often nothing reprehensible about the individual

behavior in itself, and it can, indeed, express a liberatory intent. What is disgraceful –

both politically and morally – are the apparatuses which have diverted it from their

possible use. We must always wrest from the apparatuses – from all apparatuses – the

possibility of use that they have captured.’32 As we shall discuss in the following section,

this is to be achieved by a subtraction of ourselves from these apparatuses, which leaves

them in a jammed, inoperative state. What is crucial at this point is that the apparatuses

of nihilism themselves prepare their demise by emptying out all positive content of the

forms-of-life they govern and increasingly running on ‘empty’, capable only of (inflict-

ing) Death or (doing) Nothing.

On the other hand, this degradation of the apparatuses illuminates the ‘inoperosity’

(worklessness) of the human condition, whose originary status Agamben has affirmed

from his earliest works onwards.33 By rendering void all historical forms-of-life, nihi-

lism brings to light the absence of work that characterizes human existence, which, as

irreducibly potential, logically presupposes the lack of any destiny, vocation, or task that

it must be subjected to: ‘Politics is that which corresponds to the essential inoperability

of humankind, to the radical being-without-work of human communities. There is pol-

itics because human beings are argos-beings that cannot be defined by any proper oper-

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

exhaust.’34

Having been concealed for centuries by religion or ideology, this originary inoperos-

ity is fully unveiled in the contemporary crisis, in which it is manifest in the inoperative

character of the biopolitical apparatuses themselves, which succeed only in capturing the

sheer existence of their subjects without being capable of transforming it into a positive

form-of-life:

[T]oday, it is clear for anyone who is not in absolutely bad faith that there are no longer

historical tasks that can be taken on by, or even simply assigned to, men. It was evident start-

ing with the end of the First World War that the European nation-states were no longer capa-

ble of taking on historical tasks and that peoples themselves were bound to disappear.35

Agamben’s metaphor for this condition is bankruptcy: ‘One of the few things that can be

declared with certainty is that all the peoples of Europe (and, perhaps, all the peoples of

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the Earth) have gone bankrupt’.36 Thus, the destructive nihilistic drive of the biopolitical

machine and the capitalist spectacle has itself done all the work of emptying out positive

forms-of-life, identities and vocations, leaving humanity in the state of destitution that

Agamben famously terms ‘bare life’. Yet, this bare life, whose essence is entirely con-

tained in its existence, is precisely what conditions the emergence of the subject of the

coming politics: ‘this biopolitical body that is bare life must itself be transformed into

the site for the constitution and installation of a form-of-life that is wholly exhausted

in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoe.’37

The ‘happy’ form-of-life, a ‘life that cannot be segregated from its form’, is nothing

but bare life that has reappropriated itself as its own form and for this reason is no longer

separated between the (degraded) bios of the apparatuses and the (endangered) zoe that

functions as their foundation.38 Thus, what the nihilistic self-destruction of the appara-

tuses of biopolitics leaves as its residue turns out to be the entire content of a new

form-of-life. Bare life, which is, as we recall, ‘nothing reprehensible’ aside from its con-

finement within the apparatuses, is reappropriated as a ‘whatever singularity’, a being

that is only its manner of being, its own ‘thus’.39 It is the dwelling of humanity in this

irreducibly potential ‘whatever being’ that makes possible the emergence of a generic

non-exclusive community without presuppositions, in which Agamben finds the possi-

bility of a happy life.

[If] instead of continuing to search for a proper identity in the already improper and sense-

less form of individuality, humans were to succeed in belonging to this impropriety as such,

in making of the proper being-thus not an identity and individual property but a singularity

without identity, a common and absolutely exposed singularity, then they would for the first

time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects.40

Thus, rather than seek to reform the apparatuses, we should simply leave them to their

self-destruction and only try to reclaim the bare life that they feed on. This is to be

achieved by the practice of subtraction that we address in the following section.

Whatever being and the problem of will

We have demonstrated that Agamben’s coming politics is enabled by the complete

reduction of late-modern political life to biopolitical nihilism that itself paves the way

for a happy life of whatever being by rendering void all positive forms-of-life. The final

and the most problematic principle of Agamben’s optimism consists in the claim that

happy life is not something to be attained in a strategic project of resistance to or the

takeover of political power but is entirely contained in one’s subtraction from the appa-

ratuses of nihilism and the consequent appropriation of inoperative ‘whatever being’ that

these apparatuses confine and feed on.41 The third principle of Agamben’s optimism is

thus that the happy life of inoperative potentiality is itself attainable in the absence of

work. There is just one step from the worst to the best. This claim completes the logic

of radical transformation that draws its resources solely from the condition it denounces,

the condition in which we have nothing to lose. Yet, why would this step away from the


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apparatuses of biopolitical nihilism into the potentiality of whatever being be taken by

the subjects of contemporary societies?

If we assess Agamben’s political thought on its own terms, without introducing

extrinsic normative criteria that would turn the discussion into an interminable polemic,

it is clear why there is not much to lose in risking a complete destruction of the biopo-

litical machine that has been running on ‘empty’ and producing nothing but bare life.

Agamben also provides an admirable demonstration of the possibility of a radically dif-

ferent form-of-life on the basis of the very same destitution that surrounds us. Yet, hav-

ing outlined this form-of-life and the pathway that leads to it, Agamben has little to say

about why the subjects of the biopolitical societies would actually opt for it and not pre-

fer to continue dwelling in the inauthentic realm of contemporary sociality. Surely, it is

not a matter of historical (or post-historical) necessity, since what is at stake is precisely a

reappropriation of one’s freedom understood in terms of potentiality.42 Yet, neither is it

possible to conceive of the move towards happy life as a matter of free will, insofar as

Agamben refuses to frame this transformation in terms of a project, a decision, or even,

as we shall see below, an act as such. With respect to the first two principles of optimism,

Agamben has managed to dispense with both will and necessity, insofar as the totality of

the apparatuses of biopolitical nihilism and the possibility for appropriating the products

of their self-destruction are neither cast in terms of historical necessity nor depend on

wilful, project-oriented action as a condition for their possibility. However, once we

go beyond the critical diagnostics of the contemporary political terrain to the inquiry into

the form-of-life to be attained at a subtractive distance from this terrain, it becomes dif-

ficult to sustain one’s optimism about the possibility of happy life, as long as it is neither

cast as historically necessary nor asserted as a voluntarist project.

This problem is somewhat concealed by the focus of Agamben’s commentators on his

most infamous claim about the concentration camp as the paradigm of the nomos of

modernity.43 If this identification is accepted, then the problem of will does not arise,

as it would be obscene to pose the question of why anyone would want to leave the con-

centration camp. Yet, there are two reasons why Agamben’s figure of the camp is inap-

propriate as a paradigm of the contemporary state of politics. First, the camp is a highly

specific case of what Agamben has described more generally as the condition of the

sovereign ban,44 characterized by the inclusive exclusion of bare life into the nomos. The

subject of the ban is indeed exposed to sovereign violence but he is not necessarily con-

fined within its space – indeed, as other examples that Agamben deals with in Homo

Sacer demonstrate, this condition may also take the form of ostracism, exile, or exodus,

in which the threat of sovereign violence remains a permanent possibility.45 What the

camp effects is the transformation of this possibility into a necessity, whereby what can

not be is converted into what cannot not be. As a site of the destruction of all potentiality

in the name of necessity of death, the camp is indeed an extreme form of the functioning

of the machine of sovereign biopolitics, but as an extreme example it does not really

cover the possibilities available to the subject of the ban and hence cannot serve as a

paradigm in any meaningful sense.46 As a space of confinement and extermination the

camp lacks the anarchic potentiality of the state of exception that offers the possibility

of the reappropriation of whatever being in a post-biopolitical form-of-life. Thus, we

need to abandon the camp as a paradigm of the state of exception and focus on its less

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extreme manifestations, where it is by no means guaranteed that the subjects of the

contemporary biopolitical societies would want to abandon the existing apparatuses of

law, order and security for a ‘real state of exception’, which is neither law-preserving

nor law-making, but consists solely in the reappropriation of the anomie that the legal

apparatus has expropriated.47

The second reason why the idea of the camp as the nomos of modernity is unhelpful is

that it obscures the second aspect of the degradation of modern politics addressed by

Agamben, i.e. the late-capitalist society of the spectacle. As we have argued above,

Agamben is furthest away from a ‘state phobia’ that finds in the state the root of all trou-

bles and views its destruction as leading to a harmonious ‘free society’. On the contrary,

for Agamben contemporary social life is characterized by the ‘museification’ of the

world that consecrates the objects of experience, withdrawing them from all possible use,

and the apparatuses of ‘advertising and pornography’ that expropriate the linguistic

essence of human existence, suspending and neutralizing our communicative potential-

ity.48 Yet, while it is safe to assume that one would want to exit the camp, is such an

assumption plausible for this condition of degraded sociality, which no one actually

forced us to enter in the first place and which is to a great extent our own product? In

his programmatic essay ‘In Praise of Profanation’ Agamben is very clear on how one

might go about bringing these apparatuses to a halt through experimental profanation

that irreverently returns things and experiences to the sphere of free use.49 However,

there remains a question of why we would abandon the museum for a free use of artistic

praxis or disrupt the apparatus of pornography through artistic provocation of the kind

Agamben discusses in the case of Chloe des Lysses, a performer whose display of abso-

lute ataraxia and indifference both to her partner in the sexual act and to her audience is

held to pave the way for a ‘new use of sexuality’.50

Since what is at stake in Agamben’s notion of inoperative ‘whatever being’ is the non-

canonical or unconventional use of the practices that the biopolitical apparatuses have

captured and diverted for their positive projects or, as is the case today, the absence

thereof, he must account precisely for this turn towards experimentation and free use.

Even if the vacuity of contemporary apparatuses, from nationalism to consumerism, is

increasingly evident to everyone, is it not too optimistic to expect the late-modern soci-

eties to opt for the unconventional and experimental modes of use as opposed to sticking

to the tried and true, nullified as it is? To recall Heidegger’s discussion of the ‘They’ (das

Man), this inauthentic mode of being-in attains its hold over Dasein not so much by

oppression but rather by ‘accommodating’ it, making its everydayness more comfortable

precisely insofar as it conforms to the average understandings that may otherwise appear

to be vacuous or absurd. If, as Heidegger suggests, ‘fallenness’ is ‘tempting’ and ‘tran-

quilizing’, then how is this temptation to be overcome?51

Contrary to the critics’ complaints, the problem with Agamben’s affirmation of pro-

fanation and subtraction is then not its excessive radicalism, but its relative modesty in

the wider social context. Agamben appears to be positing a self-consciously minoritar-

ian, if not ‘bohemian’, form-of-life that can barely be expected to be replicated across the

entire social order, simply because the attraction of this profane non-canonical use of

objects or experiences for the wider society would be dubious. Just as subversive experi-

ments with the representation of sexual practices hardly overtake mainstream


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pornography in popularity, it is difficult to expect the subtractive practices Agamben

proposes to win over the society at large and thus wrest away human existence from the

nihilistic spectacle of the unprofanable. This is not a matter of criticizing these practices

as ineffective or dangerous,52 but simply of posing the question of why anyone who is

not already outside the apparatuses in question (critical intellectuals, avant-garde artists)

would want to exit them in order to engage in these practices, especially insofar as

Agamben refuses to frame this move in terms of a revolutionary project of liberation,

which would involve articulating some form of normative justification for these prac-

tices. Of course, the problem of how a theoretical design of transformation is to be trans-

lated into political practice is not unique to Agamben, yet in his work it becomes more

acute due to his refusal of any construction of politics in terms of a project and the affir-

mation of inoperosity as both a means and an end of the coming politics.53

In short, there is a problem of accounting for the move from the worst towards the

best, which is by no means evident as long as we abandon the hyperbole of the camp and

focus on the wider range of statist and economic apparatuses deployed in the governmen-

tality of late-modern societies. At first glance, there are two possibilities of resolving this

problem. First, insofar as the happy life of whatever being consists in nothing but exis-

tence itself, affirmed in its pure inoperative potentiality, it is possible to argue that we are

all already dwelling in it and merely misrecognize this dwelling place (ethos) for a par-

ticular form-of-life. To return to the analogy with Heidegger’s description of the falling

of Dasein, our inauthentic dwelling in the world of the ‘They’ is possible solely on the

basis of an authentic existence in face of which we flee.54 In Agamben’s work, this argu-

ment is made with reference to the ontology of language, which forms the background of

his political writings. Just as the event of language is present in every signifying state-

ment, so the ‘coming community’ of ‘whatever being’ is already there and it is simply

a matter of recognizing it through actively experiencing the utmost vacuity of all partic-

ular, historical forms-of-life.55 As we have seen, Agamben’s ‘happy life’ is not a matter

of a project, of doing or building something new. On the contrary, given the originary

status of whatever being as a concealed foundation of any positive bios, happiness is

attained precisely by not doing, i.e. by subtraction and inoperosity.56 Thus, this transfor-

mation requires nothing but refraining from living and acting in the apparatuses of bio-

political nihilism, withdrawing from them and reappropriating one’s existence for

whatever use. Yet, while we agree that there is really nothing to be added to the existent

in order to attain a happy form-of-life this does not remove the possibility that the sub-

jects in question might well choose to persist in the misrecognition of their own ethos.

The second option is to dismiss this question altogether in the manner best exempli-

fied by Michel Foucault’s approach to the function of his work. Rather than posit nor-

mative criteria that would tell people why they must act in this or that manner,

Foucault claimed to be content with simply demonstrating how one could resist, if one

wanted, without imposing this mode of praxis as normatively privileged:57

It is absolutely true that when I write a book I refuse to take a prophetic stance; that is, the

one of saying to people: here is what you must do, and also: this is good and this is not. I say

to them, roughly speaking, it seems to me that things have gone this way; but I describe

those things in such a way that the possible paths of attack are delineated. Yet, even with

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this approach I do not force or compel anyone to attack. So then, it becomes a completely

personal question, if I choose, if I want, to take certain courses of action with reference to

prisons, psychiatric asylums, this or that issue.58

This is certainly a valid option, though it is arguably less appropriate for Agamben’s

works, which are marked by a strong messianic pathos completely alien to Foucault and

which promise a global transformation that Foucault refused even to discuss. Moreover,

it is important that Foucault famously referred to his practical disposition in terms of

‘pessimistic activism’ rather than optimism,59 an activism alongside others who are

already resisting the apparatuses of power from a minoritarian position. While Agamben

could also claim that his idea of an inoperative form-of-life is a ‘toolkit’, intended for

‘users’ rather than an ‘audience’,60 this limitation of the vision of transformation to those

already interested or involved in it would certainly result in a certain de-sublimation of

the pathos that made his philosophy so attractive and subsume his thought under the

wider rubric of minoritarian dissent alongside numerous poststructuralist and post-

Marxist authors. If the originality of Agamben’s approach to ‘coming politics’ is to be

retained, we must look for another solution to the problem of accounting for the subtrac-

tive step from the biopolitical apparatuses towards a happy life of whatever being. In the

next section we shall offer an interpretation of the problematic status of will in

Agamben’s philosophy through a discussion of his reading of Melville’s ‘Bartleby the

Scrivener’ and address the possibility of an optimistic affirmation that finds no ground

in either necessity or will.

Why would Bartleby stop writing?

The difficulty with Agamben’s third principle of optimism arises from a wider problem

of the status of will in his philosophy. From his very first book Man without Content, in

which the occlusion of the Greek distinction between poiesis and praxis by the under-

standing of (artistic and other) production in terms of the exercise of will is held respon-

sible for the degradation of modern aesthetics, Agamben has attempted to separate his

problematic of potentiality from the affirmation of free will.61 The best example of this

separation is Agamben’s treatment of Melville’s Bartleby as an exemplar of a purely

whatever being, whose famous ‘preference not to’ is entirely devoid of any positive

content and completely unintelligible in terms of wilful praxis.62 In his pure passivity,

Bartleby serves as an epitome of Agamben’s idiosyncratic concept of potentiality. For

Agamben, the thought of potentiality must be purged of all connotations of will and

necessity that have obscured its meaning throughout the history of philosophy: ‘[P]oten-

tiality is not will, and impotentiality is not necessity. To believe that will has power over

potentiality, that the passage to actuality is the result of a decision that puts an end to the

ambiguity of potentiality (which is always potentiality to do and not to do) – this is the

perpetual illusion of morality.’63 This illusion is traced by Agamben to medieval theol-

ogy, which distinguished between potentia absoluta, God’s potentiality to do anything

whatsoever, and potentia ordinata, by which God can only do what is in accordance with

his will.


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Will is the principle that makes it possible to order the undifferentiated chaos of potentiality.

. . . A potentiality without will is altogether unrealizable and cannot pass into actuality.

Bartleby calls into question precisely this supremacy of the will over potentiality. If God

(at least de potentia ordinata) is truly capable only of what he wants, Bartleby is capable

only without wanting, he is capable only de potentia absoluta.64

In Language and Death, Agamben similarly affirms the stakes of his philosophical

project in terms of wrestling potentia absoluta away from any constraint by will:

If there were not always already a will in God, He would have remained cloistered in his

abyss without expressing any word (the Son). Without will or love, God would have con-

signed himself to Tartarus, sinking eternally into his own abyss. But, we ask, what would

have happened if there were no trace of self in God, no will? If we let God fall headlong

into his abyss?65

It is evident that according to Agamben’s first principle of optimism, God is presently

falling into Tartarus and, according to his second principle, it is precisely this ‘falling’

that makes possible the happy life of pure, inoperative potentiality: ‘only when we suc-

ceed in sinking into this Tartarus and experiencing our own impotentiality do we become

capable of creating, truly becoming poets’.66 This dissociation of ‘absolute potentiality’

from will does not thereby resign it to non-existence, whereby the possible becomes

impossible. What is at stake is rather precisely the passage of potentiality into actuality

as potentiality, the real existence of the possible as such:

[Potentiality] does not remain unactualized of a lack of will. One could say of Bartleby that

he succeeds in being able (and not being able) absolutely without wanting it. Hence the irre-

ducibility of his ‘I would prefer not to’. It is not that he does not want to copy or that he does

not want to leave the office; he simply would prefer not to. The formula that he so obsti-

nately repeats destroys all possibility of constructing a relation between being able and will-

ing, between potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata. This is the formula of potentiality.67

In order to emphasize Bartleby’s ‘being capable without wanting’, Agamben’s read-

ing systematically suppresses the modal verb ‘would’ in Bartleby’s formula, which

seems to indicate at least a remnant of will in Bartleby’s suspension of work: ‘‘‘I prefer

not’’, which appears three times, is the only variation of Bartleby’s usual phrase; and if

Bartleby then renounces the conditional, this is only because doing so allows him to

eliminate all traces of the verb ‘‘will’’, even in its modal use.’68 While this ‘renunciation

of the conditional’ arguably does little to remove the connotations of will in the verb

‘prefer’, it is evident why Agamben seizes on this apparently unimportant modification

of Bartleby’s formula. Indeed, this ‘modification’ helps Agamben to present Bartleby as

a figure that affirms potentiality beyond all will to be otherwise and his persistent being-

thus as purely contingent beyond all necessity. Bartleby’s refusal is thus a refusal of

nothing in particular or perhaps a refusal of all things in particular. His absolute ‘prefer-

ence not to’ rather entails the demand for the ‘decreation’ of reality as such, whereby

‘what could not have been but was becomes indistinguishable from what could have

been but was not’.69

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It is noteworthy that there is no indication in Melville’s text of any actual decision by

Bartleby to cease performing his duties, which suggests that Bartleby never even preferred

to prefer not to. Bartleby does not want to stick to any determinate mode of being against the

will of others to transform it nor does he resist his confinement in order to enter a different

mode of being. Instead, he exists as nothing but his own potentiality (not) to be, as something

that can both be and not be, as a purely contingent being that perpetually (de)creates itself. In

Agamben’s adaptation of the key formula of the philosophy of the Skeptics, Bartleby exists

‘no more than’ he does not, i.e. he inhabits a zone of indistinction between affirmation and

negation, potentiality and actuality, and ultimately ‘between Being and Nothing’.70 This is

what Agamben terms his ‘experiment de contingentia absoluta’.71

It is now clear that raising the question of why the subjects of contemporary societies

would want to subtract themselves from the biopolitical apparatuses would contradict the

basic tenor of Agamben’s philosophy. We are furthest away from Foucault, whose gen-

ealogical ‘toolkits’ emphasized precisely the possibility of transforming the existing

apparatuses by wilful praxis. What matters for Agamben is solely the subjects’ potenti-

ality for whatever being, which is exactly what remains once the nihilism of today’s pol-

itics is fully illuminated. If one’s subtraction from the contemporary apparatuses were

something willed, it would pose a limit to potentiality and thus be conceivable as yet

another historical project, which would contradict the understanding of the coming pol-

itics in terms of inoperosity.

And yet, this stubborn refusal of the problematic of the will is extremely difficult to

maintain, since we cannot get rid of the question of why Bartleby stopped writing. In his

reading Agamben rejects as wholly inadequate the interpretation of the narrator of the

novella, which psychologized Bartleby’s refusal by interpreting it as a result of depression

or some other pathology that Bartleby developed during his work at the Dead Letter

Office – the place in which the contingency of our existence is demonstrated most starkly:

‘on errands towards life, these letters speed to death’.72 Yet, Agamben’s own interpreta-

tion, which takes up this phrase as a ‘barely disguised citation’ from Paul’s Letter to the

Romans (7: 10) and proceeds to interpret Bartleby as a figure of messianic suspension,

clearly abandons the previously postulated ‘capability without wanting’ and recasts

Bartleby as a militant activist, who ‘comes to abolish the Old Law’, ‘comes to save what

was not’, ‘fulfils the Torah by destroying it from top to bottom’.73 Of course, this messia-

nic praxis remains entirely heterogeneous to any historical project that actualizes some

potentialities to the detriment of others. In contrast, Bartleby’s decreation returns the

existent to its potentiality of not being and endows what never was with the potential to

exist, i.e. it institutes the reign of absolute contingency. Yet, before decreating anything,

Bartleby must first subtract himself from the apparatuses that order his existence and thus

let himself be his own potentiality. This act of ‘letting oneself be’ finds its paradigm in the

sovereign decision, which is central to Agamben’s political ontology.

Potentiality (in its double appearance as potentiality to and as potentiality not to) is that

through which Being founds itself sovereignly, which is to say, without anything preceding

or determining it . . . other than its own ability not to be. And an act is sovereign when it

realizes itself by simply taking away its own potentiality not to be, letting itself be, giving

itself to itself.74


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Without this act of letting oneself be, Agamben’s affirmation of ‘being-thus’ would

degenerate into a resigned acceptance of the tyranny of actuality, whereby nothing at all

would be able to happen. Indeed, this is exactly what takes place in the extreme forms of

the state of exception, where potentiality is entirely expropriated by the sovereign and its

subjects are abandoned to dwelling in absolute necessity, exemplified by the camps.

Contrary to frequent misunderstandings, Agamben’s critique of sovereign power does

not target sovereignty as such, but rather its expropriation and sacralization in the sep-

arate sphere of the state.75 The ‘real’ state of exception consists precisely in the profane

reappropriation of this power of letting oneself be by the entire society. It is therefore not

surprising that despite his insistence on Bartleby’s ‘being capable only without wanting’,

Agamben finally reintroduces the theme of decision, when he addresses the question of

how a life of potentiality becomes possible. In order for potentiality not to degenerate

into an ‘eternal recurrence’ that effaces contingency by elevating the actual to the status

of the willed, Bartleby ‘decided to stop copying’, he ‘must stop copying, must give up his

work’.76 It is precisely in this sovereign decision that the novella leaves unaccounted for

that Bartleby sets aside his potentiality not to stop copying but does not thereby translate

potentiality into actuality, but rather materializes it as a possibility that exists in its own

right.77 This materialization neither collapses potentiality into actuality nor leaves it in

the privative mode of something merely inactual. Whatever being that is truly sovereign

in relation to itself is entirely contained in the actual existence of potentiality that has set

aside its potentiality not to be and given itself to itself and can now not not-be. Agam-

ben’s coming community of happy life is characterized by precisely this mode of being

‘actually potential’, i.e. absolutely contingent.

Conclusion

As we have seen, the return to the problematic of decision is unavoidable if we want to

pose the question of how Agamben’s ‘happy life’ of inoperative potentiality is to be con-

stituted. One must decide to subtract oneself from the biopolitical apparatuses, to ‘play

with the law’,78 to profane the sacred,79 etc. Moreover, the modal verb ‘must’ is here

used not only in the sense of logical necessity (Bartleby must stop copying in order to

enter the state of whatever being) but also of obligation, since Agamben is quite unequi-

vocal about his attitude to the suppression of potentiality in actuality and one’s persis-

tence in the inauthentic ethos:

The only ethical experience (which, as such, cannot be a task or a subjective decision) is the

experience of being (one’s own) potentiality, of being (one’s own) possibility – exposing,

that is, in every form one’s own amorphousness and in every act one’s own inactuality. The

only evil consists instead in the decision to remain in a deficit of existence, to appropriate

the power to not-be as a substance and a foundation beyond existence.80

The stakes of Agamben’s work are such that the Foucauldian gesture of somewhat

contrived indifference to whether his ‘toolkits’ are applied would be entirely inappropri-

ate. What Agamben is concerned with is nothing less than the possibility of salvation,

which, to use the characteristic Heideggerian inversion, consists entirely in the salvation

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of possibility itself, the restoration of the potentiality of human existence. This

possibility is explicitly presented as an ethical injunction that on a number of occasions

Agamben presents in the imperative mood: ‘Be only your own face. Go to the threshold.

Do not remain the subjects of your properties and faculties, do not stay beneath them:

rather, go with them, in them, beyond them.’81 Since what is at issue here is maintaining

fidelity to one’s own potentiality for being, affirming this possibility as such as opposed

to sticking to one of its contingent actualizations, Agamben’s injunction may be grasped

as an inversion of Kant’s categorical imperative: ‘You must because you can!’Yet, there remains a problem of how this imperative could ever be responded to in a

decision in favour of potentiality. Agamben’s resumption of the discourse of decision in

his discussion of Bartleby as a messianic figure is neither a careless slip nor an abandon-

ment of an earlier stance but rather indicates the full complexity of the question of the

existence of contingency. One must decide to enter the state of whatever being, but

this decision cannot simply be a matter of will that actualizes it as a potentiality among

others – this would clearly be a case of a ‘decision to remain in a deficit of existence’.

This must rather be something like a meta-decision in favour of potentiality as such, in

favour of actualizing the potentiality for potentiality, setting aside the potentiality for

potentiality not to be. For this very reason, this decision cannot be accounted for in terms

of will, which would only serve to restrict our potentia absoluta by potentia ordinata. To

the extent it can be accounted for at all, it is as a matter of conversion or metanoia, a

radical perspectival shift that unfolds in an almost magical manner.

In the context of Agamben’s work magic would not be an accidental metaphor, since

his theorization of happy life is inextricably linked to it. ‘Whatever we can achieve

through merit and effort cannot make us truly happy. Only magic can do that.’82 For

Agamben, happiness can never be deserved or attained through work or any project-

oriented action, hence the emphasis on inoperosity as both the pathway to and the entire

content of happy life: ‘Naturally it is not a matter here of fulfilling something; nothing is

more boring than a man who has fulfilled his own dreams: this is the insipid social-

democratic zealousness of pornography.’83 Severing the link between happiness and

work, Agamben posits happiness as a condition that can never be destined for us or

brought about as a reward for our willed activity: ‘happiness can be ours only through

magic. At that point, when we have wrenched it away from fate, happiness coincides

entirely with our knowing ourselves to be capable of magic.’84 While historical appara-

tuses promise us chimerical happiness in the future in return for our subjection in the

present, genuine happiness is possible only in the general absence of work, identity and

destiny that illuminates the irreducibly potential character of our existence. Potentiality

and inoperosity are thus entirely indissociable, insofar as our being able (not) to do

something depends on our not having to do anything else.

If the only way to achieve happiness is not to aspire to reach it, since it is precisely the

renunciation of work that restores to one’s existence the potentiality in which happiness

consists, then the metanoia towards absolutely contingent ‘whatever being’ is only con-

ceivable as itself a matter of pure contingency, something that can not be.85 Happy life is

not attained as a matter of the immanent logic of history or as a result of a voluntarist

project, hence Agamben’s optimism cannot be expressed in terms of either necessity

or will but remains squarely within the dimension of contingency. At first glance, any


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contingency worthy of the name appears to be entirely indifferent to either optimism or

pessimism since it warrants nothing but the possibility of things being otherwise without

any specification of the likelihood of this possibility.86 The nihilistic degradation of the

global biopolitical apparatuses does indeed open the possibility of the reappropriation of

whatever being but this very possibility is accessible only in its own capacity not-to-be.

It is therefore just as possible that we remain within the deficit of existence that we mis-

recognize for our authentic ethos, remain stuck in the worst, just one step away from the

best. It is possible that nothing will happen – indeed, insofar as our time is the age of

nihilism nothing is precisely what is happening to us, daily. Agamben clearly recognizes

these possibilities but adds to them a crucial caveat: ‘This – but not only this – is possi-

ble.’87 It is precisely the supplement ‘but not only this’ that permits Agamben to retain

his optimism in the face of absolute contingency. In a reading of a scene in Orson

Welles’ unfinished Don Quixote in his fragment ‘The Six Most Beautiful Minutes in the

History of Cinema’, which could easily compete for the title of the most beautiful page in

the history of philosophy, Agamben advances an ethics of contingency that goes beyond

the voluntarist quests for fulfilment and the pessimistic dwelling within the impossible:

What shall we do with our imaginations? Love them and believe in them to the point of hav-

ing to destroy and falsify them (this is perhaps the meaning of Orson Welles’ films). But

when, in the end, they reveal themselves to be empty and unfulfilled, when they show the

nullity of which they were made, only then can we pay the price for their truth and under-

stand that Dulcinea – whom we have saved – cannot love us.88

The contingency of the outcome is certainly not the reason to evade the wager on

‘happy life’ or renounce all dreams of it, which would merely turn the contingent into

the necessarily impossible. What we must do with our dreams is simply take the risk

of using them without any fear of using them up, of ‘destroying’ and ‘falsifying’ them,

of going to the bottom of them and finding nothing but the void. And even if they all

amount to nothing, if the potential subjects of whatever being shrug and say ‘whatever’

in response to Agamben’s vision of happy life, this only means that ‘not only this is pos-

sible’, that the possibility of a happy life remains a possibility, a possibility to succeed or,

in Beckett’s terms, to fail better. This is the ultimate limit of Agamben’s optimism,

beyond which his thought cannot venture, having dispensed with both will and necessity

and finding its ground in absolute contingency alone. This curious optimism, which is

only strengthened with each successive failure, resonates with Wallace Stevens’ famous

words in Notes on the Supreme Fiction, ‘It is possible, possible, possible, it must be pos-

sible. It must be that in time the real will from its crude compoundings come.’

Notes

1. See Ernesto Laclau ‘Bare Life or Social Indeterminacy’, in Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty

and Life, ed. Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,

2007), pp. 11–22; Antonio Negri, ‘Giorgio Agamben: The Discreet Taste of the Dialectic’, in

Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, pp. 109–25.

2. Giorgio Agamben, ‘I am Sure that You are More Pessimistic than I am: an Interview with

Giorgio Agamben’, Rethinking Marxism 16(2) (2004): 115–24 (124).

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3. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press, 1998), pp. 19–29.

4. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 3.

5. See Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (New York: Zone Books, 2007), pp. 91–2; Giorgio

Agamben, ‘What is an Apparatus?’ and Other Essays (Stanford, CA: Stanford University

Press, 2009) for a detailed discussion of the notion of the apparatus (dispositif). This notion

was originally developed by Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction

(Harmondsworth, Mx: Penguin, 1990), pp. 23, 75–81; Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge:

Selected Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books,

1980), pp. 194–228. See also Gilles Deleuze, ‘What is a Dispositif?’, in Michel Foucault: Phi-

losopher, ed. T. J. Armstrong (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992). In Agamben’s gen-

eralization of the Foucauldian concept, the apparatus refers to any structure that captures

human existence for the purpose of its positive ordering.

6. See James Bernauer, Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight: Towards an Ethics for Thought

(Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1990), p. 175.

7. See Paul Passavant, ‘The Contradictory State of Giorgio Agamben’, Political Theory 35(2)

(2007): 147–74.

8. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, 1985).

9. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994).

10. See Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality,

ed. Graham Burchell et al. (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p. 102.

11. Giorgio Agamben, ‘Life, a Work of Art Without an Author: The State of Exception, the

Administration of Disorder and Private Life’, German Law Journal 5 (2004): 609–14 (612).

12. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1977–1978

(Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 219–33.

13. Agamben, Profanations, p. 90. See also Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of

Negativity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Giorgio Agamben, The Com-

ing Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

14. Agamben, State of Exception, p. 87.

15. Agamben, Language and Death, pp. 39–40; Agamben, State of Exception, pp. 63–4. For a

detailed discussion of Agamben’s criticism of Derridean deconstruction see Adam Thursch-

well, ‘Cutting the Branches for Akiba: Agamben’s Critique of Derrida’, in Politics, Metaphy-

sics and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, ed. Andrew Norris (Durham, NC:

Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 173–97; Catherine Mills, ‘Agamben’s Messianic Politics:

Biopolitics, Abandonment and Happy Life’, Contretemps 5 (2004): 42–62.

16. William Rasch, ‘From Sovereign Ban to Banning Sovereignty’, in Giorgio Agamben:

Sovereignty and Life, p. 102.

17. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

18. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, pp. 75–8, 185–9.

19. Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minne-

sota Press, 2000), p. 11. See also Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose (New York: SUNY Press,

1995), pp. 87–92.

20. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 2001), p. 118.

21. Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 82.


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22. ibid., p. 57.

23. Cf. Laclau ‘Bare Life’, pp. 20–2; Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben (Stocksfield,

Northumb.: Acumen, 2008), pp. 127–9.

24. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London:

Routledge, 1970), p. xvii.

25. See Agamben, Language and Death, pp. 84–98.

26. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 118.

27. Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 2008), pp. 45–77.

28. The idea of free use, as opposed to possession or property, is central to Agamben’s ethics and

has been developed in most detail in his study of St Paul’s messianism. See Giorgio Agamben,

The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press, 2005), pp. 26–9, 134–7. See also Agamben, Profanations, pp. 73–92, where

use functions as an epitome of profane praxis.

29. Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the College de France 1973–1974

(Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave, 2006), pp. 241–8.



32. Agamben, Profanations, p. 92.

33. See Agamben, Idea of Prose, p. 87; Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the

Destruction of Experience (London: Verso, 2007), pp. 113–15.

34. Agamben, Means without End, pp. 141–2.

35. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,

2004), p. 76.

36. Agamben, Means without End, p. 142.

37. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 188.


39. Agamben, The Coming Community, pp. 1–3.

40. ibid., p. 64.

41. The notion of subtraction has been developed in Alain Badiou’s metaontology of the truth pro-

cedure and refers to the mode of negation that does not seek the destruction of what it negates

but simply dissociates itself from it, becoming indiscernible in its terms. See Alain Badiou,

Being and Event (London: Continuum, 2005), pp. 328–43; Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings

(London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 105–20. Although Agamben rarely uses this term, it ade-

quately grasps the phenomena he discusses under such diverse rubrics as ‘rendering inopera-

tive’, ‘profanation’, ‘deactivation’, etc.

42. See Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Selected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press, 1999), pp. 182–3.

43. Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 161–80.

44. ibid., pp. 28–9.

45. ibid., pp. 104–11, 182–6.

46. See Giorgio Agamben, ‘What is a Paradigm?’, European Graduate School Lecture, accessed

25 December 2008 at: <www.egs.edu>

47. See Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz (New York:

Schocken Books, 1986), pp. 277–300; Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of

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History’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books), pp. 253–64. Cf.

Agamben, State of Exception, ch. 4.

48. See Agamben, The Coming Community, pp. 63–5; Agamben, Idea of Prose, pp. 87–92;

Agamben, Means without End, pp. 52–4, 78–85; Agamben, Profanations, pp. 81–5.

49. Agamben, Profanations, pp. 73–94.

50. ibid., pp. 90–1.

51. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: HarperCollins, 2008[1962]), pp. 164–8, 224.

Agamben’s theory of whatever being is best grasped in relation to Heidegger’s thought. The

reappropriation of one’s own potentiality that Agamben affirms is nothing other than

Heidegger’s ‘anticipatory resoluteness’, in which Dasein is able to grasp its everydayness

in an authentic way and thereby exit the fallenness of the They, which for Agamben is exem-

plified by the apparatuses of biopolitical nihilism. In contrast to Heidegger, however, Agam-

ben finds no reason to link this resolute decision with the anticipatory ‘being toward Death’

and more generally refuses to conceive of death as a politically relevant fact. Second, Agam-

ben’s philosophy lacks any equivalent of Heidegger’s ‘Voice of Conscience’ to which reso-

luteness would be an authentic response, which raises the question of how the subtractive

step towards happy life is to be taken. Cf. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 312–47.

52. See Laclau, ‘Bare Life’, pp. 20–2; Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben, pp. 124–30; Passavant,

‘The Contradictory State’, pp. 165–71.

53. This problem may be illuminated by contrasting Agamben’s work with the philosophy of Alain

Badiou, for whom any politics worthy of the name is also cast in subtractive terms of a radical

break with the existing situation (event), a pure affirmation of the existence of the undecidable

event (intervention) and the painstaking process of the composition of the indiscernible subset

that is the truth of the situation (fidelity). See Badiou, Being and Event, Meditations 17, 20, 23,

31. Yet, as the latter concept demonstrates, for Badiou this subtractive praxis is presented as an

ethical injunction, a call to disciplined militant action that is presented precisely in terms of a

task or a project that Agamben seeks to dispense with. Badiou is explicitly concerned with

championing militant activism, not least by philosophically linking it with the formation of truth

and positing truth itself as an ethical guideline. Yet, while for Badiou this truth, which is itself

infinite, emerges in fragments that consist precisely of subjective investments in fidelity proce-

dures, for Agamben the truth of being is exhausted in whatever being and is immediately acces-

sible as a result of subtraction, which both makes it possible to dispense with the very idea of a

truth process and, insofar as we thereby also dispense with the problematic of disciplined acti-

vism, raises the question of how subtraction is to be accounted for. See Agamben, Language and

Death, pp. 84–106; Agamben, Potentialities, pp. 116–37.

54. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 315–16, 365.

55. Agamben, Language and Death, pp. 31–8.

56. Cf. Agamben, ‘I am Sure’, p. 121.

57. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure (New York: Random

House, 1990), p. 9.

58. Michel Foucault, ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’, in Foucault Live: Interviews, 1961–1984, ed.

Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), p. 261.

59. For a rare reference to optimism in Foucault’s work see ‘Practicing Criticism’, in Michel Fou-

cault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence

Kritzman (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 156.


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60. Foucault, ‘Power and Strategies’, in Power/Knowledge, p. 145.

61. Giorgio Agamben, The Man without Content (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).

62. See Agamben, Potentialities, pp. 243–71; Agamben, The Coming Community, pp. 35–7.

Bartleby has become a privileged figure in continental philosophy, addressed in the work

of, among others, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Zizek and Antonio Negri.

63. Agamben, Potentialities, p. 254.

64. ibid., p. 255.

65. Agamben, Language and Death, p. 98, n. 1.


67. ibid.

68. ibid., p. 254.

69. ibid., p. 270. See also Agamben, The Time that Remains, p. 137.

70. ibid., p. 256.

71. ibid., p. 261.

72. Hermann Melville, ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’, in Hermann Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor and

Other Stories (Harmondsworth, Mx: Penguin, 1985), p. 99.


74. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 46.

75. Cf. Rasch, ‘From Sovereign Ban’; Jenny Edkins, ‘Whatever Politics’, in Giorgio Agamben:

Sovereignty and Life, pp. 70–91.


77. ibid., pp. 217–18.


79. Agamben, Profanations, pp. 91–2.




83. Agamben, Idea of Prose, p. 75.


85. Agamben, Potentialities, pp. 261–5.

86. As Quentin Meillassoux has admirably demonstrated, the absolute contingency of things (e.g.

of the laws of physics) can coexist without any contradiction with their utmost stability over

millennia. See Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency

(London: Continuum, 2008), pp. 82–111.

87. Agamben, Potentialities, p. 126; original emphasis.


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