The Power of Life: Agamben and the Coming Politics

Introduction

LIFE IN VENICE

The Philosophical Subject

The year 1968 was a remarkable one in the life of Giorgio Agamben. It began with a trip to Athens, his first visit to the ruins of the birthplace of Western philosophy and politics—the main planes in between which his thought still oscillates. Then, in May, he left for Paris to take part in the final chain of events that turned the city on its head during that restless spring. From Paris he went to New York. After attending a performance of Hair on Broadway, he took the train up to Harvard, where he participated in the International Seminar, a gathering of young intellectuals from around the world, headed by Professor Henry Kissinger. The director, however, was rarely to be seen, so the days passed with the seminar’s host, a young philosophy professor named Stanley Cavell, usually showing the participants old Hollywood movies in between discussions about American culture. One day, Kissinger actually gave a short talk. At its end, Agamben, then twenty-six years old, raised his hand and frankly told the lecturer that he understood nothing about politics. Kissinger, according to Agamben, did not respond but only smirked. Not long after he returned home to Rome, Agamben packed his suitcase once again and checked into a small hotel in Provence, where he again participated in a seminar, this time with Martin Heidegger (another professor with a dubious political involvement). It was this event that initiated him into the world of philosophy for good. Agamben recollects: At Le Thor, Heidegger held his seminar in a garden shaded by tall trees. At times, however, we left the village, walking in the direction of Thouzon or Rebanquet, and the seminar then took place in front of a small hut hidden away in the midst of an olive grove. One day, when the seminar neared its end and the students crowded round him, pressing him with questions, Heidegger merely remarked: ‘You can see my limit; I can’t’ (IP, 59).

The stamps on Agamben’s passport from this eventful year include some of the central stations in what would become his elaborate intellectual itinerary while traveling through the Western tradition. But they also help us comprehend the very limit that Heidegger claims he is unable to see. One way to interpret Heidegger’s blindness, which has guided (or haunted) Agamben ever since, is to say that there is a certain concept, proposition, thesis, or argument that the philosopher cannot comprehend and that his followers need to try to articulate. Until you understand a writer’s ignorance, Coleridge declares, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.¹ Like the human eye, every thinker has a lacuna, which can be compensated for in two ways: either through constant movement (the thought, like the eye, must always change its position, so with the help of our short-term memory the blind spot can be erased) or by the employment of another perspective (even though another thinker, like a second eye, has a blind spot exactly as the first one does, using them together enables us to have an unobstructed view of the matter at hand). Yet another way to treat Heidegger’s claim is to simply rewrite it thus: Perhaps you could see my limit if you could see my self, but I can’t. This is, more or less, what Ludwig Wittgenstein had in mind when he wrote that the subject, which he also called the philosophical I, is the limit—not a part of the world.² My I is missing from my world in the same way that my eye is missing from its visual field. Though human beings seem to have what Heidegger took to be a reflexive ability to be concerned about their very being, they also tend to relapse into Ovid’s predicament, as they live and know not that they live. We always operate in the tension between this gnosis and ignorance. The Platonic injunction to know thyself is nice counsel but never an accomplished fact. From this perspective, we could suggest that the focal point, which is also the lacuna of every thinker, or the horizon, which is also the threshold of his or her thought, is his or her self. But this is a very special kind of self that has nothing to do with any individual, personal, psychological, or physiological considerations. Wittgenstein’s philosophical I (or the I of the philosopher) is, rather, a descendant of Kant’s transcendental I and an ancestor of the new postconscious and postsubjective, impersonal and non-individual transcendental field that Agamben, following Gilles Deleuze, calls "a life" (PC, 225). When a person moves in this (admittedly still very vague) direction, his individuality could be said to become, in Walter Benjamin’s words, secondary to his life just as a flower’s is to its perfume, or a star’s to its light.³

The rumor about the death of the author has been greatly exaggerated. Put differently, though no less facetiously, a good author is not necessarily a dead author. In Agamben’s philosophy, authors still enjoy a rather sweet afterlife, even if, in the wake of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, they are no longer considered to be entities that stand behind, are expressed in, or are represented by their work, and even though they lack a definable presence that can be located or captured. Instead, he claims that the life of the author is put into play within the work itself, in such a way that the author is transformed within the text into a gesture, which is the name Agamben gives to that which remains unexpressed in each expressive act (P, 66–67). There is no apparent reason why we should not apply this approach to the very author to which this book is dedicated, by treating his own life as a gesture in language, so to speak, rather than as a mere fact in the world. This enables us to understand a critical point: Agamben’s work is "not a writing, but a form of life," as he suggests in a different context (TR, 122). In other words, although this book is dedicated to Agamben’s philosophy of life, its success or failure may be measured by its ability to lead the reader to imagine a form of life, by its capacity to clarify how his way of thinking points toward a way of living. Scholars tend to devote their research to a single thinker, rather than a single subject, either because they feel the need to scrutinize the internal coherence of the thought or because they are dazzled by it. But is it also possible to take a similar route in order to try to illuminate a life? Can the subject of philosophy be the philosophical subject? If Robert Musil’s claim that one needs to live as one reads has more than a merely aesthetic appeal, then what is the ethical, even political relationship between reading and living?⁴

The problem, however, is that it is not difficult to get the impression that Agamben let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his work, to use another one of Benjamin’s beautiful formulations.⁵ But the truth of the matter is that neither Agamben’s life nor his work can really make a lot of sense independently of one another, because they both operate in the zone of indetermination that we call a lifework, which is all but extinct in the intellectual climate of our day. Since he always effaces himself by speaking through proxies, since he only asserts his own philosophy by means of synthesizing the writings of others, Agamben seems to follow Socrates’s basic insistence that he does not give birth to his own ideas but only engenders them in his interlocutors. (One apparent difference, it must be said, is that for Agamben it is typically old texts, rather than young boys, that are pregnant with new and radical thoughts.) Despite these hurdles, this book will show how the true power of Agamben’s work lies in its ability to reimagine political action, philosophical thought, and the ethical subject in such a way that the three constitute the corners of a triangle whose center is called form of life.

There Is Something Inside the Text

To demonstrate how this book directs itself toward the very axis on which Agamben’s thought turns, let us take a look at "Experimentum linguae. Written in the late 1980s, this essay marks a subtle yet decisive turn that efficiently divides his writings into what may be called the early Agamben and the later Agamben. In this threshold text he articulates in unequivocal terms the terrain toward which all my work is oriented, which comes down to the following questions: What is the meaning of ‘there is language’; what is the meaning of ‘I speak’?" (IH, 6). There is, however, something rather suspicious about this too easily granted confession. Retrospectively, the attentive reader can see that this self-conscious moment marks a genuine watershed in Agamben’s work rather than the place in which he comes to terms with it once and for all. The point insisted on most fervently in a thinker’s work is often the point seen least clearly; or, in Agamben’s own words, only a thought that does not conceal its own unsaid—but constantly takes it up and elaborates it—may eventually lay claim to originality (ST, 8). How, after all, can one express the very existence of language, the recently discovered center (or transfixion) of Agamben’s thought? It is surely impossible to formulate a sentence in language that can express the existence of language as such. In the last lines of his essay, Agamben admits that there is only one possible way to express the fact that I speak: that I live. The existence of life is the proper manifestation for the existence of language. The result, therefore, of the experiment conducted in Agamben’s essay, or the experience it tries to evoke, transports his thought from the question of language to the question of life. It is human life, understood "as ethos, as ethical way," as form of life (which is also nothing but an experiment/experience), that will function from this point on as the core of his entire philosophy (IH, 9–10). Even though the notions of language and life both play pivotal roles in his work from beginning to (the yet-to-be-seen) end, his thought’s center of gravity seems to shift here from the former to the latter.

This does not mean that after his turn Agamben will hold that language simply dwells in life, that the lived has priority over the said. Such ideas inform the genre of biography: this effort to write a life, to dictate a form of life, as it were. Writing a biography about the life of a writer, for example, is mainly an attempt to reconstruct, explain, or justify the written work on the basis of the lived experience. One of the problems, however, with the lives of thinkers is that no matter how extraordinary their story may be, they tend to pursue an undistinguished life on paper. Even our cultish fascination with figures like Kafka and Benjamin does not arise from their life story per se but from this tension between their vital failures and their eventual linguistic triumphs. This is what stands behind Heidegger’s apparent contempt toward any attempt to speak about the historical and personal context of a philosophical thought, which he famously dismissed by saying, Aristotle was born, worked, and died.⁶

Agamben’s resistance to the biographical temptation does not lead him to ignore life altogether by claiming that there is nothing outside the text. Instead, he presents, before and after his ostensible turn, the link between language and life in a manner diametrically opposite to that of the biographer. He maintains that "life is only what is made in speech, that life is essentially nothing but a fable" (EP, 81). Originating from the prologue to Saint John’s Gospel, where life is said to dwell in the Word, this decisive idea found its exemplary manifestation in the medieval tradition of love poetry that extends from the troubadours to the Dolce stil Novo and, most important, to Dante Alighieri. On the face of it, these poems are the direct result of the existence of a certain flesh-and-blood woman with whom the poet fell in love. The biographer is therefore tempted to look for the thirteenth-century Florentine girl that Dante refers to in his Vita nuova as Beatrice. Agamben questions this practice by claiming that any biographical event that the poem seems to put into words must be considered as invented, as fabulated. In his view, what is poeticized has a decisive priority over what is lived. Dante’s true love, Agamben argues, is actually directed toward language itself, for which the poeticized Beatrice stands as the supreme metaphor. After all, it is only from this event of language—a poem written in the vernacular—that Dante’s new life could emerge (EP, 58). This realization needs to inform any attempt, including the present one, to think about the ordinarily uneventful life of the philosopher; otherwise, it is doomed to fall into the double trap of biography and hagiography. Hannah Arendt sums up this attitude in her elucidation of Heidegger’s one-line biography of Aristotle: "We are so accustomed to the old opposition of reason versus passion, spirit versus life, that the idea of a ­passionate thinking, in which thinking and aliveness become one, takes us somewhat aback."⁷ There is a certain passion in Agamben’s thought; there is a life that appears to be embedded in his words. This, before anything else, is what his reader should not lose sight of.

Agamben often thinks about language as pure potentiality: not merely as the communication of this or that piece of information but, above all, as communicability itself. What is really important for him is not that we speak about all sorts of things but that we have this capacity to speak, speakability as such. Language is a power that may or may not be exercised, and it is the second point—what we can not say (which is not the same as what we cannot say)—on which he never tires of insisting. Nevertheless, it is impossible to even imagine the existence of this power of language apart from what we will call from now on the power of life, without accounting for the living being who prefers or prefers not to speak, or act, or even think. The world may be filled with mountains of white paper and oceans of black ink, but without at least a single scribe (but also at least the hope of an addressee) nothing would ever be written. The potentiality of language is therefore not to be conflated with what Ferdinand de Saussure calls langue, which is language’s abstract structure independent of its utterance in actual speech (parole). As Saussure himself conceded, there can be no science of language that does not study the life of signs in the domain of social life.⁸ If we forget for a second that language is always embedded in shared human praxis, that words are simply patterns in the weave of our common lives, then