GIORGIO AGAMBEN

A Critical IntroductionBy Leland de la Durantaye

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6142-0

Contents

Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………………………………xiAbbreviations of Agamben’s Works……………………………………………………………………………………….xiiPreface: The Law of the Good Neighbor…………………………………………………………………………………..xviiiIntroduction: The Idea of Potentiality………………………………………………………………………………….1Scholium I: The Inoperative……………………………………………………………………………………………18Scholium II: On Creation and Decreation…………………………………………………………………………………21Scholium III: Heidegger’s Potential, or Creative Terminology………………………………………………………………24Chapter One: Art for Art’s Sake: The Destruction of Aesthetics and The Man Without Content……………………………………26Scholium I: Benjamin and Heidegger, or Poison and Antidote………………………………………………………………..53Scholium II: The Potentiality of Art……………………………………………………………………………………55Chapter Two: A General Science of the Human: Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture…………………………………..56Scholium: On Erudition………………………………………………………………………………………………..79Chapter Three: A Critique of the Dialectic: Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience………………………………..81Scholium I: Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, or The Floodgates of Enthusiastic Misunderstanding………………….111Scholium II: The Now of Knowability…………………………………………………………………………………….113Scholium III: Kairos………………………………………………………………………………………………….116Scholium IV: Dialectics at a Standstill, or Means and Ends………………………………………………………………..117Chapter Four: The Pure Potentiality of Representation: Idea of Prose……………………………………………………….121Scholium I: The Art of Citing Without Quotation Marks…………………………………………………………………….145Scholium II: The Idea of Benjamin………………………………………………………………………………………148Scholium III: Reading What Was Never Written…………………………………………………………………………….151Scholium IV: The Storyteller…………………………………………………………………………………………..154Chapter Five: From Spectacle to Shekinah: The Coming Community…………………………………………………………….156Scholium I: Jacques Derrida and Aher, or The Cutting of the Branches……………………………………………………….184Scholium II: The Idea of Pornography……………………………………………………………………………………192Scholium III: Guy Debord, Strategy, and Political Ontology………………………………………………………………..195Scholium IV: On Hope, Redemption, and the Irreparable…………………………………………………………………….197Chapter Six: The Potential of Paradigms: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life…………………………………………..200Scholium I: Progress and Catastrophe, or Clear and Present Dangers…………………………………………………………239Scholium II: Paradigm and Dialectical Image, or The Shadow of the Present…………………………………………………..243Chapter Seven: The Unique and the Unsayable: Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Homo Sacer III…………………247Scholium I: What Is a Remnant?…………………………………………………………………………………………298Scholium II: On Genius, or Heidegger’s Poison and Benjamin’s Antidote………………………………………………………303Scholium III: Eternal Recurrence of the Same, or Nietzsche and the Potentiality of the Past…………………………………..314Chapter Eight: The Suspended Substantive: The Open: Man and Animal…………………………………………………………324Chapter Nine: The exceptional Life of the State: State of Exception. Homo Sacer II.1…………………………………………335Scholium I: Adorno, Profanity, and the Secular Order……………………………………………………………………..360Scholium II: Carl Schmitt, or Politics and Strategy………………………………………………………………………363Chapter Ten: The messiah, or on the Sacred and the Profane………………………………………………………………..366Conclusion: The idea of the Work……………………………………………………………………………………….383Notes……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….391Bibliogrpahy…………………………………………………………………………………………………………441Index……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….455

Chapter One

Art for Art’s Sake: The Destruction of Aesthetics and The Man Without Content

Giorgio Agamben’s first book, The Man Without Content, bears a title that raises many questions: Who is this man? Where has his content gone? Does he want it back? And yet although this title might sound enigmatic, its subject is simple. The Man Without Content inquires into the nature and function of art. This is, however, no neutral inquiry. The book does not engage in aesthetic inquiry for the sake of aesthetic inquiry, and it is not written from the distanced perspective of a historian of ideas. It is instead a response to what Agamben sees as an alarming state of contemporary affairs.

The Original Stature of the Work of Art

For Agamben, the nature and function of art in our culture has been obscured. Art has come to resemble, in his words, “a planet that turns toward us only its dark side” (MWC, 43 [66], translation modified). With the waning of the enlightening role that art had played for earlier eras, Agamben sees his goal as understanding how and why art’s illuminating face has turned away from us, and what we might do to see its return.

From the outset, his means are extreme:

Perhaps nothing is more urgent-if we really want to engage the problem of art in our time-than a destruction [distruzione] of aesthetics that would, by clearing away what is usually taken for granted, allow us to bring into question the very meaning of aesthetics as the systematic study of the work of art. The question, however, is whether the time is ripe for such a destruction, or whether instead the consequence of such an act would not be the loss of any possible horizon for the understanding of the work of art and the creation of an abyss in front of it that could be crossed only with a radical leap. But perhaps just such a loss and such an abyss are what we most need if we want the work of art to reacquire its original stature [la sua statura originale]. [MWC, 6 (16-17), italics in original, translation modified]

In his first book, Agamben’s first call is for destruction. To effect this destruction he must traverse what he sees as the arid expanses of the formalizing discipline of aesthetics. Beyond these wastes, what he seeks is nothing less than the “original stature” of the work of art. However, if Agamben aspires to bring about a “destruction” that will help him understand both the “original stature” of the work of art and the “authentic sense” of the aesthetic project that was to circumscribe it, we might first ask what sort of destruction he is calling for. As is clear from the preceding passage, his tone is not that of Dionysian intoxication and what he is calling for is not merely anarchic. Although during these years he may have felt great affinity for such sulphurous artists from the past as Artaud and from the present as Pasolini, his manner and message are markedly different. The first hallmark of the destruction Agamben envisions is that it is singularly lucid. He aims to clear and clarify a field of inquiry, and the goal of such a procedure is clearly stated: understanding the original stature of the work of art.

Yet if Agamben’s goal is so simple, why does he need such extreme measures-or at least such extreme language? The answer is that for him such “destruction” is necessary because the problem he isolates is not generally recognized as such. Art’s having ceased to play a shaping role in our culture-its loss of an “authentic” or “original” status-has become, for Agamben, so accepted in our day and age that it does not attract special notice. In other words, the loss has become so complete that it is no longer even experienced as a loss. To make this absence felt, Agamben attempts to clear away that which has obscured our vision-and to this operation he gives the extreme name destruction.

The Structure of Destruction

Although Agamben’s idea of destruction is unusual, it is not unprecedented. One of the things that Heidegger’s philosophy first made possible for Agamben was precisely destruction. Heidegger entitled the programmatic sixth section of Being and Time “The Task of Destroying [Destruktion] the History of Ontology.” There he writes, “If the question of Being is to have its own history rendered transparent, then our rigidified tradition must be loosened and its concealments dissipated. We understand this task as one in which by taking the question of Being as our guide, we are to destroy [Destruktion] the traditional content of ancient ontology so as to arrive at those primordial experiences through which we achieve our first ways of determining the nature of Being” (Heidegger 1993, 44 [22], italics in original, translation modified). In a lecture course from 1920-21 Heidegger had already noted that “the modern study of the history of religion can do much for phenomenology on the condition that it is submitted to a phenomenological destruction [Destruktion]” (Heidegger GS 60.78, italics in original). As Heidegger is careful to underline, the destruction for which he is calling is not just any destruction and should not be understood in a conventional sense. To begin with, its principal function is not negative. Heidegger is careful to point out in Being and Time that Destruktion is not meant in a merely “negative sense,” and that on the contrary it is motivated by a “positive intention” (Heidegger 1993, 44, 45 [22, 23]). Heidegger asks that his destruction be understood as the clearing away of corrupted material so as to get at an untainted origin. To employ his favorite family of metaphors, it is the cleaning of the house of being.

The reason Heidegger saw a necessity for such extreme housekeeping-and the reason Agamben was so interested in it-was that philosophy’s initial and most fundamental problem-that of the nature of the being that all individual beings share-had ceased to be considered a pressing philosophical problem at all-let alone the problem that should guide philosophy’s steps. So grave had matters become, and so deep did this forgetfulness run, that Heidegger saw the problem that for the Greeks lay at the very center of philosophy-the true task of metaphysics, which he called “the wonder of wonders: that being is”-was now to be glimpsed only at philosophy’s margins (Heidegger 1996, 261). This “forgetting of Being,” as Heidegger called this loss of a sense for the largest question that philosophy might ask, was the first obstacle he saw lying before him, and it was in response to it that he called for the extreme measure of a “destruction of the history of ontology.”

How Heidegger envisioned this destruction that so influenced Agamben is best illustrated by his choice of words. German disposes of more than one word for what is rendered in both English and Italian as “destruction.” Both Zerstrung and Vernichtung can mean the same thing as the destruction or the distruzione. Heidegger’s Latinate alternative to these more common terms was the relatively rare substantive Destruktion. It is specially suited to his purposes in that what he outlines-both in this section of Being and Time and elsewhere in his work-is not a smashing to bits (what he would have called a Zerstrung or Zersplitterung) nor an annihilation or an eradication (what he might have called a Vernichtung). It is instead a sort of irradiation through which an underlying structure becomes visible in the process of being rendered inoperative. On this point Heidegger is perfectly clear as he writes, “destruction [Destruktion] does not mean here the destruction of demolition [Zerstren], but rather that of dismantling [Abbauen], of clearing away and laying aside” (Heidegger 1956, 53). He continues: “Destruction [Destruktion] means: opening our ears, making the way free for what addresses us in our tradition as the being beings share” (Heidegger 1956, 53). Heidegger’s Destruktion is thus above all a taking-apart that, while rendering inoperative, also exposes a concealed structure. (As the term Abbauen indicates, the operative metaphorical register is architectural.) The difficulty of expressing this special process is what gave birth to deconstruction-the term Derrida coined to translate Heidegger’s Destruktion and that came to play such a central role in his philosophy and its reception. This conceptual and linguistic difficulty that led Derrida to his celebrated neologism is the same one that the young Agamben responded to with his “destruction of aesthetics.”

The goal of such destructions as those of Heidegger, Derrida, and Agamben is to reveal the concealed, to glimpse what has been so long viewed through what Coleridge called “the film of familiarity” that it is effectively hidden from view. The “destruction of Western metaphysics” for which Heidegger called aims, like Derrida’s deconstruction and the “destruction of aesthetics,” to return to the origins of philosophical thought and to uncover forgotten and fundamental ways of conceiving our world-way that have become buried in confusion and convention. Agamben’s destruction of aesthetics is an attack that aspires not simply to topple aesthetics’ towers, but also to glimpse, in their falling, the innermost forms and flaws of their construction.

Divine Madness

With the how of Agamben’s inquiry clarified, we can turn to its what. One goal of The Man Without Content is indeed to regain a sense of art’s original stature and structure-an ontological question. Another goal is to trace the progressive obscuring of this original space that art offered-a historical question. A third goal is the desire to restore art to its former status as a true shaper of actions and beliefs-a programmatic question. Agamben fuses these goals in his retelling of the history of Western art from the Greeks to the present.

A watershed moment in that history is recorded by Hegel, who in 1829 stated that “art no longer provides for the satisfaction of those spiritual and intellectual needs that earlier peoples and times found in art and in art alone.” This conviction led Hegel to the extreme conclusion that “in all of these [cultural and spiritual] relations, art, in its highest vocation [Bestimmung], is for us a thing of the past” (Hegel 1970, 13.24-13.25). As had Heidegger before him, Agamben endeavors in his first work to take the full measure of Hegel’s diagnosis.

At first sight it has appeared to many that Hegel seriously misjudged the situation. Art, it seems, has not become “a thing of the past”-on the contrary, perhaps more than for any earlier age it is a thing of the present. Contemporary art stands at the center of our cultural stage, and there appears to be no lack of people seeking its satisfactions. Yet as Agamben well knows, this is not what Hegel is speaking of. What is at issue is not commercial value or cultural prestige but instead something more fundamental and more essential to the forms that cultures take and to the ideas they pursue. To better view the question Agamben takes a long historical step backward. As is well known, Plato recommended singular treatment for the artist in his ideal republic. Should an artist appear in that republic, he was to be paid the highest respects: he was to be anointed with myrrh, crowned, praised-and then led forth out of the city’s gates. This was not because Plato lacked sensitivity to, or respect for, art and its audiences. On the contrary, his prescriptions seem to have stemmed from his very sensitivity. Following ancient rumor, Plato found his philosophical vocation in the same fashion as Agamben-by renouncing an earlier, poetic one. It is said that one day the young dramatic poet was traversing an Athenian square when he heard the voice of Socrates. He listened, and then went home, burned the tragedies he had been composing, and became a philosopher. Art had, in his view, such power that it could make the worse appear the better reason, and blur the lines that divided fact from fiction. For this reason, it was to be feared.

Not only in Plato’s day but also for millennia to come, in Western discussions of art it was the audience that was described as running a risk in the experience of the work of art-the same audience that was subject to what Plato called “divine madness.” As Agamben’s historical analysis in The Man Without Content demonstrates, one does not often find modern audiences subject to divine madness, and the passion that characterized the antique response to the work of art has largely disappeared from the contemporary stage. Audiences may come in equal numbers, but they come with much different ideas and expectations. To state the matter with maximal simplicity, they seem to have grown calmer and cooler. Be that as it may, the divine madness that was an integral part of the experience of the work of art has not simply disappeared. Instead, it has, in Agamben’s words, “migrated.” If a divine madness associated with the work of art is still to be found today, it is to be found not in the audience but in the artist, petrified by the terrifying whiteness of the blank page or struggling against violent forces roiling within. In modern times, it is no longer the purveyors but the creators of art who are subject to this divine frenzy, and one need only think of Hlderlin, Rimbaud, and Nietzsche for prominent instances. If the extremity of Van Gogh’s self-mutilation is the exception rather than the rule, the idea of the modern artist doing battle with a lacerating force so as to emerge victorious with the completed work is not, and it is this historical “migration” that Agamben follows to inquire into art’s original status and the means for regaining it.

Art as Art

At this point in his investigation Agamben’s question has become a simple one: What happened between Plato’s and Hegel’s equally profound reactions to the power of art? The answer Agamben offers is that what intervened is what he is seeking to “destroy”: aesthetics. For Agamben, the discipline of aesthetics embodies this cooling of artistic passions. A chapter of The Man Without Content is titled “The man of Taste and the Dialectic of the Divide.” it makes programmatically clear that the doctrine of taste has brought about a division-or in Agamben’s more extreme term, laceration-in our experience of the work of art. What is this laceration that Agamben associates with the man of taste? To answer this question and thereby understand the mystifying title of this chapter, we need to turn first to the title of the work of which it is a part. Who is this titular man without content? The answer is the artist. As Agamben tells his reader, “The artist is the man without content” (MWC 55 [83]). This designation, however, is by no means a denunciatory one. Agamben is not diagnosing a side-effect of art such as Diderot’s paradoxe du comdien, where the actor is able to incarnate such a variety of characters because he has no single character of his own. Agamben’s artist is a man without content not because of a psychological deficit but because of a historical development. He has not always been without content-he has been deprived of it by a historical shift, by the man of taste and the lacerating dialectic that he has developed.

For Agamben-particularly in the essays leading up to the publication of The Man Without Content-the figure of Antonin Artaud is powerfully representative of this state of affairs. In an essay from 1966, the twenty-four-year-old Agamben evokes “this impasse in our culture which is the work of Antonin Artaud” (SG, 59). The idea of Artaud diagnosing and denouncing a desiccated vision of culture and standing at a turning point in the history of art is voiced by Agamben in another essay, from that same year, in which he sees the paradox of the work of art “reach its dead spot in the work of Artaud” (PB, 48). In The Theater and Its Double, Artaud talks of “the senseless shrinking to which we have subjected our idea of culture” and gives a clear indication of blame: “What led us to lose our culture is the Western idea of art” (1964, 15, 16). Inspired by the indigenous cultures of Mexico (just a another figure important to Agamben, Aby Warburg, was inspired by the Hopi in the American southwest), Artaud proclaimed that “an authentic culture opposes to our disinterested [dsintresse] and inert idea of art one that is magical and violently egotist-that is, one that is interested [intresse]” (1964, 17). This same primal passion and strident denunciation is found in another figure important to the young Agamben-Pasolini. Although Pasolini is nowhere cited in Agamben’s first work, echoes of his violent criticism of Western culture and what he saw as its adulterated idea of art may be heard in its cardinal theme.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from GIORGIO AGAMBENby Leland de la Durantaye Copyright © 2009 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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