notes for the coming community

The Power of Life

2011-11-11T12:01:00.010-05:00

I have been using this strange medium for the past six years as a public notebook. Many of the sketches posted in this blog found their way into my new book, which, in this day and age, feels like an even stranger medium.

Google Books
Amazon
Stanford UP

Also, Wittgenstein's Form of Life is now available in paperback.

2011-11-09T10:57:00.001-05:00

Sheer Life

2011-09-24T02:55:00.004-04:00

Please visit my new website, where I will post short chapters from a new book I'm currently working on:

sheerlife.tumblr.com

Mass Culture and Terrorist Culture

2011-09-03T12:19:00.010-04:00

1. The great fear of the nineteenth century was that amorphous blob called “the masses.” The masses were irrational, unpredictable, ungovernable, and extremely violent. From the construction of the wide boulevards in Paris to the castle-like armories across New York, the people in charge went out of their way to combat the monster in the heart of the great metropolis.

2. For a twenty-first century reader of nineteenth century newspapers, the stories about the riots and the general paranoia they engendered feel very much like today’s discourse about terrorism. Though the looters are still alive and kicking, and the terrorists seem to be on the wane and on the run, there is certainly an overall shift in good society’s “greatest fear.”

3. What is the most effective way to gain control over the masses and avoid the dreadful riot? More police officers and CCTV? Better jobs and social benefits? The twentieth century actually found a much better method to put the masses on a leash: It invented something called “mass culture.” To paraphrase Clement Greenberg, we could say that mass culture pretends to demand of its consumers not only their money, but also the promise to never revolt.

4. If you can’t beat the masses, entertain the masses. If the masses can see their own image and likeness in films, music, television, etc., then their sense of oppression is all of a sudden, as if by magic, less justified. When life feels like a dead end, you can easily band with others who feel the same and take to the streets. Alternatively, you can press play on your iPod and listen to your favorite rapper telling you about his fabulous exploits. You feel that you have a voice, you feel empowered, the anger goes away, and you decide to stay in your room.

5. European culture is still much more elitist than American culture, which is one way to explain why European cities are more vulnerable these days to riots than American cities. In the US everyone is equal...in front of their TV sets. Justice needs not be done, if it can only be seen as if it is done. Economically, kids in New York have as good a reason to smash a window as the kids in London. Culturally, they feel too good about themselves to even bother.

6. Mass culture, however, has been drugging the unstable masses to non-action long before hip hop. We have to keep things in perspective and realize that today’s anxiety from the rioting mob is a pale semblance of what it used to be a hundred years ago. Mass culture is such an effective mass tranquilizer that this (justified or unjustified) fear that people will suddenly unleash the animals inside of them is not unlike the zoogoers’ giddy fantasy that the tiger will escape from its cage.

7. If the comparison between the old fear of the masses and the new fear of terrorism is indeed viable, then the following thesis becomes very tempting: In precisely the same way that the best way to cope with “the masses” is to develop a powerful mass culture, then the best way to deal with terrorism is through what I would like to call “terrorist culture.” Terrorist culture will shape the culture of the twenty-first century exactly as mass culture shaped the culture of the previous century. Just as mass culture dispelled the fear of the masses, terrorist culture is quelling the terrorist boogeyman.

8. Banksy is the high priest of the burgeoning terrorist culture. Terrorist culture must (appear as if it) subvert(s) the cultural hegemony. Indeed, terrorist culture must (pretend to) undermine the insipid power of mass culture. While those in power have guns, the terrorists have homemade bombs. While the corporations inundate us with their fast food and stupid sitcoms, we can still make our own artisanal bread and shoot with our phones a quirky video and post it on YouTube. If only Harvard professors get to be critics for the New Yorker, we can write a blog.

9. Al-Qaeda is a DIY army. Voina is waging a cultural Jihad. If the capitals of mass culture are Manhattan and Hollywood, the capitals of terrorist culture are Brooklyn and San Francisco. If television was the prime tool to disseminate mass culture, smartphones are the best way to propagate terrorist culture. But if a revolution is “all over twitter” (rather than televised), does the statue of the sovereign make a sound as it tumbles (or tumblrs)?

10. Terrorist culture is no longer operating on the fringes of mass culture, the way Greenberg believed that the avant-garde must remain the obscure alternative to kitsch. Terrorist culture is becoming the dominant cultural force in the twenty-first century. In the same way that Adorno used to lament the demise of high culture in face of the rise of mass culture, some smartass will soon tell us how glorious were the days when mass culture gave us a sense of unity and democracy, while today’s terrorist culture is only leading to fragmentation and exclusivity.

11. Nevertheless, terrorist culture, like mass culture, is only a reaction against a deep-seated anxiety. They are both just a continuation of a war (on the masses, on terror) by other means. From this perspective, both mass and terrorist culture are probably doomed to do more harm than good, because they end up sacrificing a genuine revolutionary force on the altar of its own representation.

Academic Labor

2011-08-14T15:50:00.001-04:00

An academic job is much more demanding than it seems. You need to do a lot of work to hide the fact that you don't really have anything significant to say.

The Alienation of Theory

2011-07-07T12:03:00.010-04:00

“How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life” --Wittgenstein

Granted, there is not much money to be made doing theoretical work. Which makes it all the more difficult to explain why theory turned into something that looks more and more like a feverish commodity market. Like the latest electronic gadgets, today’s concepts and subjects quickly rise and fall as they enter and exit the discourse of speculative exchange in the marketplace of ideas.

At the same time young financiers consult their Bloomberg machines in an attempt to decide whether they should invest their available capital in crude oil futures or sub-prime morgages, young philosophers attend scholarly conferences and read blog posts in an attempt to figure out what people talk about in today’s theoretical landscape, and where they should invest their available brain cells. Biopolitics? Animal philosophy? Speculative realism? Anarchism? Hauntology?

This is certainly a fun little game. It makes us think that the world of theory is alive and kicking. Like fashion, it creates the exclusive feeling of the in-crowd, the exciting sense of hype, and the exaggerated belief that some understand something that others simply don’t get.

The downside to all of this (the “collateral damage,” to use the right buzz word) is the alienation of theory. We talk about concepts the way a Wall Street analyst talks about stocks, or the way a Burger King employee flips burgers. Ideas have only exchange value for us, but no use value. Our philosophical labor feels more and more foreign to who we really are. The only thing we really care about is not the work that we do (the arguments we make, the books we write) but its surplus value (the invitation to present a paper, the prospect that others will cite it, and, ultimately, the tenure job).

Philosophy used to function according to the formula C-M-C: you developed a new Concept, which led to the gathering of Minions, which helped you to develop other Concepts, and so on. But today’s philosophy functions according to the formula M-C-M: you gather around you Minions, with the help of which you can disseminate your Concepts, which leads to the attraction of new Minions, and so forth.

It is rather strange to see how so many thinkers who love to talk about Marx (at least since he made his spectacular comeback in Derrida’s Specters) fail to apply his most basic idea about the alienation of labor to their own lofty practice. While all around us people try to reintroduce un-alienated labor (the “artisanal” bakery that replaces the factory bread), in theoretical work any investigation that defies the cosmopolitan production of jet-set ideas is treated as a marker of low intellectual capacity.

No one in particular is to be blamed for the alienation of theory. Neither Derrida, nor Zizek, nor Agamben, nor their minions, is more responsible than others for this predicament. We all carry this blame together. Once we realize this, we could begin to cure ourselves from the depressing effects of this alienation, no matter what faction or school we belong to. Then, perhaps, the notion of “lifework,” where one’s life and one’s work cannot be told apart from each other, will return to inform who we are and what we do.

The Finest Thing about New York City

2011-06-03T20:08:00.002-04:00

"The finest thing about New York City, I think, is that it is like one of those complicated Renaissance clocks where on one level an allegorical marionette pops out to mark the day of the week, on another a skeleton death bangs the quarter hour with his scythe, and on the third the Twelve Apostles do a cakewalk. The variety of the sideshows distracts one’s attention from the advance of the hour hand."

-A. J. Liebling, "Apology for Breathing"

Friend-Prisoner-Enemy

2011-04-26T12:53:00.030-04:00

This diagram was prepared by Bruce Jessen, a psychologist whose work was instrumental in the design of the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques Program, used by the US Department of Defense and the CIA to torture their detainees.

What interests me about this diagram is the way the prisoner at the center is treated as a zone of indetermination that can either undermine or substantiate Carl Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction. First, noticed that the American interrogator is labeled in the diagram as the enemy, while the terrorist group back at home is the friend (in the prisoner's mind, of course). The point is to transform the enemy into a friend and the friend into an enemy, that is, to make the prisoner collaborate with the enemy and resist his friend.

To achieve this goal, torture is actually presented as counterproductive. Punishment from the enemy (the interrogator), coupled with the potential reward from the friend (predicated on the prisoner's unwillingness to collaborate), leads to colossal failure (this is the left side of the diagram). Success lies on the right: rewarding the prisoner (thus making him feel that the interrogating enemy is actually a friend), while instilling the notion that collaboration will lead to punishment from the friend back at home (thus transforming the friend into the new enemy of the prisoner).

Of course, turning the friend-enemy distinction on its head is only an illusion. The interrogator will never be the prisoner's friend, and the prisoner knows it. This is why the interrogator always remains an enemy in the diagram, even when collaboration is achieved (the same is true about the friend).

But what is most intriguing about this diagram is that the prisoner is labeled in it neither as a friend nor as an enemy. Instead, the prisoner creates a zone of indistinction between the two categories. Put differently, the prisoner is the sovereign who decides on who is a friend and who is an enemy.

It is therefore not a coincidence that the prisoner is depicted in the diagram as if crucified. What Christ does to the Jew/Gentile distinction the prisoner does to the friend/enemy distinction. This becomes clear when one considers Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor,” where the image of Christ and that of the prisoner merge into one. In the parable, Christ returns to Spain in the sixteenth century, performs a few miracles, and is adored by the people as the true Messiah. But before long the cynical Inquisition, which perceives Jesus as a threat to the status quo, decides to sentence him to death. Christ does not utter a word throughout the parable, so the bulk of the text is dominated by the long speech of the Grand Inquisitor during his nocturnal visit to the cell where the Resurrected awaits his execution. But Christ does reply to this speech, though not with words. When the old inquisitor concludes his denunciation, at the very end of the parable, Christ gently kisses the old man on his “bloodless” lips.

Schmitt, who was a devout Roman Catholic, could be easily compared to the Grand Inquisitor. I wonder what would be his reaction if, at the end of one of his lectures in which he discussed his friend/enemy distinction, one of the audience members (preferably a Jew) were to approach him behind the lectern and kiss the eloquent jurist on his bloodless lips.

And who knows, maybe in one of the interrogation cells in Guatanamo Bay a prisoner is leaning over right now and kissing his American interrogator. I would love to see this scene at the end of a Hollywoodian psychological thriller about a CIA agent and an al-Qaeda operative. Maybe the film should be titled, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

In the Commandment was the Word

2011-03-30T17:32:00.003-04:00

Audio of Giorgio Agamben's lecture, "What is a Commandment?" London, 28 March 2011.

Follow this link (or right click to download linked MP3 file)

The Inoperative Police

2011-03-21T19:29:00.011-04:00

“...inoperativity is not inert; on the contrary, it allows the very potentiality that has manifested itself in the act to appear. It is not potentiality that is deactivated in inoperativity but only the aims and modalities into which its exercise had been inscribed and separated... We are not dealing here with a simple and insipid absence of a purpose, which often leads to a confusion in both ethics and aesthetics. Rather, at stake here is the rendering inoperative of any activity directed toward an end, in order to then dispose it toward a new use, one that does not abolish the old use but persists in it and exhibits it...” (Giorgio Agamben, "The Glorious Body," in Nudities)

Follow the link below to a pretty neat example of inoperativity: a live feed of the New York Police Department radio layered over random ambient tracks. Listen to it as you read a book, cook dinner, or fold your laundry.

http://youarelistening.to/newyork

Situationist, the iPhone App...

2011-03-14T20:52:00.008-04:00

How about this situation: grab my iphone and run away with it.

Kids' Revolution

2011-03-05T18:29:00.024-05:00

For Naomi

Today, perhaps more than ever, parents are plagued by the anxiety that they do not give their children what it takes to get “ahead in life.” After the recent uprisings around the globe, some radically-inclined mothers and fathers might ask themselves another fundamental question: What can I do to make my kids grow up to become good revolutionaries? When the time comes, will they be among those in the street, or will they stay at home and miss the historical moment?

The solution to this pressing problem is simpler than you think. All that the parent needs is a copy of the most revolutionary movie in recent memory. I am referring, of course, to the animated feature, Madagascar. The film begins in the Central Park Zoo, where the caged animals are treated like celebrities, adored by the visitors and pampered by their caretakers. Relinquishing this cozy arrangement, the zebra leads the lion, giraffe and their cohorts to escape from the zoo and experience life in the wild for the first time.

To understand the deep revolutionary spirit of Madagascar, we need to go back for a second to Aristotle. Humans, he points out the obvious, are animals. But they are a special type of animal that possesses the additional capacity for political life. Every animal has a given form of life that it shares with its species. A fish lives its life in one way and a donkey lives its life in another way. But a fish cannot decide one morning to live like a donkey or vice versa. Humans, on the other hand, don’t have to follow such a narrow form of life. They can live in many different ways, speak in many languages, have different occupations, and so on. And how do humans come to change, develop, and share those diverse forms of life? Aristotle’s answer is twofold: first, they need to realize that the aim in life is not just to live, but to have a good life. Second, they need to speak and act with one another in order to pursue this good life together. If both conditions are met, man transforms from just another animal to a political animal (or, in Greek, politikon zoon).

In a regular zoo, the captive animals have no way out. They are doomed to live the life prescribed to them by their biological necessity and by the zookeeper. In the animated zoo presented in Madagascar, however, the animals transform into political animals, since they act and speak with one another, and since they come to ask themselves whether a different life, perhaps a better life, awaits on the other side of the wall. As a result, they can revolt. A similar point is made in another popular animated film, where the question is radicalized even further. Toys are just things. They have no life whatsoever. Kids can do to them whatever they want: play with them, toss them around, stuff them in a box, etc. A pet still maintains a certain level of volition (the puppy can bite the kid), but a toy is absolutely powerless. In Toy Story, however, the toys mount their revenge. Again, by acting and speaking with one another, by transforming into political animals (or political objects?) they are no longer merely impotent playthings. The story of those toys is therefore a revolutionary story, with the child in the role of the great dictator.

The moral is very simple. Human beings, those animals with the additional possibility of living a political life, have a choice. They can just hold on to life itself, which, Aristotle admits, is pretty sweet as such. Like the other animals, they don’t need to question the way they live. They can simply accept it as a given. They don’t need to seek the good life beyond the confines of their already prescribed lifestyle. The other option, which is the more difficult one, arises from a dissatisfaction with the life we live, with a sense that the good life is elsewhere, and that, by speaking and acting with other humans who find themselves in the same condition, we can change this form of life. We can revolutionize or resist or revolt against every aspect of our life, and not only the way we are being governed. When we do so, we become political animals. When we don’t, we are essentially just animals, or maybe even only inanimate objects. In fact, we can barely even be a “we.”

A final clarification. One might assume that living in captivity is an unnatural way for an animal to exist. Trying to escape from the zoo and live in the wild, so it seems, is an attempt to fulfill the animal’s natural destiny, its true essence. But of course, when the animals in Madagascar that were used to the amenities of life in New York find themselves in the middle of the jungle, they realize, like the Woody Allen character, that this is not exactly for them. To paraphrase one of Allen’s zingers, “Have you read the book Jews and Nature? It is very very short!” We may lose the joke if we swap “Jews” for “humans,” but we gain in this way a basic philosophical insight that runs from Aristotle in ancient Greece to Agamben in contemporary Italy. The “good life” that humans try to achieve as political animals is never defined in a particular way. The good revolutionary cause, as basic as it might seem (freedom, democracy, equality, etc.), is not a natural goal that all humans must necessarily achieve. Sometimes the good life does not even lie in our ability to change the world (as in Marx's credo). Sometimes it is enough to simply try, like philosophers do, to interpret it.

Foucault’s Utopian Body

2011-02-14T11:38:00.003-05:00

[Excerpts from the translation by Lucia Allais of a radio lecture Foucault delivered in 1966. Published in Sensorium, MIT Press, 2006, 229-34.]

…

My body: it is the place without recourse to which I am condemned. And actually I think that it is against this body (as if to erase it) that all these utopias have come into being. The prestige of utopia--to what does utopia owe its beauty, its marvel? Utopia is a place outside all places, but it is a place where I will have a body without body, a body that will be beautiful, limpid, transparent, luminous, speedy, colossal in its power, infinite in its duration. Untethered, invisible, protected--always transfigured. It may very well be that the first utopia, the one most deeply rooted in the hearts of men, is precisely the utopia of an incorporeal body.

…

No, really, there is no need for magic, for enchantment. There’s no need for a soul, nor a death, for me to be both transparent and opaque, visible and invisible, life and thing. For me to be a utopia, it is enough that I be a body. All those utopias by which I evaded my body--well they had, quite simply, their model and their first application, they had their place of origin, in my body itself, I really was wrong, before, to say that utopias are turned against the body and destined to erase it. They were born from the body itself, and perhaps afterwards they turned against it.

…

My body, in fact, is always elsewhere. It is tied to all the elsewheres of the world. And to tell the truth, it is elsewhere than in the world, because it is around it that things are arranged. It is in relation to it--and in relation to it as if in relation to a sovereign--that there is a below, an above, a right, a left, a forward and a backward, a near and a far. The body is the zero point of the world. There, where paths and spaces come to meet, the body is nowhere. It is at the heart of the world, this small utopian kernel from which I dream, I speak, I proceed, I imagine, I perceive things in their place, and I negate them also by the indefinite power of the utopias I imagine. My body is like the City of the Sun. It has no place, but it is from it that all possible places, real or utopian, emerge and radiate.

…

Maybe it should also be said that to make love is to feel one’s body close in on oneself. It is finally to exist outside of any utopia, with all of one’s density, between the hands of the other. Under the other’s fingers running over you, all the invisible parts of your body begin to exist. Against the lips of the other, yours become sensitive. In front of his half-closed eyes, your face acquires a certitude. There is a gaze, finally, to see your closed eyelids. Love also, like the mirror and like death--it appeases the utopia of your body, it hushes it, it calms it, it encloses it as if in a box, it shuts and seals it. This is why love is so closely related to the illusion of the mirror and the menace of death. And if, despite these two perilous figures that surround it, we love so much to make love, it is because, in love, the body is here.

Limit to your Love

2011-02-05T21:16:00.002-05:00

by James Blake

No Ideas but in Things

2011-01-14T18:39:00.002-05:00

Here’s a fun little game. First, find a Marxist, which is not that difficult these days. Then, engage the Marxist in a conversation about anything whatsoever. The aim of the game is to defer as much as possible the moment when the Marxist says something like, “Look, you must take into consideration the difference between the structure and the superstructure.” To those who don’t know (or are afraid to ask) what the Marxist means, the following should suffice: poetry and art, philosophy and politics, culture and ideas, laws and institutions, do not exist on their own. They are, rather, only the effects of material conditions that, as a whole, are their causes. Economy determines our lofty human endeavors. The overall structure of these relations and forces of capitalist production is the ultimate foundation of the superstructure of our intellectual achievements.

When Walter Benjamin sent in 1938 the first text that was meant to become a part of his never-finished Arcades Project to the Institute of Social Research in New York, it didn’t take long for its director, Theodor Adorno, to jump the structure/superstructure gun. Benjamin’s project, which was supposed to produce a kind of a philosophy book dedicated to Paris, the capital of the nineteenth century, is really an assemblage of a variety of themes: ancient streets and new boulevards, shady catacombs and shiny department stores, iron and glass constructions, prostitutes and collectors, to name just a few. In Adorno’s eyes, these could all be considered as integral parts of the material structure of Paris. The problem, however, is that Benjamin resists the subsumption of these elements within a single coherent system, and instead treats them as independent fragments or “monads,” as he liked to call them. As a result, any inference from this disjointed basic structure to the higher superstructure is highly suspicious, and so it must be dismissed as a case of “vulgar materialism”--a standard Marxist anathema.

Benjamin did not manage to make Adorno see the value of his “micrological” way of thinking, which resists any integration into a totality. Even in Prisms, published 15 years after Benjamin’s death, Adorno continues to reprimand him on precisely this ground. One must wait another 22 years before Giorgio Agamben mounted his defense of Benjamin’s method against its greatest critic. The distinction between structure and superstructure, Agamben claims, cannot be based on a simplistic causal relationship. The need to figure out the entire material structure before one can go up to the immaterial superstructure is a false need. If anything, Benjamin shows that there is a direct correspondence between the two, which abolishes the metaphysical or dialectical distinction between animality and rationality, nature and culture, matter and form, economy and politics, reality and poetry. By making immediate or unmediated connections between elements of the structure and the superstructure, Benjamin does not practice vulgar materialism, but a courageous one. “The fear of vulgarity,” Agamben therefore snaps, “betrays the vulgarity of fear."

The question remains, however, how can structure and superstructure correspond to each other so perfectly? The answer is that, for Benjamin, these two realms are both manifestations of one and the same thing, or attributes of one and the same substance, which I would like to call infrastructure. What both Adorno and Agamben seem to miss is that, as much as Benjamin was interested in the material structure and the immaterial superstructure of Paris, these two realms only play in his thought second fiddle to a third layer, even deeper than the first two, which is the true subject of his Arcades Project. This is what I call the city’s infrastructure. Infrastructure can encompass everything that we normally mean by this term (train stations, the sewage system, sidewalks, street signs, gas lamps, et cetera), but not only. In Benjamin, infrastructure could stand for anything that is understood in and of itself, that is, before it finds its expression within the fields of structure or superstructure (for example, as an economic or political entity). Before Benjamin even considers the use and exchange values of a thing, or its aura, or its philosophical and poetic sense, his true aim is to never lose sight of the thing itself. Early on in his life, he even tried to make the argument that things possess their own language, by which they communicate themselves to man. By looking at the infrastructure of the city, he was able to finally reveal things in the purity of their singularity, as such, thus.

The paradigmatic example of an infrastructure is the arcades themselves, those covered passageways that were very popular in nineteenth century Paris (though they also quickly went out of fashion, like today’s shopping malls). An arcade is not an expression of ideas, whether they are economic or political, material or formal. Those ideas are expressed in this thing that we call an arcade. Whatever may be the structure or the superstructure of the arcades (are they public or private? Are they some kind of an indoor agora? How do they transform a commodity when it enters their space? And how do they transform the man who strolls through them?), it must come to manifest itself through the infrastructure, and not vice versa. The infrastructure thus becomes the secret key that unlocks the mysteries of the city. Those who try today to undermine the overwhelming power of the metropolis know very well that, while an attack aimed at the structure or superstructure is utterly hopeless, slightly tipping over the infrastructure can bring the city to its knees.

It may be helpful to think about this issue in the simplest Freudian terms. Analyzing what is conscious and what is unconscious in Paris of the nineteenth century, à la Freud’s early “topographical” model of the psychic apparatus, may surely be of value. This, of course, is what it means to look for the city’s structure and superstructure. Yet Freud’s more advanced “structural” model--the id, ego, and superego--becomes an exceedingly more useful tool in Benjamin’s hands, as he dissect the Parisian urban apparatus. Infrastructure is the city’s id, the origin of both ego and superego, underneath both structure and superstructure. But what is this id, according to Freud, other than das Es, literally, “the It.” To come to terms with the city as an It or the It of the city (as in “It is glorious,” “It is expensive,” “It is hectic”), to manage to think not about what the city is, but that it is, is, after all, a work reserved for ontology, or first philosophy, which is what the Arcades Project, in its quintessence, was meant to be.

Gaza's Youth Manifesto for Chnage

2011-01-04T15:16:00.001-05:00

"Fuck Hamas. Fuck Israel. Fuck Fatah. Fuck UN. Fuck UNWRA. Fuck USA! We, the youth in Gaza, are so fed up with Israel, Hamas, the occupation, the violations of human rights and the indifference of the international community! We want to scream and break this wall of silence, injustice and indifference like the Israeli F16’s breaking the wall of sound; scream with all the power in our souls in order to release this immense frustration that consumes us because of this fucking situation we live in; we are like lice between two nails living a nightmare inside a nightmare, no room for hope, no space for freedom. We are sick of being caught in this political struggle; sick of coal dark nights with airplanes circling above our homes; sick of innocent farmers getting shot in the buffer zone because they are taking care of their lands; sick of bearded guys walking around with their guns abusing their power, beating up or incarcerating young people demonstrating for what they believe in; sick of the wall of shame that separates us from the rest of our country and keeps us imprisoned in a stamp-sized piece of land; sick of being portrayed as terrorists, homemade fanatics with explosives in our pockets and evil in our eyes; sick of the indifference we meet from the international community, the so-called experts in expressing concerns and drafting resolutions but cowards in enforcing anything they agree on; we are sick and tired of living a shitty life, being kept in jail by Israel, beaten up by Hamas and completely ignored by the rest of the world."

Continue reading

If this is a Person

2010-11-10T10:48:00.004-05:00

"At the moment when individuals are nailed down to a purely biological and asocial identity, they are also promised the ability to assume all the masks and all the second and third lives possible on the Internet, none of which can ever really belong to them. To this one can add the fleeting and almost insolent pleasure of being recognized by a machine, without the burden of the emotional implications that are inseparable from recognition by another human being. The more the citizens of the metropolis have lost intimacy with one another, the more they have become incapable of looking each other in the eye, the more consoling the virtual intimacy with the apparatus becomes (an apparatus that has learned in turn to look so deeply into their retinas). The more they have lost all identity and all real belonging, the more gratifying it has become for them to be recognized by the Great Machine in its infinite and minute variants: from the turnstile of a subway entrance to an ATM machine, from the video camera that benevolently observes them while they enter the bank or walk down the street to the apparatus that opens the garage door for them, all the way to the future obligatory identity card that will recognize them in any time and any place for what they inexorably are. I am here if the Machine recognizes me or, at least, sees me; I am alive if the Machine, which knows neither sleep nor wakefulness, but is eternally alert, guarantees that I am alive; I am not forgotten if the Great Memory has recorded my numerical or digital data.

That this pleasure and these certainties are artificial and illusory is evident, and the first ones to recognize this are precisely those who experience them on a daily basis."

From "Identity without the Person," in Giorgio Agamben's Nudities

Immaterial Labor?

2010-10-12T16:47:00.004-04:00

Banksy takes The Simpsons

2010-09-03T06:42:00.005-04:00

By Marcus Leis Allion

Fourth Thesis on the Concept of Form of Life

2010-08-15T11:07:00.004-04:00

Paraphrasing Nietzsche, we could say that one is a philosopher at the cost of regarding that which all non-philosophers call “form” as content, as “the thing itself.” To be sure, philosophers belong in a topsy-turvy world: for henceforth content becomes something merely formal--our life included. At its best, philosophy (but also art, as in Nietzsche’s original fragment, and even religion, as in Hegel’s system) allows us to find patterns of forms of life in the seemingly endless and senseless fragments that crowd our everyday existence. It can also help us realize that our manner of being is not merely the arbitrary shape or inconsequential refinement of this rough and ready thing that people call life (their so-called life). Rather, our form of life is precisely what philosophers like to call “the thing itself.” (As an example of this philosophical proclivity at work, think of Judith Butler’s understanding of gender.) This is not to say that philosophers should merely act as the servants of a form of life, or that their true task is to develop some pseudo-science of forms of life. Even though people treat the way they live as fish treat water, philosophers are not fishermen. Philosophy is, above all, a way of life in its own right. Until this elemental fact (which, as Pierre Hadot has shown, was an obvious one for the Ancient Greeks) returns to inform current philosophical practice, it has no chance of getting out of the inconsequential mess in which it finds itself today. Luckily, when philosophy as a form of life devolves into philosophy as a profession, when friends degenerate into peers, the unique power that inheres in such a strange mode of being does not become yet another power that dominates life (aside from the occasional stray student). Kierkegaard probably said it the best: instead of having any power whatsoever, today’s philosophers seem to cheerfully “speculate themselves out of their own skin.”

Third Thesis on the Conept of Form of Life

2010-07-29T09:49:00.001-04:00

There is a direct correlation between the growing power of life and the growing power over life. The rise of forms of life does not necessarily lead to the decline of bare lives. The stakes today are simply higher: the more power a life obtains, the more ingenious are the apparatuses designed to control it; the more value a life has, the more intricate are the tactics devised to capitalize on it. While in medieval times the inquisition and the confession were enough to keep most people in line, the modern apparatuses of power employ much more complex techniques to achieve much less effective results. If it is true that today’s men and women are more servile than ever (“the most docile and cowardly social body that has ever existed in human history,” Agamben claims), then why is there a need for all those sophisticated and ruthless apparatuses out there to get them? It is generally believed that in a global culture the differences between forms of life gradually give way to a monochromatic existence. But as power grows over more lives in isolated or neglected places, the power of these previously untouched lives with their still not dead forms can eventually grow as well. This is not achieved, however, because the West flattens the image of these cultures in order to feign the semblance of diversity and satisfy its fascination with the Other, but only because those “others” seize the means of representation and impress their own image on the planetary spectacle in which we live. Forms of life cannot be preserved by isolation--they can only be challenged by interaction, which is what a globalized public sphere may facilitate. Trying today to speak or listen while a million different voices crave to be heard at the same time is quite enervating, but this cacophony is still overcome whenever a single person attends to another and understands what he or she has to say. Every such communication or conversation, as fleeting or insubstantial as it may be, is a generator of the power, and form, of life. So despite the fact that we are witnessing a massive proliferation and expansion of apparatuses that are meant to get hold of our lives--from the close-circuit television that monitors our every move to the regular television that manipulates our every desire, from the cell phone that traces our whereabouts to the credit card that keeps a tab on our conspicuous consumption, from the shrinks who dissect our souls to the doctors who regiment our bodies, from the schools that discipline us well into our thirties to the media outlets that monopolize our public domain--it is encouraging to note that these powers only appear mighty. In reality, they are just scrambling to recapture what is constantly slipping through their clumsy fingers.

Second Thesis on the Concept of Form of Life

2010-07-04T11:21:00.003-04:00

Whether they know it or not, all established apparatuses of power tend to agree on one basic point, formulated in the clearest terms by the best theoretical minds of the Third Reich: that since “no political system can survive even a generation with only naked techniques of holding power,” politics is basically the practice of “giving form to the life of the people.” To complicate our basic dichotomy, it must be admitted that what the power over life is concerned with above all else is how, and not just that, we live. It is only when the powers that be realize that they did not manage to achieve the desired result, when life did not care to conform to a certain form, that the opposite practice is unleashed: the stripping of life from its form (whatever it may be), this diabolical metamorphosis from caring (for the form of life) to forsaking (bare life), as power yields to violence and biopolitics transforms into “thanatopolitics”--a politics concerned with death rather than with life. Bare life is by no means a manifestation of sovereign power, but a proof of sovereign powerlessness, that is, its failure to influence or protect the way we live. Nothing is simpler than to subject a bare life to power (indeed, the desire to do so is usually a mark of weakness); but it is extremely difficult, if not outright impossible, to completely subject a form of life to a power external to it. No matter how awesome the powers of the state, the law, the sovereign, the government, the police, or the army are, they can only contain the explosive power of the multitude of forms of life with limited success. A life completely devoid of a form, like a point without extension, is a fiction. In the same way that outside the theoretical realm of Euclidean geometry there is no point with zero dimensions, there is no absolutely bare life in the actual world, outside Agamben’s political theory, though horrifying limit cases, like the Muselmann, do exist. (By the same token, we could add that there are no pure forms of life that are totally separated from actual physical life outside Debord’s theses on The Society of the Spectacle, though beatific limit cases, like cartoon characters, do indeed exist.)

First Thesis on the Concept of Form of Life

2010-06-17T12:39:00.003-04:00

There are two forces in this world that propel our lives in opposite directions: the first is the power over life, and the second is the power of life. On the one hand, “biopower” is understood by Agamben as the first force, as the incessant attempt to strip life from its form and reduce it to bare life, to the mere fact of being alive, and thus deplete it of its power. On the other hand, biopower may also be presented as a force that is internal or immanent to a life that is always understood as a form or a way or a manner of living, wherein lies its power. While in the first process life cedes its powers to the forces external to it, in the second process those external forces become powerless in face of life. If the first force does its best to depoliticize our lives in such a way that only the fact that we are alive persists as its main concern, the second force politicizes our lives, because how each and every one of us lives in any given moment becomes the central political question. We will use the term “biopolitics” from now on to designate this constant struggle between these two forces, rather than only one of them independently of the other: on the one hand, the monitoring, controlling, disciplining, and administrating of our lives by apparatuses of power (like the government and the police, but also the education system and economic institutions, to mention just a few obvious examples); on the other hand, our ability to fight these powers by imagining, producing, practicing, or presenting new ways to share our lives with one another. It may be assumed that the power of life is merely a reaction against the growing power over life. But it is also possible to reverse the genealogy and claim that it is actually the various apparatuses of actualized power that are the ones reacting against the potential power embedded in the multifarious ways we live our lives. While it is usually assumed that “life becomes resistance to power when power takes life as its object,” I would like to turn Deleuze’s formulation on its head: power becomes resistance to life when life takes power as its object. If the power over life is what we usually call “the powers that be,” the power of life is what we may call “the powers that become,” or “the coming power.”

Forms of Power

2010-04-30T08:18:00.007-04:00

Only those who have no path will reach their end.
The first segment from a seminar with Giorgio Agamben.

Moods

2010-03-31T13:32:00.017-04:00

Excerpts from Yoel Hoffmann's new book, translated from the Hebrew.

[54] This book is a book of states of mind. You can call it moods.
Sometimes we love and sometimes we hate. And there are times when we hate the things we used to love or love the things we used to hate and there is no end to such things.
We used to hate spiders but now we love them. Especially those with skinny legs and round bodies. And since we don’t scare them away (as others do) they spin their webs in all sorts of places and roam the floor and walls and sometimes they stand all night long above the bed, almost touching the nose.
And as we sit at the table and prepare to write, a spider approaches the paper and stands on the words.

[95] This is the solution to the Zen riddle about the sound of the one hand, as well as the solution to the agonies of man about which Sigmund Freud spoke. Namely, that someone will touch someone else and so forth.
We think that the readers should use this book to look for another human being. For example, they should drop it in a bar or a pub and lift it up and ask a woman, Is this yours? Or they should place on it two glasses of red wine (we will make sure that it will be big enough). Or they should stab it with a dagger and say, If the dagger will touch the word love you come with me (we will make sure to spread the word everywhere). Or they should say, If your back hurts you better put under your head something stiff (for this reason we will publish a special hard-cover edition).
Once (we remember) we used to put books on chairs to reach high places.

[153] The readers always need to see the paper behind the words. Not the one that was there before the words were written, but the one that arises after they have been read.
Don’t believe those physicists who speak about specific gravity. The things that you see, even if they seem to be heavy, are the materials of dreams. And don’t even believe that. A dream is in itself a dream.

Nevertheless, when you see large things like a hippopotamus or a sumo wrestler you are tempted to ascribe to them exaggerated actuality. It was very difficult, for instance, to doubt my stepmother Franciska. But once we knew a very fragile woman, who appeared and disappeared like a hologram. It was very easy to doubt her existence but the longings for her were extremely painful.

[154] Because of these longings that are very hard to bear novels with three hundred and even six hundred pages are being written for all of you, full with countless human beings that come and go, like a medicine cabinet filled with Tylenol pills.

You need to place one of those novels in front of a raven. Or, if you wish, a turtle.
Once a raven entered through the main door and stood on the kitchen table. It first pecked at some breadcrumbs and then froze in its place and stared at us.
This is why we write all these things. If we knew what the raven saw when it looked at us, we would reveal it to the readers instead of this book. But because we don’t know we write and write.

Public Enemy

2009-11-02T18:13:00.019-05:00

"In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates."
-Foucault

With his exceptional acumen and erudition, Daniel Heller-Roazen traces in his new book, The Enemy of All, a painstakingly detailed genealogy of the figure of the pirate. Predominately an analysis of the strange legal status of piracy, the book interlaces texts from the history of political theory, philosophy, and literature in order to show how “the common enemy of all,” as Cicero calls the pirate, morphed in mediaeval times into “the enemy of the human species,” and then, in Modernity, into “the enemy of humanity.”

Traversing the liquid paths of the high seas, pirates operate in a lawless, soveringless state of exception, and they are treated by jurists accordingly: like the “illegal enemy combatants” of the recent “war on terror,” their actions occupy a zone of indistinction between the criminal and the political, and so they are protected by neither the civil law nor the law pertaining to prisoners of war. As a deputy assistant attorney general in the Bush administration once put it, “Why is it so hard for people to understand that there is a category of behavior not covered by the legal system? What were pirates?” Or, as Heller-Roazen phrases it in the closing pages of his book, Why is it still difficult for many to realize that we are currently moving “toward a perpetual war,” where man is a pirate to man, where sovereign power can do anything to whomever is labeled “the enemy of all”?

This book will surely be read by some as an indispensable addendum to Agamben’s Homo Sacer, but it also seems to contain the seed of a yet-to-be-developed radical thought. Enemies, Heller-Roazen explains, are traditionally divided into two categories: private and public. A private enemy (inimicus, a negation of amicus, the friend) is an individual who seeks to hurt another individual, and takes pleasure in doing so. A public enemy (hostis) stands for a nation that does not act with hatred but with a sense of right, making claims against another nation, or refuses its claims, and wages an open war in their name. The public enemy, 18th century philosophers of law claim, is a political figure who fights for a political cause. There is, however, a more ancient distinction that contrasts the public enemy with the bandit. While the former receives a mandate from a sovereign and thus has certain rights, is treated as an equal, and fought against according to prescribed conventions, the latter is literally an “out-law,” or an “unlawful enemy”: he is a pirate to whom no pledge can be made, and with whom no oath is binding. Like a shadow of the public enemy, there is no need to declare war before the bandit or the pirate is attacked, and there are no rules that must be followed in the process of his elimination.

To the modern ear, the expression “public enemy” means something completely different. With a semantic somersault that has to do as much with the mass media as it does with law enforcement, the most wanted criminals in the modern state (most notably American gangsters) were given a name that was reserved until then for the legitimate enemy in a traditional war between nations. In the society of the spectacle, the “public enemy number one” is not just infamous but also, quite plainly, famous. As Benjamin observes, when the army, police, and secret services obtain a complete monopoly on violence, the “great criminals” arouse the secret admiration of the public, no matter how abominable their means or ends may be, simply because they exist outside the law. A great criminal is not just a regular criminal on a larger scale. As a public enemy, he becomes a mythological figure (to use Barthes’s term) that functions as a menace to the social, political, juridical, and economic orders, and evokes, precisely for this reason, a not-so-secret fascination in the minds of so many people. But what is a better paradigm of the “great criminal” in Western culture than the pirate? Could it be that the “enemy of all” and the “public enemy”--two figures that used to be opposite--are closer to one another than they appear?

Though the criminals recorded in the archives of the French police that Foucault gathered in “Lives of Infamous Men” were not always the sort of notorious figures that captivated the attention of an entire nation, Agamben believes that they are perfect examples of how “the encounter with power pulls from darkness and silence human existences that would otherwise not have left any traces.” From private, unknown enemies, they become (usually against their will) public enemies--and here we use the term “public” in the strict Arendtian sense of the word: they are political figures the moment they set sail for the liquid paths of the modern public sphere. By using what society deems inglorious means, public enemies can achieve glory, even immortality, within the shimmering light of appearances (Chuck D was clearly aware of this argument when he named his hip hop group "Public Enemy").

 Granted, the juridical no man’s land in which the pirate and his modern descendants dwell is indeed a serious problem with ruinous consequences. Good-old liberals will continue to fight for the inclusion of those “enemies of all” within an agreed-upon legal code, as well as for the restoration of their human rights. Bad-new anarchists, however, know better. What is certain about the Tiqqun affair is that the French government made a textbook mistake that we are well-familiar with since the days of the Greeks and Romans: try to get rid of a “public enemy” like Socrates or Jesus, and the result is a wild proliferation in the popularity of the ideas that these “common enemies” stood for (of course, not all public enemies are born equal; some just idly fascinate us for a while until another one comes along). Not many people cared about the “Invisible Committee” and its philosophy before last year’s events. Now put the word “tiqqun” in Google Trends and see what happens: it is no longer a local curiosity, but a global phenomenon. Assuming that the ideas of Julien Coupat and his friends are indeed “dangerous,” could it be that today they are no longer the enemies of France, but literally the “enemies of all”? And is it fair to say that their incarceration only worked in their favor?

In 1964, Andy Warhol was commissioned to create a mural for the exterior of the New York Pavilion in the World Fair. His submission comprised of enormous black and white silk-screened plates, prepared from mug shots of the thirteen most wanted men on the FBI list. Just before the opening, a word came from above, probably from the office of Robert Moses, the most powerful man in New York and the director of the Fair, ordering the swift and complete alteration of the work. Warhol’s decision to paint on top identical portraits of Moses enraged Philip Johnson, the architect of the pavilion, and so eventually the artist decided to cover them over in a single reflective silvery color. Though Thirteen Most Wanted Man--made by the man who understood the notion of fame better than anyone else--was only seen by a handful of people before it was destroyed, it remains not only one of his most powerful works, but also a perfect meditation on the idea of infamy, and its perpetual persistence in face of the attempts to cover it up.

What makes the public enemy such a potent figure is that any attempt of the powers that be to reduce his being to a bare life, to expose his body to random acts of violence, and eventually to kill him with impunity, is usually not only futile, but also counter-productive. The reason for this is simple: the public enemy’s form of life is a life that cannot be separated from its form.

The Economy of Philosophy

2009-10-14T09:17:00.006-04:00

Theoretical and material concerns are much closer to one another than one may assume. It might be true that Thales, the first philosopher, fell into a well while gazing at the stars. But there is another famous anecdote about Thales, according to which he bought all the olive presses in Miletus ahead of a bountiful harvest, thus making a huge profit as a result of his monopoly. This successful business venture is far from being at odds with Thales’s lofty metaphysical work. In fact, both seem to be grounded on the very same activity, which we call “speculation.” Though his words and deeds were sometimes based on certain facts or clues, Thales had no way to be sure that the universe is indeed made out of water, or that the branches of the olive tree will indeed be heavy with fruit next season (he happened to be wrong about the former). Shrewd philosophers and successful businessmen are both gifted speculators. But they should not be confused with the clairvoyant. Their practice is based not on an empty prediction of the future, but on the present investment of their money or their mind in a commodity or an idea, with the hope that one day the value of their economical, social, symbolic, or cultural capital (to use Bourdieu’s terms) will increase. An acknowledgment in the beginning of a book or a bibliographic reference at its end is in this sense a straightforward system of credit and debt.

To take our analogy even further, one could say that critical theory may be compared to what financiers call “short selling”: a topsy-turvy speculative practice, where an investor actually gains from a decline in the value of his investment (if you wonder, it works roughly like this: you first borrow an asset and sell it right away for the same market price; then you wait for the value to drop in order to buy an identical asset for the reduced price and return it to the lender, thus keeping for yourself the difference). In the same way, when a thinker invests his thought in a certain notion that he decides to criticize (like “enlightenment,” “presence,” or “the sacred”), and then the notion is indeed looked at with suspicion by the intellectual community, the thinker and his followers will gain from such devaluation. The marketplace of ideas, like the regular stock market, suffers from cyclical booms and busts. Today, for example, the academic discourse is clearly suffering from an inflation in many areas, like post-colonialism, gender, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction. Intelligent speculators know that it is time to “short” these discourses, while the slow witted continue to invest their mental (but also material) assets in fields that will sooner or later deflate in a roaring silence.

Marx made use of Hegel’s philosophical system in order to think through economical phenomena. A side effect of this strategy is that the link established between theory and matter also works in the opposite direction: since the nineteenth century, we often see philosophy through the glasses of economy. What is here at stake is not the philosophy of economy (like Marx’s), but the economy of philosophy, which has little to do with how much money philosophers make, and everything to do with the way notions from the field of economy pervade our philosophical discourse. From Arendt’s perspective, this development is very problematic. The Ancient Greeks, I can almost hear her say, insisted that economic matters must be restricted to the home, or the oikos, while philosophy was conceived as an essential activity in the public realm of the city, or the polis. Nevertheless, I believe that this traditional picture can be put into question, not only in view of Thales’s clever fortune from the olive oil business, but mainly in view of the original arena where Socratic philosophy came to be: the agora, this is to say, the marketplace. But on the other hand, please read the excellent comments below.

Spectacle as Violence, Violence as Spectacle

2009-08-30T21:37:00.022-04:00

Anyone who is familiar with Quentin Tarantino’s body of work is accustomed to his twin obsessions: movies and violence. Yet it is only in Inglorious Bastards, his latest film, that the director’s two themes achieve their perfect enunciation, as well as their point of coalescence, where it is virtually impossible to tell one from the other.

The film is structured as two parallel narratives that barely converge at its end. The one tells the story of a young French woman of Jewish descent who runs a movie theater at the center of occupied Paris under a borrowed identity, and thus eludes the Germans’ grip. When the entire Nazi elite, Hitler included, decides to gather at her theater for the premier of Goebbel’s latest piece of cinematic propaganda, she plots to use this opportune moment in order to burn down the theater while all the generals and party officials are trapped inside. The second narrative relates the story of a clandestine unit of the US army. Their mission is to infiltrate behind enemy lines in occupied France and kill as many Nazis as possible in the most gruesome way possible, simply in order to instill fear and horror among the German troops.

The “artful” or “creative” violence inflicted by the Americans is spectacular in its very essence. Their success is not measured by their ability to sidetrack German operations, conquer land, or dwindle the ranks. The war will be won on the shore of Normandy, rather than in the basement of a tavern in the countryside. Their success is measured by their fame, or their notoriety, among common German soldiers who hear about their terroristic exploits through word of mouth. Though, in the film, Nazis do die and true blood is spilled, the annihilation of bare lives is far from being the point. In Auschwitz, the Jews died a death that was not meant to be seen or known. The idea was to kill as many people while making the least noise. The hope was that no one would be left to tell the story of what happened, and that if someone did survive, no one would believe his or her story. On the other hand, the task of the American soldiers in the film is to make Nazis die only in order to make their German brothers know that they have died. They made sure that the story of their horrible death would proliferate rather than be silenced. It is as if the Americans operated with this question in mind: If a head of a Nazi is smashed with a baseball bat in the middle of a forest but no one hears it crack, is the Nazi actually dead? The answer of the commander of the American unit (who, like Tarantino, was born and raised in Tennessee) is a negative. The commander is essentially a film director, trying to produce the most effective possible violent spectacle, to be acknowledged by the greatest number of people. At the very end of the movie, he carves a swastika with his knife on the forehead of a German officer. “I think this just might be my masterpiece,” the commander mutters with his southern accent, though it is really Tarantino who is talking here, quite justly, I think, about his film.

Meanwhile, in the parallel narrative of the movie, the Jewish proprietor of the Parisian cinema prepares her Nazi trap by amassing all the celluloid that she can put her hands on (celluloid, after all, is one of the most flammable materials known to man; you can use it in order to make a film, but it is also a very good bomb). Nevertheless, the theater owner, like Tarantino, is a cinephile, and so a mere fire would not suffice. In addition, she shoots a short film, to be screened for the German dignitaries before their inevitable death. When the right moment arrives, the reel of the Nazi film is replaced by a reel that shows a close-up of the Jewish woman, telling the Nazis about her true identity, about her people who died in the holocaust, and about the fact that all present in the theater are about to be burned alive. As the screen itself burns down, it is only her ghostly image, now projected onto the escalating smoke, that continues to mercilessly laugh at the spectators who try to run for their lives. Here we come to understand the other side of the same coin: the cinematic apparatus, which usually produces seemingly harmless spectacles, transforms into the most efficient killing machine. The old problem of violence in film as a gateway to real-life violence, which has always occupied Tarantino’s prudish critics, is transformed here into a scenario in which the film itself is, literally, violent. It is as if Tarantino tells us that the inclusion of violence in a cinematic spectacle is not merely a choice exercised by the director. Violence is in a way the very cipher of cinema.

As dazzling as it may be, the spectacle that we experience every time we enter the movie theater has little to do with the way that the pope’s church and the monarch’s court used to assert their supremacy through the propagation of glory. In opposition to the glorious spectacles produced by the priest and the prince, films are based neither on ritual nor on liturgy, and they inspire neither honor nor solemnity. The true power of film--a bastard form of art, created by bastard artists--lies in the very fact that it is inglorious.

Enjoy

2009-08-23T10:32:00.001-04:00

Two Weeks - Grizzly Bear from Gabe Askew on Vimeo.

What is Nudity?

2009-08-03T16:41:00.005-04:00

"The nudity of the human body is its image; that is, the trembling that makes this body knowable, though it remains, in itself, ungraspable. Hence the unique fascination that images exercise over the human mind. Precisely because the image is not the thing, but the thing’s knowability (its nudity), it neither expresses nor signifies the thing. Nevertheless, inasmuch as it is nothing other than the giving of the thing over to knowledge, nothing other than the stripping off of the clothes that cover it, nudity is not separate from the thing: it is the thing itself."

[An excerpt from Giorgio Agamben's Nudities, forthcoming in Stanford University Press.]

Kain

2009-06-28T15:26:00.026-04:00

Race de Caïn, au ciel monte, Et sur la terre jette Dieu!
-Baudelaire

Aleph
Anyone who has read Kafka’s novels probably wondered at some point about their protagonists’ names: Karl Rossmann in Amerika, Joseph K. in The Trial, and especially K. in The Castle. From Brod’s first speculation that K. stands for Kafka, to Agamben’s latest suggestions that K. stands for kalumniator (slanderer in Latin) or even for kardo (a line traced by Roman land surveyors), interpreters seem to consider this letter as a crucial cipher to Kafka’s literary universe.

Bet
What follows is an attempt to advance an alternative hypothesis that, as far as I can tell, never received its due critical attention: that Kafka’s K. stands for Cain, Adam’s first-born son and the murderer of his brother, Abel. Even more specifically, I will claim that the letter K. functions in Kafka’s thought as the very “mark of Cain.”

Gimel
Though the English (as well as Italian and Spanish) spelling of the biblical name refutes right from the start the linkage that I wish to establish, in Czech and German, the two languages in which Kafka spoke and wrote, Cain is spelled “Kain,” as I will do herein. In Hebrew--a language that Kafka did not manage to master despite his repeated attempts--Kain, Kafka, and the protagonists of his posthumously published novels are all spelled with kuf (reproduced above).

Dalet
Another piece of circumstantial evidence that gets lost in translation has to do with the mark that God set upon Kain according to Genesis 4:15. The word for mark in Hebrew is ot, which could also mean sign or omen, though the most direct translation is simply “letter.” How, precisely, was Kain marked is anybody’s guess, and indeed wildly different opinions spread throughout the ages. Nevertheless, one of the most persistent suggestions is that Kain was marked on his forehead with one of the twenty-two Hebrew letters, hence “the letter of Kain,” though again there is little agreement which one. Branding a letter on the forehead was a common practice in the classical world: Greek slaves were often marked with a Delta (for doulos) and Roman slanderers, as Agamben points out, were marked with a K (for kalumniator).

He
On January 19, 1911, Kafka writes in his diary: “Once I planned a novel in which two brothers fought each other, one of whom went to America while the other remained in a European prison.” The novel about a brotherly dispute, those modern Kain and Abel (can you imagine Kafka retelling in his novel the parable of the Prodigal Son?) never materialized. But this narrative structure still survived in many pivotal compositions: the first is the short story “A Fratricide” (Ein Brudermord)--written in 1917 and published during Kafka’s lifetime in four separate places (a clear indication that it was considered by him as an essential text)--which gives a short and chilling account of a murder, though the title is the sole indication that the murdered is indeed the murderer’s brother. The second survivor is Amerika (Der Verschollene), Kafka’s first (though unfinished) novel about a young man who had been sent to the New World by his parents after he had an illegal child from their maid. The third possible survivor is the Letter to His Father, which is too often read under the sign of Oedipus, rather than under the sign of Kain.

Vav
God rejected Kain’s sacrificial offering of fruit and vegetables from his land, in favor of Abel’s nobler sacrifice of meat and fat from his flock. This was apparently the trigger for Kain’s heinous act of jealousy. His subsequent punishment was to become a nomad or a vagabond, to no longer be able to cultivate the land, though he soon settled, east of Eden, in a new city that he named after his son, Enoch. Humanity, however, did not descend from the inhabitants of Enoch, but rather from Seth, the third son to whom Adam and Eve gave birth after the death of their second son, and the disappearance of their first son.

Zayin
We read the following entry in Kafka’s diary from May 27, 1914: “I find the letter K offensive, almost disgusting, and yet I use it. This must be very characteristic of me.” The ambivalence that Kafka had toward the letter K, which seems to both repel and lure him, is also present in its Hebrew cousin, the letter kuf, which in Judaism is considered above all else as an abbreviation for kadosh, or sacred--a deeply ambivalent word that can designate something that is either holy or accursed, though in either way the sacred entity must be excluded from the normal sphere. The mark that God cast on Kain is also quite ambivalent: though it is usually conceived as a sign of shame and disgrace (ot kalon in Hebrew), it was clearly meant to be a mark of protection, signaling to anyone who wishes to harm Kain that any act of retaliation will not pass unnoticed, but will in fact be punished by God with an exceptional vengeance.

Chet
Many commentators assume that Kain actually repented for killing Abel and was therefore forgiven by God. As a matter of fact, Kain is not considered as a particularly negative or dark character in many accounts. It was only after the Gnostics elevated him to the rank of a heroic figure and a victim of injustice, that the Jewish and Christian establishment reacted polemically by casting him in later texts as the pure incarnation of evil. In modern depictions of the story, Cain regains from time to time his Gnostic position as a positive figure that resents and resists the fallen world in which we all live, as in Byron’s Cain: A Mystery, and Hesses’s Demian.

Tet
But no one is responsible for the “re-branding” (in every sense) of Kain more than Baudelaire, who “defines the face of the modern, without denying the mark of Kain on its brow,” as Benjamin puts it. His poem, “Abel and Kain” from Les Fleurs du mal, is a perfect manifestation of the currents that seek to interpret the story from the fourth chapter of Genesis in a radical way. Humanity is divided into two groups or classes: the race of Abel and the race of Kain. The race of Abel is the successful one, the ruling class, the lucky throw, comprising of the favored sons or the bourgeoisie, if you like, on whom God smiles complacently (in Hebrew, abel simply means "vanity"). The race of Kain stands for the downtrodden, disinherited, and dispossessed, for the pariahs and the proletariat, if you wish. Nevertheless, it is in the hands of the race of Kain that at the very end of the poem Baudelaire entrusts the task of going up to heaven, grabbing God, and throwing him down to earth.

Yod
Even though, statistically speaking, the race of Kain is the source for a disproportionate amount of murderers and other garden-variety criminals, populating to our day the ever-expanding prisons around the world, no one assumes in his right mind that their crimes are the cause for their wretched condition, since the overwhelming evidences point to the exact opposite. God addresses this unfortunate injustice in Genesis 4:7, probably the most difficult sentence in the whole chapter, which should be translated thus: “If you are doing well [i.e., you are from the race of Abel], you will be forgiven and your honor will be upheld, no matter what you do; but if you are not doing well [i.e. you are from the race of Kain], sin will lurk at your threshold, desiring to have you, and so you must be its master.”

Kaf
At the very end of Kafka’s final letter to Felice, after their engagement was annulled, he finds it appropriate to tell her about his polemic against Brod’s idea that he is “happy in his unhappiness.” Though Kafka does not accept this simplistic judgment of his own condition, he nevertheless elaborates: “‘Finding happiness in unhappiness,’ which means simultaneously ‘finding unhappiness in happiness’ (although the former may be the more decisive)—these words may have been said when Kain was branded. It means being out of step with the world; it means that he who bears the mark is the one who has destroyed the world and, incapable of resurrecting it, is hunted through the ruins. Unhappiness, however, is not what he feels, since unhappiness belongs to life and this he has disposed of, but he sees the fact with inordinate clarity, and in this sphere that amounts to unhappiness.” One of the interesting ideas in this extraordinary passage is that Kafka insists that the forsaken or marked person does not pretend to be innocent (like Job or Jesus), that he is indeed the one who destroyed the world, and is now “hunted through the ruins” of his own making.

Lamed
In the biblical world, a state of lawlessness is not uncommon. Certain crimes, like murder, did not necessarily result in an official trial or punishment, but rather with a permission to kill the offender with impunity. In the Jewish tradition, such condition is best expressed in the phrase damo mutar, “his blood is permitted.” The homo sacer of the Roman world is in fact a native of various biblical heathscapes, beginning with Kain, who was doomed to “be a restless wander on the earth” who could be killed by anyone who found him (Genesis 4:14).

Mem
The usual way to deal with a lawless zone, with this state of legal exception, is to circumscribe it, to try and contain it to very particular events, places, or circumstances. The Bible, however, tells us of a very different way of coping with this situation in which everything is permitted. The mark of Kain, let us remember, is a way to protect him from random acts of violence. Instead of abolishing the state of exception in which Kain found himself, in which it is permitted to spill his blood, God decides to create an exception to the exception. To explain: the rule is that (a) killing a man is considered as homicide; the exception to this rule is that (b) certain offenders, like Kain, could be killed with impunity; the exception to the exception is that (c) a person marked like Kain is no longer forsaken. This final condition (c), however, should not be confused with the regular order (a).

Nun
The mark of Kain is not an isolated case. It first reemerges in the Bible during episodes in which offenders flee to the exceptional zone of the altar, holding one of its four corners, and thus saving their lives, because it was agreed that anyone who entered the sacred space of the altar was untouchable. This practice was then institutionalized and codified in the shelter city (ir miklat). If you killed someone by mistake and without premeditation, any member from the family of the dead was still permitted to “make justice” by killing you. In order to avoid this fate, you had to flee your home and enter the shelter city, where you were protected, and you could not leave this city as long as the High Priest was alive. Upon his death you were pardoned, and were permitted to return home safely. (The Talmud relates that the mother of the High Priest used to visit the shelter city and give alms to its inhabitants, with the request that they will not pray for her son’s death.)

Samech
The ancient shelter city is the inverse image of the modern concentration camp. Though they are both exceptional zones, the camp (an exception to the rule) allows killing, while the shelter city (an exception to the exception) prevents it. In the same manner, while the tattoo on the arm of the camp inhabitant means that he is forsaken, the mark of Kain means that he is safe.

Ayin
If the exception becomes the rule, if anyone is a potential homo sacer whose life is bare life, then the best strategy to resist such a predicament is not to reverse the process backwards, but to work with it, to take it to the extreme, by creating an exception to the exception, or a real state of exception: marks of Kain, shelter cities, where the forsaken can be safe. Sometimes, for some people, a shelter city is an actual place (for blacks, Irish, Jews, homosexuals, and so many others, New York used to be precisely that). But the notions of “city” and “mark” can also be understood metaphorically. They stand for essentially any time or space, any constellation or configuration, in which your life cannot be separated from its form. For Kafka, for example, the mark of Kain was simply called “writing.”

Peh
The Jewish psyche has always feared the flood. In order to be protected, its main strategy has always been to build an arc. The State of Israel is an elaborate attempt to construct such an enduring arc, or a permanent shelter city, where being Jewish (the mark of Kain) is no longer a mark of shame but of power. Today, this place is ruled by the race of Abel, in their relentless oppression of the Palestinian race of Kain.

Tsadi
If today every war could be conceived as a civil war, if it is true that we slowly but surely enter into a global civil war, then this also means that every war is essentially a family dispute, and every homicide is a fratricide. This is not to say that humans are ever going to live in brotherly love. As we all know, there is no dispute that is as bitter as the one between members of the same family. But only those who can see themselves as an extended family (as Loraux demonstrates in The Divided City) could also somehow forgive one another for, and even forget, any deed, as terrible as it may be, in order to continue and share their lives with each other.

Kuf
However one imagines the coming community, whatever the coming politics may be, a single questions must always persist, like a thorn in the flesh of each and every person: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Instead of an Afterward

2009-06-13T09:04:00.002-04:00

for What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays

No light; but rather darkness visible
--John Milton, Paradise Lost

The by now agreed upon English rendition of Foucault’s “dispositif” as “apparatus” is one of those fortunate choices that gains in translation an aspect of the original term still hidden from view. Think, for example, about the “Apparat” from Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” and especially about the uncharacteristically happy ending of this fable, where the operator of the torture machine is being subjected to his own device. Soon after the apparatus is set to inscribe with precise little needles the sentence “Be Just” onto the flesh of the executioner, the mechanism goes out of control, destroying itself while brutally killing its long time operator. In an early gloss on this parable, Agamben suggests that Kafka’s apparatus stands for language itself. He claims that “the ultimate sense of language...is the commandment ‘Be Just.’ Nonetheless, precisely the sense of this commandment is what the machine of language is absolutely incapable of understanding.” Twenty years later, “What is an Apparatus?” elaborates on the same idea, now calling language “the most ancient of apparatuses -- one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primate inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that he was about to face.” but the idea that language can be conceived as an apparatus dates back to Freud’s first book, On Aphasia, where he speaks explicitly and consistently about “the speech apparatus” as the exclusive field of his investigation. This is a clever move that enabled Freud to treat language as a sort of a complex machine that can break down from time to time in a thousand different ways, thus leading to aphasia, this partial or colossal loss of the capacity to produce or understand language, this array of speech impairments. Given Agamben’s call for a relentless fight, or a hand-to-hand struggle, with the apparatuses in which our life is captured, it could be helpful to follow the strategies embedded in Freud’s analysis. For example, Freud is already interested at this early stage in what we call today a “Freudian slip:” this fleeting breakdown of the speech apparatus. One way to cope with our oppressive apparatuses is therefore to notice their pathologies in everyday life, their blemishes or blunders, which might signal deeper or broader vulnerabilities still hidden from sight.

The method of comprehending a function by observing its dysfunction is also instrumental in approaching Agamben’s second essay in this book, “The Friend.” At its core you will find an exegesis on “the ontological basis of Aristotle’s theory of friendship,” which begins with the latter’s curious and seemingly unimpressive observation that “he who sees senses that he is seeing, he who hears senses that he is hearing, he who walks senses that he is walking.” What happens, however, when you lose this sensation of being, this sixth sense or “inner touch” (as Daniel Heller-Roazen calls it)? Neurophysiologists call the sense of one’s own body “proprioception.” You have a sense of the external world and a sense of your internal world, but people rarely think about the perception of their own selves. Oliver Sacks explains the idea of proprioception by saying: “If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self--himself--he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.” The perception of our own being is arguably the most important sensation that we have, but precisely because of its simplicity and familiarity it usually escapes our attention. This is what stands behind Sacks’ story about Christina, “The Disembodied Lady,” who overnight had to face the horror of no longer sensing her body as her own. She was not paralyzed: after three months she re-learned how to walk, but she could no longer sense that she was walking. This condition is not as abnormal as it may sound, since babies also have virtually no proprioception. Christina’s uniqueness lies in her ability to use language and share her experience (or its lack thereof) with other people, thus offering us a rare window into Agamben’s main idea in his essay: that friendship is the shared sensation of being. Sacks compares Christina’s case with one of the characters from Wittgenstein’s On Certainty who doubts the existence of his own body. Wittgenstein famously objects anyone who would raise his hand and utter a sentence like, “I know that this is my hand,” which the philosopher takes to be neither true nor false, but merely nonsensical. There is, however, at least one person in the world towards whom Wittgenstein would probably make an exception. As counter intuitive as it may sound, for Christina, the woman who could not sense that she exists, saying, “I know that this is my hand” would make perfect, painful, sense.

Similarly, the guiding question in Agamben final essay, “What is the Contemporary?” calls forth a particular experience that cannot be expressed, that dissipates at the moment in which one utters the words, “I am at this moment contemporary” (which is like saying, “I am fashionable,” or “I am cool”--the moment you say it, you lose what you thought that you have). Nevertheless, one way to sense, so to speak, contemporariness, can be found in Agamben’s passages dedicated to the sensation of darkness, where he claims that to be contemporary is to be able to perceive this darkness. “Light,” as he comments elsewhere, “is only the coming to itself of the dark.” There seems to be little hope in his philosophy that light really has the capacity to enlighten. A light can only flicker, like a distant star, and the darkness that surrounds it is not meant to understand it. In fact, even the heavenly “total darkness” that we see at night is considered as “the testimony of a time in which the stars did not yet shine.” Even Arendt’s Gnostic faith in the power of singular bright “men in dark times” to ever more slightly make a difference in this world does not seem to play the same role in his thought. That said, it is also clear that Agamben is possessed by an exigency, a demand to which he cannot not answer: it is difficult to miss (though many still do) that in all his writings he tries to bear witness to a certain light, or at least a glimmer. If you ever tried to catch fireflies with your hand on a hot summer night, you may have experienced this curious philosophical comportment. As a contemporary, Agamben operates within what may be called a “dialectic of endarkenment,” by which I mean a perpetual attempt “to perceive, in the darkness of the present, this light that strives to reach us but cannot.”

Book Bash

2009-05-30T16:11:00.004-04:00

To mark the publication of Giorgio Agamben’s What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays (Stanford University Press), please join the translators David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella for a celebration of the work of one the world’s leading philosophers and radical thinkers. The three essays collected in this new book offer a succinct introduction to Agamben’s recent work through an investigation of Foucault's notion of “apparatus” (or dispositif), a meditation on the intimate link of philosophy to friendship, and a reflection on the singular relation with one’s own time that we call contemporariness. The evening will also include a sneak-peak reading from Agamben's forthcoming book, Nudity.

Friday, June 5th, 7pm
Bluestockings Books, 172 Allen Street, New York City (directions)

Agamben on Tiqqun

2009-04-23T14:25:00.007-04:00

Agamben sur Tiqqun
Uploaded by contretempsweb2

Paris, April 19, 2009

Marx in Scranton

2009-04-06T11:29:00.026-04:00

“People will never go out of business.”
-M. Scott

Melville was probably the first great writer to use the workplace as the focal point of his stories. It is easy to forget that the Pequod, the ship in Moby Dick, was essentially a workplace, conducting a very risky business, funded by what we call today venture capital, with workers who received dividends based on future profits. Melville had little trouble saturating his novel about this floating workplace, headed by an insane boss, on a mission to hunt the great white whale, with many hair-raising tales (as well as endless hairsplitting details). But he probably had much more difficult time when he attempted to achieve the same level of dramatic effect in a much shorter story, which also revolves around a workplace: the office of a Wall Street lawyer. With no cannibals, harpoons, and the great expanse of the ocean, Melville had to conceive a different narrative scheme to animate his novelette. His solution was to make his hero, Bartleby, a competent scrivener who joins the office in the beginning of the story, utterly inoperative. Whatever his (rather congenial) boss asked him to do, Bartleby replied, “I prefer not to.” The tumult in the workplace sparked by this seemingly innocuous catchphrase and its stoic utterer was more than enough to make from “Bartleby, the Scrivener” a belated classic.

This is not to say, however, that Melville, a native of Manhattan, the great capital of capitalism, was simply trying to glorify the workplace for the enjoyment of the bourgeoisie. The workplace at stake in both Moby Dick and Bartleby is actually a battlefield between capitalist forces and their antagonists. In the former example, Captain Ahab is not interested at all in the enterprise of systematic whale hunting, which aims to reduce these magnificent animals into barrels of blubber. His monomania was to catch Moby Dick, a singular whale (which thus becomes the indisputable hero of this novel, without uttering a single sentence) not for the sake of profit, but for the sake of revenge. This is what leads this capitalist venture, and the workplace at its center, to its final demise at the story’s end. In the example of Bartleby, the refusal to work (or, more precisely, the preference not to work, which was also a preference not to go home after work, and then not to leave after he was let go) was not as devastating. Nevertheless, it was disturbing enough to lead the business to relocated to a new office, merely to get rid of the unsightly sight of a workless worker.

The relationship between American culture and the capitalist machine is much more subversive than what one may expect. American culture rarely deals with the end of the capitalist world as we know it, its complete annihilation for the sake of some communist utopia, since it simply knows better. Instead, it looks for various ways to subvert the machine, depict its blunders, and show its utter irrelevance to the true life of human beings. A paradigmatic example is, of course, Chaplin’s Modern Times. But I would like to speak now of a very interesting contemporary example which is full with beautiful insights about the current condition of late capitalism: The American television comedy, The Office.

What could ever happen in the Scranton branch of a corporate paper company? Nothing much, if you ask the Marxist critics who like to talk about the alienation of labor. Just a bunch of disaffected workers sitting in a nondescript workplace reaping some profit for the faceless capitalist pig sitting in his Manhattan headquarter. Besides, it is just a cookie-cutter American TV series, for heaven’s sake, produced in order to entertain the mass consumers to death. But if you look closer, you will discover a very curious strategy for action against (or through, or by means of) capitalism, in the direct tradition of Melville and Chaplin.

Michael Scott, the office’s boss, bears various similarities to Ahab, Bartleby, and the factory worker in Modern Times: either intentionally or unintentionally, they don’t come to the workplace in order to be the good, diligent, and industrious workers-machines that the capitalist hopes to find there, but to somehow undermine this workplace as we think that we know it. Though Scott loves his workplace (it is his whole life), he does not like to work, and so he involves his mystified underlings (who, besides one eccentric exception, seem to have very little respect for him) with various activities that have absolutely nothing to do with productivity. To the surprise of all, the Scranton branch is actually declared as the most profitable branch of them all. This is the reason why the latest episodes, where a new, efficient, and no-nonsense boss is introduced into the plot-line is so unnerving to watch, because it jeopardizes all that the office managed to achieved over the years. In a nutshell, The Office shows us how to transform the grey workplace into the many colors of the tree of life; how to divert the alienation of labor in such a way that it can draw humanity a little bit closer; and how to insist that people are not reduced to the hours that they can work, since they are first and foremost reflected through the relationships they can have with each other.

Marx in South Park

2009-03-30T08:19:00.007-04:00

Today we slowly come to realize that Benjamin's thesis could not be closer to the truth: capitalism is a religion. But one question remains open: which religion was he thinking about? The latest episode of South Park--one of the most intelligent voices in American discourse that sometimes manages to insert a truly radical message behind its scatological and popular facade--brilliantly retells the Jesus narrative in terms of the present economic crisis. In this version, however, Kyle "pays for our debts so we could spend once more." So please put aside for a moment your rarefied intellectual taste and enjoy yourself, for a change:

The Future of Détournement is Here

2009-03-12T09:10:00.017-04:00

Here is a couple of unbelievable mashups composed from a myriad of youtube videos. They prove, among other things, that it is not necessary to sample canonical sources in order to mix them up into a new subversive composition. As Benjamin explains, the documents of the ruling class are documents of barbarism, and they remain as such even after they are being reused, by cutting and pasting them into a new, supposedly liberating, document. But what happens when your source material, your found object, is thoroughly devoid of any trace of such barbarism? Well, the answer, as those videos clearly show, is a new form of humanism.

Thru-You, by Kutiman

The Egg and the Wall

2009-02-20T12:13:00.022-05:00

"It is our duty as human beings: to put the egg together again. For each of us, sir, is Humpty Dumpty. And to help him is to help ourselves."
-Paul Auster

This week, Haruki Murakami received the Jerusalem Prize in literature. His speech was directed at those who advised him not to come to accept this Israeli honor while the Palestinian wound from the Gaza massacre remains open. His reply was as follows:

"Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg."

Yes, he said, “the egg” in this metaphor could be the unarmed Palestinian civilians who were crushed by the ruthless Israeli army machine, which is “the wall.” But there is, he told the audience of Israeli dignitaries, another, deeper, way to interpret this metaphor:

“Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: It is The System. The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others -- coldly, efficiently, systematically.”

But what is this wall, this “System,” other than the various apparatuses that try to capture our lives, which Murakami sees as a fragile egg? And what happens when an egg becomes a part of the wall? One way to deal with these and other related questions lies in the origin of this metaphor: the nursery rhyme about Humpty-Dumpty who “sat on a wall” and “had a great fall,” which “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” did not have the power to amend (notice that the rhyme is essentially a riddle, since it nowhere mentions that Humpty-Dumpty is an egg).

Those who are familiar with the writings of Giorgio Agamben sometimes get the feeling that he envisions the members of the coming community as if they were Humpty-Dumptys, sitting on a wall that divides two opposing realms. In Agamben’s terminology, this wall is called a “threshold,” or a “zone of indistinction,” and the two realms are whatever bipolar division our tradition posits: political life and biological life, culture and nature, the universal and the particular, man and animal, et cetera. Agamben seems to think that instead of choosing one side, or canceling the dualism altogether, our proper place is Humpty-Dumpty’s place: to sit on a wall, and hence to prepare for the great fall.

Asked about this perilous condition, Agamben replied after a short moment of hesitation: “Yes, but Humpty-Dumpty does not break!” This is certainly wrong if the nursery rhyme is considered. But in Lewis Caroll’s retelling of the story this is indeed what happens (or rather, does not happen): Alice has a long and lovely conversation with Humpty-Dumpty, but at the end of the chapter the egg remains intact, as Alice proceeds to her next adventure.

Even though Alice, like every English child of her generation, knows the nursery rhyme by heart, she admits that the last line of this little poem, which predicts the seemingly inevitable downfall of this curious egg-person, is “almost too long.” On the ground of the above considerations, it seems that this riddle-in-rhyme could be rewritten for our times as follows:

Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty-Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t make Humpty-Dumpty fall again.

The Specter of Venice

2009-02-12T11:08:00.009-05:00

"Spectrality is a form of life; a posthumous or complementary life that begins only when everything is finished. Spectrality thus has, with respect to life, the incomparable grace and astuteness of that which is completed, the courtesy and precision of those who no longer have anything ahead of them."

[An excerpt from Giorgio Agamben's Nudities, forthcoming in Stanford University Press.]

Apparatus of Capture

2009-01-31T16:42:00.022-05:00

One of the most intriguing texts in Deleuze’s oeuvre dedicated to political philosophy is “7000 B.C.: Apparatus of Capture,” the thirteenth chapter in A Thousand Plateaus. I have no intention to analyze here this extremely intricate piece, but only to make two short comments that try to connect the loaded title and the strange illustration that set it in motion (a version of which appears above).

First, the title. You may assume that “apparatus” stands for the French dispositif, a notion that was very dear to Foucault at the time, and to which Deleuze dedicated a later essay, entitled “What is a Dispositif?” As a matter of fact, the word in A Thousand Plateaus is simply appareil. There is, however, no clear difference between what Foucault calls dispositif and what Deleuze calls appareil, which may give another justification for the common translation of both into a single English word: apparatus.

So what is an apparatus? The most lucid explanation of this decisive notion can be found in a recent essay by Agamben, forthcoming in English in a book bearing on its cover this very question. Yet a provisional answer can be given on the mere ground of the illustration in the beginning of “Apparatus of Capture.” Its source is the Dictionnaire economique, published in 1732 by Noel Chomel. According to the List of Illustrations at the end of A Thousand Plateaus, it appears under the entry Perdix (Partridge), but it can actually be found under the entry Filet (net). This little slip is more meaningful and symbolic than it seems. In order to understand why, let us look closer at this fascinating document.

Chomel understands economy, the subject matter of his dictionary, in a classical, rather than a modern sense. If you expect to learn about credit, mortgage, labor, derivatives, or sub-prime (as one would expect from a recent dictionary on the subject), you will be gravely disappointed. But if you want to learn how to build a pigsty, how to prepare a marinated hen, how to hunt deer, how to grow radishes, how to avoid smelly urine, how to sleep soundly, or how to distinguish between the milk of a cow, a goat, and a woman, then you are in the right place. Anything that has to do with the management of the home (or the oikos, from which the word economy derives) including its living inhabitants (animals, plants, but also humans, to a lesser degree) can be found in this magnificent book.

Today we like to distinguish between home and work, but this separation would not make much sense to many people before the nineteenth century. This is why Chomel’s book could be a fruitful starting point for a conversation about the recent rise of people who “work from home.” There is also a striking similarity between Chomel’s thoroughly informative encyclopedia and the current torrent of magazines dedicated to various aspects of the movement that we call “Do It (cooking, sewing, building, growing…) Yourself,” which could actually be traced back to Thoreau’s Walden in the middle of the nineteenth century. What you see when you open Chomel’s dictionary is therefore a more generous sense of the word “economy” than the restricted meaning that we give the word today. Call it, if you like, “pre-alienated economy.”

Why, then, an “apparatus of capture”? In “What is an Apparatus?” Agamben reveals the surprising link between the Greek oikonomia and the Latin dispositio, between economy and apparatus. He eventually defines an apparatus as “literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.” With his detailed entries and meticulous illustrations, Chomel offers his contemporaries useful apparatuses to capture living beings, beautifully exemplified by the various nets reproduced here (please excuse the quality: I lacked the appropriate apparatus to capture these illustrations).

Chomel, of course, was only interested in apparatuses that can capture animals and plants, but not people, though his inclusion of various entries about human health in his economic dictionary is certainly suspicious. As Foucault shows, this tendency intensified at the end of the eighteenth century, giving rise to a myriad of apparatuses designed specifically in order to capture human lives, which is what we call today “biopower” and “biopolitics.” Nevertheless, in view of Agamben’s recent research (especially The Reign and the Glory), alongside the publication of Foucault’s lectures (especially The Birth of Biopolitics), we could also easily speak about “bioeconomy.”

Chomel’s dictionary may illustrate the continuous “spillage” of economic apparatuses from the animal and plant kingdom to the human one. That this lesson was already very familiar and successfully practiced by a young man from Nazareth around year zero may be proved by his near-obsessive use of economic metaphors in his sermons and miracles targeted at potential followers. Nets that capture fish can also capture people.

The Intellectual Underclass

2009-01-26T14:03:00.030-05:00

Written by a distinguished member of the Institute for Pataphysical Research, the University of Muri

In a recent piece for the New York Times, Stanley Fish dubbed himself "The Last Professor." Academia, he bemoans, is not what it used to be. The tenured professor is by now a rare breed, overrun by a horde of adjuncts. The pure spirit of the humanities dwindles, while the instrumental rationalism of more "practical" disciplines triumphs. It is as if (and here his argument is only implicit) the whole edifice of western civilization rests upon the shoulders of those distinguished professors with their six figures annual salary.

What Fish and Co. fail to understand is that this is by no means the end; it is just a new beginning. After two hundred years in which the academic system reigned supreme, we are witnessing today the slow but steady rise of an intellectual underclass. The prototype of this new class may indeed be the adjunct professor, who gets paid "by the pound" for each class that he teaches, but next to him stand strong a whole array of intellectuals that cannot find (or do not care for) a privileged place within the university system. This intellectual underclass, toiling in the sweatshops of spirit, is about to mount a silent revolution. It is from the ranks of the gritty intellectual underclass, and not the moribund intellectual bourgeoisie, that the true thinkers of the new century will rise.

We are looking for neither a party nor a union to represent the intellectual underclass, in an attempt to get a more lucrative salary or better benefits. This is certainly important, but it is far from being the main problem that the intellectual underclass is facing today. In a much more elementary level, what we need is first and foremost a true consciousness that we exist. Then we also need to start feeling pride in our existence, conviction in our integrity, and confidence about our potential power. We are neither outcasts, nor victims, nor exceptions. We (are about to become the new) rule. The academy is like a dam that was designed to contain the critical mass of the intelligentsia, making sure that it will not overflow. But today this dam is full of cracks, and the water begins to flood the valley that was kept artificially dry for too long.

One of the crucial things that Marx remained blind to (which is usually true about most thinkers) was his own predicament. Living in abject poverty in a small London flat while working in the British Library, he was not the bourgeois that he sometimes pretended to be. He was also not a proletarian, because reading, thinking, and writing cannot be considered (at least in Arendt's eyes) as labor. Rather, Marx was one of the founding fathers of the intellectual underclass.

During a meeting of Cornell's literature department to decide the fate of Nabokov's tenure, one of the professors objected by saying that allowing a writer to be a part of a literature department is not unlike letting an elephant to be a zookeeper. This is to prove that established professors could still have a good insight once in a while. Indeed: professors are zookeepers, keeping in orderly cages specimens of untamed life for all to look at from a safe distance.

In a recent article in Haaretz, Yitzhak Laor writes about one of his repeated nightmares, in which "professor Benjamin eventually managed to move to Israel, to get his tenure, to become an average schemer, and to refuse to accept an Arab student to his department, even though such an acceptance was the student's only way to enter the country." With this in mind, he confesses that he cannot help but muse "how beautiful the suicide on the French-Spanish border seems at times."

Notwithstanding Agamben

2009-01-20T14:02:00.002-05:00

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them - that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.
- Barack Hussein Obama

I don’t know about you, and I am not even entirely sure about myself, but I do have a very strong feeling that today Hannah Arendt is celebrating up there in heaven.

How to Disappear Completely

2009-01-14T11:25:00.006-05:00

Written by Invisible Man

Power tends to fear a vacuum. This is why Agamben asks in The Coming Community to expose “in every form one’s own amorphousness and in every act one’s own inactuality.” The guiding question of this formless form of life could therefore be posed as follows: How to disappear completely, or at least almost completely? I often tried, with little success, to make some practical sense of this question, until I read this passage from Kafka’s diary:

“Many years ago I sat one day, in a sad enough mood, on the slope of the Laurenziberg [a hill at the center of Prague]. I went over the wishes that I wanted to realize in life. I found that the most important or the most delightful was the wish to attain a view of life (and -- this was necessarily bound up with it -- to convince others of it in writing), in which life, while still retaining its full-bodied rise and fall, would simultaneously be recognized no less clearly as a nothing, a dream, a dim hovering. A beautiful wish, perhaps, if I had wished it rightly.”

Kafka’s readers are easy to embrace his celebrated worldview, with its intricate bureaucracy and nightmarish senselessness. They are much less receptive to the unique lifeview portrayed in his writings, which is lucidly defined in this diary entry as the tension between presence (life’s “full-bodied rise and fall”) and absence (“a nothing, a dream, a dim hovering”). Notice how all the characters in Kafka’s three novels have a specific task that they need to fulfill or a particular role that completely consumes their existence. Arendt refers to these characters as “jobholders,” before contrasting those “omnicompitenet” beings with the protagonists, the three K.s, who are the only exceptions to this rigid literary rule (Joseph K. from The Castle is a land surveyor by name but not by practice). Kafka’s unheroic hero remains hovering in his predicament, abandoned in his state of limbo, suspended in his whateverness. Though Arendt may be right that there is nothing extraordinary about such “man of good will” who “may be anybody and everybody,” this pariah is the unmistakable model for the new vision of life that first came to Kafka while he was sitting on the slopes of the Laurenziberg hill, like a Moses without a people on the Mount Sinai of our modern times.

What we are witnessing here could be seen as a blueprint for a distinctive form of life, but only as long as we realize that this “form is empty, and emptiness is form.” The notion of emptiness crystalized in this famous line from the Budhist Heart Sutra is one of those powerful ideas that proves why Western philosophy (and Agamben in particular) could be better off paying closer attention to its Eastern ally. The Tao Te Ching, attributed to Laozi, formulates this idea in one of its earliest forms:

“Thirty spokes are united in one hub. It is in its emptiness, where the usefulness of the cart is. Clay is heated and a pot is made. It is in its emptiness, where the usefulness of the pot is. Doors and windows are chiseled out. It is in its emptiness, where the usefulness of a room is. Thus, there is presence for the benefit, there is non-presence for the use.”

Laozi distinguishes here presence from absence by saying that the former is beneficial (in actuality) while the latter is useful (in potentiality). For example, the benefit of a cup is that one may drink tea from it. But the cup cannot be useful unless it is empty. Notice that the usefulness of what is not, in opposition to the benefit of what is, can never be exhausted. The doorknob may be broken because of misuse or overuse, but the threshold through which you pass every day will never be worn out. This is true not only about objects but also about persons. Emptiness can inform a potentially powerful and inexhaustible way of life, which is the life, if you like, of Agamben’s “man without content.” Zhuangzi, Laozi’s successor, clarifies this idea through a simple parable: Imagine that you cross a calm river by boat, when suddenly an empty boat happens to bump into yours. Even if you have hot and quick temper, Zhuangzi reasons, you will not get angry at the empty boat. But if there was a man in the other boat, you will surely shout at him. Emptiness, in opposition to fullness, is therefore a prime strategy of a life that can evade the scrutiny of power: “If man could succeed in making himself empty, and in that way wander through the world, then who could do him harm?”

Inconspicuousness and even blandness are basic virtues that may enable a person to achieve a state of emptiness. In order to see this point we do not need to consult the texts of ancient Chinese masters. All that it takes is to glance at a few passages written by two modern masters from Paris, France. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari call “becoming-imperceptible” the way by which somebody can “be like everybody else.” In opposition to the usual laments about conformism, they claim that not everybody can become everybody, since “to go unnoticed is by no means easy. To be a stranger, even to one’s doorman or neighbors,” to “blend in with the walls,” requires a certain “asceticism,” “sobriety,” and “elegance.” Deleuze, by the way, was a dedicated practitioner of this method: his most remarkable (one might say eccentric) philosophical thought never deterred him from living the most unremarkable (one might say boring) everyday life -- a fact that certainly pains his prospective biographers. Today, the mundane became one of our greatest fears. What we fail to realize is that to live a resolutely mundane life simply means to achieve a truly worldly being (from the Latin mundus) rather than a heavenly being, to embrace the profane order rather than the sacred order.

Open Call for Notes

2008-12-15T08:02:00.000-05:00

To celebrate the first birthday of “notes for the coming community” (and, actually, the third anniversary of the now defunct “form of life,” to those who have been following my writings since then), I would like to invite you to submit a short piece to be published in this humble venue. The site is just shy of a thousand hits a month, and it seems to draw many dedicated readers from around the world, so the lack of prestige may be compensated by ample exposure. There are no guidelines other than the previous notes, though, of course, the point of this experiment is to expand the vision rather than emulate it.

Please send your submissions to my formoflife account at google’s mail service.

Terrorism or Tragicomedy?

2008-11-24T08:40:00.005-05:00

by Giorgio Agamben

[first published in Libération, November 19, 2008. Translation courtesy of Semiotext(e).]

On the morning of November 11, 150 police officers, most of which belonged to the anti-terrorist brigades, surrounded a village of 350 inhabitants on the Millevaches plateau, before raiding a farm in order to arrest nine young people (who ran the local grocery store and tried to revive the cultural life of the village). Four days later, these nine people were sent before an anti-terrorist judge and “accused of criminal conspiracy with terrorist intentions.” The newspapers reported that the Ministry of the Interior and the Secretary of State “had congratulated local and state police for their diligence.” Everything is in order, or so it would appear. But let’s try to examine the facts a little more closely and grasp the reasons and the results of this “diligence.”

First the reasons: the young people under investigation “were tracked by the police because they belonged to the ultra-left and the anarcho autonomous milieu.” As the entourage of the Ministry of the Interior specifies, “their discourse is very radical and they have links with foreign groups.” But there is more: certain of the suspects “participate regularly in political demonstrations,” for example, “in protests against EDVIG [a database of “potential suspects” held by the French police] and against the intensification of laws restricting immigration.” So political activism (this is the only possible meaning of linguistic monstrosities such as “anarcho autonomous milieu”), the active exercise of political freedoms, and the employment of a radical discourse are therefore sufficient reasons to call in the anti-terrorist division of the police (SDAT) and the central intelligence office of the Interior (DCRI). But anyone possessing a minimum of political conscience could not help sharing the concerns of these young people when faced with the degradations of democracy entailed by the EDVIG database, biometrical technologies, and the hardening of immigration laws.

As for the results, one might expect that investigators found weapons, explosives and Molotov cocktails on the farm in Millevaches. Far from it. SDAT officers discovered “documents containing detailed information on railway transportation, including exact arrival and departure times of trains.” In plain French: an SNCF train schedule. But they also confiscated “climbing gear.” In simple French: a ladder, such as one might find in any country house.

Now let’s turn our attention to the suspects and, above all, to the presumed head of this terrorist gang, “a 33 year old leader from a well-off Parisian background, living off an allowance from his parents.” This is Julien Coupat, a young philosopher who (with some friends) formerly published Tiqqun, a journal whose political analyses – while no doubt debatable – count among the most intelligent of our time. I knew Julien Coupat during that period and, from an intellectual point of view, I continue to hold him in high esteem.

Let’s move on and examine the only concrete fact in this whole story. The suspects’ activities are supposedly connected with criminal acts against the SNCF that on November 8 caused delays of certain TGV trains on the Paris-Lille line. The devices in question, if we are to believe the declarations of the police and the SNCF agents themselves, can in no way cause harm to people: they can, in the worst case, hinder communications between trains causing delays. In Italy, trains are often late, but so far no one has dreamed of accusing the national railway of terrorism. It’s a case of minor offenses, even if we don’t condone them. On November 13, a police report prudently affirmed that there are perhaps “perpetrators among those in custody, but it is not possible to attribute a criminal act to any one of them.”

The only possible conclusion to this shadowy affair is that those engaged in activism against the (in any case debatable) ways social and economic problems are managed today are considered ipso facto as potential terrorists, when not even one act can justify this accusation. We must have the courage to say with clarity that today, numerous European countries (in particular France and Italy), have introduced laws and police measures that we would previously have judged barbaric and anti-democratic, and that these are no less extreme than those put into effect in Italy under fascism. One such measure authorizes the detention for ninety-six hours of a group of young – perhaps careless – people, to whom “it is not possible to attribute a criminal act.” Another, equally serious, is the adoption of laws that criminalize association, the formulations of which are left intentionally vague, which allow the classification of political acts as having terrorist “intentions” or “inclinations,” acts that up to now were never considered as means to terroristic ends.

The present state of art is unworthy of the future form of life

2008-11-22T14:38:00.004-05:00

Pipilotti Rist, "Pour Your Body Out (7534 Cubic Meters),” Museum of Modern Art, New York

Educative Violence

2008-11-19T10:10:00.010-05:00

Towards the end of On Violence, Arendt makes the following side-remark without developing it any further:

“For better or worse -- and I think there is every reason to be fearful as well as hopeful -- the really new and potential revolutionary class in society will consist of intellectuals, and their potential power, as yet unrealized, is very great, perhaps too great for the good of mankind. But these are speculations.”

You could hear an echo of this idea, which we may call “intellectual violence,” in Agamben’s early (and still untranslated) essay, “On the Limits of Violence.” Following in Arendt’s footsteps, he begins by admitting that on the face of it any link between violence and politics seems contradictory, because politics is the sphere of language, of persuasion, from which brute violence is strictly excluded. Nevertheless, Agamben argues that today we are witnessing with our own eyes the emergence of a new phenomenon that he calls “linguistic violence.” Probably the most obvious example for the way by which the modern age transforms the apparatus of language into a special form of violence is propaganda (in late capitalism, we seem to prefer the terms “public relations” or “advertisement”). Violence can become an integral part of language at the moment in which language crosses the thin line between rational persuasion and psychological manipulation. On the other hand, one could add that today it becomes clear how certain acts that we would traditionally call “violent” -- from independent terrorist attacks to established wars -- are nothing but twisted means of persuasion or manipulation of public opinion. Linguistic means and violent means -- which were completely separated in Arendt’s mind -- therefore enter a dangerous zone of indetermination, where the expression “linguistic violence” no longer appears to be contradictory at all. Agamben further claims that even the modern world of letters could be suffused with the sort of powerful linguistic violence that already led Plato to call for the banning of poetry from the Greek city. Agamben therefore treats Sade as an example of an author who exercised, by means of his writings, a form of intellectual violence that

"would go on having perpetual effect, in such a way that so long as I lived, at every hour of the day and as I lay sleeping at night, I would be constantly the cause of a particular disorder, and that this disorder might broaden to the point where it brought about a general corruption so universal or a disturbance so formal that its effects would still be felt even after my life was over"

The hypothesis that I would like to advance is that the field of human actions that we have placed under the provisional titles “intellectual violence” and “linguistic violence” is precisely what Benjamin calls “pure violence.” In “Critique of Violence,” Benjamin describes his adjacent notion “divine violence” as certain acts of God that have nothing to do with laws or boundaries, acts that are not meant as His retribution for the wrongdoing of the people. Such divine acts are supposed to evoke in the people neither fear nor guilt, but expiation or atonement. When humans witness an act of divine violence they usually come to change their ways, their minds and hearts, but not because of the threat that breaking God’s word will lead to dire consequences (like little children who finish their lunch only to be allowed to go out and play). Though divine violence might certainly be lethal, its aim is not the bloody annihilation of the bare lives of its victims, but first and foremost the transformation of the form of life of those who remain alive.

Benjamin’s only example of this divine violence is the Biblical story of Korah and his followers, who rebelled against Moses and were consequently swallowed alive by the earth. But I think that even more illustrative is the story of Jonah, to whom Scholem dedicated “On Jonah and the Concept of Justice,” an essay from 1919 that appears to be the model for Benjamin’s conception of divine violence. Scholem explains that what is so streaking about the Book of Jonah is its substitution of law for justice. Since it contains very little concrete prophesy, it is essentially a “pedagogical” or “didactic” book: “A human being is taught a lesson about the order of what is just. And there is indeed no figure more representative for the teacher than God himself, nor one more representative for the student than the prophet.” Jonah’s rebellion against God and his subsequent expiation (after spending three days and three nights inside the belly of a whale) is thus essentially a story about the education of the prophet, who is presented to the reader, according to Scholem, as “a childlike person.”

Going back to Benjamin’s essay, we could now easily understand his decision to move away from the notion of divine violence to an assertion that is one of the most decisive, and most neglected, in his entire cryptic essay: “This divine violence,” he writes, “is not only attested by religious tradition but is also found in present-day life in at least one sanctioned manifestation. Educative violence (erzieherische Gewalt), which in its perfect form stands outside the law, is one of its manifestations.” How, then, are we to understand this “educative violence”? In the narrow sense, it could stand for the (rather ineffective and usually controversial) violent measures (from spanking to detention and beyond) used by teachers or parents in order to achieve their pedagogical goals. But in a more general sense, one could define any effective form of education as a form of pure, immediate, and bloodless violence that does not appeal to a law or an end, but to a different way of thinking or living. Of course, education in this sense goes way beyond what we tend to reduce to “formal education” within the confines of the “education system.” The state’s monopoly on educative violence in the past two centuries is quite impressive, but far from being complete. Moreover, frontal education, with its fixation on the presence of a teacher and a student one in front of the other, is clearly not the only possible method to influence the way people think and act. From this perspective, education can be strictly distinguished from indoctrination (into an explicit or implicit set of laws or rules). In fact, education could be seen as something that you do to yourself much more than something that is done to you. Our model here could be the autodidact, the self-taught person, who is perhaps the pure incarnation of what Agamben calls in his early essay "self-violence." Any linguistic or intellectual endeavor, any human deed or act, that has the power to make or remake a human being, that allows one to see or do things differently, that has some ethical or political effect, has from this perspective an educative power.

Despite Arendt’s struggle against the confusion of violence with power, the sphere of the coming political power could therefore be ultimately indistinguishable from the sphere of pure violence, as long as both are conceived in their intellectual, linguistic, or educative manifestations. Following this lead, it becomes apparent why the opposite of bloody wars is not peace, but what we sometimes call “cultural war” -- which could be understood as the pure form of civil war -- where the guiding question is not whether we are going to live, but how are we going to live. The true threat (or blessing) is not necessarily death, but a different form of life, which is, when push comes to shove, what we need to fight for (or against). But it is also important not to forget Arendt’s warning that “words used for the purpose of fighting lose their quality of speech; they become clichés,” which then leads to an “impotent language, degraded to pure instrument,” as Benjamin once put it. Linguistic, intellectual, or educative violence could properly be called “pure” only when it remains within a sphere of means that are not directed at a particular or ultimate end, only which it has nothing whatsoever to do with law, only when it merges with the life that Agamben calls “form-of-life,” for which what is at stake in its way of living is living itself, and what is above all at stake in living itself is a way of life.

The Sacrament of Language

2008-11-04T12:47:00.016-05:00

[Provisional translation of pp. 89-90 from Agamben’s new book, Il Sacramento del linguaggio: Archeologia del giuramento (Homo Sacer II, 3) Editori Laterza, 2008.]

Let us try to arrange in a series of theses the new understanding of the phenomenon of the oath that arises from the analysis developed hitherto.

1. Studies have always explained, in a more or less explicit manner, the institute of oath through a reference to the megico-religious sphere, to a divine power, or to a “religious force” that intervenes in order to guarantee the effective punishment of perjury. With a curious circularity, the oath is therefore interpreted, as in Hesiod, as what serves to prevent perjury. Our hypothesis is exactly the reverse: the megico-religious sphere does not preexist, logically speaking, the oath, since it is the oath. The oath is an originary performative experience of speech, which can in turn explain the phenomenon of religion (and law, which is closely connected to religion). This is the reason why horkos, or oath, is considered in the classical world as the more ancient entity, the only potential power to which the gods must submit. In monotheism, God is also identified with the oath: God is the being whose word is an oath, or the being that coincides with the true and effective word in principio.

2. The oath can therefore be properly understood within the context of those institutes, like fides, or faith, where it functions as the performative affirmation of truth and the reliability of speech. The horkia are par excellence pista, trustworthy, and the pagan gods summon in a performative way the oath essentially as a testimony to this trust. Monotheistic religions, Christianity above all, inherited through the institute of oath the centrality of faith in the word as the essential content of the religious experience. Christianity is, properly speaking, a religion and a deification of logos. The attempt to reconcile faith as a performative experience of veridiction, or truth-telling, with the belief in a series of assertive dogmas, is the service and, at the same time, the central contradiction of the Church. Overlooking a perspicuous evangelical credo, the Church henceforth forces what is technically considered as an oath and a curse into specific juridical institutions. This is the reason why philosophy, which does not try to fixate veridiction within a system of codified truth but, in each and every event of language, leads to the word and exposes the veridiction on which it is founded, is necessarily what we may call vera religio.

3. It is in this sense that we need to understand the essential proximity between the oath and sacratio (or devotio). We have interpreted sacertas as an originary performance of power by means of the production of a naked life that can be killed but not sacrificed. To this we must now add that even more than being a sacrament of power, the oath is the consecration of living beings through speech and according to speech. The oath can function as the sacrament of power insofar as it is, above all, the sacrament of language. This original sacratio that finds its place in the institute of oath takes the technical form of a curse, of a politiké ara, which accompanies the proclamation of the law. The law, in this sense, is constitutively tied with the curse. Only a politics that breaks this original connection with the curse could one day eventually bring about the emergence of another use for speech and law.

2008-10-24T23:37:00.004-04:00

"...modern economy, seen as a whole, resembles much less a machine that stands idle when abandoned by its stoker than a beast that goes berserk as soon as its tamer turns its back..."
-Walter Benjamin

Agamben and Banksy

2008-10-01T12:14:00.013-04:00

"There is no Virgil to guide us in this Inferno," reads a graffito in Agamben's neighborhood, which he takes his visitors to see with what seems like a mixture of pride and self-effacement. He claims that when the paint began to fade, he asked one of his friends to reinforce the lines in red spray. After the job was done, the friend added a stencil of a black rat sitting on a step at the bottom right of the sentence (click to enlarge).

I took a picture of this wall almost a year ago, but only this morning I came to notice the similarity of this little rat and the insignia of Banksy, the greatest street artist in the world today, who is currently completing (like always, incognito) a series of works in various locations around my neighborhood. "Like most people," Banksy writes, "I have a fantasy that all the little powerless losers will gang up together. That all the vermin will get some good equipment and then the underground will go overground and tear this city apart." Note, also, that "rat" is an anagram of "art." I have little interest in the question whether Agamben and Banksy know each other personally or not. What interests me here is the basic philosophy that they both share.

In the very beginning of Agamben's philosophy, in the first pages of The Man without Content (published when he was 28 years old), the reader encounters an emphatic plea for the inseparability of art from life. Developing Nietzsche's critique of disinterested beauty, Agamben takes to task the Kantian aestheticization of art, that is to say, the approach that emphasizes the sensory involvement of the spectator instead of the creative force of the artist. It is after all the hand, rather than the eye, that has the most intimate relationship with the work of art. Pygmalion, "the sculptor who becomes so enamored of his creation as to wish that it belonged no longer to art but to life," is the symbol of Agamben's new vision. Rimbaud, who wished that his poetry would "change life" (rather than the world) is an obvious model. The ultimate concern of such a vision is a promise of happiness and not only a spectacle of happiness; its aim is the good life rather than a good taste. This position offers a surprising perspective on Plato's infamous crusade against the poets who, he believed, endanger the city; a position that rings so wrong to the Modern ear only because art does not have the same influence on us as it did on him. "Only because art has left the sphere of interest to become merely interesting," Agamben writes, "do we welcome it so warmly." The decline of censorship, he implies, is not simply the result of a growing liberal sentiment, but an indication that the artwork in question is impotent, since no one cares to ban ineffective art. Though he does not use the word yet, it is clear that art gains here a political significance, in the strong, Arendtian, sense of politics. As improbable as it may sound, from this standpoint "beauty is an indescribably more ruthless and cruel upheaval than any political revolution ever was," as Robert Musil claims in The Man without Qualities. Agamben's thought originates from this belief in art as insurgency, and this aversion towards its transformation today into mere spectacle, or its "museification," as he recently claimed in Profanations. That the very same argument holds for contemporary philosophy goes without saying.

A link to Bansky's Website

A link to an article on Banksy in The New Yorker

The Stone and the Shadow

2008-09-14T17:58:00.007-04:00

An Investigation of the Stone and the Shadow
a poem by Giorgio Agamben

The Lion dreams
and dreams the Rose.
The Rose dreams
and dreams the King.
The King dreams
and dreams the law.
The law dreams
and dreams grace.
Grace dreams
and dreams the circle.
The circle dreams
and dreams the line.
The line dreams
and dreams pain.
Pain dreams
and dreams the scale.
The scale dreams
and dreams the shadow.
The shadow dreams
and dreams Gold.
Gold dreams
and dreams the stone.
The stone dreams
and dreams the serpent.
The serpent dreams
and dreams poison.
Poison dreams
and dreams death.
Death dreams
and dreams destiny.
Destiny dreams
and dreams life.
Life dreams
and dreams the mask.
The mask dreams
and dreams god.
God dreams
and dreams the word.
The word dreams
and dreams the Rose.
The Rose dreams
and dreams man.

Man dreams
and dreams the stone.

[First published forty years ago in the journal Nuovi Argomenti (11), July-September 1968.]

The Joker

2008-08-23T01:02:00.019-04:00

[A reply to Adam's Theses on the Dark Knight]

In a world consumed by nihilism, the moralistic distinction between good and evil might be up for grabs, but the ethical distinction between good and bad is not. To favor the Joker and castigate Batman - as Adam, together with the citizens of Gotham, and together with the denizens of the society of the spectacle who attended The Dark Knight en masse - is no contrarianism, but mere foolishness. Indeed, it is to give in to the maxim that anything that doesn’t kill you simply makes you stranger, rather than stronger. Adam’s patron saint, the unmistakable joker of contemporary philosophy, exemplifies this predicament: There is no doubt that Zizek sometimes manages to call a spade a spade, but then he quickly turns to another one of his card tricks that leaves the audience gasping. A magician can supply good entertainment only by means of deception. When the truth behind the sleight of hand is revealed, the audience rushes to demand its money back. The box office revenues of the movie in question prove that the Joker’s illusion was successful: at the end Christ looks like the Antichrist. But this is only a magic trick, and everybody should know that.

In Judaism, the Messiah is considered to be the “Son of David,” a direct descendant of the king who exemplified the image of the sovereign. Hence the Hebrew syntagm “melech mashiach,” or “King Messiah,” which is closely linked to the Christian “Jesus Messiah.” The Jewish yearning for, and the Christian belief in, this messiah, this “King of Kings,” is therefore very problematic, since it implies that the people cannot do without a sovereign power above them. They simply swap the earthly king with a heavenly one, like those heroin addicts that are now dependent on methadone. Here lies the justified skepticism in the figure of the messiah: the fear that he is just another, or the ultimate, power grabbing monster. This is what stands behind Adam’s critique of Batman, who is, like any superhero, an obvious Imitator of Christ. It is true, from this perspective, that Batman, in an attempt to defend lost causes, makes authoritarian executive decisions which have nothing to do with the so called established law, and everything to do with the state of emergency, or the civil war, in which Gotham finds itself.

There is, however, a very simple litmus test that distinguishes the false messiah from the true one, the Antichrist from Christ, the dark and the light knight: the question is whether, on the day after the last day, the “Messiah” remains in power or not. If he steps down, then the end of days has truly arrived. Otherwise, the lie is revealed, though a second too late, and history only repeats itself. The sovereign (like the [biblical] Adam) is therefore a figure of the Messiah, but only as long as the sin of the former is overturned by the deeds of the latter. The “King of Kings” is not a king, and “King Messiah” is meant to atone for the horridness sins of all the previous kings.

Kafka claims that “the Messiah will come only when he is no longer needed.” Bruce Wayne is Batman only because Batman is needed. Bats, by nature, are creatures of darkness. When Batman will no longer be needed, when a new day will dawn on Gotham (which will then be more like New York of the present), Wayne promises that he will hang up the suit. Since men, in opposition to bats, do not act according to a specific nature, and because men, in opposition to animals, can lie, we still don’t know whether Wayne is “a man of his word” or not. We are not omniscient. This is why political decisions are always risky. But to remain skeptical about everyone, to take zero risks, and to trust no one, is a proved receipt for the continuation of Gotham. Politics that is not driven by fear is indeed at hand. But politics without a little faith is like bread without yeast (this is why, by the way, you can eat matzo only for the week of Passover, since anything more than that is a gastronomical nightmare).

All things considered, the Joker was right about one single thing: anyone that has a plan is a schemer. Even though Adam mysteriously overlooks this thesis, it is one of the strongest arguments against liberalism in sight. Everyone has a plan: the cops, the mob, and, most importantly, Harvey Dent. Hence, they are all schemers. The Joker insists that he doesn’t have a plan, and I believe him. But there is one person that he intentionally leaves out from his long list of planners/schemers: Batman himself. I believe that Batman’s sole destiny is to stop being Batman, that there is no plan involved, and that hence no scheme to take over the world is to be feared. The choice, then, is between a “dog chasing cars” and a Batmobile chasing dogs. Adam chose the former. I choose the latter.

The Kiss

2008-08-05T03:06:00.002-04:00

It would be difficult to come to terms with the way by which Agamben develops Benjamin’s dialectics at a standstill without contrasting it with the work of Adorno and his circle (which basically held the monopoly on Benjamin’s thought for about half a century). In order to see the stark difference between Adorno’s “damaged life” and Agamben’s own notion of life, we need to consider the fairy tale about the frog-prince, this happy inversion of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. You are familiar with this tale about the witch who transformed a handsome prince into a frog, and the young maiden who had to kiss the slimy frog in order to reverse the spell and win the love of her life. (In fact, folklorists are unsure about the origin of the prevalently modern kiss element. In most versions, the maiden has to intimately lay in bed with the frog or violently slam it against a wall in order to remove the spell.) In Agamben’s stark retelling of this story, the prince-frog is revealed as an allegory for history, as Adorno plays the role of the witch, and Benjamin that of the maiden:

"Dialectical historicism, whose spokesman [Adorno] is, is the witch who, after turning the prince into a frog, believes she holds within the magic wand of dialectics the secret of any possible transformation. But [Benjamin’s] historical materialism is the maiden who kisses the frog right on the mouth, and breaks the dialectical spell. For whereas the witch knows that, since every prince is really a frog, every frog can become a prince, the maiden does not know this, and her kiss touches precisely what the frog and the prince have in common."

One of the ways to misunderstand Agamben’s own method is to assume that he proposes a conscious historical development in which one situation can transform into another by means of the magic wand of theory. For example, you might assume that the task of his philosophical work is to metamorphose what he calls “naked life” (the frog) into what he calls “form-of-life” (the prince). Even though, like every fairy tale, Agamben’s thought bears a certain promise of happiness, it can do so only by resisting what he calls the myth of sacrifice, as every fairy tale is meant, according to Benjamin, “to shake off the nightmare of myth.” This cannot be done through back and forth dialectical transformations or endless mediations, but through what Benjamin calls, somewhat enigmatically, “cunning” (Untermut) and “high spirits” (Übermut). In Adorno, we face the demand for a sort of a metaphysical totality that renders any concrete moment as a means for an end (namely, of fulfilling this totality), or the demand for a mythical superstructure that hovers above our material structure (as Adorno demanded from Benjamin in their letter exchange from the winter of 1938). Whereof the dialectical system envisions a pedantic theoretical synthesis of the prince and the frog into one monstrous creature, Agamben’s method searches for the zone of indistinction between this man and this animal, which should not be confused with some essential core that remains unchanged throughout its mutations. The philosopher-maiden is not meant to recognize the frog in (or as) the prince and the prince in (or as) the frog, but just to kiss the prince-frog on its lips.

The kiss, which certainly demands explanation, is not an accidental gesture in Agamben’s thought. It may even serve as a crystallization of his own brand of dialectics at a standstill. Think, in this respect, about what is probably the most celebrated kiss in the history of modern literature, which takes place at the end of “The Grand Inquisitor,” the central parable in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. The first curious thing about this parable is that Ivan insists to present it to Alyosha, his young brother, as a poem, despite the fact that it is told in simple prose. In this “poem,” Christ returns to Spain of the sixteenth century. He performs a few miracles and is adored by the people before he is being sentenced to death by the cynical Inquisition. Since Christ never utters a word, the bulk of the (usually existentialist) commentators focus on the long speech of the Grand Inquisitor during his visit to the Resurrected before the planned execution. I would like to say nothing about this speech, and focus entirely on Christ’s reply, which Ivan recounts after his brother implores, “And how does your poem end?” It ends when the old inquisitor concludes his denunciation, and Christ gently kisses him on his “bloodless” lips. As the story continues, Ivan the atheist wonders out loud whether he can still be embraced by his pious little brother after he pronounced his solidarity with the inquisitor’s speech. Instead of giving a verbal reply, Alyosha, the imitator of Christ, simply kisses his brother in silence.

Agamben maintains that “the end of the poem,” that is, the last line in every poetic composition, presents a puzzling difficulty. The only consistent criterion that distinguishes poetry from prose is the presence of enjambment, that is, the breaking of a syntactic unit between the poem’s lines. The difficulty, however, is that this definition cannot account for the poem’s end. If a poem is founded on the tension of its metrical and syntactic elements, on the non-coincidence of sound and sense (which is the direct outcome of enjambment), then the last verse, from which enjambment is missing (because there is no further line to carry over the final idea), is what Agamben calls “the state of poetic emergency.” The end of the poem is the place where the tension generated by enjambment, this dialectical play of sound and sense, is not resolved, but arrives to a stalemate.

In On Revolution, Arendt invokes the end of Dostoevsky’s prose/poem in order to explain her notion of compassion. She observes that com-passion, this shared suffering, tends to use a language of gestures rather than of words:

"It is because he listens to the Grand Inquisitor’s speech with compassion, and not for lack of arguments, that Jesus remains silent, struck, as it were, by the suffering which lay behind the easy flow of his opponent’s great monologue. The intensity of this listening transforms the monologue into a dialogue, but it can be ended only by a gesture, the gesture of the kiss, not by words."

The kiss enables Arendt to confront one of her basic visions of the political as a space for discourse, since compassion, as we can see, abolishes the necessary distance between men where politics usually takes place: through reasonings, arguments, interests, persuasions, negotiations, compromises, and other linguistic apparatuses. The end of Dostoevsky’s poem, like every end of every poem according to Agamben, is therefore a zone in which language “collapses into silence.” This “compassionate silence” may very well mark the end of politics as we know it, but since it is obviously and infinitely more thoughtful than many of the banalities that people tend to utter, it is a possible beginning for the coming politics that lives on in the Agambenian standstill. That this beginning is not so far off from what Nietzsche calls “The Stillest Hour” is evident from its oft-quoted (but not yet banal) lines: “It is the stillest words that bring on the storm. Thoughts that come on doves’ feet guide the world.”

The Sensation of Being

2008-07-30T07:31:00.005-04:00

The method of comprehending a function by observing its dysfunction seems to be quite instrumental in approaching one of Agamben’s recent essays, “The Friend.” At its core you will find an exegesis on “the ontological basis of Aristotle’s theory of friendship,” which begins with the latter’s seemingly unimpressive observation that “he who sees senses that he is seeing, he who hears senses that he is hearing, he who walks senses that he is walking.”

What happens, however, when you lose this sensation of being, this sixth sense or “inner touch” (as Daniel Heller-Roazen calls it)? Neurophysiologists call the sense of one’s own body and one’s own self “proprioception,” which is hence distinguished from our sense of both the external and internal worlds. “If a man has lost a leg or an eye,” Oliver Sacks explains, “he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self – himself – he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.”

The perception of our own being is arguably the most important sensation that we have, but precisely because of its simplicity and familiarity it usually escapes our attention. This is the motive behind Sacks’ story about Christina, “The Disembodied Lady,” who overnight had to face the horror of no longer sensing her body as her own. She was not paralyzed: after three months she re-learned how to walk, but she could no longer sense that she was walking. This condition is not as abnormal as it may sound, since very small infants also have virtually no proprioception. Christina’s uniqueness lies in her ability to use language and share her experience (or its lack thereof) with other people, thus offering us a rare window into Agamben’s idea that friendship is the shared sensation of being.

Sacks compares Christina’s case with one of the characters from Wittgenstein’s On Certainty who doubts the existence of his own body. Wittgenstein actually objects to anyone who would try to raise his hand and utter a sentence like, “I know that this is my hand,” which the philosopher takes to be neither true nor false, but merely nonsensical. There is, however, at least one person in the world towards whom Wittgenstein would probably make an exception. As counter intuitive as it may sound, for Christina, the woman who could not sense that she exists, saying, “I know that this is my hand” would make perfect, painful, sense.

Zarathustra’s Whisper

2008-07-19T20:27:00.005-04:00

Love forms the limit of a thinking that carries itself to the limit of philosophy.
-Jean-Luc Nancy

1. There are two “Dancing Songs” in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. They are both presented as love songs, depicting an affair between Zarathustra, “the great hope,” and a woman named Life. Here is how the first song begins:

"Into your eyes I looked recently, O Life! And into the unfathomable I then seemed to be sinking. But you pulled me out with a golden fishing rod; and you laughed mockingly when I called you unfathomable."

This, however, is not a simple love story. Soon it will be shattered, as we come to realize that Life is not the only woman in Zarathustra’s heart. There is also a second woman. Her name is Wisdom. Despite Zarathustra’s devotion to Life, he also has a secret, unexplainable attraction to Wisdom:

"For thus matters stand among the three of us: Deeply I love only life – and verily, most of all when I hate life. But that I am well disposed towards wisdom, and often too well, that is because she reminds me so much of life. She has her eyes, her laugh, and even her little golden fishing rod: is it my fault that the two look so similar?"

Zarathustra offers here an explanation for his inability to remain loyal to Life. Wisdom’s allure, so he claims, is a consequence of her uncanny resemblance to Life. But this, I would like to claim, is more than a lame excuse. This point becomes evident in the next stanza, when Zarathustra gathers the courage to tell Life about the other woman, about Wisdom, which he first describes as “evil and false,” as a woman that “one thirsts after her and is never satisfied.” Surprisingly, instead of being outraged, Life only “laughed maliciously, and closed her eyes,” wondering aloud about Wisdom’s true identity:

"'Of whom are you speaking?' she asked; 'no doubt, of me. And even if you are right – should that be said to my face?'"

This strange reproach raises the following questions: First, why does Life say that when Zarathustra speaks about Wisdom, he really speaks about her, about Life? We can also wonder whether Zarathustra made a wise step in telling Life about the other woman. But more importantly, we need to ask ourselves whether telling Life that Wisdom, his lover, looks just like her, was a tactful move. Is it possible that Zarathustra, “the Godless,” will make such a beginners’ mistake in his relationship with this woman named Life? I think that he is presented here a bit as a fool, in opposition to Life, who seems here to be secure in her position. But I also do not think that we should rush to quick judgment. There is something peculiar about the resemblance between Life and Wisdom that is still unexplained. And there is something strange about the love between Zarathustra and Life. We need to bear in mind that Zarathustra’s devotion to Life knows no bounds. In the beginning of the “Other Dancing Song” he confesses:

"I fear you near, I love you far; your flight lures me, your seeking cures me: I suffer, but what would I not gladly suffer for you?"

But no matter. Wisdom’s seduction is sweet and strong, and Zarathustra’s love towards Life appears to be gradually fading away. As the second “Dancing Song” progresses, we reach the pleading words of Life, who now seems to be utterly devastated as her lover is planning his final departure:

“O Zarathustra, don’t crack your whip so frightfully! After all, you know that noise murders thought – and just now such tender thoughts are coming to me… And that I like you, often too well, that you know; and the reason is that I am jealous of your wisdom, Oh, this mad old fool of a wisdom! If your wisdom ever run away from you, then my love would quickly run away from you too.”

No doubt – there is definitely something very odd about this triangular love affair. Why does Life tell Zarathustra that in case Wisdom would one day abandon him, she, Life, would no longer love him as well? Even though she feels disdain towards Wisdom, “this mad old fool,” her relationship with Zarathustra is absolutely symmetrical to his relationship with Wisdom. The two women look the same, act the same, and love the same. So why does Zarathustra want to leave Life for another woman, exactly like her? The answer is to be found at the end of Nietzsche’s little soap opera. It begins when Zarathustra admits that he is indeed about to leave Life for good:

"Then life looked back and around thoughtfully and said softly: “O Zarathustra, you are not faithful enough to me. You do not love me nearly as much as you say; I know you are thinking of leaving me soon.”
“Yes,” I answered hesitantly, “but you also know –” and I whispered something into her ear, right through her tangled yellow foolish tresses.
“You know that, O Zarathustra? Nobody knows that.”
And we looked at each other and gazed on the green meadow over which the cool evening was running just then, and we wept together. But then life was dearer to me than all my wisdom ever was."

Remember that just a moment ago Zarathustra told Life that he is about to abandon her. But after he whispered the secret that “nobody knows,” the couple all of a sudden gazed at each other, then looked at the green meadow below, and shed tears of joy. In this grand finale, the love of Zarathustra towards Life triumphs, and the affair he had with Wisdom is miraculously forgotten.

2. So what did Zarathustra whisper into the ear of Life? This pressing question is the cipher to Nietzsche’s dancing songs, and perhaps, even, to something more. Quite a few scholars attempted to solve this mystery in recent years. Daniel Conway’s answer is that Zarathustra’s secret must remain a secret, and it can never be explicated as a positive proposition. Michael Platt’s preliminary attempt to explicitly answer this question is rejected by Platt himself, like the explanation that Zarathustra tells Life that he wants to leave her because she is barren, or that he wants to leave her because he knows that she is planning to leave him first. This leads Platt to a solution that is shared by many scholars, such as Walter Kaufmann, Laurence Lampert, David Goicoechea, Alan White, Eugene Victor Wolfenstein, and Frances Nesbitt Oppel. They believe that Zarathustra’s secret is the eternal recurrence – that even though he is about to leave Life, he tells her that he will eventually return. However, other scholars rightly point out that the eternal return is far from being a secret. At this stage of the book, the reader is already familiar with it quite well, and therefore there is no reason to hide it, or present it as the secret that “nobody knows.” Besides, it is highly dubitable that any woman, and Life in particular, would find the following reply satisfactory: “I am going to be with the other woman now, but eventually I will return and love you once again.” And so an alternative answer is suggested, namely, that Zarathustra whispers that he is about to die, and so, by leaving Life, he executes his death wish. This answer is shared by Hans-Georg Gadamer, Maudemarie Clark, Robert Gooding-Williams, and T.K. Tsung. But could such a fatalistic answer by Zarathustra – the one who is supposed to say Yes to life, to affirm life, to be truly in love with life – make the couple to look into each other eyes and then gaze onto the green meadow? Should we equate Zarathustra and Life to Romeo and Juliet? Must we treat Nietzsche’s dancing songs as suicide songs? In any event, the consequence of all the above readings lead one to conclude, together with Stanley Rosen, that this episode should be understood “as a sign that life is fundamentally tragic, but that this tragedy is, as Zarathustra says next of life, dearer to him than all his wisdom.”

There is, however, a completely different way to understand what Zarathustra whispered into Life’s ear through her golden tresses. I would like to suggest “a new way of thinking” about this secret which is, in opposition to all the above interpretations, “an affirmative thought, a thought that affirms life and the will to life, a thought which finally expels the whole of the negative,” as Gilles Deleuze puts it. Life’s initial admittance in the first dancing song that she is “changeable and wild” gives us a first indication. All the various clues concerning the striking similarity between the two women point to a single conclusion. The turn of heart at the end of the song after the secret has been divulged proves it. There is one answer that could completely ease Life’s mind so easily, and transform this couple on the verge of separation into eternal lovers. After Life said that she knows that Zarathustra is about to leave her for Wisdom, he whispered into her ear something along these lines: “But you also know that Wisdom is not another woman, but simply you, O Life, in disguise.” The two women only seem to be different. Life and Wisdom, who are portrayed as women in various places in Nietzsche’s writings, are revealed in the Dancing Songs to be one and the same person. It was therefore not Zarathustra who played with Life’s heart, but vice versa: It was Life who fooled Zarathustra all along, disguising herself as another woman, seducing her own man. Zarathustra only thought that he was a cheater, hiding his secret behind Life’s back. In reality, he never left her. But maybe Zarathustra actually knew about this sham all along, and this was nothing but a complicated role-playing: Life pretended to be Wisdom, and Zarathustra pretended not to know. Whatever the case may be, Zarathustra’s heart, which seemed to be split in half, is now whole once again, and his bond with Life is no longer put into question.

This, however, is not to say that from now on Zarathustra and Life would live happily ever after, that the intimacy between the two would transform this enigmatic woman called “Life” into an open book, that Life is now irrevocably moving from concealment to unconcealment. This is a basic misunderstanding of the concept of love. As Giorgio Agamben explains, love is in fact

"to live in intimacy with a stranger, not in order to draw him closer, or to make him known, but rather to keep him strange, remote: unapparent – so unapparent that his name contains him entirely. And, even in discomfort, to be nothing else, day after day, than the ever open place, the unwaning light in which that one being, that thing, remains forever exposed and sealed off."

As much as you feel close to life, life will always remain closed from you.

3. What, then, is the implication of this exegesis? Here is one plausible suggestion. The love of wisdom – this is the meaning of philosophy according to its Greek etymology. But this love, Nietzsche intimates, is not the end of the story. The truth is that there is only one woman that we, the philosophers, love dearly, and the name of this woman is not Wisdom, but Life. At best, Wisdom is simply Life in disguise. Even though we may want to betray life, and even though we may wish to leave life, she is the one we truly cherish, in sickness and in health, until Death do us part. Which is not to say that Life is an obedient woman, always waiting for us to return home from our escapades. Life is no Penelope. Remember: it is not us who play with Life’s emotions, but Life who plays her tricks on us, those who are so madly in love with her, to the extent that we constantly make fools of ourselves in front of our object of desire. As Nietzsche explains elsewhere,

"perhaps this is the most powerful magic of life: it is covered by a veil interwoven with gold, a veil of beautiful possibilities, sparkling with promise, resistance, bashfulness, mockery, pity, and seduction. Yes, life is a woman."

What “nobody knows” is that the philosophical love of wisdom is, at the end of the day, nothing more, but nothing less, than a love of life. Which is the reason why, according to Heidegger, “philosophy of life” is an expression that “says about as much as the ‘botany of plants.’" These are redundant expressions. As every botany is evidently the botany of plants, every philosophy is a philosophy of life. Philosophy is, properly speaking, the love of life. This is still only a whisper. But today, in the midst of “the great spectacle in a hundred acts…the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps also the most hopeful of all spectacles” – which unravels before our eyes as Nietzsche predicted – Zarathustra’s whisper is beginning to be heard.

Homo Economicus v. Homo Sacer: Foucault replies to Agamben, Part 2

2008-07-11T18:07:00.004-04:00

[Excerpts from The Birth of Biopolitics]

Since the eighteenth century, has homo economicus involved setting up an essentially and unconditionally irreducible element against any possible government? Does the definition of homo economicus involved marking out the zone that is definitively inaccessible to any government action? Is homo economicus an atom of freedom in the face of all the conditions, undertakings, legislation, and prohibitions a possible government, or was he not already a certain type of subject who precisely enabled an art of government to be determined according to the principle of economy, both in the sense of political economy and in the sense of the restriction, self-limitation, and frugality of government? Obviously, the way in which I have formulated this question gives the answer straightaway, but this is what I would like to talk about, that is to say, homo economicus as the partner, the vis-à-vis, and the basic element of the new governmental reason formulated in the eighteenth century.

Homo economicus is someone who can say to the juridical sovereign, to the sovereign possessor of rights and founder of positive law on the basis of the natural right of individuals: You must not. But he does not say: You must not, because I have rights and you must not touch them. This is what the man of right, homo juridicus, says to the sovereign: I have rights, I have entrusted some of them to you, the others you must not touch, or: I have entrusted you with with my rights for a particular end. Homo economicus does not say this. He also tells the sovereign: You must not. But what must he not? You must not because you cannot. And you cannot in the sense that “you are powerless.” And why are you powerless, why can’t you? You cannot because you do not know, and you do not know because you cannot know.

You can see that in the modern world, in the world we have known since the nineteenth century, a series of governmental rationalities overlap, lean on each other, challenge each other, and struggle with each other: art of government according to truth, art of government according to the rationality of sovereign state, and art of government according to the rationality of the economic agents, and more generally, according to the rationality of the governed themselves. And it is all these different arts of government, all these different types of ways of calculating, rationalizing, and regulating the art of government which, overlapping each other, broadly speaking constitute the object of political debate from the nineteenth century. What is politics, in the end, if not both the interplay of these different arts of government with their different reference points and the debate to which these different arts of government give rise? It seems to me that it is here that politics is born.

State-Phobia: Foucault replies to Agamben, Part 1

2008-07-10T18:33:00.005-04:00

[excerpts from The Birth of Biopolitics]

You will, of course, put to me the question, or make the objection: Once again you do without a theory of the state. Well, I would reply, yes, I do, I want to, I must do without a theory of the state, as one can and must forgo an indigestible meal. What does doing without a theory of the state mean? If you say that in my analyses I cancel the presence and the effect of state mechanisms, then I would reply: Wrong, you are mistaken or want to deceive yourself, for to tell the truth I do exactly the opposite of this. Whether in the case of madness, of the constitution of that category, that quasi-natural object, mental illness, or of the organization of a clinical medicine, or of the integration of disciplinary mechanisms and technologies within the penal system, what was involved in each case was always the identification of the gradual, piecemeal, but continuos takeover by the state of a number of practices, ways of doing things, and, if you like, governmentalities. The problem of bringing under state control, of “statification” is at the heart of the questions I have tried to address.

However, if, on the other hand, “doing without a theory of the state” means not starting off with an analysis of the nature, structure, and functions of the state in and for itself, if it means not starting from the state considered as a sort of political universal and then, through successive extension, deducing the status of the mad, the sick, children, delinquents, and so on, in our kind of society then I reply: Yes, of course, I am determined to refrain from that kind of analysis. There is no question of deducing this set of practices from a supposed essence of the state in and for itself. We must refrain form this kind of analysis first of all because, quite simply, history is not a deductive science, and secondly, for another no doubt more important and serious reason: the state does not have an essence. The state is not a universal nor in itself an autonomous source of power. The state is nothing else but the effect, the profile, the mobile shape of a perpetual “statification” or “statifications,” in the sense of incessant transactions which modify, or move, or drastically change, or insidiously shift sources of finance, modes of investment, decision-making centers, forms and types of control, relationships between local powers, the central authority, and so on. In short, the state has no heart, as we well know, but not just in the sense that it has no feelings, either good or bad, but it has no heart in the sense that it has no interior. The state is nothing else but the mobile effect of a regime of multiple governmentalities. That is why I propose to analyze, or rather take up and test this anxiety about the state, this state-phobia, which seems to me a typical feature of common themes today, not by trying to wrest from the state the secret of what it is, like Marx tried to extract the secret of the commodity, but by moving outside and questioning the problem of the state, undertaking an investigation of the problem of the state, on the basis of practices of governmentality.

I think that there are two important elements which are fairly constant in this theme of the critique of the state. First, there is the idea that the state possesses in itself and through its own dynamism a sort of power of expansion, an intrinsic tendency to expand, an endogenous imperialism constantly pushing it to spread its surface and increase in extent, depth, and subtlety to the point that it will come to take over entirely that which is at the same time its other, its outside, its target, and its object, namely: civil society. The first element which seems to me to run through all this general theme of state phobia is therefore this intrinsic power of the state in relation to its object-target, civil society. The second element which it seems to me is constantly found in these general themes of state phobia is that there is a kinship, a sort of generic continuity or evolutionary implication between different forms of the state, with the administrative state, the welfare state, the bureaucratic state, the fascist state, and the totalitarian state all being, in no matter which of the various analyses, the successive branches of one and the same great tree of state control in its continuos and unified expansion.

As soon as we accept the existence of this continuity or genetic kinship between different forms of the state, and as soon as we attribute a constant evolutionary dynamism to the state, it then becomes possible not only to use different analyses to support each other, but also to refer them back to each other and so deprive them of their specificity. For example, an analysis of social security and the administrative apparatus on which it rests ends up, via some slippages and thanks to some plays on words, referring us to the analysis of concentration camps. And, in the move from social security to concentration camp the requisite specificity of analysis is diluted.

The Apparatus of Language

2008-06-27T23:40:00.007-04:00

The by now agreed upon English rendition of Foucault’s “dispositif” as “apparatus” is one of those fortunate choices that gain in translation an aspect of the original term still hidden from view. Think, for example, about the “Apparat” from Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” and especially about the uncharacteristically happy ending of this fable, where the operator of the torture apparatus is being subjected to his own device. Soon after the machine is set to inscribe with precise little needles the sentence “Be Just” onto the flesh of the executioner, the mechanism gets out of control, destroying itself while brutally killing its operator. In an early and little known gloss on this parable, Agamben suggests that Kafka’s apparatus stands for language itself. He claims that “the ultimate sense of language...is the commandment ‘Be Just.’ Nonetheless, precisely the sense of this commandment is what the machine of language is absolutely incapable of understanding.” Twenty years later, his What is an Apparatus? elaborates on the same idea, now calling language “the most ancient of apparatuses – one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primate inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that he was about to face."

But the idea that language is an apparatus is already present in Freud’s first book, On Aphasia, where he explicitly and consistently speaks about “the speech apparatus” as the field of his investigation. This is a clever move that allows him to avoid the need to deal with the abstract structure of language (what Saussure will call langue), as well as its actual use by a speaker (parole). Instead, it enables Freud to treat language as this impersonal and pragmatic machine that can break down from time to time, thus leading to aphasia, whereof one cannot speak. He realizes that aphasia should not be understood as a single entity, but rather as a complex variety of speech impairments. Instead of localizing those different aspects of aphasia in particular parts of the brain, he insists that they are the result of different linguistic functions and dysfunctions, associations and dissociations.

Given Agamben’s call for a hand-to-hand struggle with the various apparatuses in which our life is captured, it is helpful to follow the strategies embedded in Freud’s analysis, which are surprisingly similar to Foucault’s own method of analysis of the different power apparatuses in his writings and lectures. For example, Freud is already interested at this early stage in what we call today a Freudian slip: this fleeting breakdown of the speech apparatus. One way to cope with our apparatuses is therefore to notice their pathologies in everyday life, their blemishes or blunders, which might signal deeper or more colossal vulnerabilities still hidden from sight.

As you can see, the investigation of the speech apparatus led Freud to what he later calls the “psychic apparatus,” which is the subject to which he will devote his mature thought. It is therefore interesting to compare his early and later models of the psychic apparatus (the topographical and the structural) with Agamben’s early and later models of the apparatus of the modern state, as the first volume of Homo Sacer (Sovereign Power and Bare Life) and the last one (The Reign and the Glory) demonstrate. These models should not be seen as discrepancies or contradictions within the same thinker, but as the evolution of the tool with which he handles and dismantles the very same apparatus.

Dialectic at a Standstill

2008-06-19T22:16:00.004-04:00

While Agamben evokes in any possible occasion the potentiality of a thought that thinks of itself, he never mentions that in the Metaphysics Aristotle claims in the same breath that “the activity [energin] of thinking is life” (1072b27). The actuality, and not the potentiality of thought seems to be the key to this pivotal notion of life, in such a way that “to think” and “to live” become two notions which constantly feed and explain one another.

It is not so easy, however, to represent this very activity of thinking. Cinema, for example, is totally incapable of achieving this task. Perhaps more than any other social type, “the thinker” is usually misrepresented in film as either an idler or a rascal, who tends to be either charismatic, or awkward, or eccentric, or simply mad. In order to invoke the actual act of thinking, filmmakers revert to those embarrassing “eureka!” scenes, or to those montages of a writer frowning and shuffling papers while music is playing in the background. Needless to say, all of this has little to do with our personal experience of thinking. Sometimes I catch myself projecting my own thoughts onto the face of the filmed subject, and thus I confuse the two. Even when every possible activity is stripped from the scene, and all that is left is a single person placed in front of a rolling camera (as in Andy Warhol’s screen-tests), there is nevertheless rarely a trace of a thought.

Still photography, by contrast, seem almost to have been invented for the sake of capturing thought. If a good photographer manages to capture a thinker that you particularly like when he or she is not pretentiously gazing into the horizon, or pressing a finger into their left temple, then the picture is usually as mesmerizing as a picture could be. But even in your personal photo-album there is probably more thought in the most casual snapshot of a loved one (even of a baby!) than in any given scene from the history of cinema. Thinking, which tends to be lost on the silver screen, is redeemed in the millisecond the camera’s shutter opens and then closes again.

Every activity slightly moves forward the rusty wheels of history, but thinking is the only act that arrests this movement, exactly like a still photo. Photography and thought have a secret affinity: they both somehow manage to stop time. They can do so because they function a little like the comma in a sentence: “Where the voice drops,” Agamben writes, “where breath is lacking, a little sign remains suspended. On nothing other than that, hesitantly, though ventures forth.” Thinking is therefore very different from any kind of work, because it is resolutely a sort of an “inoperative” operation or an “inactive” act. This is the reason why Agamben insists that the actuality of thought cannot be meaningfully distinguished from its pure potentiality, which may be likened to the film in a camera before it was exposed to light and impressed with a particular situation in the world. What you see then, as the true image of thought flashes up, is not this or that colorful picture of a certain state of affairs but simply “darkness,” which, according to Agamben, “is in some way the color of potentiality.”

Dialectic of Endarkenment

2008-06-07T15:21:00.001-04:00

“Let there be darkness” - these words almost impose themselves on the reader of Agamben’s philosophy. “Light,” as he once commented, “is only the coming to itself of the dark.” There seems to be little hope in his mind that light really has the capacity to enlighten. A light can only flicker, like a distant star, and the darkness that surrounds it is not meant to understand it. In fact, even the heavenly “total darkness” is for him “the testimony of a time in which the stars did not yet shine.” It is also not entirely clear whether he still shares Arendt’s gnostic faith in the power of singular bright “men in dark times” to ever more slightly make a difference in this world. Nevertheless, Agamben also appears to be possessed by an exigency, a demand to which he cannot not answer: it is difficult to miss (though many still do) that throughout his writings he always try to bear witness to a certain light, or better, a glimmer. If you ever tried to catch fireflies with your hands on a hot summer night, then you may have experienced this unique philosophical comportment. Call it, if you wish, the dialectic of endarkenment. “To perceive in the darkness of the present this light that seeks to reach us but cannot” - this is what it means to be Giorgio Agamben.

Take, for example, his ongoing Homo Sacer project, the most significant work in political philosophy in our time, and compare it with The Republic, the founding text in Western culture dedicated to this subject. The most vivid image in Plato’s book is of this dark cave from which the reader is supposed to emerge, like a prisoner released from his chains, in order to face the sunlight of truth. In Agamben, the experience is clearly the reverse: in the middle of life, while sitting in a more or less secured corner of the earth on a comfortable chair with a lamp and a hot drink, the reader finds himself in a dark forest. This experience is not only rooted in the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno, but also (or mainly) in the opening scene of Kafka’s The Trial, where Joseph K., the protagonist of the story, wakes up one morning only to discover that he is charged in a shadowy court of committing an unspecified crime. Our life, with its basic rights and liberties, is usually protected by the laws of a state; but it can easily be transformed into what Agamben calls a naked or bare life, as it is being separated from what he calls the form or way of life. Today, with a blink of an eye, or a flick of a pen, any “good citizen” from any country (it does not matter whether it is democratic or not) can be excluded from his “protection plan,” and thus be exposed to random acts of violence. Yet even as we live our seemingly respectful and meaningful everyday lives, we should not forget that, from the perspective of power, we are really nothing more than a number, or a bare fact, or a mere body that is constantly being disciplined, governed, and controlled.

But you should also not forget that what at first appears to the human eye as pitch-dark, like what in the initial ascension from the cave seems to Plato’s prisoner as the blinding light of the sun, simply takes time to get used to. You will begin to discern your way around after spending a little while in an unlit room, even though objects may still look monochromatic (as Agamben’s work might seem at times). We must therefore learn to cope with the shadows that Plato deems as mere appearance, probably because the burning sun - the king, or the sovereign - is revealed as only a made-up concoction, as it undergoes today its irrevocable twilight. This, however, does not entail that we are now devoid of the truth, as the epistemological and nihilistic readings of the story of the cave may lead you to assume:

“Because human beings neither are nor have to be any essence, any nature, or any specific destiny, their condition is the most empty and the most insubstantial of all: it is the truth. What remains hidden from them is not something behind appearance, but rather appearing itself, that is, their being nothing other than a face. The task of politics is to return appearance itself to appearance, to cause appearance itself to appear.”

2008-05-15T19:58:00.000-04:00

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Tiqqun de la noche

2008-04-17T08:53:00.013-04:00

Giorgio Agamben's postface to the Italian edition of The Coming Community from 2001.

As an intelligent preface – or, as they say, an “emancipated” one – does not really need to elaborate anything, and so it is at best reduced to a kind of false movement, a good postilla or postface can only be that which demonstrates how the author has absolutely nothing to add to his book.

The postilla is, in this sense, the paradigm of the end of time, when the last thing that can come to the mind of a sentient person is the aggregation of what has already happened. But precisely this art of speaking without saying anything, of acting without doing – or, if you like, of “recapitulating,” the saving and undoing of everything – is the most difficult thing to achieve.

The author of this postilla considers his condition – like the condition of anyone who is writing in Italian about first philosophy or politics – to be that of survival or outliving. This conscience distinguishes him from those who pretend to write today about similar topics. He knows that not only “the possibility of shaking the historical existence of a people” is vanishing into thin air, but also that the very idea of a call, of a people or of an assigned historical task – of a klesis or of a “class” – must be rethought from beginning to end. Yet this condition of survival, of outliving – of writing without addressee, or of a poet without people – leads neither to cynicism nor to desperation. On the contrary, the present time, which is the time that comes after the last day, a time in which nothing can happen because the new is always ongoing, achieving its full maturity, is the only true pleroma of times. What is true in such a time – in our time – is that, to a certain point, everyone – all the peoples and all the humans on earth – is recovering the position of a remnant. This implies, to those who look closely, that an unprecedented generalization of the messianic condition, which was in the beginning of the book only a hypothesis – the absence of work, the whatever singularity, the bloom – is becoming a reality. Precisely because the book was directed towards this non-subject, to this “life without form” and to this Shabbat of man – in other words, to a public that by definition cannot accept it – one can say that the book did not miss its aim and it did not lose, consequently, its inactuality.

It is well known that during the Jewish Shabbat one has to abstain from every melakha, from any productive work. This idleness, this primal inoperativity, is for man a sort of another soul, or, if you like, his true soul. An act of pure destruction, however, an activity that has a perfectly destructive or de-creative character, is closer to menucha, the idleness prescribed for the Shabbat and, as such, it is not prohibited. From this perspective, not work but inoperativity or decreation is the paradigm of the coming politics (the coming does not mean the future). Redemption, the tiqqun that is at stake in the book, is not an operation or work, but a particular kind of sabbatical vacation. It is the insalvable that renders the salvation possible, the irreparable that allows the coming of the redemption. For this reason, the decisive question in the book is not “What to do?” but “How to do?” Being is less important than the like that. Inoperativity does not mean inertia, but katargesis – that is to say an operation in which the how completely replaces the what, in which the life without a form and the form without a life coincide in a form of life. The exposure of this inoperativity was the operation of this book, which perfectly coincides with this postilla.

[Notes: Tiqqun is a term in Lurianic Kabbalah for the mending of the world. It is also the name of a collective of French writers who are best known for their Théorie du Bloom (to which Agamben alludes in the body of the text). Tiqqun de la noche seems to refer to a Jewish costume from Shavuot, the holiday symbolizing the giving of the Torah: during a single night, the believers are required to read, among other texts, the beginning and the end of each and every book in the Old Testament. The photo of the graffito above was taken in Venice last year. It reads, roughly: “There is no Virgil that can guide us in this Inferno.”]

The Lost Dress of Paradise

2008-04-02T08:27:00.004-04:00

A Theology of Nakedness: Vanessa Beecroft’s Performance in Berlin

By Giorgio Agamben

The first impression that the performance by Vanessa Beecroft gave the audience present at the Neue Nationalgalerie was of a political nature: nothing but dressed urban people, looking at naked urban people. The extreme and at the same time hopeless situation of man in mass society shows itself yet again in its full ambiguity, in this strange form that characterises the situation of contemporary man: as non-event. Something that could have happened did not take place.

If, however, someone would reflect in retrospect on the peculiarities of this non-event, the initial, political, impression, would be pushed aside by a genuine theological consideration. For exactly what was it that had not taken place? Neither an orgy, nor torture, nor an S&M session, but the simple nakedness of man.

In our culture, nakedness is inseparably tied up to a theological meaning. And this is not only because, when looking at these one hundred random women – standing in rows, dressed only in nylon-stockings, who were lingering without moving, as if they were expecting something – you could not avoid thinking about the nakedness of the resurrected at Judgement Day. These people, exposed as naked, I thought, are the resurrected waiting for judgement. The dressed people circling around them were, without knowing it, servants in some celestial administration, who were preparing to lead them to heaven or cast them into Gehenna.

Not only this – the theological significance of exposing someone as naked goes even deeper. We all know the narrative of Genesis, in which Adam and Eve noticed their nakedness only after the original sin. According to the theologians, this was not only due to an earlier state of simple ignorance: despite the fact that Adam and Eve were not covered in human clothing before the fall, they were still not naked. They were covered in a dress of mercy, of tight-fitting glory. Sin robbed man of this supernatural dress, and, in his nakedness, he was forced to cover himself – first with fig leaves, and then with animal skin. The dress with which we now cover our body is no longer the dress of mercy and innocence, but a dress of sin and hypocrisy. This dress belongs to man as a necessity, because it is at the same time a reminiscence of the lost dress of Paradise, and a promise of the new dress that will be given to man through redemption.

There is a special Christian dignity of the dress that reaches even the last trends in fashion: “The dress worn by fallen man,” a modern theologian writes, “represents a reminiscence of the lost dress that was once worn in Paradise. Every change and innovation in fashion that we are so willing to follow, which promises us a beginning of self-understanding, is nothing but the activation of the hope for the lost dress to be recovered (…) This dress, which we have had and lost and that we are still looking for in all the garments of the world that we are wearing, is given to us as a gift in the sacrament of baptism.”

These considerations allow us now to think in a new way about the nakedness that did not take place in Vanessa Beecroft’s performance. According to the founding axiom of the Christian theology of clothing, human nakedness is only possible, if at all, as something temporary and negative. Firstly, because in Eden the creaturely body was already clothed in divine mercy; secondly, because the body after the Fall is again covered in clothes that are the consequence of baptism; and finally, because the saved ones in Paradise will be dressed in a new dress of glory that can no longer be taken off. Nakedness exists, if at all, only in Hell. When it temporarily appears in life in the moment of sinning, nakedness remains unthought and uninterpreted, because its only meaning is related to the dress of mercy.

Now it is possible to understand why in Vanessa Beecroft’s performance – that took place not in Hell but at the Neue Nationalgalerie and had absolutely nothing sinful about it – there could be no event of nakedness. As an unrestrained accomplice to Christian theology – with which it was, without knowing it, filled to the brim – this performance exhibited nothing but the impossibility of nakedness.

The last word will therefore be a political consideration. Against this complicity of commodity and theology we must try to think a possible nakedness of man – something that theology, and then reification and pornography, have made unthinkable. What we must find again is the nakedness of Adam, before God covered him in a dress of glory. This, however, should neither be understood as a natural condition, nor as a promise of something to come. This nakedness is, rather, something that we, here and now, must liberate, piece by piece, from the theological fabric that is wrapped around it.

According to a Gnostic parable, the saved ones will, in the very last day, take the dress of light that was given to them by God on the last day, and tear it off their bodies. They will show themselves to each other in a nakedness that knows neither of sin nor of glory. The human body that will be seen that day will be like the body of that girl in the Neue Nationalgalerie that I, in passing, looked at from behind, only to immediately again lose sight of her: fragile, simple, nameless, yet without doubt naked, and unproblematically thinkable.

Originally published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 12, 2005. Translated from the German by Christian Nilsson.

You are our Letter

2008-03-20T09:17:00.005-04:00

Review of Giorgio Agamben’s The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Translated by Patricia Dailey. Stanford: Stanford University Press. $19.95.

When the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben passes through the looking glass of critical theory, it is often read as an “apocalyptic prophesy” full of “pessimism” and “disdain for the world,” to use a few “superlatives” from a recent account of his work. With his piercing critique of modern politics, Agamben is often depicted as the angel of history, who looks at the past as a pile of debris that grows skyward before his clawed feet. It will therefore come as a surprise that, for Agamben, this angel of history “cannot be a melancholic and Luciferian figure of a shipwreck. Rather, he must be a bright figure who, in the strict solidarity of happiness and historical redemption, establishes the very relation of the profane order to the messianic.” Did someone say happiness? Did someone say redemption? Is there a place for such notions in the decadent Wonderland of postmodernity? There must be a mistake. But now, with the English publication of The Time That Remains, his book on Saint Paul, it becomes clear: Agamben’s sense and sensibility is radically different from the weary spirit that prevails our Church of nihilism. Here Agamben stands – he can do no other.

Like the angel of history, the messianic event can be seen from two perspectives. First, there is the melancholic messianism of “a life lived in deferral” in which nothing can be achieved. Not incidentally, Gershom Scholem, who is the source for the figure of the Luciferian angel of history, is also the herald of this pessimistic brand of messianism. However, in The Time That Remains, Agamben proposes that this widespread interpretation needs to be overturned. According to his view, the messianic event is in fact a true achievement that must be grasped correctly, and rejoiced:

"The Messiah has already arrived, the messianic event has already happened, but its presence contains within itself another time, which stretches its parousia [literally, presence], not in order to defer it, but, on the contrary, to make it graspable. For this reason, each instance may be, to use Benjamin’s words, the “small door though which the Messiah enters.”"

The ambivalence of Agamben’s philosophy, which can be read as reflecting both the curse of, and the cure for, our time, may be attributed to the double strategy behind his publications in recent years. On the one hand, we have the celebrated Homo Sacer series, which, up to now, is comprised of three books, available in English translation: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, State of Exception (the only two books most people bother reading), and Remnants of Auschwitz: the Witness and the Archive (a new publication, The Reign and the Glory, is forthcoming with Stanford UP). These books analyze the darkness of our time, which Agamben calls “biopolitics” – the political power over our naked life. However, the attentive reader can also discern in each of these critiques a certain light that shines in the darkness, which flashes up at the closing sections of each one of those “pessimistic” books. Because of the difficulty of his readers to recognize this light, Agamben offers a second set of investigations, those other books, which elaborate on his glad tidings. These are the books that show us how to bring about the mending of the broken world in which we live: The Coming Community, The Open: Man and Animal, Profanations, and the book that concerns us here, The Time That Remains.

Up to now, it is mainly the first, critical, or “pessimistic” aspect of Agamben’s philosophy that has generated a powerful whirlpool in the current of contemporary thought. But when we disregard the other, “redemptive,” aspect, we end up in a complete misunderstanding of the Agambenian project. One might assume, for example, that what Homo Sacer asks us to do is simply to pay close attention to the minute details of our biopolitical twists and turns. But let us remember the motto of the same book: “And the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death.” Paul’s formulation encapsulates the radical message of Agamben’s project: Modern politics, which was supposed to give us life, is propelling us unto death. As a result, the fulfillment of the situation depicted in Homo Sacer must be its transgression. It is far from being enough to continue to dwell on the nature of the state, the law, the sovereign, human rights, and the like. To use a Wittgensteinian metaphor, we could say that if you understand Agamben, then you need to recognize that the propositions of his book, Homo Sacer, in their erudite description of our current condition, are, plain and simple, nonsensical – like a ladder, you need to climb through these propositions, on them, over them. You need to throw the biopolitical ladder away. Only then will you begin to see the Agambenian world aright.

But what, then, does one see? The answer, I believe, is far from being metaphysical. And it is not something about which we must remain silent. One could say that the event that encapsulates Agamben’s true positive philosophy is not the event of death (as the tradition that stretches from Hegel to Heidegger and up to Derrida suggests), but the event of life itself. Agamben is very clear about this point: “The concept of “life,” as the legacy of the thought of both Foucault and Deleuze, must constitute the subject of the coming philosophy.” More precisely, it is what he calls “form-of-life,” which he defines as “a life that can never be separated from its form…a life for which what is at stake in its way of living is living itself.” This form-of-life, he further claims, quite boldly, “must become the guiding concept and the unitary center of the coming politics.” It is therefore not a surprise to hear Agamben intimating that the last installment in the Homo Sacer series will be a book entitled, simply, Form-of-life. Of course, it is rather difficult to read what Agamben has not yet written, but this must be our task, especially because his work so far is strewn with extremely helpful clues about the nature of this saving power. Here I would like to draw your attention to one of the most decisive passages in The Time That Remains, where Agamben discusses the two covenants – the old covenant with Abraham, and the new covenant in the messianic time:

"The messianic instance, which takes place in historical time and renders Mosaic law inoperative, goes back genealogically before Mosaic law, towards the promise. The space that opens up between the two diathekai [covenants] is the space of grace. This is why the kaine diathekai [new covenant] cannot be something like a written text containing new and diverse precepts (which is how it ends up). As stated in the extraordinary passage right before the affirmation of the new covenant, it is not a letter written in ink on tables of stone; rather, it is written with the breath of God on hearts of the flesh. In other words, it is not a text, but the very life of the messianic community, not a writing, but a form of life: hè epitolè hemón hymeis este, “You are our letter” (2 Cor. 3:2)!"

To the foot-soldiers of deconstruction, Agamben explains that the promise is to be found neither in a text, nor in writing. The new promise is a form of life – the life in the coming community. To paraphrase Benjamin, we could say that this life is the life that is lived at the foot of the hill on which the biopolitical castle stands. In this way, the power over life will transform into the power of life, in a way that turns biopolitics on its head. Naked life becomes form-of-life, and the laws that govern our universe become inoperative.

It is difficult, indeed, to see what is here at stake. It is far from being clear how are we supposed to imagine this form of life. But let me offer one possible line of investigation, which seems like a proper continuation of Agamben’s analysis of theological texts. It is interesting to note that when Agamben talks about the old and new covenants, he does not mention that in the Torah one can already discern two distinct promises, two different covenants. As we all know, there is the celebrated covenant of God with Abraham, which consists of a very exclusive promise of a certain land to a certain race. But there is another covenant, less known, which precedes this promise. This is the covenant after the flood, between God and Noah. Curiously, this first covenant is far from being exclusive to a certain people or a certain place. It is, in fact, a covenant with all living creatures, the whole of the animal kingdom: “And the rainbow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living soul of all flesh that is upon the earth.”

It therefore seems worthwhile to analyze, with the kind of close philosophical scrutiny that Agamben exemplifies, not only the Pauline text, in which the law is deactivated, but also the law itself, this is to say, the Torah. We need to ask ourselves the following questions: What does it mean to live in the time of the Torah, the time of the law? Could Adam, Noah, Abraham, Joseph, and their fellow men and women live according to the law, the law which is the very book in which their lives are being depicted? Do they live before the gate of law, or on the threshold of the gate of the law? But what is the Torah, if not a multiplicity of lives? What is the Mosaic law, other than a mosaic of biographies? Can we observe a law that is grounded on the lives of those who could not observe the law, simply because they are the law? And how such a life in the book of law, in each moment it has been lived, can become a citation a l'ordre du jour, as Benjamin once put it?

“For the mystery of lawlessness,” Paul writes, “is already at work [energeitai], but only until the person now holding it back [ho katechón] gets out of the way.” In The Time That Remains, Agamben shows us that the messianic event is a crucial step on the way to reveal the mystery of lawlessness in all its terrifying glory. The cynics, the pessimists, and the unbelievers, who do not let this lawlessness become the law in which we live, may continue to write their learned tracts about mourning and about melancholia. We only ask them to do so on the side of the road.

The Work of Dance in the Age of Sacred Lives

2008-03-10T22:15:00.015-04:00

We still don’t know what a body can do.
~Spinoza

Christina, queen of Sweden, was about to celebrate her 23 birthday when René Descartes, the 53 years old father of modern philosophy, joined her court in Stockholm. As is only fitting her young age and stature as the most powerful person in Europe, she insisted right away that Descartes will dance in her upcoming spectacular court ballet. When the philosopher boldly refused, she demanded instead that he will write the libretto for the performance. These are the circumstances that led to the composition of Descartes’ last text, The Birth of Peace, a rather strange addition to his oeuvre, constituting his only venture into poetry and politics.

Although the authorship of this text was contested very recently and for the first time by Richard A. Watson, it is difficult not to be struck by the poem itself. In essence, it is nothing less than a condensed reenactment of Hobbes’ Leviathan in verse and dance. The ballet begins with a war of all against all, which reaches its end only after the middle of the ballet, as Pallas, the sovereign - a role danced by Queen Christina herself - enters the stage. The libretto thus praises:

"Thank her for her clemency,
The good designs she has conceived,
And as for the wrongs you have received,
Suffer them patiently,
Because she has power from destiny,
Soon to end the infamy."

Other gods who play secondary roles in the dance are presented as having certain well-known dispositions. For example, Mars loves war while Earth hates it. If these gods acted in opposition to their inclinations - if, all of a sudden, Mars will seek peace while Earth will reject it - they would rightfully be blamed for abandoning their destiny. Nonetheless, Pallas, or Christina, is said to lack such a consistent, or constrictive, nature:

"Pallas alone is one and the same,
Whether in peace, whether in war.
Therefore, none of us should dare,
To check or control her judgment."

This absolute sovereign power is reiterated in the last lines of the poem, where Christina is presented as superior even to the well-grounded checks and balances exercised by the god of Peace and the god of Justice:

"By Pallas, we meant eternal wisdom; to be plain,
Pallas here rules.
Justice and Peace reign with her,
But we have only one Queen and one God."

Probably the most striking moment in the whole spectacle takes place in the penultimate act, performed by the cavaliers, danced by the corpse de ballet. Here is their own song of praise to Pallas:

"It is enough for us to live in a body,
Of which we are the arms. You are the divine flame,
Alone commands all, and we call you the soul.
It is enough for the arms to be only supple and strong."

What image arises from these lines? Nothing other than the frontispiece of the Leviathan: this great monarch whose body is composed from the multitude of the people. This commonwealth now opens its collective mouth and sings together about the glory of the head of state. But here also lies the deconstructive moment of this dance: the corpse de ballet is clearly a representation of the people, which are merely bodies (corpse), like supple and strong arms with no mind of their own. But Pallas, the sovereign, is neither the choreographer nor the spectator, but another dancer, a very physical and present body rather than an ephemeral soul; it is the flesh and bones of Christina herself, jumping and twirling for the enjoyment of all.

Whether the story about Descartes’ refusal to dance is true or false, and whether he was indeed the author of the libretto for this subversive baroque performance or not, the fact of the matter is that two months after the show he was found dead, and that four years after his death Christina willfully abdicated her throne, and spent the rest of her life in exile from Sweden.

The idea that one can speak about dance, that the movement of the dancing body should or could be captured in systematic language, originates in Italy of the 15th century. Beforehand the lexicons show very little evidence of words that are meant to describe specific dance moves. Then, during the Renaissance, you have at least three distinct treatises by three different authors dedicated to the subject, the first by Domenico da Piacenza, and the others by his students, Guglielmo Ebreo and Antonio Cornazano. The humanists held that an eloquent mind is incomplete without an eloquent body. Graceful movement was perceived as a manifestation of great intelligence. As a consequence, they did not see the dancing body as separated from thought, but, like language, indistinguishable from it. Dance was conceived for the first time as an art, a techne, which was an important element in the great art of living. Along with painting, architecture, poetry and science, dance became an integral part in the edifice of man.

As the ethos of the Renaissance traveled in the 16th century together with Catherine de’ Medici across the Alps, it was all but lost in a violent translation. When important foreigners came to Versailles, the lack of common language was compensated by the lavish dances that Catherine, the wife of Henry II, orchestrated. These ballets could probably be considered as the first modern spectacles, but they could also be seen as the earliest exemplars of statist propaganda, explicitly aiming at the glorification of the power of France. In fact, the entrance of the modern state and the entrance of “classical” ballet to the stage of European history are in complete unison of space and time. This is not merely a case of synchrony, but of simple causality: though people always danced and will always dance, ballet is the lawful child of modern politics. There is no other form of art that functions as such a vital organ of the Western state apparatus. (Even today, European dance is heavily funded by the state, while in the US it is not. Though most American dancers and choreographers lament their impoverished situation, they should not forget that in this way they overcome this Mephistophelian pact that continues to plague the most respected companies in the Occident and elsewhere. Bat-Sheva, the celebrated Israeli company, is exemplary in this very problematic respect.)

That the most powerful sovereigns, from Luis XIV to Christina, were the principle dancers in their court ballets demands our special attention. Domenico proclaims in his dance treaty that the agreement between the dancer and the music is the most important element for a successful ballet. Two centuries later, the French court not only abandoned the Italian musical style, but also placed the king’s own dance moves as the paradigm which all the other dancers had to correspond to and comply with. The dance floor was therefore a unique zone in which the very physical moves of the sovereign, rather than his verbal decisions, became the measure of all things. It was not the king or the queens’ words that became law, but their mere bodies.

And so the ideal of “the art of living,” which informed the Renaissance discourse on dance, changed from the 17th to the 20th centuries into a discourse about the techniques of discipline of bodies and their governance on the stage. Eloquence transformed into control. Even today, the training of the classical ballerina is one of the best examples of the ways by which power and knowledge can be inscribed into a human body. Walking, probably the most basic gesture of homo sapiens, is violently altered in two ways: first, the legs turn out rather than forward, and second, the balance between the heal and the toes is rejected in favor of the predominance of the pointe. Ballet schools in the 18th and the 19th centuries actually used special machines in order to achieve these contortion of the dancers’ feet.

Accordingly, three main and rather expected metaphors of the dancer spread throughout those centuries: The first is of the dancer as an animal. As early as the 17th century, Charles-Louis Beauchamps could claim that his choreographic ideas for the new Paris Opera were inspired by observing pigeons as they scurried after the corn he threw for them. The second metaphor for the dancer is the machine. As late as the twentieth century, the dance critic André Levinson could write the following: “You may ask whether I am suggesting that the dancer is a machine? But most certainly! -a machine for manufacturing beauty - if it is in any way possible to conceive a machine that in itself is living, breathing thing.” But even more importantly, the ballet dancer was conceived as the secret symbol of the body politic. From the notion of the corpse de ballet mentioned above, to the iconic moment when the male dancer, standing behind the ballerina, lifts and presents her body to the sovereign eye of the spectator, the ballet is the best biopolitical theater that one can imagine. The pure grace of the ballerina should therefore not deceive you: her sacred body is in fact accursed, and the lightness of her innocent pirouettes is burdened with guilt.

The dance community is only now beginning to come to terms with the pact its founding fathers made with their sovereigns. For instance, it is far from being common knowledge that Rudolf von Laban, one of the most important figures in modern dance, who invented a revolutionary system of dance notation, and is the founder of the Laban School in London, was an enthusiastic Nazi. As the dance director of the State Opera in Berlin, he ordered the removal of all Jewish pupils from the children's’ classes. This happened in 1933, according to Laban’s own initiative, while only in 1938 non-Aryan children were expelled from the German school-system. In 1934, he was promoted to the position of the head of the dance operations in The Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, headed by Goebbels. “Hitler’s Dancers,” a monograph published in 2003, reveals for the first time documents from the period that Laban’s biographers tried to suppress for years. During his time as a Nazi official, he headed a project that aimed at the institution of a new German “total dance.” The capstone of this project was a spectacle Laban choreographed for the opening of the Berlin Olympics. Goebbels, who attended one of the rehearsals, decided to nix the dance, claiming that it was “too intellectual.” Laban realized then that the Nazis no longer supported him, and decided to leave Germany, presenting himself to the world ever since as a dissident expatriate.

I think that it is well worth investigating whether the link between Laban and Nazism is more than coincidental. The Laban technique is heavily influenced by geometry. It is a sort of an incarnation of the Cartesian system of coordinates for moving human bodies. Here you can see the reduction of dance into bodies moving in space, which could then be monitored by and inscribed into language, this is to say, Laban’s complex system of dance notation. An important component in the Nazi machine was its ability to have total control over every human living being in the Lebensraum (an ability that today is so much more developed, and therefore so much more dangerous than it was during the Third Reich). It is also interesting to note that Laban’s ideal of a “total dance” is the source for the myth that a dancer must be completely and without reserve dedicated to the dance. The dancer needs to basically sacrifice his or her life to dance. His autobiography, published in 1935, thus bears a title that perfectly expresses this sacrificial myth: “Ein Leben für den Tanz,” “A Life for Dance.”

The definitive threshold between “classical” ballet and “modern” dance, where you can hardly tell the difference between the two, is the Ballet Russes. Despite the name, this company was based in France under the direction of Serge Diaghilev, who was deeply immersed in the artistic big-bang that took place in Paris during the first decades of the 20th century. Leaving behind them the state-operated ballet schools of Moscow and St. Petersburg, Diaghilev and his pupils distanced themselves for the first time from all institutional political powers (which is not to say that they were a-political). Their star dancer, Vaslav Nijinsky, began his career at age 10, as he entered the Russian Imperial School of Dance. Like the other children, he was separated from his biological parents and was essentially adopted by the Tsar. The groundbreaking productions of the Ballet Russes were the ones choreographed by Nijinsky. Among his four creations, it was the third one, The Rite of Spring, that is our obvious paradigm case.

Even though no complete documentation of the original choreography of The Rite of Spring survived, we can safely say the following: Instead of classical ballet’s turn-out rotation of the legs, Nijinsky’s dancers were asked to turn their legs in. Instead of standing on their tip-toes in an attempt to touch the sky, they were stumping their feet violently into the ground. The dance tells the story of a human sacrifice during the celebration of the spring, as an offering for a new beginning. The principle dancer, the one who dances unto death, was not Nijinsky, who wanted to maintain the charged symbol of the female ballerina, that perfect sacrificial offering. Dance, which was a sacred religious ritual for centuries before the invention of ballet, confronts here both its danger and its saving word.

The Rite of Spring, premiered in 1913, on the eve of the First World War, was received by the audience in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Together with Stravinsky’s original composition, Nijinsky’s dancers were like extraterrestrials even to the savvy Parisian audience. The uproar that broke loose is by now the stuff for legends. People were shouting at the stage so loudly that the dancers could not hear the music from the orchestra pit. Even though the police was summoned, the performance somehow reached its end, as Nijinsky, standing on a chair in the wings, counted the steps for the confused dancers. Those who claim that modernity was born at this precise moment are far from overstating the case.

Nijinsky stopped dancing and choreographing when he was 28. He began his last recital, at the end of the First World War, by sitting on a chair for half an hour without moving. Then he declared that he “is going to dance the war, the war that everyone are responsible for because they did not stop it,” after which he performed a ferociously improvised solo. Shortly after, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent the remaining 30 years of his life in various sanatoriums. Most notably he was treated by Ludwig Binswanger, to whom he once complained that his body is not his, that someone else moves his body. He was controlled by his imposing wife Romola, who published the diary and drawings he produced during his downfall, casting his image as a mad genius. His main statement in these diaries - that he is God or a sort of a Christ figure - was always considered as a characteristic manifestation of his illness. His last words, which he uttered when he was basically an invalid, never even crossed the radar of all those who are so fascinated by his story. Every time someone tried to approach him during the last years of his life, he said, very clearly and coherently, “Ne me touchez pas,” “Don’t touch me.” This, of course, is what the Resurrected said to Maria Magdalene. I am the untouchable, because my body, which was sacrificed so that others could live, is not simply a physical body, but a body of glory, as the body of the dancer on the stage is never merely a naked life, but an exemplary form of life. This new dancing body can no longer be harmed. The dancer is dead. Long live the dancer.

During a visit to London, years after he stopped performing, Nijinsky was asked to dance one last time. After a long moment of silence and stillness, to the surprise of all, he suddenly jumped into the air and hovered there with his arms and palms stretched while a photographer snapped a picture. This arrest of movement, this thought, is the icon of a new Christ without a cross, of a dancer that can no longer be sacrificed.

Mallarmé famously claimed that a dance is a sort of a new form of writing, that the body of a dancer writes “a poem free of all writing apparatuses.” Hence the concept choreo-graphy, or dance-writing. Giorgio Agamben begins a little-known essay about dance, entitled “The Body to Come,” by going against this widespread metaphor:

"Dance is not presented here as a writing, but as a reading. Nonetheless, the text that is read is missing, or is, instead, illegible. According to Hofmannsthal’s beautiful image, the dancer 'reads what was never written.'"

The community of modern dance that has been thriving for the past century since Nijinsky’s rise to fame is a living testament to the possibility of reading what was never written in the book our political life, as it learns to cope with the traumatic history of classical ballet. If you bear in mind the strong linkage between ballet and politics that I was trying to sketch above, then you could see why anyone who partakes in the most fascinating and urgent intellectual project of our day, the project of imagining the politics to come, should look for modern dance as a paradigm case. The modern dancer could then function as an exemplar for what Agamben calls the “whatever singularity” of the coming being. Alternatively, dance could be conceived as the manifestation of pure means, or means without end, which Agamben sees as the true political sphere. The fact that ballet is still performed today in stuffy halls, and that even modern dancers still take ballet class from time to time, could mean the following: the sovereign state is not going to disappear, but to remain as an anachronistic institution that some will still attend to (as some still attend to the Roman Church), though it will eventually lose its menacing power that is leading us today toward a global civil war.

On Birds

2008-01-20T17:35:00.007-05:00

"One should be light like a bird, not like a feather"
-Valéry

In Land and Sea, Schmitt makes an enigmatic claim: after the Leviathan and Behemoth, the rulers of the sea and the land, will kill one another in an apocalyptic struggle, a third monster which rules the sky will come to the fore. Agamben’s The Open begins with a curious analysis of an illustration found in a German bible from the second half of the 13th century. In the lower part of the picture you can see a depiction of the feast that will take place in the end of days. The guests of honor in this feast will be the righteous, which are depicted here with human bodies and animal heads. According to a Jewish tradition, the menu for this meal will consist of three legendary monsters depicted on the top of the page: the sea creature leviathan, the land creature behemoth, and the air creature ziz. But what stands behind these mystical allusions imbedded in the arguments of these two critical thinkers? What follows constitutes a precursory response.

First and foremost, the allusion to the frontispiece of Hobbes’ Leviathan is an obvious one. It is also important to note here that a book called Behemoth, published after Hobbes’ death, will identify the land monster with all the powers (mainly religious) that undermine the sovereign state, this great leviathan, thus bringing about the horrors of revolution and civil war. According to the Jewish tradition, it is impossible to oppose the might of leviathan and behemoth. All that you need to do is simply to wait: sooner or later, the two monsters will fight one another; a fight that neither will survive. Without lifting a finger, the righteous will then have the main course in their messianic symposium.

But there is here an element which Agamben fails to linger on. Who is ziz, this griffin? What is its symbolic power? In the economy of politics and theology, leviathan and behemoth, sea and land, what is the place of this bird? Here are a few preliminary possibilities.

The first clue comes from various iconographers who investigated numerous images in which trees and birds are placed one next to each other. Although you can find this link in different cultures, the Jews give it a specific content: the tree is the paradisiacal Tree of Life, and the bird is called chol. According to the legend, Eve gave all the animals in the garden to eat from the tree of knowledge, therefore deeming them to the same horrible fate that befell the human race (this is in opposition to the common belief, which is a central motif in Elsa Morante’s writings, that asserts the innocence of all non-human animals). There is only one exception: chol rejected the forbidden fruit, and so God granted the bird a sort of eternal life in Eden.

This peculiar legend is based on the great reverence the ancients had for birds of all kinds. Think, for example, about the role of the dove in the story of the deluge: the bird is the sole messenger of salvation to the rest of the living kingdom trapped inside Noah’s arc. Think also about the sacrifice during Abraham’s covenant with God: the sacrificial animals are cut into two parts, but there are also sacrificial birds which remain intact, as they fly around the altar. Saint Augustine explains this scene:

“Carnal beings are divided among themselves, whereas spiritual beings are in no way divided, whether, like the turtle-dove, they remove themselves from the busy world of human affairs, or, like the pigeon, pass their lives among them. Both of those birds, moreover, are simple and harmless, thus signifying that...there would be individual sons of the promise and heirs of the kingdom destined to continue in eternal felicity.”

One can therefore wonder whether the myth of Icarus and Dedalus should be understood merely as a story about the vanity that blinds us to the physical facts that bind mankind to the ground. Standing between Athens and Jerusalem, we may suggest that the point of the myth has nothing to do with the technical ability to fly, but with a strive to escape the perpetual war in the land and on the sea. This is the urge to a life in the open air (not in heaven) that neither leviathan nor behemoth can reach, which is the zone of ziz, the Jewish phoenix.

One can also wonder whether Deleuze’s “Lignes de fuite,” or “lines of flight” stand only for paths of escape. After all “fuite,” like “flight,” is inseparable from flying. Lines of flight are like birds’ flight. Or, as Nietzsche puts it, “Thoughts that come on doves’ feet guide the world.” But remember that Nietzsche, one of Deleuze's heroes, has another very important allusion to birds: the "birds of prey," which are his prime symbol of noble morality.

Perhaps the most beautiful chapter in the iconographic history of birds can be found in another illuminated Jewish manuscript, which is also believed to originate from Germany between the 13th and the 14th century. This is the Birds’-Head Haggadah at the National Library in Jerusalem. Like the image that interests Agamben, we also have here a depiction of humans with animal heads, only that here all the heads are of birds wearing a special hat that the Jews had to wear in public. Those Jews/birds are not only depicted in the end of days. Throughout the manuscript they represent figures (Abraham, Moses, etc.) enacting famous biblical passages. There are also depictions of Jews/birds going through the traditional rituals of Passover. But there are exceptions: the sun, the moon, the angels, and the king (Pharaoh) all have human faces.

If you bear in mind the rich symbolic meaning of the bird as we tried to delineate it so far, the subversive political-theological message emerging from this magnificent Haggadah needs little explication (and it surely had to be carefully guarded by the mediaeval Jews who read it every year). Nevertheless, after you stare at those images long enough, another iconic image comes to mind - the anti-semitic image of the Jews with their big, beak-like noses. Ruth Mellinkoff tried to claim recently that the Birds’-Head Haggadah was actually illustrated by anti-semitic Christian artists, and is therefore a proof to the endless oppression of the Jews who allowed themselves to be slandered in their own prayer books. I, however, would like to suggest the opposite: Maybe the origin of the anti-semitic depiction of the Jews is based on this hidden messianic Jewish image of a man with a bird head?

It is therefore fitting to conclude with the most powerful representation of birds in our time: the already classic Hitchcock film, The Birds. What the psychoanalysts will never understand is that, from an iconographic point of view, this film is not merely perverse, but deeply subversive. How should we therefore understand this story of those white bourgeois men and women who are attacked all of a sudden by those seemingly innocuous winged creatures? If we retain for a second the comparison between birds and Jews, then this film could very well be used as a Nazi propaganda. You can also think here about our fear today from those other semitic people, the arabs, who fly into our buildings without any warning.

But this is not the point that I am trying to make. I think that what really seems to arise from all the examples of birds in the history of mankind put forth above is a symbol of a new kind of power, potential power, that evades all traps, that escapes our earthly grasp. While for the coming community the bird is the obvious icon of hope, for the current, modern, capitalist, biopolitical society, this seemingly harmless creature is a secret source of horror.

Pictures of people taking pictures of people pretending to be reading a book

2007-12-30T15:55:00.000-05:00

The New York Public Library between Christmas and New Years

DISCIPLINE AND PUBLISH

2007-12-22T00:42:00.009-05:00

Disputation of Academia

1. It is rather odd that Michel Foucault, the great unmasker of modernity’s apparatuses of power, was relatively silent about the one institution that he was a full member of - the academy. From the hight of his chair at the College de France, the Professor of the History of Systems of Thought talked again and again about the madhouse and the hospital, the prison and the state, the barrack and the boarding school, but very little about the space in which his body and soul dwelled - the modern university.

2. The university is to the church what the madhouse is to the lepers’ house. The indisputable place of the church in the mediaeval land is morphing in front of our eyes into this seemingly harmless place the university occupies in the modern world.

3. The average middle-ager did not expect to celebrate his 30th birthday. If you add the days he spent in church throughout his life, you arrive to about three or four years, which happens to be the time most people spend in college.

4. The function of the professor is to profess the doctrine, hence the title “doctor.” The professor is a priest.

5. If the modest, disheveled, liberal professor of today does not manifest the aura of a spiritual guide, consider how, in 1892, during a visit to Berlin, Mark Twain stared in amazement as a crowd of a thousand young students "rose and shouted and stamped and clapped, and banged the beer-mugs" when the historian Theodor Mommsen entered the room: “This was one of those immense surprises that can happen only a few times in one's life... Here he was, clothed in a titanic deceptive modesty which made him look like other men. Here he was, carrying the Roman world and all the Caesars in his hospitable skull, and doing it as easily as that other luminous vault, the skull of the universe, carries the Milky Way and the constellations.”

6. The modern universities originated in Paris and Bologna as an outgrowth of ecclesiastical institutions, and their teachers asserted their authority by sitting, like bishops, in thrones. This is the reason why we still speak about professorships as “chairs.” William Clark explains in Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University: “The lecture, like the sermon, had a liturgical cast and aura. One must be authorized to perform the rite, and must do it in an authorized manner. Only then does the chair convey genuine charisma to the lecturer."

7. In the church, the purpose of liturgy is glory. In the university, the liturgy may be disguised, but the effect, the glory, is the same. There is simply no other way to explain the subtle rules of the academic conference or the baroque processions of the commencement ceremony.

8. Every first-year philosophy student heard the story about how Descartes had to convince the professors of the Sorbonne that his book adheres to the Christian dogma. Most people remember this as a story about the fight between reason and the church. But could this also be simply a story about the struggle between reason and academy? This is the zone of indistinction between priests and professors, church and university, philosophy and heresy.

9. At the end of his retched life, Walter Benjamin - who was first shunned by members in the German academy, then by members in the American academy, and then even by members in the pre-Israeli academy - wrote about a hidden hunchback who manipulated a puppet with Turkish clothes to look as if it can play a winning game of chess. He was indeed right to call the hunchback “theology,” but he mistakenly identified the puppet as “historical materialism.” If he only observed his own situation, he would realize that the name of this puppet could very well be something that we can call “academic materialism.”

10. Think about the truly greatest thinkers of modernity. How many of them were university professors? Most of them worked on the side of mainstream academic research. Those who held professorships, either left their posts in order to write their greatest works, or wrote those works before they were appointed to their prestigious posts. If the people that you deem as great thinkers were indeed mainstream university professors, then ask yourself whether they develop a system, or whether they left behind them a school. If you can still think of more than one or two great modern thinkers who happened to also be professors, then you better stop reading this. There are surely too many papers in distinguished journals and presentations in important conferences that you should first attend to.

11. For example, when all is said and done, people will come to realize that today’s greatest thinker is a man who never studied in graduate school; a man who deems his short formal studies as worthless; a man who began teaching at a university in his mid-forties; and to this day, twenty years later, is still awaiting a tenure. This man is Giorgio Agamben. It is not a surprise that so many distinguished academicians are so critical about Agamben’s work, while the young generation continues to read his books with great enthusiasm. But no matter. In fifty years no one will remember that those assistant, associate, and full professors ever existed, while Agamben’s books will continue to be read.

12. One of the most ludicrous myths about the university is that the campus is a hotbed for revolt. You simply need to go into any campus around the world and look into the eyes of the students, and you will see nothing but passivity and dispassion. Then you will perhaps think about other times, better times, probably in the sixties, when the student unrest shook the foundations of cities and states around the globe. But what was it exactly that those students opposed? First and foremost, it was the university system itself!

13. In one of the notes for her book On Violence, Hannah Arendt grasps with great tenacity the secret way by which the Church is linked to the university, which she calls "the only secular institution still based on authority." Thinking about the Berkeley riots, she writes: "The university today calls upon the police for protection exactly as the Catholic church used to do before the separation of state and church forced it to rely on authority alone. It is perhaps more than an oddity that the severest crisis of the church as an institution should coincide with the severest crisis in the history of the university." Nonetheless, it is quite clear, forty years later, that Arendt overstated the matter. The 1960's crisis dissipated and the university is today stronger than ever. This probably has to do less with its authoritarian rationality, and more with what we call instrumental rationality.

14. The college is not meant to perpetuate the revolutionary desires of the young generation but to block them, or to channel those desires into so-called “productive” or intentionally futile avenues. Even if deviation is allowed, it is circumscribed to certain times and places, or exceptions, that never interfere with the rule. The graduate school is meant to produce “scholars” who are in fact the officers who will control this process by which passion is put into an idle program.

15. The teaching and the writing of a professor is not supposed to agitate. “Academic freedom” is nothing but the sleeping pill of comfortable living. Professors are rarely creative thinkers but mostly monotonous producers - they get paid to produce a certain amount of classes and publications every year. What good can come of that?

16. Today, revolt is possible anywhere but in the academy.

17. "There is no oxygen in Cambridge for you," Wittgenstein told one of his pupils, as he tried to convince him to leave this god forsaken place. When the pupil wondered why did the great philosopher still cling to his academic position, Wittgenstein replied: "It does not matter for me. I manufacture my own oxygen."