Agamben’s Political Ontology of Nudity in Literature and Art

Frances Restuccia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367204808
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429537332
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume develops the central (though neglected) Agambenian concept of nudity along with its crucial political implications. The book discovers within The Use of Bodies a philosophical path to Agamben's "ontology of nudity," as it is subtended by his notion of the messianic—a dual temporality of form in motion reflected in the image of a whirlpool that is autonomous although no drop of water belongs to it separately. Drawn from Paul and Benjamin (rather than Derrida), Agamben's messianic is elaborated in this study through its embodiment in literature—Woolf's To the Lighthouse, James's The Aspern Papers, Brodsky's Watermark, and Mann's Death in Venice—in response to Agamben's insistence on the wedding of poetry and philosophy. In particular, Coetzee's Disgrace gives poetic form to Agamben's focus on the dissolution of the human/animal border, the salvation of the unsavable, and "nudity"—all to illustrate Agamben's Open without a closedness. This text shows how art serves as the house of philosophy also by taking up the nude in visual art, making the case that, in comprising chronos and kairos (the two messianic components of Agamben's ontology of nudity), art demonstrates the constitution of form-of-life for the viewer. Emphasizing Agamben's privileged non-unveilability/nudity, this book finally examines two major missed encounters, with Heidegger and Lacan, philosophers of the veil. Veiling to Agamben correlates with the sovereignty/bare life structure of the exception, which his ontology of nudity is meant to deactivate—as there is no such thing as a bare life.

Part I
Literature and Art

1 Profaning the Messiah or Why Can’t Dulcinea Love Us?

This chapter opens Agamben’s Political Ontology of Nudity in Literature and Art by explaining Agamben’s notion of the messianic as the interplay between creation and de-creation via a film clip from Orson Welles’s Don Quixote. Agamben turns to art as a mode of redeeming gesture to counter the evil magician of capitalism and to heal the fractures carved out by the insidious society of the spectacle. Don Quixote’s divinely violent messianic gesture in the Welles film segment (what Agamben in Profanations hyperbolically calls “The Six Most Beautiful Minutes in the History of Cinema”) serves here to reflect Agamben’s sense of a genuine political act, as it deactivates the Law through fulfillment. Featuring the negative example of Dulcinea, who cannot love us, Welles’s film snippet conveys the Pauline idea, central to this book, that love fulfills Law. All these components of Agamben’s messianism constitute a theory of the subversion of the state of exception. Agamben offers a “completely new politics,” unfounded on the exception of bare life, that art enables us to grasp (Agamben, 1998, 11).

The penultimate chapter of Agamben’s Profanations, “In Praise of Profanation,” issues an impossible-sounding injunction to the coming generation—to profane the unprofanable. With that directive, Agamben’s book might appropriately have ended. But Profanations forges ahead by focusing on a deleted segment of Welles’s silent film, in a chapter that Agamben also calls “The Six Most Beautiful Minutes in the History of Cinema.” This final section of Profanations offers a response to Agamben’s sense of the urgent “political task of the coming generation”—the “profanation of the unprofanable” (Agamben, 2007, 92)—by putting the spectacle into play. Don Quixote toys with the spectacle, making the most of the spectacle’s potential to dissolve, in fact, by enacting the ultimate profanation, that of the Messiah Himself. And this is why chapter ten on Welles’s excluded fragment has the final say as well as why this film clip constitutes the six most beautiful minutes in the history of cinema. It is film and, “most exemplarily, the silent movie,” along with the “dance of Isadora Duncan and Sergei Diaghilev, the novel of Proust, the great Jugendstil poetry from Pascoli to Rilke,” that traces “the magic circle in which humanity tried for the last time to evoke what was slipping through its fingers forever” (Agamben, 2000, 53–54).

The Imagination as Profanatory Tool

In “The Six Most Beautiful Minutes in the History of Cinema,” Agamben poses a question about the imagination that is crucial for comprehending the very chapter in which this topic is broached, helping us to think about how the imagination serves as a profanatory tool insofar as it enables play. Agamben queries, “What are we to do with our imaginations? Love them and believe in them to the point of having to destroy and falsify them” (Agamben, 2007, 93–94). Although this latter statement too has the ring of a question, it actually replies to the preceding line that asks how we are to treat the imagination or objects thereof. Loving (Agamben is proposing) as well as believing in the imagination is accomplished paradoxically through destruction. This assertion is a variation on Agamben’s notion, expressed in an essay titled “Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films,” that “at the heart of every creative act[,] there is an act of de-creation” (Agamben, 2002a, 318).

Such a de-creation is what Don Quixote violently enacts in the Orson Welles film clip. Realizing that a woman is in danger of being harmed by feuding knights in the film he is watching, Don Quixote rushes up to the stage to defend her and slashes away at the screen. In other words, he loves and believes in his imagination—as it is realized by the fiction of the film he is experiencing—to the point of massacring it. In doing so, he performs a double operation: he reveals the “nullity” of which the imagination is made; and he destroys images, in a playful act of imagination, shattering the spectacle. We can assume that the images on the screen are exposed as typical of the spectacle especially insofar as the adult audience (“matured” beyond magical happiness) erupts in a rage over Don Quixote’s demolition, whereas the children (associated in Agamben with pre-spectacular magical happiness) standing in the balcony cheer Don Quixote on. In this connection, in The Signature of All Things, Agamben quotes Foucault approvingly on “the value of a poetic imagination” as it “is measured by the power of destruction internal to the image.” What he draws from Foucault’s Dits et écrits next is even more pertinent to his point about the relation of the imagination to images: “all imagination, in order to be authentic, must learn to dream; and ‘poetic art’ has meaning only insofar as it teaches itself to break the spell of images in order to open to the imagination the free path toward the dream, which offers, as absolute truth, its ‘indestructible kernel of night.’” Agamben then pursues this idea on his own: “This dimension beyond images and phantasms toward which the movement of the imagination is directed is . . . the initial moment of existence . . .” (Agamben, 2009, 105).

Don Quixote disturbs the adult fixation on images through his enactment of childlike magical experience. In a messianic gesture, he extracts desire from hard images, an act that works against the “extreme phase of capitalism in which we are now living, in which everything is exhibited [as spectacle or glossy image] in its separation from itself” (Agamben, 2007, 82). The spectacle removes things from themselves to the point that nothing remains to profane, which is why we are now left with the formidable task of profaning the unprofanable. Naturally, our desire needs to be detached from such shells. In the fractured society of the spectacle, shell-like things merely appear in all their emptiness, their “essences” having been shucked. Agamben explains that consumption inevitably ruins “the thing”; it negates use (82). In contrast, Don Quixote puts the film imaginatively to “use” as he returns the sensationalistic film within the Welles fragment to its status as gesture by destroying it as spectacular image. He rescues desire from the frozen image and turns it into a warm, ephemeral one.

Imagination thus bears a relation to the question of desire, which Agamben casts as “imagined desire.” Desire needs to be peeled away from the rigidified image and located on the side of imagination. To Agamben, our desires are “simple,” “human,” and “unavowable” because we have imagined them. In his chapter, in Profanations, titled “Desiring,” Agamben espouses the related notion that “[D]esire will remain forever unfulfilled.” Yet he immediately appears to contradict this idea in asserting that the “messiah comes for our desires”—as demonstrated through the action of Don Quixote—to separate them “from images in order to fulfill them. Or rather, in order to show they have already been fulfilled” (my emphases, Agamben, 2007, 53–54). The trick here is to comprehend how desire is necessarily unfulfilled and yet already fulfilled. Don Quixote epitomizes the idea that the attempt to fulfill desire inevitably fails: Dulcinea is a potent figment of his imagination, rather than a real object that could be possessed in a way that might satisfy desire. But, more to the point, by shattering images in the film within the Welles fragment, Don Quixote indicates that desire is never commensurate with, or fulfilled by, images that attempt to express it, as members of the society of the spectacle delude themselves into believing it is.

But desire is fulfilled insofar as it takes place. “Whatever we have imagined,” Agamben writes, “we have already had.” To imagine, in other words, is to experience desire. In that act itself lies desire. Hence, “with imagined desire,” Agamben tells us, comes “the beatitude of paradise” (Agamben, 2007, 54)—all of which aligns with Agamben’s later sense of being’s demand/desire to exist, its beatitude. Don Quixote helps us out here as well: rather than leading to a conquering endpoint, his desire is fulfilled insofar as it transpires, through the medium of the images he simultaneously de-creates. “The Six Most Beautiful Minutes in the History of Cinema” renders inoperable the “possessable image” by enacting the de-creation inherent in the “usable” image of imagination. Actually, the image is never merely static. Agamben conceives of every image as “animated by an antinomic polarity: on the one hand, images are the reification and obliteration of a gesture (it is the imago as death mask or as symbol); on the other hand, they preserve a dynamis intact” (Agamben, 2000, 55). All images encapsulate motion that gets released when they are transformed into gesture. Agamben writes that

A certain kind of litigatio, a paralyzing power whose spell we need to break, is continuously at work in every image; it is as if a silent invocation calling for the liberation of the image into gesture arose from the entire history of art. This is what in ancient Greece was expressed by the legends in which statues break the ties holding them and begin to move. (56)

(We will encounter such moving statues as they reflect messianic time through the work of Bernini in Chapter 6.)

Agamben celebrates art that activates the profanatory, poetic imagination, engaged equally in creation and de-creation as well as in the shattering of the reified image, art that allows for the experience of (imagined) desire, rather than capturing anything. He favors art that “lives” rather than suffers from our modern-day, deadly process of museification—the “impossibility of using.” Agamben conceptualizes the Museum (not as an actual site but) as “the separate dimension to which what was once—but is no longer—felt as true and decisive has moved.” He laments the loss of “spiritual potentialities” that used to define life—“art, religion, philosophy, the idea of nature, even politics”—now “withdrawn into the Museum” (Agamben, 2007, 83–84). Agamben regrets that “the work of art is no longer . . . the essential measure of man’s dwelling on earth” (Agamben, 1994, 33). The energy of art has expired. We fail to penetrate the “innermost vitality” of an amazing work of art (40); we fail to experience it as “the concrete appearance of the divine” (41). We are as obtuse, Agamben insinuates, as the Inquisitor in Ivan Karamazov’s poem in The Brothers Karamazov—and here we might note the particular analogy Agamben draws on. Even as the Inquisitor strives to put into place a Christian world, he “negate[s] Christ when he has him before his eyes” (49). Just as Dostoevsky’s Inquisitor ironically negates Christ, we face art to encounter it but only efface it.

Gesture, Pure Means, Cinema

The revelation of gesture is lost on us. All that appears now is “the exhibition of an impossibility of using, of dwelling, of experiencing” (Agamben, 2007, 84). Such exhibition has become the “unprofanable” that needs to be played with, put to new use, and thereby profaned. To Agamben, things have reached such a boiling point, in fact, that the spectacle itself brings with it a “positive possibility,” the chance to pass into his “coming community.” In Means Without End, Agamben proposes that “(precisely because what is being expropriated is the possibility itself of a common good), the spectacle’s violence is so destructive; but, for the same reason, the spectacle still contains something like a positive possibility—and it is our task to use this possibility against it” (Agamben, 2000, 82–83). As of the current moment, however, the spectacle still mainly obstructs those phenomena within it that operate according to pure means, appropriating gestures as reified images.

It is precisely because things in the realm of pure means are the most fragile that they are in danger of being seized by the society of the spectacle and that gestures are hardened into spectacular images. Capitalism is a “gigantic apparatus for capturing pure means” or in other words “profanatory behaviors” (Agamben, 2007, 87). Certain pure means that do the crucial work of deactivating all separation are apt to find themselves appropriated by the sphere of the spectacle. It is pornography that best illustrates this lost opportunity. Agamben calls pornography an apparatus that “appears to have realized the capitalist dream of producing an unprofanable” (88–89). He looks at erotic photography, however, as an art form that had potential, that was not quite “in step with the capitalist absolutization of the commodity and exchange-value” (89). He points out that that despicable synchronization did not occur until the models began to look back shamelessly at their spectators, to reveal more of an interest in the one looking at them than in a partner.

The difference between erotic photography and pornography seems clear. But when Agamben turns to the topic of the porn star’s face, his argument becomes very subtle, if not murky. One expects him to be lamenting, if not condemning, the moment when the model senses that she is being looked at and as a result becomes expressionless. But Agamben sees promise in this turn of events: “precisely through this nullification of expressivity, eroticism penetrates where it could have no place: the human face, which does not know nudity” (as it is generally conceived), for the face is “always already bare. Shown as a pure means beyond any concrete expressivity, it becomes available for a new use, a new form of erotic communication” (Agamben, 2007, 90). In the end, however, the apparatus of pornography extinguishes this new use: the “solitary and desperate consumption of the pornographic image . . . replaces the promise of a new use” (91). Agamben presents this example of the porn star’s face to support his position that we need to beware of such capturing and diversion of profanatory intentions and rescue from all apparatuses the “use” they have appropriated.

It is exactly such a wresting of the appropriated “possibility of use” that Don Quixote performs, demonstrating the political task of the coming generation. Quixote’s sword destroys the images on the screen, de-creating them in a gesture that nullifies expressivity. “In the end, nothing is left of the screen, and only the wooden structure supporting it remains visible” (Agamben, 2007, 93). What had been emptied out by the society of the spectacle—the unprofanable—has been profaned, put to use, through an act of imagination. The growing black slash on the screen evokes the potential produced by Don Quixote’s act of profanation. De-creation returns the film to a black pool of possibility, a kind of Deleuzean plane of immanence, potentiality as impotentiality. Don Quixote’s gesture plays with the spectacle by living out his imagination and, as a result, ruins the spectacle in a way that opens it for new use, restoring potentiality to it. This move might be read as an allegory for transforming the spectacle in film into the type of cinema Agamben associates with gesture itself. For Agamben, cinema is, as Deborah Levitt puts it, “the most exemplary site for [the] attempt to . . . redeem gesture” (Levitt, 2008, 194). A figure in a film, Don Quixote (by entering and destroying yet another film) revives cinematic gesture.

In “Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films,” Agamben discusses Debord’s description of himself as a strategist rather than a philosopher. With this reminder of Debord’s self-image, Agamben is perhaps pointing in general to the strategic potential of cinema, mainly insofar as it presents the movement-image—not “outside history” but charged with “a dynamic tension”—to employ Deleuze’s now famous term (Agamben, 2002a, 314). Cinema, Agamben informs us, “does the opposite of the media. What is always given in the media is the fact, what was, without its possibility, its power: we are given a fact before which we are powerless” (316). But how does cinema offer something different? Not through the traditional notion of expression, where the image exists solely as a vehicle for the fully realized meaning it seeks to convey, but by foregrounding mediality. An “expressive act is fulfilled when the means, the medium, is no longer perceived as such.” But Agamben privileges a contrasting image, one that serves as “a means, a medium, that does not disappear in what it makes visible.” It is what he terms a “‘pure means,’ one that shows itself as such. The image gives itself to be seen instead of disappearing in what it makes visible” (318). Such an image is “no longer an image of anything; it is itself imageless,” an exhibiting of “the image as image.” Agamben contrasts such a giving of the image with pornography and advertising, “which act as though there were always something more to be seen, always more images behind the images.” The distinction between these two types of images—one that vanishes as a medium for the sake of conveying content, which requires unveiling; the other that shows itself as a (non-unveilable) image and thereby becomes in a sense imageless—brings into view “the ethics and politics of cinema” (319).

The not merely linear (nonetheless ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Prolegomenon to Agamben’s Political Ontology of Nudity in Literature and Art
• Part I Literature and Art
• Part II Theory (Heidegger and Lacan)
•  Afterword
• Works Cited
• Index