The Philosophy of Agamben

Catherine Mills

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781844651337
• eBook ISBN: 9781317492795
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Giorgio Agamben has gained widespread popularity in recent years for his rethinking of radical politics and his approach to metaphysics and language. However, the extraordinary breadth of historical, legal and philosophical sources which contribute to the complexity and depth of Agamben's thinking can also make his work intimidating. Covering the full range of Agamben's work, this critical introduction outlines Agamben's key concerns: metaphysics, language and potentiality, aesthetics and poetics, sovereignty, law and biopolitics, ethics and testimony, and his powerful vision of post-historical humanity. Highlighting the novelty of Agamben's approach while also situating it in relation to the work of other continental thinkers, "The Philosophy of Agamben" presents a clear and engaging introduction to the work of this original and influential thinker.

Chapter One
Metaphysics: negativity, potentiality and death

Some of the most intractable problems that Agamben addresses in his work derive from his engagement with the history of metaphysics in Western philosophy, and particularly the tendency that he diagnoses in metaphysical thought to presuppose and posit a foundation for being and language in negativity. This position is elaborated most explicitly in the complex text, Language and Death, where Agamben sets himself the project of surpassing this metaphysical tendency towards negative foundation, which he argues first requires an examination of the true meaning of the terms “Da” and “Diese” central to the thought of the German philosophers Martin Heidegger and G. W. F. Hegel respectively. Throughout this book, he pursues the logic of negative foundation as it appears throughout Western metaphysical thought, particularly in the figurations of language as constituted by or founded in the ineffable or unspeakable. The task of surpassing metaphysics leads Agamben to posit the necessity of an experiment in language, in which what is at stake in language is not the ineffable that must necessarily be suppressed in speech, but the very event of language itself, the taking place of language prior to signification and meaning.

But the engagement with Heidegger and Hegel in Language and Death not only provides an important philosophical counterpoint to Agamben’s theory of language; it also ties in with his reflections on the question of potentiality and actuality taken from Aristotle. In this chapter I show how Agamben’s retheorization of the relation of potentiality and actuality is a necessary counterpart to the attempt to surpass metaphysics. Ultimately, in Agamben’s view it is only through rethinking the relation of potentiality and actuality that the negative foundation of language and being that metaphysical thought repetitively posits can be brought to light – and also overcome.

While these are some of the most difficult problems addressed in Agamben’s work, they are also the most central to it. As I begin to show in this chapter, the task of surpassing metaphysics – which encompasses the experimentum linguae that Agamben proposes, as well as the necessity of rethinking potentiality – provides a crucial conceptual basis for his contributions to politics and ethics. Thus it is only within the context of this project that these later contributions can be properly understood and assessed. A more complete discussion of these contributions will be undertaken in later chapters. The task of this chapter is simply to set out Agamben’s approach to the conceptual problems of language, negativity and potentiality as a starting point for a deeper analysis in later chapters. I discuss his arguments in Language and Death about the metaphysical tendency to posit a negative foundation for language and being, and relate this to other conceptual problems that he addresses in works such as Infancy and History and Potentialities. This will lead to a discussion of the idea of an experimentum linguae in which what is at stake is language itself – encapsulated in the idea of infancy – as well as of Agamben’s use of literary figures such as Melville’s Bartleby, to elaborate a revised conception of the relation of actuality and potentiality. In the following chapters, I go on to explore the various consequences of Agamben’s approach to these issues in the fields of aesthetics, politics and ethics.

A “methodological” point should be made about this chapter: throughout, I attempt to reconstruct the philosophical argument that Agamben makes in Language and Death, Infancy and History and other essays, and I do so without fully explaining the implications of his argument or considering its potential weaknesses. Because these texts and the problems they engage are crucial to understanding Agamben’s œuvre and recur throughout it, setting up many of the problems that he continues to return to right up until his most recent work, I want here only to establish some of the central terms and theoretical turns of his work. We shall have more opportunity to return to his interpretations and their implications, as well as to his critical comments on various other thinkers, throughout the following chapters. Unfortunately, this makes the chapter somewhat difficult in its own right: it is extensive in terms of the material it covers (without being in the least exhaustive of Agamben’s own treatment of the issues and sources) as well as somewhat compacted in its treatment of various concepts. But with this broad outline in place, it is possible to provide a more accessible and more coherent picture of various aspects of Agamben’s thought in the following chapters.

Voice: the negative ground of language

[O]ur seminar sets out from the definitive cancellation of the Voice; or rather, it conceives of the Voice as never having been, and it no longer thinks the Voice, the unspeakable tradition. Its place is the ethos, the infantile dwelling – that is to say, without will or Voice – of man in language.

(LD: 104)

Published in Italian in 1982 and in English in 1991, Language and Death is the most extended discussion of his approach to metaphysics that Agamben provides, and is a crucial text for understanding the motivations and central concerns of his œuvre. Structured to reflect the development of ideas in a seminar in which Agamben participated in 1979 and 1980, the text takes as its starting point a comment made by Heidegger that “the essential relation between death and language flashes up before us, but remains still unthought” and proposes to investigate the relation noted here, thereby approaching the “crucial outer limit” of Heidegger’s thought (LD: xi). The central questions that Agamben addresses in the text, which takes him beyond Heidegger in some respects, concern the attribution to human beings of the corresponding “faculties” for language and for death. Agamben wishes to question not only the supposed relation between language and death, but, more importantly, the supposition that these are essential faculties of the human. In his view, to do this requires an investigation of the “place [topos] of negativity” (ibid.: xi–xii).

To briefly summarize the argument of Language and Death, Agamben proposes that a reflection on the relation of language and death is necessarily a reflection on the place of negativity within metaphysical thought. It requires examining the Western philosophical presupposition that man is a being with the “faculties” for language and death – raising the question of whether the determination of man as speaking, mortal being does not in fact suppress rather than reveal humanity’s proper nature. This determination of man as mortal, speaking being entails that the “proper dwelling place” or ethos of humanity is thoroughly permeated by negativity or nothingness. A reformulation of the metaphysical ungroundedness of humanity that this indicates must lead, Agamben argues, to a reflection on the problem of “Voice” as the “fundamental metaphysical problem” and “originary structure of negativity”. Further, the reflection on Voice as the place of negativity leads to the insight that ethics – understood in the sense of ethos or proper dwelling place – must be released from the “informulability” to which metaphysics has condemned it. While the contemporary collapse of metaphysics into ethics that the grounding of humanity in negativity generates is increasingly evident as nihilism, contemporary thought has yet to escape from or go beyond this condition. The task that Agamben sets for contemporary thought, then, is to understand and ultimately redefine the nihilism that increasingly appears at the heart of humanity’s ungroundedness. This, he ultimately argues, must be done through a thinking of the experience of language in which language is no longer grounded in the essential negativity of Voice.

This outline gives us but the barest skeleton of Agamben’s project in Language and Death and related texts, and it is necessary to investigate the terms of his analysis much more closely if the problem he diagnoses in Western thought and the solution he wants to elaborate for it is to be understood. To do this, I begin with an outline of Agamben’s relation to the thought of Heidegger. Often considered to be the greatest German philosopher of the twentieth century – and certainly one of the most controversial – Heidegger has an abiding influence upon Agamben’s thought, although the latter’s relation to the German is not without complication. The complexity of Agamben’s engagement with Heidegger’s thought is well evidenced in Language and Death. Perhaps one of the best-known elements of Heidegger’s Being and Time is his analysis of “being-toward-death” as the own-most possibility of Dasein. In this, Heidegger attempts to develop an “existential” analysis (in the sense that he gives it of relating to the ontological characteristics of Dasein rather than to ontic or everyday understandings) of death, in which he argues that death is the “own-most possibility” of Dasein. In spite of the veiling of death in everyday understandings, for Dasein in an authentic relation to death, dying is revealed as a non-relational, radically individualizing possibility because of its unavoidability and intrinsicality in life – not in the sense of an event that is yet to come or as some aspect of life that is “outstanding” and yet to be incorporated into the whole, but as the condition of existential being.

Commenting on this understanding of death, Agamben emphasizes that Heidegger’s characterization of Dasein entails that it is entirely dominated and permeated by negativity. He writes that, “together with the purely negative structure of the anticipation of death, Dasein’s experience of its own-most authentic possibility coincides with its experience of the most extreme negativity” (LD: 2). The question that arises, then, is what the source of this negativity is – from where does the negativity that permeates Dasein derive? To answer this question, Agamben elucidates the “precise meaning” of the term Dasein, insisting that this term should be understood to mean “Being-the-there”. It is, he suggests, exactly this formulation of Dasein that reveals the ontological source of negativity, since this shows that the term “Da” itself introduces negativity into the human, in so far as the human or Dasein is the being that is at home or dwells in the place of death, understood as its most authentic possibility. Thus he concludes, “negativity reaches Dasein from its very Da” (ibid.: 5), from its Being-the-there. Even so, this does not fully answer the question of what the source of negativity in Dasein is, since it says nothing about the particular power of Da to introduce negativity into being. Moreover, it leaves unaddressed the issue of whether the negativity that Heidegger posits as the own-most authentic possibility of Dasein differs from, or merely reiterates, the formulation of negativity that permeates the history of modern philosophy (ibid.: 4–5).

To begin to respond to these questions, Agamben turns to a discussion of negativity in the philosophy of Hegel, beginning with the observation that in Hegel’s masterwork, Phenomenology of Spirit, the source of negativity is the demonstrative pronoun diese, or “this”. This raises the possibility of an analogy between the Hegelian Diese and Heideggerian Da, in so far as both construe negativity as originary. Exploring this further, Agamben takes up the theme of the ineffable in Hegel’s thought, the importance of which he argues is indicated by the reference to the Eleusinian mystery in the first chapter of Phenomenology of Spirit, which recalls an early poem by Hegel, dedicated to his friend Hölderlin in 1796. The Eleusinian mystery was an Ancient Greek cult with initiation rites revolving around Demeter (Ceres in Roman mythology), the goddess of life, agriculture and fertility, and her daughter Persephone, who, according to myth, was abducted by Hades and only permitted to emerge from the Underworld each spring. The significance of these cults here is the strict silence enforced upon initiates, who were forbidden to speak of the rites of the cult and the revelations achieved therein. Thus, in his early poem, Hegel writes of the prohibition on speech such that speech appears as a sin, as well as of the “poverty of words” and necessity of cultivating knowledge in the “breast’s inner chambers” (LD: 9).

While the ineffable is thus guarded by silence in this poem, in the later reference in the Phenomenology, Hegel appears to resolve the question of the relation of the ineffable to language somewhat differently, suggesting that it is not silence that guards it, but language itself. Hegel’s discussion of sense-certainty in the first chapter of the Phenomenology posits that utterances of “this” and “now” necessarily fail to express the meaning that the speaker wants to express, since they do not indicate the sensuous object to which they refer, but instead indicate only the universal. Thus language inadvertently expresses the true content of sense-perception while necessarily failing to say what is meant. As Hegel writes, in language “we directly refute what we mean to say, and since the universal is the true [content] of sense-certainty and language expresses this true [content] alone, it is just not possible for us ever to say, or express in words, a sensuous being that we mean.”¹ Agamben emphasizes that this makes evident for Hegel the dialectic of sense-certainty, which necessarily contains negation within itself, such that “now” or “this” is always superseded by its negative and so on.

This formulation of the necessary indication of the universal and negative within language leads to Hegel’s reference to the Eleusinian mysteries in the Phenomenology, which Agamben interprets to mean that the unspeakable is harboured within language itself. Here, the unspeakable is nothing other than meaning, the intended reference to a sensuous object that is inevitably obscured in speaking. That is, “that which is unspeakable, for language, . . . is nothing other than the very meaning, the Meinung, which, as such, remains necessarily unsaid in every saying: but this un-said, in itself, is simply a negative and a universal” (LD: 13). It is important to recognize here that the mystery of the universal is thus not harboured and protected by silence through a prohibition on speaking, but is instead cast as an unspeakable element internal to language and speaking itself. As Agamben writes, “language has captured in itself the power of silence, and that which appeared earlier as unspeakable ‘profundity’ can be guarded (in its negative capacity) in the very heart of the word” (ibid.: 13–14). Thus “all speech speaks the ineffable” (ibid.: 14) and demonstrates its essential characteristic as the negative or Nothingness of meaning.

Before saying more about the analogy that Agamben has thus begun to set up between Heidegger and Hegel, it is worth noting that the reference to the Eleusinian mysteries in the Phenomenology presages Agamben’s later discussion of animality, language and world-disclosure in his book The Open. In this reference, Hegel suggests that animals are not excluded from the wisdom of the mysteries, but are instead “most profoundly initiated into it”. This is because, rather than “standing idly in front of things . . . despairing of their reality, and completely assured of their nothingness”, animals unceremoniously fall to eating them.² Agamben will return to this characterization of the animal’s relation to the world at several points, particularly in dialogue with Heidegger’s discussion of the same relation in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. I shall come back to this issue in due course, but for now I continue with the discussion of the metaphysical grounding of language in negativity.

So far, then, we have seen that Agamben interprets both Heidegger and Hegel as positing negativity as intrinsic to language, a point made evident in their respective characterizations of Da and Diese. For Agamben, the perceived coincidence of Da and Diese in relation to negativity raises the question of whether there is a “common essence” in these concepts that has yet to be disclosed. Noting that Da and Diese are etymologically and morphologically connected in their Greek root “to”, he focuses o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Metaphysics: negativity, potentiality and death
• 2. Aesthetics: language, representation and the object
• 3. Politics: biopolitics, sovereignty and nihilism
• 4. Ethics: testimony, responsibility and the witness
• 5. Messianism: time, happiness and completed humanity
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Chronology of major works
• Bibliography
• Index