El uso de los cuerpos

Homo Sacer #IV.2

by Giorgio Agamben, Rodrigo Molina-Zavalía (Translator)

Después de las indagaciones arqueológicas de los ocho volúmenes precedentes del Homo sacer, la gran obra del filósofo italiano Giorgio Agamben, en este volumen que da cierre al conjunto se elaboran y definen las ideas y conceptos que han guiado la investigación en un territorio inexplorado, cuyas fronteras coinciden con un nuevo uso de los cuerpos, de la técnica, del mundo y de nosotros mismos. El uso de los cuerpos («Homo sacer, IV, 2») responde a las expectativas con la fuerza resolutiva de la obra maestra. Este noveno y último volumen es un libro con el que será de ahora en adelante necesario medirse –aunque no sea fácil–, no sólo porque por su riqueza, erudición y claridad especulativa se está imponiendo en el panorama filosófico de nuestro tiempo, sino porque verdaderamente abre una nueva dimensión del pensamiento mientras restituye –más allá de la “potencia constituyente”, a saber, de las instituciones y del gobierno– toda la seriedad de la anarquía (entendida a la vez en sentido filosófico y político). Andrea Cavalletti

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Theory, Nonfiction, Bodies, Technology, Italy

514 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2014

About the author

Giorgio Agamben is one of the leading figures in Italian and contemporary continental philosophy. He is the author of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life; Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive; Profanations; The Signature of All Things: On Method, and other books. Through the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s he treated a wide range of topics, including aesthetics, literature, language, ontology, nihilism, and radical political thought.

In recent years, his work has had a deep impact on contemporary scholarship in a number of disciplines in the Anglo-American intellectual world. Born in Rome in 1942, Agamben completed studies in Law and Philosophy with a doctoral thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil, and participated in Martin Heidegger’s seminars on Hegel and Heraclitus as a postdoctoral scholar.

He rose to international prominence after the publication of Homo Sacer in 1995. Translated into English in 1998, the book’s analyses of law, life, and state power appeared uncannily prescient after the attacks on New York City and Washington, DC in September 2001, and the resultant shifts in the geopolitical landscape. Provoking a wave of scholarly interest in the philosopher’s work, the book also marked the beginning of a 20-year research project, which represents Agamben’s most important contribution to political philosophy.

Reviews

[homoness · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps, when approaching Agamben, it might be a good idea to remember the Deleuzian distinction between a coherent and faithful reading, one which approaches a text as a more or less coherent articulation of ideas, and then secondly a reading which does not consider a text as a systematic exposition but rather seeks to extract whatever good shit there might be in it so as to then articulate something equally interesting. If one were to approach this book, as well as any other Agamben-book, as a systematic exposition of argument "a" which is then subtended by argument "b" and ultimately concludes with thesis "z", one will be rather annoyed by Agamben's writings. If however one were to read Agamben as an adorable old man who knows literally everything (about white Western culture), yet somehow finds it hard to speak to the exigencies of precisely one topic at a time, this text will present itself as the treasure trove of ideas it indeed is.

[Virga · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nėra ko nors iš esmės kitokio, kaip kitose Agambeno knygose, bet - daug įdomių ir kartais netikėtų sąsajų tarp gyvybės (plikos, aišku) ir gyvenimo (socialinio-politinio), tarp judviejų jungties, ir dar savasties (nuo ikisokratikų laikų, pasirodo, vadintos ethos), ir dar kūno. Ir daug kitų Agambeno atrastų ir gerai panaudotų sąvokų. Ir, aišku, apie tai, kas iš visų tų jungčių išsivystė, kuo jos dabar mūsų mintyse, ir kalbose, ir veiksmuose užkastos, ir kur išlenda. Toks tikras Agambenas ir labai tirštas Agambenas.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

For longtime readers of Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies may be one of his most satisfying books (especially sections II and III, on ontology and form-of-life) even while it is also one of his most concept-focused and technical books, and in that sense circumscribed. In “The Irreparable” from 1990 (The Coming Community’s “Appendix”) Agamben hinted in ~10–15 short pages what is here, in The Use of Bodies, elaborated into part II’s 80 pages on modal ontology; his suggestive ~10-page “Form-of-Life” essay, from 1993, is here elaborated into part III’s 84 pages. The gesture toward a positive conception of use apart from ownership, in The Highest Poverty, is here teased-out in part I’s 105 pages (albeit from a different angle, by attempting to free and repurpose from “the capture within law…a figure of human acting [the status of the slave in antiquity] that still remains for us to recognize” as a “new figure of human praxis”).

In Agamben’s writings it is often difficult to determine to what extent ideas discussed, even approvingly, are actually sanctioned on his own terms, apart from the mode of commentary taking up others’ terms. Yet some sections here stand out for the especially clear metaphors employed — for example, those used when elaborating his proposed approach to ontology: images or concepts of sound/echoes (p. 149), and flux/seas (p. 174: “The modes are eddies in the boundless field of the substance that, by sinking and whirling into itself, disseminates and expresses itself in singularities”). In other words, Agamben herein makes clear that his own focus on philosophy of language does in fact relate to a reality beyond just a linguistic deferral of ultimate meaning (which corresponds to Agamben’s passing criticisms of deconstruction elsewhere, albeit not even mentioned in this book). It becomes especially clear, in The Use of Bodies, that Agamben’s analysis of “sayability,” for example, is not just a linguistic construct or descriptive ruse, but, for Agamben, describes or mirrors — even as it subsumes — an actually existing ontological relation between word and thing (p. 170), and in so many words he explicitly states as much. (By way of his long genealogy of hypostasis he also seems to eventually sanction, apart from his chronological textual analysis and commentary, an ontological primacy of process over substance.) Perhaps most notably, the beginning of part II includes a uncharacteristically blunt note on method and history in relation to ontology (p. 111):

First philosophy is not, in fact, an ensemble of conceptual formulations that, however complex and refined, do not escape from the limits of a doctrine: it opens and defines each time the space of human acting and knowing, of what the human being can do and of what it can know and say. Ontology is laden with the historical destiny of the West not because an inexplicable and metahistorical magical power belongs to being but just the contrary, because ontology is the originary place of the historical articulation between language and world, which preserves in itself the memory of anthropogenesis, of the moment when that articulation was produced. To every change in ontology there corresponds, therefore, not a change in the 'destiny' but in the complex of possibilities that the articulation between language and world has disclosed as 'history' to the living beings of the species Homo sapiens.

Also notable, in The Use of Bodies, is that even Agamben’s familiar references to Heidegger’s writings seem to take on a newfound frankness and even judgement: for example, Heidegger “could not but fail” his attempt to grasp being as time (p. 133), etc. — whereas, in many earlier texts, Agamben often seemed to treat Heidegger with a much more unquestioningly reverential tone (notwithstanding, here, his personal recollection of the 1966 Le Thor seminar, which in moments borders on the hagiographic: “…suddenly his eyes struck me, so lively, bright, and penetrating” [p. 187]).

All that said, though, this is clearly the sort of book which could only have been written after having spent decades mulling over its themes, and it shows (Agamben implies, in the “Prefatory Note,” that the texts were written sporadically between c. 1995–2014, and mostly between 2009–2014). Sections 1–6 of the “Epilogue” also helpfully offer condensed summaries of concepts and themes from Homo Sacer vols. I, II, and The Open. A stray comment in the “Prefatory Note” reveals a telling summation of the entire Home Sacer project (p. xiii):

A theory that, to the extent possible, has cleared the field of all errors has, with that, exhausted its raison d’être and cannot presume to subsist as separate from practice.

In that sense, it remains for every reader to live-out their own "destituent potential/power" — perhaps some day collectively.

[sologdin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part IX of author’s Homo Sacer project, a fitting finale.

Some curious outworks here, such as the preface calling into question the pars destruens/pars construens distinction and suggesting that they coincide without remainder (xiii), and likewise noting that the “arche that archaeology brings to light is not homogeneous to the presuppositions that it has neutralized; it is given entirely and only in their collapse. Its work is their inoperativity” (id.).

The prologue follows, working over Guy Debord and the “central contradiction” that the situationists were unable to overcome, “that the genuinely political element consists precisely in this incommunicable, almost ridiculous clandestinity of private life” (xv)—“the clandestine, our form-of-life” is thought to preserve “the stowaway of the political, the other face of the arcanum imperii (xvi). Debord’s notion of “intense life” that is “inverted and falsified by the spectacle” is read as the bios/zoe distinction—“politically qualified life and bare life, public life and private life, vegetative life and a life of relation” (xix). Private life accompanying as a clandestinity or stowaway—separated yet inseparable, the “corporeal life” of the alimentary canal, sleep, sex (again, Bakhtin’s grotesque body)—leading up to the reference to de Sade’s castle Silling, “in which political power has no object other than the vegetative life of bodies” (xxi). (The ZoI of public/private has its threshold in the intimate, perhaps, infra.)

Text proper is three essays of uncertain interrelatedness: the first concerns the sequellae of the Aristotelian theory of slavery; the second, an “Archaeology of Ontology,” which is perhaps an ambitious title for what is essentially an outline of what the argument might be, rather than the argument itself; and a definitive working out of the form-of-life apparatus.

Part I commences with Aristotle’s definition of “the nature of the slave” as “the use of the body” (3)—households (oikos) are composed of slaves and free persons, and the ‘despotic’ relation obtains between master and slave (id.). The slave is human and yet “is by its nature of another and not of itself,” which leads Aristotle to wonder if slavery is contrary to nature. Because Aristotle is more or less a numbnut, he distinguishes despotic commands (soul over body) and political commands (intelligence over appetite), and makes the analogical argument that because these (tautological) relations are proper, so too are command relations among human persons (4). Eww?

Slave in Aristotle is an “automaton or animate instrument” even though in modern terms the slave is more similar to fixed capital than to the proletarian (11). Because bios is a praxis, the slave “is an assistant for things of praxis (12). Assuming a “community of life between slave and master” (13), the Aristotelian might conclude that “the master is really using his own body” in using the slave (14). We see in the “oneirocritical acumen” of Artemidorus “the indetermination of the two bodies” and “the ‘serviceable’ hand of the master is equivalent to the [sexual] service of the slave” (18). The slave therefore as a sort of homo sacer insofar as “the special status of slaves—at once excluded from and included in humanity, as those not properly human beings who make it possible for others to be human—has as its consequence a cancellation and confounding of the limits that separate physis from nomos” (20). Slave as what “renders possible for others the bios politikos, that is to say [hoion NB], the truly human life. And if the human being is defined for the Greeks through a dialectic between physis and nomos, zoe and bios, then the slave, like bare life, stands at the threshold that separates and joins them” (id.). The (tremendous) mini-essay on the aristotelian theory of the slave concludes with a tidy summation of the ‘use of the body’—which amounts to an inoperativity, a zone of indifference between one’s own and another’s body, a zone of indifference between an inanimate instrument and a living thing, neither praxis nor poiesis nor the modern concept of ‘labor,’ and the condition of possibility of bios (22-3).

Thereafter, the first essay contains useful excogitation on chresis (24 ff), Foucault’s aesthetics (31 ff), the notion of ‘use’ for Heidegger (38 ff), a cool mini-archaeology on oikeiosis, the ‘appropriation of the self to self’ (49 ff),a mini-archaeology on hexis/habitus as related to the central thematic (58 ff), the relation of the slave to technology (66 ff), and the concluding chapter regarding the notion ‘inappropriability’ (80 ff), which is labor intensive and warrants careful reading:

Against the attempt to appropriate the inappropriable to oneself, by means of right or force, in order to constitute it as an arcanum of sovereignty, it is necessary to remember that intimacy can preserve its political meaning only on condition that it remains inappropriable. What is common is never a property but only the inappropiable. The sharing of this inappropriable is love, that ‘use of the loved object’ of which the Sadean universe constitutes the most serious and instructive parody. 93)

The volume’s second essay, the archaeology of ontology, is premised upon the notion that, for post-kantian philosophy, we can only think first philosophy as an archaeology (111), a “memory of anthropogenesis” (id.) insofar as it is the “memory and repetition” of “becoming human,” watching over our “the historical a priori” (id.). This latter notion, deployed famously by Foucault and arising perhaps from Husserl, is an aporetic, for the a priori “entails a paradigmatic and transcendental dimension” whereas history “refers to an eminently factual reality” (112). Agamben will preserve the aporetic, however, to the extent that the “contradictory formulation brings to expression the fact that every historical study inevitably runs up against a constitutive dishomogeneity” (id.). This sort of philosophical archaeology is the bringing forth of “the various historical a prioris that condition the history of humanity and define its epochs” (id.). Our own historical a priori is likely the “impossibility of first philosophy” that prevails in the post-kantian world (113). First section takes up the Aristotelian notion of ousia, as distinguished from hypokeimenon, sub-iectum, ‘that which lies under’ (115). Lotsa stuff on this, connecting up to the general HS series thematics with “the bare life of homo sacer is the irreducible hypostasis that appears between [bios and zoe] to testify to the impossibility of their identity as much as their distinction” (133), which is something of a shift from earlier conceptions of this distinction.

The next section is a thoughtful rumination on the ‘theory of hypostases,’ which originates in Aristotle as the term used to describe animal “excrement as the remainder of nourishment” (136), but which for Stoicism and Neoplatonism becomes a replacement for the ousia (135). As described in extreme detail in volume V, “the doctrine of the hypostases attains its decisive development in Trinitarian theology” (140). Author acknowledges the “problem of individuation” in this context (143), though perhaps that warrants its own volume. Upshot of this section is that the trinity is caught up in the aporia of how “the relative is at once included and excluded in the absolute, in the sense that—according to the etymology of the term ex-ceptio--it has been ‘captured outside,’ which is to say [hoion NB], included by means of exclusion [cf. volume I & II]” (144). This aporia follows Christianity to the present moment, an inheritance of the Aristotelian aporetics aforesaid, and curable only by resorting to an alternative ontology.

Section 3 of the second essay offers the alternative in ‘modal ontology’ (146 ff). It's all of less interest, am thinking, but for what it’s worth:

we have called ‘use’ a medial process of this kind [cf. Scott’s [book: The Question of Ethics Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger] regarding the middle voice]. In a modal ontology, being uses-itself, that is to say [!], it constitutes, expresses, and loves[?] itself in the affection that it receives from its own modifications. (165)

So, yeah, that’s crazier than a shithouse rat, but otherwise we’re on track.

Third essay is the bomb. Begins with an archaeology of zoe itself, noting that this initially is “not a medical-scientific notion but a philosophico-political concept” (195)—all the Marxists are now saying ‘yeah, duh?’

In Aristotle, the political community (full of bios) is contingent upon the community of bare life that supports it (i.e., “slaves and animals,” i.e., zoe) (197); the point of articulation between these two is autarkeia, a condition where the “population has reached the just numeric consistency” (id.). Apparently bios is always autarchic:

That is to say [!], autarchy, like stasis [cf. volume III], is a biopolitical operator, which allows or negates the passage from the community of life to the political community, from simple zoe to politically qualified life. (198)

Lots on this and what follows from it. Suffice it to mention that all of this meditation is prefatory to “the term form-of-life,” i.e., “a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate and keep distinct something like bare life” (207) (and cf. volume VIII). Hobbes, Benjamin, Bataille, Foucault: plenty to be said. Plotinus, Agamben argues, creates a “new bio-ontology” with the concept eidos zoe, form of life (218).

The argument collapses bios and with “it is a matter of rendering both bios and zoe inoperative [!], so that form-of-life can appear as the tertium [ i.e., Derrida’s triton genus] that will become thinkable only starting from this inoperativity, from this coinciding” (225).

Agamben pulls personal ads from a French newspaper regarding “modes of life,” such as “Young juggler, pretty, feminine, spiritual, seeks young woman 20-30, similar profile to be united in the G-spot” (230). Dude reads this as “a complete success and, at the same time, an irreparable failure” in communicating a form-of-life (id.). This is “as if something decisive—and, so to speak [!], unequivocally public and political—has collapsed to such a degree into the idiocy of the private [cf. M&E] that is becoming forever unrecognizable” (id.). Though definition of self through “hobbies” is apparently standard, it is nevertheless” necessary to decisively subtract tastes from the aesthetic dimension and rediscover their ontological character, in order to find in them something like a new ethical territory” (231). Apparently the form-of-life “corresponds to this ontology of style” (233) wherein “a singularity bears witness to itself.”

Some notes on the rhetoric of intimacy/exile (phyge) (234 ff); the apolis as “one who is cut off from all political community” (236) as laid out in the Antigone--this is the deinos, the terrible, a concept applicable to the exiled and the stateless. For Agamben’s stealth favorite Plotinus, the political ban (“flight of one alone with one alone”) is some sort of ‘superpolitical and apolitical’ moment, a form-of-life that is beyond the bios/zoe dialectic, a “new and happy intimacy of an alone by oneself, as a cipher of a superior politics.” Aristotle’s thigein (touching) is his characterization of thought, and Agamben runs with this as a ‘metaphysical interstice’ (that language from one Giorgio Colli) wherein “two entities are separated only by a void of representation” (237). The plotinian alone-by-itself defines “the structure of every form-of-life” but it is also applicable to the polis: “this thigein, this contact that the juridical order and politics seek by all means to capture and represent in a relation” (id.). Our politics

constitutively ‘representative,’ because it always already has to reformulate contact into the form of a relation. It will therefore be necessary to think politics as an intimacy unmediated by any articulation or representation: human beings, forms-of-life are in contact, but this is unrepresentable because it consists precisely in a representative void, that is, in the deactivation and inoperativity of every representation. To the ontology of non-relation and use there must correspond a non-representative politics. (237)

I am duly overwhelmed. Other cool things elsewise, including an epilogue that attempts something of a tying-together summation of the entire Homo Sacer project, which project is construed as an “archaeology of politics” (263)--no one can say that Agamben lacks intellectual ambition.

Recommended for those who would liberate the human being from the narrow limits of serviceability, persons who are void because they are only suspensions of animality, and readers who see that destitution coincides without remainder with constitution.

[Elena Molina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Katargein: notes on Giorgio Agamben’s L’uso dei corpi. By Gerardo Muñoz
(fragment.)
To read the entire review: https://infrapoliticalreflections.org...

1. L’uso dei corpi (Neri Pozza, 2014) is the culmination of Agamben’s Homo Sacer project after a little more than a decade. The thinker has warned that the volume should not be taken as the end of the project, but as the last installment before its abandonment. To this effect, it is for future thinkers and scholars to continue carrying forth an investigation that polemically proposes an archeological destruction of politics in the West. L’uso is a book written with a backward gaze on what has been elaborated in other volumes, while thematizing instances of the unsaid in them. A novelty in L’uso dei corpi is the constant iteration of anecdotal impressions that enact as emblems of the indeterminate threshold between thought and life.

None of these details are meant to add flare to the content. Rather, they allude to one’s impossible strategy of sketching or bearing witness to life. It is precisely that alocation which already introduces the idea of form of life. It is worthwhile to note that in this bravado, there is little meditation on Agamben’s own life, which remains silently opaque and perhaps on the side of “ette clandestinité de la vie privée sur laquelle on ne possède jamais que des documents dérisoires”. The writing of a life is only potential or a habitual relation of the singular with itself, foreign to conventional literary genres or works of memory and identity. The form of life coincides here with a writing that never anticipates its own becoming; it seeks for an inclination or a “gusto” (as opposed to an ‘aesthetic’ form) [1]. Hence, if according to Benjamin Heidegger’s thinking is angular; one is tempted to say that Agamben’s style is scaly as in the skin of a fish, only visible when exposed to light, generating multiple intensities and shifting canopies.

2. As the culmination of Homo Sacer, L’uso dei corpi is in equal measure the writing of the end of the ontological metaphysical tradition and the opening of the question of life or existence. This is not accomplished, like in Heidegger or Schürmann, solely as an extraction of the history of metaphysics given primacy to philosophical discourse. Rather the methodological wager here is archeology, which allows not for a process of “destruction” (although in a certain sense it is consistent with a deconstructive practice), but for one of rendering inoperative the machine(s) that capture negativity into life and politics, or the political as always an impolitical foundation or archē of life:

“L’identificazione della nuda vita come referente primo e pota in gioco della politica e stato perciò il primo atto della ricerca. La struttura originario della politica occidentale consiste in una ex-ceptio, in una esclusione inclusive della vita umana nella forma della nuda vita. Si rifletta sulla particolarità di questa operazione: la vita non e in se stessa politica – per questo essa deve essere esclusa dalla citta – e, tuttavia, e propio l’exceptio, l’esclusione-inclusione di questo Impolitico che fonda lo spazio della politica” (Agamben 333).

[“The identification of bare life as the prime referent and ultimate stakes of politics was therefore the first act of the study. The originary structure of Western politics consists in an ex-ceptio, in an inclusive exclusion of human life in the form of bare life. Let us reflect on the peculiarity of this operation: life is not in itself political – for this reason it must be excluded from the city – and yet it is precisely this exceptio, the exclusion-inclusion of this Impolitical, that founds the space of politics” (Agamben 263)].

This position allows Agamben to simultaneously bring the relation between biopolitics and sovereignty to a maximum proximity, while taking critical distance from the so-called Italian Theory, in the variants of Cacciari, Esposito, or Tronti. Like these three, politics cannot be rethought without the wrench of the theological register, but unlike them, Agamben is not interested in take part in the construction of a nomic difference posited as an exclusive modality of “Italian difference”.

His critique is situated against the political as a transversal in Western rationality and ontology vis-a-vis the unfolding of paradigms. In Agamben’s view there is no need for epochal structuration, and not even for a history of metaphysics proper. Rather, the ‘history of metaphysics’ is the history of its apparatuses; and that is why the critique of these apparatuses is not fulfilled at the domain of epochal presencing, but rather within an array of fields of tension and relays – from metaphysics proper to the classics, from theology to modern literature, from philology to jurisprudence and political philosophy – in which power articulates and divides the constitution of life.

In this way, Agamben is neither a philosopher nor a critical theorist (in the Foucaltian or Kantian sense), since for him the history of Western philosophical tradition cannot consecrate itself in two or more moment, since the narrative of the history of philosophy is far from being the place where the question of “life” is waged. (As opposed to Foucault’s position in Lectures at Dartmouth College would could still argue: “Maybe also we can say that there are two great philosophical moments: the pre-Socratic moments and the Aufklärung”). Archeology and the paradigm are not historical moments or epochs, but singular signaturas in which the amphibology between potentiality and actuality, the political and its impolitical are dispensed as ensembles of legibility.

3. Unlike conventional philosophical histories or historico-intellectual reconstruction of ideas, the archeology of paradigms has no intention of restituting something like an uncontaminated or esoteric tradition. Averroism, just to take one example, has been casted erroneously in such a light. There is no such thing as an alternative non-metaphysical history of Western metaphysics and ontology, and the form of life as the part construens does not amount to an alternative history, but rather to the unthought of metaphysics, secluded between the public and the private (in the sphere of life), the norm and the exception. What is then given is not a second history, but something like the history of intimacy of thought at the instance of contact, a region that dwells in an improper de-relation (itself-with-itself). How Agamben reads the notion of “intimacy” could also be displaced to his rewriting of the philosophical and political stakes of his work:

“א “Solo a solo” e un’espressione dell’intimità. Siamo insieme e vicinissime, ma non c’è fra noi un’articolazione o una relazione che ci unisca, siamo uniti l’uno all’altro nella forma del nostro essere soli. Ciò che di solito costruisse la sfera della privatezza diventa qui pubblico e comune. Pero questo gli amanti si mostrano nudi l’uno all’altro: io mi mostro a te come quando sono solo con me stesso, ciò che condividiamo non e che il nostro esoterismo, la nostra inappropriabile zona di non-conoscenza. Questo Inappropriabile e l’impensabile, che la nostra cultura deve ogni volta escludere e presupporre, per farne il fondamene negative della politica” (Agamben 302).

[“א Alone by oneself” is an expression of intimacy. We are together and very close, but between us there is not an articulation or a relation or a relation that unites us. We are united to one another in the form of our being alone. What customarily constitutes the sphere of privacy here becomes public and common. For this reason, lovers show themselves nude to one another: I show myself to you as when I am alone with myself; what we share is only our esoterism, our inappropriable zone of non-knowledge. This Inappropriable is the unthinkable; it is what our culture must always exclude and presuppose in order to make in the negative foundation of politics” (Agamben 237-238)]

The critique raised against negativity as a disjointed form stages the necessary condition for division and distribution of ontology as political. It would not be too grandiloquent to say that negativity for Agamben is always machination and positionality. The life of intimacy or the intimate life is consistent with an infrapolitical region that is at once “superpolitical and apolitical” (hypsipolis apolis): separated in the ban from the city, it nevertheless becomes intimate and inseparable from itself, in a non-relation that has the form of an “exile of one alone to one alone” (Agamben 236). An affirmation of the regime of exodus inscribes the life of beatitude that always dwells in an absolute politicity (to the extent that the exception is de-captured and suspended), opening to a new politics of exile. It is a unity, not separation, from the political. But calling for the politization of the absolute state of exodus is already recasting the political as something other than what it has been in the Western tradition, as tied to the duopoly of polis-oikos, of inclusion-exclusion, or one of doxology and sovereignty.

Agamben moves on to argue that there have signatures in the history of thought where this politics of exile could be recasted: first, Neo-Platonism vis-à-vis Plotinus and Marius Victorinus; and secondly, in Averroism as the signature of the noetic common intellect that evades the figure of the person. But these two traditions do not exhaust the form of life (eidos zoes) that Agamben wants to pursue. The task of the coming philosophy is to imagine and provide for such thought through traditions that function as paradigms for the potentialities of thought against the historical unfolding proper of metaphysics.

4. The project does not limit itself to an archive of philosophers, but necessarily poses problems for theology. This is the case, for instance, of the early Christian rhetor Marius Victorinus. Victorinus’ apothegm from his treatise on the Trinitarian polemic (Adversus Arium) functions as a sort of chant of the form of life: “quasi quaedma forma vel status viviendo progenitus” [“life is a habit of living, and a kind of form generated by living”] (Agamben 221). Victorinus displaces and renders inoperative the ontological ground of the post-Aristotelian Hellenistic School to a co-substantialism between Father and Son, existence and essence that already prefigures the modal ontology of the late Leibniz-Des Bosses epistolary exchange, but also the Spinozian singular substance of Nature. This is symmetrical to the Averroist intellect, since ‘life’ does not take the character of a declination between attributes, properties, and differences, but is a mode instantiated by its living. The way of living becomes the threshold of indistinction, and as such, an incalculable life that is always already singular and, by the same token, a common life. But what is not clear in Agamben’s glossing of Victorinus is his place within the debate of Trinitarian thought. In Regno e Gloria, the Trinitarian machine functioned as a dual-power that was able to divide sovereign power from administrative or oikonomical power, a regime of attribute causation to one of collateral effects, one of necessity into the site where the instrumentalization of contingency takes place [2].

The Trinitarian machine allowed for the emergence of governance and administration beyond the facticity of sovereignty in a perpetual form of the stasis of humanity. By placing Victorinus as a thinker of the eidos zoes (form of life) is a risky one, Agamben might be suggesting that another turn within the theological machine is potentiality within the Trinitarian machine [3]. And this would solidify Malabou and Esposito’s recent positions, against Agamben, that political theology cannot be deconstructed. But if stasis is always a conflict in representation of the political, what Marius Victorinus posits for thought is a reconsideration of conflict that cannot assume the form of a stasis against democracy. Perhaps at stake is a democracy that never one with the People or predicated upon legitimacy. Rather, a democracy without kratos that is generated in its living body that cannot take the shape of a bare body of life or the mystical body of the political already positioned for a governance in spite of the absent People, such as in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan.

5. Agamben’s exodus is not from the political, but rather a return to an absolute politicity. But what is the proper sphere of policity here? Are all aspects of Life subordinated to the political? What is the political for Agamben? Here the recoil is to Plotinus for whom the political is the happy life is the coincidental principle of “living well” (eu zen). Agamben condemns the Heideggerian “letting-be” (galassenheit), as yet another gesture already determinate to produce necessary exception (a ban) to the political [4]. This is why happy life is always extreme and minimal politicity that incorporates life in its form as always already taking place and as a form of beatitude. In the section “A life inseparable from its form”, Agamben writes:

“Il mistero dell’uomo non e quello, metafisica, della congiunzione fra il vivente e il linguaggio (o la ragione, o l’anima (, ma quello, pratico e politico, della loro separazione. Se il pensiero, le arti, la poesia e, in generale, le prassi umane hanno qualche interesse, ciò e perché essi fanno girare archeologicamente a vuoto la macchina e le opera della vita, della lingua, dell’economia e della società per riportarle all’evento antropogenico, perché in esse il diventar umano, non cessi mai di avvenire. La politico nomina il luogo di questo evento, in qualunque ambito esso si produca” (Agamben 265-66).

[“The mystery of the human being is not the metaphysical one of the conjunction between the living being and language (or reason or the soul) but the practical and political one their separation. If thought, the arts, poetry, and human practices generally have any interests, it’s because they bring about an archeological idling of the machine and the works of life, language, economy, and society, in order to carry them back to the anthropogenetic event, I order that in them the becoming human of the human being will never be achieved once and for all, will never cease to happen. Politics names the place of this event, in whatever sphere it is produced” (Agamben 208)].

Politics here coincides fully with inoperativity, its katargein (the suspension and accomplishment of Law according his reading of Paul in The Times that Remains), a singular strategy of profanation that turns each action into its improper destitution. This is what constitutes use (chresis) in Agamben’s early part of the book, and it is also a general methodology for thought that coincides with politics. Since politics is not a sphere of life, or of an administrative partition of what life is (ontology), politics is a general strategy that renders life into an event for whatever (qualunque) use [5]. Strategic politics does not posit a principle of action; it is rather what does not solicit calculation, submersing into thought and distance of the non-relation. A handy example comes by way of chess, as explicitly thematized in the drift on Wittgenstein’s form of life in language, since gaming itself results in strategy in which rules are co-substantial and infinite in the state of things (the game). Hence, in every sphere of human activity, thought exceeds the productionism of calculation normatively captured.

But the qualunque – as we also learned from Agamben’s The Coming Community – is what reimagines another possibility of a community of singulars and homonyms vis-à-vis praxis and use as the kernel of pure means. This ‘politics’ de-appropriates the form in life that has remained caught in the schism of every biopolitics. Here Agamben differentiates himself from understanding the political as a public presencing in Schürmann’s anarchistic destruction of principal thought [6]. Figures such as the landscape, the intimate exposition, style, or the inclination to animality, are metonymic tropes for a politics of use and of the contemplative region of a life that is co-substantial with its form. On the other end, whatever divides and administers singularity is always production of bare life, which is why evil is first and foremost a consequence of biopolitical machination.

6. The major volumes of Homo Sacer always revolved around a series of polemical signatures: Carl Schmitt in State of Exception, Erik Peterson in Kingdom and the Glory, Kojeve in The Open, or Kant in Opus Dei. It is fair to say that in L’uso dei Corpi we are confronted with two names: Michel Foucault and Martin Heidegger. Unlike Schmitt and Peterson, these two names are not presented as archenemies, but rather as the thresholds where the possibility of new thought is contested and waged. Whereas Foucault’s limit is the hidden question of pleasure as use (chresis) still co-related with a care of the subject; Heidegger appears as the highest aporia of Western thought in thinking the ontological difference in the limit of the animal. It is fair to say that Agamben situates his thought at the crossroads of the existential analytic on one side, and the intimacy constitutive of the “care of oneself” as a work of art on the other [7].

If Heidegger lays down a destruction of ontology in Western metaphysics, Foucault’s genealogy of contemporary subjection, avoids precisely that problematization. The confrontation is not longer given between negativity and existence, but rather on the question of life and the strategies (aporetic, which for Agamben entail entrapment in the theological machine) of making thinkable an inoperative zone of the form of life. There is a third figure, Guy Debord, who accomplishes perhaps two interrelated strategies in the vortex of the book: first, it plugs thought to strategy (Debord invited a game of war, a sort of alteration of chess); and second, out points to the impossibility of narrativizing life. Debord’s Panegyric is form of life precisely because it fails to assume an autobiographical testamentary form as documentation. Of course, Agamben appears here not a thinker of semiology and traces, but of gestures and signatures. The coming philosophy of the form of life is precisely that mobility of signatures inclined towards a region that coincides with the event of thought.

(fragment.)
To read the entire review: https://infrapoliticalreflections.org...

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting and valiant effort in the ontological questions of first philosophy. Agamben offers: "Both in the Aristotelian potential-act, essence-existence apparatus, and in trinitarian theology, relation inheres in being according to a constitutive ambiguity: being precedes relation and exists beyond it, but it is always already constituted through relation and included in it as its presupposition" (p.270). And it is this relation he tries to reconstitute through what he calls 'distituent potential', meaning the "interrogating and calling into question the very status of relation, remaining open to the possibility that the ontological relation is not, in fact, a relation."

As I understand it, Agamben attempts to make the relation inoperative, thus becoming a potential, "in order to allow a different use of them". He ends with a very interesting integration of the principles of an-arche or anomie as this distituent potential.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Not only have I not read Deleuze, I've not read Agamben. This one (trans'd by Adam Kotsko, our foremost Zizek interpreter) being the latest in his Homo Sacer series. The first of which, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is what I understand to be the one to begin with, when beginning upon the reading of Agamben.

Seriously, if you're a serious leftie, Agamben seems to be the favored to be familiar with, like with Foucault/Derrida/(Levinas shouldn't be left out here) back in the day, or back when Zizek was hot!


From the Boston Review ::
"To Be and to Do: The Life’s Work of Giorgio Agamben"
by Leland de la Durantaye
https://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/...

[Kevin Fitzpatrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beginning with a delineation of Aristotle's conception of the slave as the man without work ('ergon'), Giorgio Agamben's "The Use of Bodies" proceeds, in the author's inimitable erudite but accessible style (kudos to translator Adam Kotsko), to explore the etymology of the Greek verb 'chresis,' as found by linguist Emile Bienviste. The ambiguous nature of this word (with 23 separate and distinct meanings) is implicated with the importance of how the body of the slave, in Agamben's view, has no purpose or work for it; rather it is 'used' by the master. Agamben extrapolates the function of the definition of the slave ("use for others need to live a life of 'bios'" (politics)), which is to serve as that what is excluded from society, yet is the basis of society and thus included, combines this idea with his previous work on 'zoe' and 'bios,' to postulate a division in the ontology of the West that has haunted thinkers, and Western society, for ever more. Section II of the book continues this 'archeology' of the West with an exploration of Aristotle, the Stoics, and Plotinus (Neo-Platonism) and how they sought to grapple with this division in the thought of their time. Plotinus himself, in an extremely insightful intuition, breached the gap between being and life by positing that all life, even animal and plant, was in a perfect state of unity with its forms. The connection with Eastern modes of thought ("all is one, one is all") immediately comes to mind as a solution, suggested by Plotinus, to this aporia that has plagued Western man for millenia. The third section of the book, "Form-of-Life," presents Heidegger's and Foucault's wrestling with being, essence (ousia), and act, and the simultaneous innovations that Agamben himself introduces into this dialogue. "Life is a form generated by living," an insight with some profundity, announces Agamben's attempt to bridge this gap in Western thought. This section, along with the Epilogue, serves to posit "Destituent" power, power neutralized into a state of inoperativity, and thus sidestepping the dialectic of constituent and constituted power, as the solution to our predicament as citizens of the 21st century. Agamben's identification of 'contemplation,' first suggested by Plotinus, as the proper stance to 'neutralize' the aporia of sovereignty and the state of exception, and all the other damaging divisions inherent in Western thought, is pure genius, and, to this reader, seems satisfying on both an intellectual and affective level. The book ends by summing up the threads of the tradition thus previously discussed, and then the author expounds on how one may overcome the practical and political implications of this aporia that is at the center of the Western experience of being. The effect of this summation is complete and all-encompassing.
This book explicates major thinkers of the Western tradition in a rigorous and complete manner; the thought inherent in this exploration is both salient and ground-breaking; the conclusions are clear and succinct; stated simply, this book succeeds in its aims and serves as a template for an over view of our present state of being in the Western world. Moreover, its implications are far ranging and essential to our understanding of the status of thought, with all its divisions and complications.

[Eduardo Camargo · Rating 5 out of 5]

fav

[Monserrat Maxfield Markov · Rating 3 out of 5]

Creo que no me gusta la filosofía...

[Vahid Askarpour · Rating 5 out of 5]

A revolutionary consideration of what to be called as a philosophical archaeology of human awareness of her bodily existence!

[Yokusun Basi]

L'uso dei corpi. Homo sacer: IV2 by Giorgio Agamben (2014)

[Severin M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely phenomenal way to finish out Homo Sacer

[Rui Coelho · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book. It enriches the agambean conceptual toolbox with the elaboration of the concept of use and a modal ontology. It also provides some much needed clarifications on the irrevocably opaque concept of form-of-life. A strong final volume for the Homo Sacer series.

[Bram Van boxtel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Those who have read and understood the preceding parts of this work know that they should not expect a new beginning, much less a conclusion.