Why Giorgio Agamben

is an optimist

Philosophy and Social Criticism

36(9) 10531073
The Author(s) 2010
Reprints and permission:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0191453710379030
psc.sagepub.com

Sergei Prozorov
University of Helsinki, Finland

Abstract
The article takes Giorgio Agambens declaration of his optimism with regard to the possibilities of
global political transformation as a point of departure for the inquiry into the affirmative aspects of
Agambens political thought, frequently overshadowed by his more famous critical claims. We
reconstitute three principles grounding Agambens optimism that pertain respectively to the
total crisis of the contemporary biopolitical apparatuses, the possibility of a radically different
form-of-life on the basis of their residue and the minimalist character of this transformation that
consists entirely in the subtraction of existence from these apparatuses. While the first two principles are unproblematic in the wider context of Agambens work, the third principle introduces
the problematic of will that remains highly ambiguous in his philosophy. In the remainder of the
article we address this ambiguity in an analysis of Agambens reading of Melvilles Bartleby the Scrivener and conclude that Agambens optimism ultimately consists in the affirmation of absolute
contingency, beyond both will and necessity.

Keywords
Giorgio Agamben, biopolitics, contingency, exception, potentiality, sovereignty, will

Introduction
Despite the morbid themes of his writings and the perception of his work by his critics as
resigning us to despair and nihilism,1 Giorgio Agamben has repeatedly asserted his
optimism with regard to the possibilities of the coming politics. Although Agamben
is better known for his critical diagnostic of the contemporary global politics, all of his
books end on an affirmation of the possibility of a radically different form-of-life. In a
2004 interview, he has explicitly rejected any attribution of a personal or psychological
pessimism to his work and proclaimed that his critical interlocutor was more pessimistic than he was.2 In this article we shall use this declaration of optimism as a point of

Corresponding author:
Sergei Prozorov, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland 00014
Email: Sergei.prozorov@helsinki.fi

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departure for the inquiry into the affirmative aspects of Agambens political philosophy
which to date remain overshadowed by his staggering critical claims.
We shall reconstitute three principles of Agambens optimism about the possibility of
radical change in world politics. First, Agamben is optimistic because the intensification
of the contemporary global state of exception entails that we have nothing to lose from a
radical disruption of the existing political order, which has degraded into a combination
of a killing machine of sovereignty and a meaningless spectacle of global capitalism.
Second, insofar as the destructive nihilistic drive of the biopolitical machine and the
capitalist spectacle does all the work of emptying out positive forms-of-life, identities
and vocations, we literally do not have much to do to attain what Agamben calls a happy
life that is wholly contained in existence as such, devoid of positive predicates. Third,
Agambens political thought is optimistic because this new form-of-life is no longer posited as a historical task, something to be attained in reformist or revolutionary praxis, but
merely calls for the subtraction of the subjects from the existing apparatuses, whereby
they reappropriate their own potentiality for whatever being. Thus, the passage from
the worst (nihilistic degradation of social life under the global state of exception and the
capitalist spectacle) to the best (the reappropriation of human existence from its confinement in epochal projects) literally takes a single step.
We shall argue that as long as Agambens work is approached on its own terms, the
first two principles that inspire his optimism are unproblematic and account for the originality of his work in the contemporary context of critical political theory. Nonetheless,
the third principle is rather more ambiguous and merits a more detailed critical consideration. Demonstrating quite cogently why the current conjuncture in world politics
leaves us with nothing to lose and itself brings about the conditions for a happy life,
Agamben is reticent on the question of why this step from the worst to the best would
be taken by the subjects of contemporary societies. This problem is aggravated by Agambens refusal to posit this step towards a happy life as a new task, a political project, in
relation to which one could talk about social mobilization, raising awareness, articulation
of particular interests into a (counter-)hegemonic constellation, etc., since all of the
above would contradict his ontological affirmation of inoperosity (absence of work)
as an originary characteristic of the human condition. Thus, the suggestions of
Agambens critics that his political philosophy might benefit from a more appreciative
relation to law and political institutions or a more detailed consideration of immanent
resistance miss the point, as any such engagement would contradict Agambens
principled stance against politics as a project. The resolution of the problem of the will
to subtraction must come from within the basic orientation of Agambens philosophy. In
the remainder of the article we shall elaborate this problem and reconstitute Agambens
solution to it through an analysis of his theory of potentiality that dispenses with both
will and necessity and draws resources for optimistic affirmation from nothing other than
pure contingency.

Nothingness or death
Both the supporters and the critics of Agambens political thought agree that his account
of the contemporary state of politics offers a staggering account of a total crisis of a
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global scope. In contrast to the tendency in todays critical political thought to appreciate
differences, discontinuities, distinctions and diversity, Agamben presents a totalizing
image of the global state of exception, which appears bent on collapsing all differences
in the zone of indistinction, which is the privileged topos of Agambens writings.3
Among his more famous zones of indistinction are those between democracy and totalitarianism, violence and law, nature and culture, etc. In the logic of Agambens argument, our era of nihilism, which he dates back to the First World War, is marked by
the ultimate dissolution of these and other distinctions that grounded political orders and
the consequent vacuity both of the ideologies and the practices of western modernity that
were based on these distinctions. The contemporary condition that Agamben, following
Carl Schmitt, likens to a global civil war is thus not a result of a malfunctioning, ineffectiveness, abandonment, or betrayal of any of the classical political paradigms but
rather a holistic crisis of occidental politics, which reveals the nullity of its foundational
distinctions that was there all along but was concealed by the relatively ordered character
of political life.4 In this holistic crisis there is literally nothing in our tradition that we can
rely on as a foundation for political transformation. Agambens political stance is therefore radically anti-strategic insofar as it explicitly renounces any involvement in the contemporary apparatuses of sovereignty and governmentality for the purpose of, for
example, tactical alliances or reversals, playing one logic of power against the other,
internal subversion, etc.5 While the latter form of strategic intervention into the field
of power relations is most usually associated with Michel Foucaults work, which
emphasized the plurality, diversity and reversibility of power relations that offer opportunities for immanent resistance, Agamben is inspired by a different, less widely discussed position of Foucault with respect to power, his anti-strategic stance on
resistance, formulated in the context of the Iranian Revolution.6 Agamben explicitly
rejects any possibility of transforming power relations within the immanent logic of their
game, since the game in question has long lost any recognizable meaning and is running on empty.
This totalized image of the global state of exception has been criticized as both hyperbolically excessive and internally contradictory. Paul Passavant has argued that
Agambens theory suffers from a contradictory concept of the state that also plagues
his affirmative vision of the coming politics.7 While Agamben is most famous for his
deconstruction of the logic of sovereignty that radicalizes Schmitts conception,8 he has
also, from his earliest work onwards, confronted the more dispersed, governmentalized
modes of power relations characteristic of late capitalism in the manner highly influenced by Guy Debords work on the society of the spectacle.9 Against the argument that
this conjunction of sovereignty and governmentality in the analysis of late-modern
power relations constitutes a contradiction, we must recall that this duality of the contemporary apparatus of power is explicitly affirmed by Agamben himself, who, similarly
to Foucaults claim for the indissociability of sovereignty, discipline and government,10
regularly insists that the system is always double.11 The inextricable link between the
two aspects of the contemporary social order consists in the nihilistic deployment of life
itself as a (post-)historical task. Both state sovereignty and the late-capitalist society of
the spectacle are biopolitical and thus permanently feed into each other. The contemporary neo-liberal governmentality extends the operation of economic rationality to life
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Philosophy and Social Criticism 36(9)

itself, whereby life is conceived as a paradigmatic form of enterprise,12 and in this

manner expropriates the being-in-language that defines human existence and subjects
it to the laws of exchange-value or, in Agambens later works, exhibition value.13 Conversely, sovereign power expropriates the potentiality of human existence, transforming
it into the bare life that it then grounds itself in and applies itself to in the perpetual state
of exception. The state does nothing more than sustain the spectacle with its apparatuses
of security, while the spectacle does nothing more than perpetually produce the degraded
forms-of-life that sovereign power can apply itself to.
Yet, how can this claim about the mutual reinforcement of the sovereign state and the
society of the spectacle under the aegis of biopolitical nihilism ground any optimistic
disposition? It is precisely this totalized image that allows Agamben to claim that in the
contemporary situation there is nothing to lose from a total halting of the machine.14
On the one hand, Agamben refuses both the possibility of reforming or even revolutionizing social life by re-engaging with sovereignty, e.g. through the political struggle for
hegemony along the lines of Laclaus populism or the Habermasian formation of a more
inclusive political community through communicative action. Neither is there any point
in a Derridean deconstructive subversion of sovereignty in the name of the undeconstructible justice and democracy to come, which serves only to highlight the undecidability
at the heart of the law, which is essential to the latters existence.15 Since the state of
anomie is the constitutive outside of any nomos, it is bound to remain inscribed within
it irrespectively of the way the positive structure of order is transformed. The state of
exception and its product, the bare life of homo sacer, are not a political problem to
be resolved within any positive system, but rather a problem of the political itself.16 Any
search for a more effective, exception-proof positive order is entirely in vain, especially in todays condition of nihilism, in which the vacuity of historical forms-of-life
has brought the sovereign ban to the foreground as the sole substance of politics.
On the other hand, Agamben considers it impossible to confront the logic of sovereignty from the terrain of the social, which is the strategy, for example, of Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri, who posit the field of biopolitical production, defined by the postFordist immaterial labour, as the site of possible resistance to the sovereign bio-power
of Empire, conceived as a purely negative, expropriating force in relation to the plenitude
and authenticity characteristic of the social plane of immanence.17 In contrast to this
approach, which unwittingly replicates the state phobia that gave rise to the very neoliberalism that Hardt and Negri decry,18 Agamben is clearly aware of the degradation
of social life in the late-capitalist spectacle and insists on [d]istinguishing between the
massive inscription of social knowledge into the productive processes (an inscription that
characterizes the contemporary phase of capitalism, the society of the spectacle) and intellectuality as antagonistic power and form-of-life.19 As we shall see, to the extent that the
spectacle can be a site of any transformation, it is only as a site of its own destruction.
Thus, Agamben rejects as illusory any attempt to find the locus of radical transformation either in the state and the legal system or in the immanence of social praxis, but,
rather than draw from this disillusionment the pessimistic conclusion about the impossibility of an alternative politics, finds in it the possibility of a similarly total change,
which is no longer constrained by any institutional structures of the contemporary order,
but jams the entire biopolitical apparatus in both its statist and socioeconomic aspects.
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Simply put, the current dual structure of the sovereign ban, which destines us to the
possibility of violent death, and the nihilistic spectacle, which destines us to the vacuity
of biopolitical management, leaves us with an alternative Nothingness or Death, which
is really not much of a choice at all. Nonetheless, it is precisely the falsity of this alternative that liberates us from having to choose between different versions of nihilism and
enables us to probe the possibilities of forms-of-life outside the biopolitical apparatuses.

The saving power of biopolitical nihilism

The second principle of Agambens optimism is best summed up by Holderlins phrase,
made famous by Heidegger: where danger grows, grows saving power also.20 According to Agamben, radical global transformation is actually made possible by nothing other
than the unfolding of biopolitical nihilism itself to its extreme point of vacuity. On a
number of occasions in different contexts, Agamben has asserted the possibility of a radically different form-of-life on the basis of precisely the same things that he initially set
out to criticize. Agamben paints a convincingly gloomy picture of the present state of
things only to undertake a majestic reversal at the end, finding hope and conviction in
the very despair that engulfs us.21 Our very destitution thereby turns out be the condition
for the possibility of a completely different life, whose description is in turn entirely
devoid of fantastic mirages. Instead, as Agamben repeatedly emphasizes, in the
redeemed world everything will be as is now, just a little different,22 no momentous
transformation will take place aside from a small displacement that will nonetheless
make all the difference. While we shall deal with this small displacement in the following section, let us now elaborate the logic of redemption through the traversal of danger
in more detail.
It is evident that the danger at issue in Agambens work is nihilism in its dual form of
the sovereign ban and the capitalist spectacle. If, as we have shown in the previous section, the reign of nihilism is general and complete, we may be optimistic about the possibility of jamming its entire apparatus since there is nothing in it that offers an
alternative to the present double subjection. Yet, where are we to draw resources for
such a global transformation? It would be easy to misread Agamben as an utterly utopian
thinker, whose intentions may be good and whose criticism of the present may be valid if
exaggerated, but whose solutions are completely implausible if not outright embarrassing.23 Nonetheless, we must rigorously distinguish Agambens approach from utopianism. As Foucault has argued, utopias derive their attraction from their discursive
structure of a fabula, which makes it possible to describe in great detail a better way
of life, precisely because it is manifestly impossible.24 While utopian thought easily provides us with elaborate visions of a better future, it cannot really lead us there, since its
site is by definition a non-place. In contrast, Agambens works tell us quite little about
life in a community of happy life that has done away with the state form, but are remarkably concrete about the practices that are constitutive of this community, precisely
because these practices require nothing that would be extrinsic to the contemporary
condition of biopolitical nihilism. Thus, Agambens coming politics is manifestly
anti-utopian and draws all its resources from the condition of contemporary nihilism.
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Moreover, this nihilism is the only possible resource for this politics, which would
otherwise be doomed to continuing the work of negation, vainly applying it to nihilism
itself. Given the totality of contemporary biopolitical nihilism, any positive project of
transformation would come down to the negation of negativity itself. Yet, as Agamben
demonstrates conclusively in Language and Death, nothing is more nihilistic than a
negation of nihilism.25 Any project that remains oblivious to the extent to which its
valorized positive forms have already been devalued and their content evacuated would
only succeed in plunging us deeper into nihilism. As Heidegger adds in his commentary
on Holderlin, It may be that any other salvation than that, which comes from where the
danger is, is still within non-safety.26 Moreover, as Roberto Espositos work on the paradox of immunity in biopolitics demonstrates, any attempt to combat danger through
negative protection (immunization) that seeks to mediate the immediacy of life through
extrinsic principles (sovereignty, liberty, property) necessarily introjects within the
social realm the very negativity that it claims to battle, so that biopolitics is always at
risk of collapsing into thanatopolitics.27 In contrast, Agambens coming politics does not
attempt to introduce anything new or positive into the condition of nihilism but to use
this condition itself in order to reappropriate human existence from its biopolitical
confinement.28
Thus, while the aporia of the negation of negativity might lead other thinkers to resignation about the possibilities of political praxis, it actually enhances Agambens optimism. Renouncing any project of reconstructing social life on the basis of positive
principles, his work illuminates the way the unfolding of biopolitical nihilism itself produces the conditions of possibility for radical transformation. We can now see that the
state of total crisis that Agamben has diagnosed must be understood in the strict medical
sense. In pre-modern medicine, the crisis of the disease is its kairos, the moment in which
the disease truly manifests itself and allows for the doctors intervention that might
finally defeat it.29 For this reason, the crisis is not something to be feared and avoided
but an opportunity that must be seized. Similarly, insofar as the sovereign state of exception and the absolutization of exchange-value completely empty out any content of positive forms-of-life, the contemporary biopolitical apparatus prepares its self-destruction
by fully manifesting its own vacuity.
First, the sovereign ban no longer functions as a negative foundation of a positive
political order, manifested only in the exceptional occasions of revolt or coup detat, but
rather coincides with the latter completely, which entails the eclipse of the juridical state
form and its degradation into a killing machine that destroys the very order it was
meant to protect.
[As] long as the two elements [law and anomie] remain correlated yet conceptually, temporally and subjectively distinct, their dialectic though founded on a fiction can nevertheless function in some way. But when they tend to coincide in a single person, when the state
of exception, in which they are bound and blurred together, becomes the rule, then the
juridico-political system transforms itself into a killing machine.30

Second, with respect to the society of the spectacle, Agamben argues that the investment of the human body by capitalist commodification does not merely subject it to the
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laws of exchange-value and transfer it into the sacred (unusable) sphere but ultimately
frees it from a quasi-natural ineffability into a space of perfect communicability, thus
paving the way for the human reappropriation of ones body as truly whatever:
To appropriate the historic transformations of human nature that capitalism wants to limit to
the spectacle, to link together image and body in a space where they can no longer be separated, and thus to forge the whatever body . . . this is the good that humanity must learn
how to wrest from commodities in their decline. Advertising and pornography, which escort
the commodity to the grave like hired mourners, are the unknowing midwives of this new
body of humanity.31

In a later work, Agamben generalizes this logic and transforms it into a basic ethical
imperative of his work: [There] is often nothing reprehensible about the individual
behavior in itself, and it can, indeed, express a liberatory intent. What is disgraceful
both politically and morally are the apparatuses which have diverted it from their
possible use. We must always wrest from the apparatuses from all apparatuses the
possibility of use that they have captured.32 As we shall discuss in the following section,
this is to be achieved by a subtraction of ourselves from these apparatuses, which leaves
them in a jammed, inoperative state. What is crucial at this point is that the apparatuses
of nihilism themselves prepare their demise by emptying out all positive content of the
forms-of-life they govern and increasingly running on empty, capable only of (inflicting) Death or (doing) Nothing.
On the other hand, this degradation of the apparatuses illuminates the inoperosity
(worklessness) of the human condition, whose originary status Agamben has affirmed
from his earliest works onwards.33 By rendering void all historical forms-of-life, nihilism brings to light the absence of work that characterizes human existence, which, as
irreducibly potential, logically presupposes the lack of any destiny, vocation, or task that
it must be subjected to: Politics is that which corresponds to the essential inoperability
of humankind, to the radical being-without-work of human communities. There is politics because human beings are argos-beings that cannot be defined by any proper operation, that is, beings of pure potentiality that no identity or vocation can possibly
exhaust.34
Having been concealed for centuries by religion or ideology, this originary inoperosity is fully unveiled in the contemporary crisis, in which it is manifest in the inoperative
character of the biopolitical apparatuses themselves, which succeed only in capturing the
sheer existence of their subjects without being capable of transforming it into a positive
form-of-life:
[T]oday, it is clear for anyone who is not in absolutely bad faith that there are no longer
historical tasks that can be taken on by, or even simply assigned to, men. It was evident starting with the end of the First World War that the European nation-states were no longer capable of taking on historical tasks and that peoples themselves were bound to disappear.35

Agambens metaphor for this condition is bankruptcy: One of the few things that can be
declared with certainty is that all the peoples of Europe (and, perhaps, all the peoples of
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the Earth) have gone bankrupt.36 Thus, the destructive nihilistic drive of the biopolitical
machine and the capitalist spectacle has itself done all the work of emptying out positive
forms-of-life, identities and vocations, leaving humanity in the state of destitution that
Agamben famously terms bare life. Yet, this bare life, whose essence is entirely contained in its existence, is precisely what conditions the emergence of the subject of the
coming politics: this biopolitical body that is bare life must itself be transformed into
the site for the constitution and installation of a form-of-life that is wholly exhausted
in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoe.37
The happy form-of-life, a life that cannot be segregated from its form, is nothing
but bare life that has reappropriated itself as its own form and for this reason is no longer
separated between the (degraded) bios of the apparatuses and the (endangered) zoe that
functions as their foundation.38 Thus, what the nihilistic self-destruction of the apparatuses of biopolitics leaves as its residue turns out to be the entire content of a new
form-of-life. Bare life, which is, as we recall, nothing reprehensible aside from its confinement within the apparatuses, is reappropriated as a whatever singularity, a being
that is only its manner of being, its own thus.39 It is the dwelling of humanity in this
irreducibly potential whatever being that makes possible the emergence of a generic
non-exclusive community without presuppositions, in which Agamben finds the possibility of a happy life.
[If] instead of continuing to search for a proper identity in the already improper and senseless form of individuality, humans were to succeed in belonging to this impropriety as such,
in making of the proper being-thus not an identity and individual property but a singularity
without identity, a common and absolutely exposed singularity, then they would for the first
time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects.40

Thus, rather than seek to reform the apparatuses, we should simply leave them to their
self-destruction and only try to reclaim the bare life that they feed on. This is to be
achieved by the practice of subtraction that we address in the following section.

Whatever being and the problem of will

We have demonstrated that Agambens coming politics is enabled by the complete
reduction of late-modern political life to biopolitical nihilism that itself paves the way
for a happy life of whatever being by rendering void all positive forms-of-life. The final
and the most problematic principle of Agambens optimism consists in the claim that
happy life is not something to be attained in a strategic project of resistance to or the
takeover of political power but is entirely contained in ones subtraction from the apparatuses of nihilism and the consequent appropriation of inoperative whatever being that
these apparatuses confine and feed on.41 The third principle of Agambens optimism is
thus that the happy life of inoperative potentiality is itself attainable in the absence of
work. There is just one step from the worst to the best. This claim completes the logic
of radical transformation that draws its resources solely from the condition it denounces,
the condition in which we have nothing to lose. Yet, why would this step away from the
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apparatuses of biopolitical nihilism into the potentiality of whatever being be taken by

the subjects of contemporary societies?
If we assess Agambens political thought on its own terms, without introducing
extrinsic normative criteria that would turn the discussion into an interminable polemic,
it is clear why there is not much to lose in risking a complete destruction of the biopolitical machine that has been running on empty and producing nothing but bare life.
Agamben also provides an admirable demonstration of the possibility of a radically different form-of-life on the basis of the very same destitution that surrounds us. Yet, having outlined this form-of-life and the pathway that leads to it, Agamben has little to say
about why the subjects of the biopolitical societies would actually opt for it and not prefer to continue dwelling in the inauthentic realm of contemporary sociality. Surely, it is
not a matter of historical (or post-historical) necessity, since what is at stake is precisely a
reappropriation of ones freedom understood in terms of potentiality.42 Yet, neither is it
possible to conceive of the move towards happy life as a matter of free will, insofar as
Agamben refuses to frame this transformation in terms of a project, a decision, or even,
as we shall see below, an act as such. With respect to the first two principles of optimism,
Agamben has managed to dispense with both will and necessity, insofar as the totality of
the apparatuses of biopolitical nihilism and the possibility for appropriating the products
of their self-destruction are neither cast in terms of historical necessity nor depend on
wilful, project-oriented action as a condition for their possibility. However, once we
go beyond the critical diagnostics of the contemporary political terrain to the inquiry into
the form-of-life to be attained at a subtractive distance from this terrain, it becomes difficult to sustain ones optimism about the possibility of happy life, as long as it is neither
cast as historically necessary nor asserted as a voluntarist project.
This problem is somewhat concealed by the focus of Agambens commentators on his
most infamous claim about the concentration camp as the paradigm of the nomos of
modernity.43 If this identification is accepted, then the problem of will does not arise,
as it would be obscene to pose the question of why anyone would want to leave the concentration camp. Yet, there are two reasons why Agambens figure of the camp is inappropriate as a paradigm of the contemporary state of politics. First, the camp is a highly
specific case of what Agamben has described more generally as the condition of the
sovereign ban,44 characterized by the inclusive exclusion of bare life into the nomos. The
subject of the ban is indeed exposed to sovereign violence but he is not necessarily confined within its space indeed, as other examples that Agamben deals with in Homo
Sacer demonstrate, this condition may also take the form of ostracism, exile, or exodus,
in which the threat of sovereign violence remains a permanent possibility.45 What the
camp effects is the transformation of this possibility into a necessity, whereby what can
not be is converted into what cannot not be. As a site of the destruction of all potentiality
in the name of necessity of death, the camp is indeed an extreme form of the functioning
of the machine of sovereign biopolitics, but as an extreme example it does not really
cover the possibilities available to the subject of the ban and hence cannot serve as a
paradigm in any meaningful sense.46 As a space of confinement and extermination the
camp lacks the anarchic potentiality of the state of exception that offers the possibility
of the reappropriation of whatever being in a post-biopolitical form-of-life. Thus, we
need to abandon the camp as a paradigm of the state of exception and focus on its less
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extreme manifestations, where it is by no means guaranteed that the subjects of the

contemporary biopolitical societies would want to abandon the existing apparatuses of
law, order and security for a real state of exception, which is neither law-preserving
nor law-making, but consists solely in the reappropriation of the anomie that the legal
apparatus has expropriated.47
The second reason why the idea of the camp as the nomos of modernity is unhelpful is
that it obscures the second aspect of the degradation of modern politics addressed by
Agamben, i.e. the late-capitalist society of the spectacle. As we have argued above,
Agamben is furthest away from a state phobia that finds in the state the root of all troubles and views its destruction as leading to a harmonious free society. On the contrary,
for Agamben contemporary social life is characterized by the museification of the
world that consecrates the objects of experience, withdrawing them from all possible use,
and the apparatuses of advertising and pornography that expropriate the linguistic
essence of human existence, suspending and neutralizing our communicative potentiality.48 Yet, while it is safe to assume that one would want to exit the camp, is such an
assumption plausible for this condition of degraded sociality, which no one actually
forced us to enter in the first place and which is to a great extent our own product? In
his programmatic essay In Praise of Profanation Agamben is very clear on how one
might go about bringing these apparatuses to a halt through experimental profanation
that irreverently returns things and experiences to the sphere of free use.49 However,
there remains a question of why we would abandon the museum for a free use of artistic
praxis or disrupt the apparatus of pornography through artistic provocation of the kind
Agamben discusses in the case of Chloe des Lysses, a performer whose display of absolute ataraxia and indifference both to her partner in the sexual act and to her audience is
held to pave the way for a new use of sexuality.50
Since what is at stake in Agambens notion of inoperative whatever being is the noncanonical or unconventional use of the practices that the biopolitical apparatuses have
captured and diverted for their positive projects or, as is the case today, the absence
thereof, he must account precisely for this turn towards experimentation and free use.
Even if the vacuity of contemporary apparatuses, from nationalism to consumerism, is
increasingly evident to everyone, is it not too optimistic to expect the late-modern societies to opt for the unconventional and experimental modes of use as opposed to sticking
to the tried and true, nullified as it is? To recall Heideggers discussion of the They (das
Man), this inauthentic mode of being-in attains its hold over Dasein not so much by
oppression but rather by accommodating it, making its everydayness more comfortable
precisely insofar as it conforms to the average understandings that may otherwise appear
to be vacuous or absurd. If, as Heidegger suggests, fallenness is tempting and tranquilizing, then how is this temptation to be overcome?51
Contrary to the critics complaints, the problem with Agambens affirmation of profanation and subtraction is then not its excessive radicalism, but its relative modesty in
the wider social context. Agamben appears to be positing a self-consciously minoritarian, if not bohemian, form-of-life that can barely be expected to be replicated across the
entire social order, simply because the attraction of this profane non-canonical use of
objects or experiences for the wider society would be dubious. Just as subversive experiments with the representation of sexual practices hardly overtake mainstream
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pornography in popularity, it is difficult to expect the subtractive practices Agamben

proposes to win over the society at large and thus wrest away human existence from the
nihilistic spectacle of the unprofanable. This is not a matter of criticizing these practices
as ineffective or dangerous,52 but simply of posing the question of why anyone who is
not already outside the apparatuses in question (critical intellectuals, avant-garde artists)
would want to exit them in order to engage in these practices, especially insofar as
Agamben refuses to frame this move in terms of a revolutionary project of liberation,
which would involve articulating some form of normative justification for these practices. Of course, the problem of how a theoretical design of transformation is to be translated into political practice is not unique to Agamben, yet in his work it becomes more
acute due to his refusal of any construction of politics in terms of a project and the affirmation of inoperosity as both a means and an end of the coming politics.53
In short, there is a problem of accounting for the move from the worst towards the
best, which is by no means evident as long as we abandon the hyperbole of the camp and
focus on the wider range of statist and economic apparatuses deployed in the governmentality of late-modern societies. At first glance, there are two possibilities of resolving this
problem. First, insofar as the happy life of whatever being consists in nothing but existence itself, affirmed in its pure inoperative potentiality, it is possible to argue that we are
all already dwelling in it and merely misrecognize this dwelling place (ethos) for a particular form-of-life. To return to the analogy with Heideggers description of the falling
of Dasein, our inauthentic dwelling in the world of the They is possible solely on the
basis of an authentic existence in face of which we flee.54 In Agambens work, this argument is made with reference to the ontology of language, which forms the background of
his political writings. Just as the event of language is present in every signifying statement, so the coming community of whatever being is already there and it is simply
a matter of recognizing it through actively experiencing the utmost vacuity of all particular, historical forms-of-life.55 As we have seen, Agambens happy life is not a matter
of a project, of doing or building something new. On the contrary, given the originary
status of whatever being as a concealed foundation of any positive bios, happiness is
attained precisely by not doing, i.e. by subtraction and inoperosity.56 Thus, this transformation requires nothing but refraining from living and acting in the apparatuses of biopolitical nihilism, withdrawing from them and reappropriating ones existence for
whatever use. Yet, while we agree that there is really nothing to be added to the existent
in order to attain a happy form-of-life this does not remove the possibility that the subjects in question might well choose to persist in the misrecognition of their own ethos.
The second option is to dismiss this question altogether in the manner best exemplified by Michel Foucaults approach to the function of his work. Rather than posit normative criteria that would tell people why they must act in this or that manner,
Foucault claimed to be content with simply demonstrating how one could resist, if one
wanted, without imposing this mode of praxis as normatively privileged:57
It is absolutely true that when I write a book I refuse to take a prophetic stance; that is, the
one of saying to people: here is what you must do, and also: this is good and this is not. I say
to them, roughly speaking, it seems to me that things have gone this way; but I describe
those things in such a way that the possible paths of attack are delineated. Yet, even with
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this approach I do not force or compel anyone to attack. So then, it becomes a completely
personal question, if I choose, if I want, to take certain courses of action with reference to
prisons, psychiatric asylums, this or that issue.58

This is certainly a valid option, though it is arguably less appropriate for Agambens
works, which are marked by a strong messianic pathos completely alien to Foucault and
which promise a global transformation that Foucault refused even to discuss. Moreover,
it is important that Foucault famously referred to his practical disposition in terms of
pessimistic activism rather than optimism,59 an activism alongside others who are
already resisting the apparatuses of power from a minoritarian position. While Agamben
could also claim that his idea of an inoperative form-of-life is a toolkit, intended for
users rather than an audience,60 this limitation of the vision of transformation to those
already interested or involved in it would certainly result in a certain de-sublimation of
the pathos that made his philosophy so attractive and subsume his thought under the
wider rubric of minoritarian dissent alongside numerous poststructuralist and postMarxist authors. If the originality of Agambens approach to coming politics is to be
retained, we must look for another solution to the problem of accounting for the subtractive step from the biopolitical apparatuses towards a happy life of whatever being. In the
next section we shall offer an interpretation of the problematic status of will in
Agambens philosophy through a discussion of his reading of Melvilles Bartleby the
Scrivener and address the possibility of an optimistic affirmation that finds no ground
in either necessity or will.

Why would Bartleby stop writing?

The difficulty with Agambens third principle of optimism arises from a wider problem
of the status of will in his philosophy. From his very first book Man without Content, in
which the occlusion of the Greek distinction between poiesis and praxis by the understanding of (artistic and other) production in terms of the exercise of will is held responsible for the degradation of modern aesthetics, Agamben has attempted to separate his
problematic of potentiality from the affirmation of free will.61 The best example of this
separation is Agambens treatment of Melvilles Bartleby as an exemplar of a purely
whatever being, whose famous preference not to is entirely devoid of any positive
content and completely unintelligible in terms of wilful praxis.62 In his pure passivity,
Bartleby serves as an epitome of Agambens idiosyncratic concept of potentiality. For
Agamben, the thought of potentiality must be purged of all connotations of will and
necessity that have obscured its meaning throughout the history of philosophy: [P]otentiality is not will, and impotentiality is not necessity. To believe that will has power over
potentiality, that the passage to actuality is the result of a decision that puts an end to the
ambiguity of potentiality (which is always potentiality to do and not to do) this is the
perpetual illusion of morality.63 This illusion is traced by Agamben to medieval theology, which distinguished between potentia absoluta, Gods potentiality to do anything
whatsoever, and potentia ordinata, by which God can only do what is in accordance with
his will.
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Will is the principle that makes it possible to order the undifferentiated chaos of potentiality.
. . . A potentiality without will is altogether unrealizable and cannot pass into actuality.
Bartleby calls into question precisely this supremacy of the will over potentiality. If God
(at least de potentia ordinata) is truly capable only of what he wants, Bartleby is capable
only without wanting, he is capable only de potentia absoluta.64

In Language and Death, Agamben similarly affirms the stakes of his philosophical
project in terms of wrestling potentia absoluta away from any constraint by will:
If there were not always already a will in God, He would have remained cloistered in his
abyss without expressing any word (the Son). Without will or love, God would have consigned himself to Tartarus, sinking eternally into his own abyss. But, we ask, what would
have happened if there were no trace of self in God, no will? If we let God fall headlong
into his abyss?65

It is evident that according to Agambens first principle of optimism, God is presently

falling into Tartarus and, according to his second principle, it is precisely this falling
that makes possible the happy life of pure, inoperative potentiality: only when we succeed in sinking into this Tartarus and experiencing our own impotentiality do we become
capable of creating, truly becoming poets.66 This dissociation of absolute potentiality
from will does not thereby resign it to non-existence, whereby the possible becomes
impossible. What is at stake is rather precisely the passage of potentiality into actuality
as potentiality, the real existence of the possible as such:
[Potentiality] does not remain unactualized of a lack of will. One could say of Bartleby that
he succeeds in being able (and not being able) absolutely without wanting it. Hence the irreducibility of his I would prefer not to. It is not that he does not want to copy or that he does
not want to leave the office; he simply would prefer not to. The formula that he so obstinately repeats destroys all possibility of constructing a relation between being able and willing, between potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata. This is the formula of potentiality.67

In order to emphasize Bartlebys being capable without wanting, Agambens reading systematically suppresses the modal verb would in Bartlebys formula, which
seems to indicate at least a remnant of will in Bartlebys suspension of work: I prefer
not, which appears three times, is the only variation of Bartlebys usual phrase; and if
Bartleby then renounces the conditional, this is only because doing so allows him to
eliminate all traces of the verb will, even in its modal use.68 While this renunciation
of the conditional arguably does little to remove the connotations of will in the verb
prefer, it is evident why Agamben seizes on this apparently unimportant modification
of Bartlebys formula. Indeed, this modification helps Agamben to present Bartleby as
a figure that affirms potentiality beyond all will to be otherwise and his persistent beingthus as purely contingent beyond all necessity. Bartlebys refusal is thus a refusal of
nothing in particular or perhaps a refusal of all things in particular. His absolute preference not to rather entails the demand for the decreation of reality as such, whereby
what could not have been but was becomes indistinguishable from what could have
been but was not.69
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It is noteworthy that there is no indication in Melvilles text of any actual decision by

Bartleby to cease performing his duties, which suggests that Bartleby never even preferred
to prefer not to. Bartleby does not want to stick to any determinate mode of being against the
will of others to transform it nor does he resist his confinement in order to enter a different
mode of being. Instead, he exists as nothing but his own potentiality (not) to be, as something
that can both be and not be, as a purely contingent being that perpetually (de)creates itself. In
Agambens adaptation of the key formula of the philosophy of the Skeptics, Bartleby exists
no more than he does not, i.e. he inhabits a zone of indistinction between affirmation and
negation, potentiality and actuality, and ultimately between Being and Nothing.70 This is
what Agamben terms his experiment de contingentia absoluta.71
It is now clear that raising the question of why the subjects of contemporary societies
would want to subtract themselves from the biopolitical apparatuses would contradict the
basic tenor of Agambens philosophy. We are furthest away from Foucault, whose genealogical toolkits emphasized precisely the possibility of transforming the existing
apparatuses by wilful praxis. What matters for Agamben is solely the subjects potentiality for whatever being, which is exactly what remains once the nihilism of todays politics is fully illuminated. If ones subtraction from the contemporary apparatuses were
something willed, it would pose a limit to potentiality and thus be conceivable as yet
another historical project, which would contradict the understanding of the coming politics in terms of inoperosity.
And yet, this stubborn refusal of the problematic of the will is extremely difficult to
maintain, since we cannot get rid of the question of why Bartleby stopped writing. In his
reading Agamben rejects as wholly inadequate the interpretation of the narrator of the
novella, which psychologized Bartlebys refusal by interpreting it as a result of depression
or some other pathology that Bartleby developed during his work at the Dead Letter
Office the place in which the contingency of our existence is demonstrated most starkly:
on errands towards life, these letters speed to death.72 Yet, Agambens own interpretation, which takes up this phrase as a barely disguised citation from Pauls Letter to the
Romans (7: 10) and proceeds to interpret Bartleby as a figure of messianic suspension,
clearly abandons the previously postulated capability without wanting and recasts
Bartleby as a militant activist, who comes to abolish the Old Law, comes to save what
was not, fulfils the Torah by destroying it from top to bottom.73 Of course, this messianic praxis remains entirely heterogeneous to any historical project that actualizes some
potentialities to the detriment of others. In contrast, Bartlebys decreation returns the
existent to its potentiality of not being and endows what never was with the potential to
exist, i.e. it institutes the reign of absolute contingency. Yet, before decreating anything,
Bartleby must first subtract himself from the apparatuses that order his existence and thus
let himself be his own potentiality. This act of letting oneself be finds its paradigm in the
sovereign decision, which is central to Agambens political ontology.
Potentiality (in its double appearance as potentiality to and as potentiality not to) is that
through which Being founds itself sovereignly, which is to say, without anything preceding
or determining it . . . other than its own ability not to be. And an act is sovereign when it
realizes itself by simply taking away its own potentiality not to be, letting itself be, giving
itself to itself.74
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Without this act of letting oneself be, Agambens affirmation of being-thus would
degenerate into a resigned acceptance of the tyranny of actuality, whereby nothing at all
would be able to happen. Indeed, this is exactly what takes place in the extreme forms of
the state of exception, where potentiality is entirely expropriated by the sovereign and its
subjects are abandoned to dwelling in absolute necessity, exemplified by the camps.
Contrary to frequent misunderstandings, Agambens critique of sovereign power does
not target sovereignty as such, but rather its expropriation and sacralization in the separate sphere of the state.75 The real state of exception consists precisely in the profane
reappropriation of this power of letting oneself be by the entire society. It is therefore not
surprising that despite his insistence on Bartlebys being capable only without wanting,
Agamben finally reintroduces the theme of decision, when he addresses the question of
how a life of potentiality becomes possible. In order for potentiality not to degenerate
into an eternal recurrence that effaces contingency by elevating the actual to the status
of the willed, Bartleby decided to stop copying, he must stop copying, must give up his
work.76 It is precisely in this sovereign decision that the novella leaves unaccounted for
that Bartleby sets aside his potentiality not to stop copying but does not thereby translate
potentiality into actuality, but rather materializes it as a possibility that exists in its own
right.77 This materialization neither collapses potentiality into actuality nor leaves it in
the privative mode of something merely inactual. Whatever being that is truly sovereign
in relation to itself is entirely contained in the actual existence of potentiality that has set
aside its potentiality not to be and given itself to itself and can now not not-be. Agambens coming community of happy life is characterized by precisely this mode of being
actually potential, i.e. absolutely contingent.

Conclusion
As we have seen, the return to the problematic of decision is unavoidable if we want to
pose the question of how Agambens happy life of inoperative potentiality is to be constituted. One must decide to subtract oneself from the biopolitical apparatuses, to play
with the law,78 to profane the sacred,79 etc. Moreover, the modal verb must is here
used not only in the sense of logical necessity (Bartleby must stop copying in order to
enter the state of whatever being) but also of obligation, since Agamben is quite unequivocal about his attitude to the suppression of potentiality in actuality and ones persistence in the inauthentic ethos:
The only ethical experience (which, as such, cannot be a task or a subjective decision) is the
experience of being (ones own) potentiality, of being (ones own) possibility exposing,
that is, in every form ones own amorphousness and in every act ones own inactuality. The
only evil consists instead in the decision to remain in a deficit of existence, to appropriate
the power to not-be as a substance and a foundation beyond existence.80

The stakes of Agambens work are such that the Foucauldian gesture of somewhat
contrived indifference to whether his toolkits are applied would be entirely inappropriate. What Agamben is concerned with is nothing less than the possibility of salvation,
which, to use the characteristic Heideggerian inversion, consists entirely in the salvation
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of possibility itself, the restoration of the potentiality of human existence. This

possibility is explicitly presented as an ethical injunction that on a number of occasions
Agamben presents in the imperative mood: Be only your own face. Go to the threshold.
Do not remain the subjects of your properties and faculties, do not stay beneath them:
rather, go with them, in them, beyond them.81 Since what is at issue here is maintaining
fidelity to ones own potentiality for being, affirming this possibility as such as opposed
to sticking to one of its contingent actualizations, Agambens injunction may be grasped
as an inversion of Kants categorical imperative: You must because you can!
Yet, there remains a problem of how this imperative could ever be responded to in a
decision in favour of potentiality. Agambens resumption of the discourse of decision in
his discussion of Bartleby as a messianic figure is neither a careless slip nor an abandonment of an earlier stance but rather indicates the full complexity of the question of the
existence of contingency. One must decide to enter the state of whatever being, but
this decision cannot simply be a matter of will that actualizes it as a potentiality among
others this would clearly be a case of a decision to remain in a deficit of existence.
This must rather be something like a meta-decision in favour of potentiality as such, in
favour of actualizing the potentiality for potentiality, setting aside the potentiality for
potentiality not to be. For this very reason, this decision cannot be accounted for in terms
of will, which would only serve to restrict our potentia absoluta by potentia ordinata. To
the extent it can be accounted for at all, it is as a matter of conversion or metanoia, a
radical perspectival shift that unfolds in an almost magical manner.
In the context of Agambens work magic would not be an accidental metaphor, since
his theorization of happy life is inextricably linked to it. Whatever we can achieve
through merit and effort cannot make us truly happy. Only magic can do that.82 For
Agamben, happiness can never be deserved or attained through work or any projectoriented action, hence the emphasis on inoperosity as both the pathway to and the entire
content of happy life: Naturally it is not a matter here of fulfilling something; nothing is
more boring than a man who has fulfilled his own dreams: this is the insipid socialdemocratic zealousness of pornography.83 Severing the link between happiness and
work, Agamben posits happiness as a condition that can never be destined for us or
brought about as a reward for our willed activity: happiness can be ours only through
magic. At that point, when we have wrenched it away from fate, happiness coincides
entirely with our knowing ourselves to be capable of magic.84 While historical apparatuses promise us chimerical happiness in the future in return for our subjection in the
present, genuine happiness is possible only in the general absence of work, identity and
destiny that illuminates the irreducibly potential character of our existence. Potentiality
and inoperosity are thus entirely indissociable, insofar as our being able (not) to do
something depends on our not having to do anything else.
If the only way to achieve happiness is not to aspire to reach it, since it is precisely the
renunciation of work that restores to ones existence the potentiality in which happiness
consists, then the metanoia towards absolutely contingent whatever being is only conceivable as itself a matter of pure contingency, something that can not be.85 Happy life is
not attained as a matter of the immanent logic of history or as a result of a voluntarist
project, hence Agambens optimism cannot be expressed in terms of either necessity
or will but remains squarely within the dimension of contingency. At first glance, any
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contingency worthy of the name appears to be entirely indifferent to either optimism or

pessimism since it warrants nothing but the possibility of things being otherwise without
any specification of the likelihood of this possibility.86 The nihilistic degradation of the
global biopolitical apparatuses does indeed open the possibility of the reappropriation of
whatever being but this very possibility is accessible only in its own capacity not-to-be.
It is therefore just as possible that we remain within the deficit of existence that we misrecognize for our authentic ethos, remain stuck in the worst, just one step away from the
best. It is possible that nothing will happen indeed, insofar as our time is the age of
nihilism nothing is precisely what is happening to us, daily. Agamben clearly recognizes
these possibilities but adds to them a crucial caveat: This but not only this is possible.87 It is precisely the supplement but not only this that permits Agamben to retain
his optimism in the face of absolute contingency. In a reading of a scene in Orson
Welles unfinished Don Quixote in his fragment The Six Most Beautiful Minutes in the
History of Cinema, which could easily compete for the title of the most beautiful page in
the history of philosophy, Agamben advances an ethics of contingency that goes beyond
the voluntarist quests for fulfilment and the pessimistic dwelling within the impossible:
What shall we do with our imaginations? Love them and believe in them to the point of having to destroy and falsify them (this is perhaps the meaning of Orson Welles films). But
when, in the end, they reveal themselves to be empty and unfulfilled, when they show the
nullity of which they were made, only then can we pay the price for their truth and understand that Dulcinea whom we have saved cannot love us.88

The contingency of the outcome is certainly not the reason to evade the wager on
happy life or renounce all dreams of it, which would merely turn the contingent into
the necessarily impossible. What we must do with our dreams is simply take the risk
of using them without any fear of using them up, of destroying and falsifying them,
of going to the bottom of them and finding nothing but the void. And even if they all
amount to nothing, if the potential subjects of whatever being shrug and say whatever
in response to Agambens vision of happy life, this only means that not only this is possible, that the possibility of a happy life remains a possibility, a possibility to succeed or,
in Becketts terms, to fail better. This is the ultimate limit of Agambens optimism,
beyond which his thought cannot venture, having dispensed with both will and necessity
and finding its ground in absolute contingency alone. This curious optimism, which is
only strengthened with each successive failure, resonates with Wallace Stevens famous
words in Notes on the Supreme Fiction, It is possible, possible, possible, it must be possible. It must be that in time the real will from its crude compoundings come.
Notes
1. See Ernesto Laclau Bare Life or Social Indeterminacy, in Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty
and Life, ed. Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2007), pp. 1122; Antonio Negri, Giorgio Agamben: The Discreet Taste of the Dialectic, in
Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, pp. 10925.
2. Giorgio Agamben, I am Sure that You are More Pessimistic than I am: an Interview with
Giorgio Agamben, Rethinking Marxism 16(2) (2004): 11524 (124).
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3. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1998), pp. 1929.
4. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 3.
5. See Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (New York: Zone Books, 2007), pp. 912; Giorgio
Agamben, What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2009) for a detailed discussion of the notion of the apparatus (dispositif). This notion
was originally developed by Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction
(Harmondsworth, Mx: Penguin, 1990), pp. 23, 7581; Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge:
Selected Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books,
1980), pp. 194228. See also Gilles Deleuze, What is a Dispositif?, in Michel Foucault: Philosopher, ed. T. J. Armstrong (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992). In Agambens generalization of the Foucauldian concept, the apparatus refers to any structure that captures
human existence for the purpose of its positive ordering.
6. See James Bernauer, Michel Foucaults Force of Flight: Towards an Ethics for Thought
(Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1990), p. 175.
7. See Paul Passavant, The Contradictory State of Giorgio Agamben, Political Theory 35(2)
(2007): 14774.
8. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1985).
9. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994).
10. See Michel Foucault, Governmentality, in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality,
ed. Graham Burchell et al. (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p. 102.
11. Giorgio Agamben, Life, a Work of Art Without an Author: The State of Exception, the
Administration of Disorder and Private Life, German Law Journal 5 (2004): 60914 (612).
12. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Colle`ge de France 19771978
(Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 21933.
13. Agamben, Profanations, p. 90. See also Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of
Negativity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
14. Agamben, State of Exception, p. 87.
15. Agamben, Language and Death, pp. 3940; Agamben, State of Exception, pp. 634. For a
detailed discussion of Agambens criticism of Derridean deconstruction see Adam Thurschwell, Cutting the Branches for Akiba: Agambens Critique of Derrida, in Politics, Metaphysics and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agambens Homo Sacer, ed. Andrew Norris (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 17397; Catherine Mills, Agambens Messianic Politics:
Biopolitics, Abandonment and Happy Life, Contretemps 5 (2004): 4262.
16. William Rasch, From Sovereign Ban to Banning Sovereignty, in Giorgio Agamben:
Sovereignty and Life, p. 102.
17. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
18. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, pp. 758, 1859.
19. Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 11. See also Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose (New York: SUNY Press,
1995), pp. 8792.
20. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 2001), p. 118.
21. Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 82.
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22. ibid., p. 57.

23. Cf. Laclau Bare Life, pp. 202; Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben (Stocksfield,
Northumb.: Acumen, 2008), pp. 1279.
24. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London:
Routledge, 1970), p. xvii.
25. See Agamben, Language and Death, pp. 8498.
26. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 118.
27. Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2008), pp. 4577.
28. The idea of free use, as opposed to possession or property, is central to Agambens ethics and
has been developed in most detail in his study of St Pauls messianism. See Giorgio Agamben,
The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2005), pp. 269, 1347. See also Agamben, Profanations, pp. 7392, where
use functions as an epitome of profane praxis.
29. Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Colle`ge de France 19731974
(Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave, 2006), pp. 2418.
30. Agamben, State of Exception, p. 86.
31. Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 50.
32. Agamben, Profanations, p. 92.
33. See Agamben, Idea of Prose, p. 87; Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the
Destruction of Experience (London: Verso, 2007), pp. 11315.
34. Agamben, Means without End, pp. 1412.
35. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2004), p. 76.
36. Agamben, Means without End, p. 142.
37. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 188.
38. Agamben, Means without End, p. 11.
39. Agamben, The Coming Community, pp. 13.
40. ibid., p. 64.
41. The notion of subtraction has been developed in Alain Badious metaontology of the truth procedure and refers to the mode of negation that does not seek the destruction of what it negates
but simply dissociates itself from it, becoming indiscernible in its terms. See Alain Badiou,
Being and Event (London: Continuum, 2005), pp. 32843; Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings
(London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 10520. Although Agamben rarely uses this term, it adequately grasps the phenomena he discusses under such diverse rubrics as rendering inoperative, profanation, deactivation, etc.
42. See Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Selected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1999), pp. 1823.
43. Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 16180.
44. ibid., pp. 289.
45. ibid., pp. 10411, 1826.
46. See Giorgio Agamben, What is a Paradigm?, European Graduate School Lecture, accessed
25 December 2008 at: <www.egs.edu>
47. See Walter Benjamin, Critique of Violence, in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz (New York:
Schocken Books, 1986), pp. 277300; Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of
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History, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books), pp. 25364. Cf.
Agamben, State of Exception, ch. 4.
48. See Agamben, The Coming Community, pp. 635; Agamben, Idea of Prose, pp. 8792;
Agamben, Means without End, pp. 524, 7885; Agamben, Profanations, pp. 815.
49. Agamben, Profanations, pp. 7394.
50. ibid., pp. 901.
51. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: HarperCollins, 2008[1962]), pp. 1648, 224.
Agambens theory of whatever being is best grasped in relation to Heideggers thought. The
reappropriation of ones own potentiality that Agamben affirms is nothing other than
Heideggers anticipatory resoluteness, in which Dasein is able to grasp its everydayness
in an authentic way and thereby exit the fallenness of the They, which for Agamben is exemplified by the apparatuses of biopolitical nihilism. In contrast to Heidegger, however, Agamben finds no reason to link this resolute decision with the anticipatory being toward Death
and more generally refuses to conceive of death as a politically relevant fact. Second, Agambens philosophy lacks any equivalent of Heideggers Voice of Conscience to which resoluteness would be an authentic response, which raises the question of how the subtractive
step towards happy life is to be taken. Cf. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 31247.
52. See Laclau, Bare Life, pp. 202; Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben, pp. 12430; Passavant,
The Contradictory State, pp. 16571.
53. This problem may be illuminated by contrasting Agambens work with the philosophy of Alain
Badiou, for whom any politics worthy of the name is also cast in subtractive terms of a radical
break with the existing situation (event), a pure affirmation of the existence of the undecidable
event (intervention) and the painstaking process of the composition of the indiscernible subset
that is the truth of the situation (fidelity). See Badiou, Being and Event, Meditations 17, 20, 23,
31. Yet, as the latter concept demonstrates, for Badiou this subtractive praxis is presented as an
ethical injunction, a call to disciplined militant action that is presented precisely in terms of a
task or a project that Agamben seeks to dispense with. Badiou is explicitly concerned with
championing militant activism, not least by philosophically linking it with the formation of truth
and positing truth itself as an ethical guideline. Yet, while for Badiou this truth, which is itself
infinite, emerges in fragments that consist precisely of subjective investments in fidelity procedures, for Agamben the truth of being is exhausted in whatever being and is immediately accessible as a result of subtraction, which both makes it possible to dispense with the very idea of a
truth process and, insofar as we thereby also dispense with the problematic of disciplined activism, raises the question of how subtraction is to be accounted for. See Agamben, Language and
Death, pp. 84106; Agamben, Potentialities, pp. 11637.
54. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 31516, 365.
55. Agamben, Language and Death, pp. 318.
56. Cf. Agamben, I am Sure, p. 121.
57. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure (New York: Random
House, 1990), p. 9.
58. Michel Foucault, Friendship as a Way of Life, in Foucault Live: Interviews, 19611984, ed.
Sylve`re Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), p. 261.
59. For a rare reference to optimism in Foucaults work see Practicing Criticism, in Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Interviews and Other Writings 19771984, ed. Lawrence
Kritzman (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 156.
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60. Foucault, Power and Strategies, in Power/Knowledge, p. 145.

61. Giorgio Agamben, The Man without Content (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
62. See Agamben, Potentialities, pp. 24371; Agamben, The Coming Community, pp. 357.
Bartleby has become a privileged figure in continental philosophy, addressed in the work
of, among others, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Zizek and Antonio Negri.
63. Agamben, Potentialities, p. 254.
64. ibid., p. 255.
65. Agamben, Language and Death, p. 98, n. 1.
66. Agamben, Potentialities, p. 253.
67. ibid.
68. ibid., p. 254.
69. ibid., p. 270. See also Agamben, The Time that Remains, p. 137.
70. ibid., p. 256.
71. ibid., p. 261.
72. Hermann Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener, in Hermann Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor and
Other Stories (Harmondsworth, Mx: Penguin, 1985), p. 99.
73. Agamben, Potentialities, p. 270.
74. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 46.
75. Cf. Rasch, From Sovereign Ban; Jenny Edkins, Whatever Politics, in Giorgio Agamben:
Sovereignty and Life, pp. 7091.
76. Agamben, Potentialities, p. 268.
77. ibid., pp. 21718.
78. Agamben, State of Exception, p. 64.
79. Agamben, Profanations, pp. 912.
80. Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 44.
81. Agamben, Means without End, p. 100.
82. Agamben, Profanations, p. 19.
83. Agamben, Idea of Prose, p. 75.
84. Agamben, Profanations, p. 19.
85. Agamben, Potentialities, pp. 2615.
86. As Quentin Meillassoux has admirably demonstrated, the absolute contingency of things (e.g.
of the laws of physics) can coexist without any contradiction with their utmost stability over
millennia. See Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency
(London: Continuum, 2008), pp. 82111.
87. Agamben, Potentialities, p. 126; original emphasis.
88. Agamben, Profanations, p. 94.

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