Lecture: Agamben

NCTU Graduate Practical Philosophy

§1 BARE LIFE/HOMO SACER In the 1980s a young American woman named Karen Quinlan slipped into a state of deep coma and was kept alive for years by means of artificial respiration and nutrition. Because she could not speak/reason, she did not meet the classical definition of human life as that of an animal who has the faculty of language/reason; because she could not move her body independently she did not meet the classical definition of animal as being capable of auto-locomotion from place to place; because she could not eat or breathe without a machine attached to her she did not meet the definition of vegetable life as that which possesses its own nutritive faculty. Nonetheless this woman, who had managed to “survive” every known categorical form-of-life, was sustained by the state legal system. In one way, she had less life than a carrot; in another way, she was more-than-human—or, alternatively, inhuman—because she had survived human, animal, and vegetative life. Yet, she was without any relation whatsoever except by proxy with a technico-politico-legal structure. She was not assisted in being able to survive; she was made to survive until it could be determined whether she was properly speaking alive, or, in Agamben’s insight: whether she was properly speaking human. She had entered a “zone of indetermination” in which life and death/ human and inhuman had lost their meaning. At one point a state court, at the urging of her grieved parents, ruled that Karen was “already dead” (which had to mean that the court understood her to be a living corpse) and ordered the artificial respiration to be suspended. Karen survived even that, began to breathe on her own, and was then given nutrition artificially until 1985 when she succumbed to “natural death”.


This is one exemplary case that Giorgio Agamben employs to help articulate his notion of la vita nuda: Bare, naked, nude, de-nuded life. Bare life is life without qualities but nonetheless real; the overcomatose person “wavers between life and death” and delimits “a space of exception in which a purely bare life, entirely controlled by man and his technology, appears for the first time. And since it is precisely a question not of natural life but of an extreme embodiment of homo sacer […] what is at stake is […] the definition of a life that may be killed without the commission of a homicide (and that is, like homo sacer, ‘unsacrificeable’, in the sense that it obviously could not be put to death following a death sentence)”.







§2 POLTICIZED LIFE The Karen Quinlan case means “that today—as is implicit in Peter Medawar’s observation that ‘in biology, discussions on the meaning of the words ‘life’ and ‘death’ are signs of a low level of conversation’—life and death are not properly scientific concepts but rather political concepts, which as such acquire a political meaning precisely only through a decision”. Agamben’s context is not scientific but critically onto-philosophical and thus political in the sense that he believes that every philosophy implies a politics. Michel Foucault had already begun to investigate society’s “threshold of biological modernity” beginning with volume one of the History of Sexuality. Agamben radicalizes the perspective by stating that life is in fact the original political element, that the function of power is to separate qualified life from utterly banal life, bare life, and hence to produce populations who are homines sacri: capable of being killed without infraction of law and without memory. He quite extensively traces this history through now five volumes from, among many examples, Roman Law, to the Renaissance notion of the “King’s Two Bodies”, to German lager, to US Congressional decisions on speed limits, to Karen Quinlan, to the ever increasing numbers of “stateless refugees”, and to the future and the possibility of “neomorts”, or, “human” bodies which exist only to have their organs harvested .





That life which survives vegetable-animal-human is not superior power. Although real, this life is not intuited; it is not felt; it does not think; nor is it pure natural existence. It is perhaps not even a resistance to death (“A set of functions that resist death”as the physician Bichat defines life) but instead an inability to die, an impotentiality. Its only reality is its infinite divisibility by power relations because, when it is encountered in some context, in some world or environment, its belonging there is in question and must be decided upon by sovereign power. The reduction of any form-of-life to this dimension is what Agamben labels HOMO SACER.

After he had used them as scapegoats in his early speeches and then rose to power, Hitler seldom spoke of the Jews [Speer, Inside the Third Reich, 94, 112]. He couldn’t. They had to become less than a theme; they had to become ‘vermin’, unspeakable. Prior to being murdered they had to have become utterly banal lives, without value, bare, not worth even talking about so that they could be killed en masse without the killing being murder and without the Jews living on in memory as having been sacrificed for a destiny.

In the US Congress some time ago there was debate about speed limits. If the limit were to be set at 55 MPH x number would die on the roads; if set at 65 MPH x+n would die. Essentially, a population of people—namelessly x, n—had (has) been reduced to bare life, and since there is no way of knowing who the dead will be, everyone in a car is virtually homo sacer. American life was reduced to sheer political calculation which accounts for the unease many American felt during the hearings.

The situation is the same today at Guantanimo Bay and Abu Ghriab where, for the word “terrorist” one should read homo sacer. It is the logic of the camp and indeed Agamben goes so far as to declare that the camp is the modern political paradigm: “[T]he camp is the space that opens up when the state of exception starts to become the rule” and when life and law can no longer be distinguished from each other as was the case for Karen Quinlin: if the courts had declared she was alive, she was alive; if the courts had declared she was dead, she was dead. Fact and law were indistinguishable from each other.





§3 THE HOMO SACER PROJECT is to be completed in five volumes:

Homo Sacer

State of Exception

Il Regno e la Gloria [The Power and the Glory]

Remnants of Auschwitz

A forthcoming volume on “Forms-of-Life”



The attempt is vast because Agamben wishes to show that ‘bare life’ is the original political element and that Western politics has always been a biopolitics. Born in Rome in 1942, Agamben studied relations between Law and Philosophy and completed his dissertation on the thought of Simone Weil. As a post-doctoral student he attended Martin Heidegger’s seminars on Hegel and Heraclitus. In his youth he was friends with filmmaker Pier Paolo Passolini, writers Pierre Klossowski, Elsa Morante and Italo Calvino, and also theorist Guy Debord. He has said that in conversations with his friends when they talked to each other about their career plans he declared a fascination with dualist conflicts that appear again and again in western culture. All of his work centers on originary dualist conflicts: language separated into poetry and prose; the manufactured object split into use-value and exchange-value; potentiality and actuality; human and animal; means and ends; words and phantasm; and so on. In these volumes of the homo sacer project the issue is zoē and bios into which life is split.

We read in these pages that in the Classical world simple, natural life, the mere fact of living (zoē) common to animals, human beings, and the gods was distinguished from qualified life, the good life (bios). This distinction is critical for Aristotle for whom “the state comes into existence, originating in the bare needs of life, but continuing in existence for the sake of the good life” [Politics 1252b, 29-30] and for whom the statesman [politicos] is different in kind from either the head of an estate [oikonomos] or the head of a family [despotês] [Politics 1252a, 5-10]. The latter two are concerned with the reproduction and sustenance of life; the former with the good. This all seems to show that life and political life have been separated; that man comes into community in distinction from his being a living being; that as living man’s place is in the family and estate, while as a member of community man becomes a political subject. Oikos and polis are classically distinct as the unqualifiable is distinct from what can be qualified. A human being, for Aristotle, is one who must acquire the good within the political by leaving or setting aside the natal.

But Agamben, following from Foucault, is arguing that we no longer have any notion of this; that the distinction has been neutralized, that between sheer, mute, incommunicable life and articulation there is now indistinction; that in our politics our very life as living beings is at stake. In his volumes on the History of Sexuality and his lectures at the Collège de France Foucault described an historic transition in power from sovereignty over nations and territories to sovereignty over life; that power ceased to exist for the sake of conquest and instead began to exist as organizers and managers of populations (“peoples”, “races”). Life had become to be included in the political community from the birth of the individual. But by examining Aristotle’s distinction in some detail Agamben teases out a logic that shows that in fact the biolpolitcal begins in the Classical world. He argues at length that, precisely by setting natal life outside the polis, by excluding it, the political realm in fact includes it as ex-cepted, as banned, as abandoned. Thus, what Foucault called our attention to only reveals in a massive way what in fact is the “secret” of sovereign power from the beginning. Agamben wants to show that life has always been the negative foundation of sovereign power.

Relying on any number of other thinkers (Schmitt, Heidegger, J-L Nancy, Benjamin, Kafka, etc.) and various paradigmatic cases such as I mention above, Agamben seems to show that power has always founded and maintained itself in a relation to that with which there is no relation. That which is banned is at once consigned to its otherness and at the same time brought under the mercy of the one who abandons. That which is ex-cepted is at the same time included by the sovereign who/which is at once inside and outside the law. These are the two poles which organize western politics for Agamben in which living beings and political subjects are fatally integrated and indistinct. Natal life which has been sovereignly ex-cepted becomes bare life, becomes the pure form of separation from forms-of-life, which in turn becomes a mediality and an autonomy of its own upon which soveignty decides (or suspends decision). (Agamben himself is somewhat inconsistent about all this, making his book difficult to follow in places.) Bare life is life which is completely exposed to sovereign power and decision.



Keep in mind that Agamben is always working at the philosophico-historical level in order to, he says, “orient ourselves in relation to the new realities and unforeseen convergences of the end of the millennium” and so that we may “clear the way for a new politics, which remains largely to be invented.” At the philosophical level he means that Western politics is tied to its metaphysics; a new politics which “remains to be invented” would be a new way of thinking as well and at the same time. Metaphysically, man in the west is the animal who has language, who can articulate the just from the unjust, and this is so while grounded on the negative foundation that his given, natural voice has been removed, excepted, as Agamben argues at length in his book Language and Death. His “solutions” to what seems hopeless are an “experience of language as such” (which he articulates somewhat in his book Infancy and History) and an experience of community as such (which he articulates very elliptically in his The Coming Community). It is now supposed that his forthcoming “forms-of-life” book will continue the process of a new thinking/politics. It is not altogether clear what Agamben means by this, but what is clear is that he continually shifts back and forth from pure forms of separation (such as bare life, or such as Debord’s “spectacle”) to forms of life, or life which cannot be separated from what it can do or be. Agamben seems then ultimately to define power as that which separates a being from what that being can do or be. When power separates it produces a mediality that then becomes autonomous and occupies a separate sphere. This is certainly what happens with bare life. It is also the case that he subscribes to Debord’s notion that capital has become so concentrated as to become a spectacle that has become autonomous and separates us from our very sociality. We observe sociality as if it were no longer a human vocation to be social creatures. Captialism/spectacle separates us from out native capacity for sociality, or forms of life. But at the same time, in a way that is a little vague, it opens the possibility for an experience of sociality as such. In other words, it seems that, for Agamben, these autonomous spheres are also ‘thresholds” to the new.

Another spot where metaphysics and the forms of western politics are shown to be intertwined is in Agamben’s equation of the sovereign with Aristotle’s discussion of potentiality as the manner in which Being sovereignly founds itself (that is, without anything else preceding it or determining it). In Aristotle, potentiality is the ability both to be and not to be. Precisely through its ability not to be potentiality maintains itself in relation to actuality. At its extreme, Potentiality gives itself to itself precisely by suspending its ability not to be, and this suspension renders it indistinguishably purely actual and purely potential and is thus outside the relation actual/potential. The task for the new politics (and new ontology) will involve thinking “outside relation”; even outside the limit relation of the ban which is the extreme figure of metaphysics and is also a threshold of some kind, if we can get ourselves to think it or figure it in some way. Some possible “figures” of this new thinking outside metaphysics include Nietzsche’s thought of the “eternal return”, and Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener”. (Regarding Nietzsche, Agamben later withdraws the thought of the eternal return as a possible figure because one cannot will a return of the Holocaust.) At any rate, a reading of Agamben is always simultaneously philosophy + political history.




§ Art and Abandonment Life enters the political just as a work of art enters a museum or the marketplace. When the work of Art enters the museum it loses something vital; it becomes a ‘piece’, a ‘museum piece’, and it acquires a value, a cultural value—it is declared to be a cultural ‘treasure’ whose value fluctuates with changes in accord with the ways in which a culture sees itself or indeed values itself. When a work of art enters the market place the same thing happens: it becomes an object, an art object, and ultimately a commodity: it is assigned a monetary value which fluctuates with the market. In either case some other relation to Art is lost and, when there is no other place for Art then all Art is artworks or art objects and the essential relation between human being and its artistic vocation is forgotten, erased. So that, today, the average viewer may look at a new painting and respond only with: “It’s great. It belongs in a museum”, or “It’s great. I’ll bet it will be worth a lot of money someday.” The possibility that the relation with Art may be a quasi-religious experience as for the Greeks who experienced the death of their gods in Art (as opposed to philosophy which merely proclaimed the Gods non-existence or worldly irrelevance); or as another form of transcendence or of transformation of human experience as in Romantic Art; or even as a mourning for all these lost relations with Art as with Modernism; or as the possibility of Art as the very origin of human experience itself as in the thought of Hölderlin, Paul Celan; or that, in Heidegger and others, that Art (and not philosophy) reveals a World to a civilization; or others still—all this is lost and even rendered senseless. We no longer have any idea of these relations to Art. We are cut off from or separated from these possibilities. Instead, Art is given value, but valuation is the death of Art, because all values are relative and changeable. To value Art is the nihilation of Art; in fact all valuation is a form of nihilism. It was for the traditional vocations of man, in the west, to reveal a World; this was the task of science, philosophy, art, religion, and love. These have all been expropriated and brought into museums, technologies, rhetoric, sex/marriage/family, and psychopathology.


Art is a sign without a signified, without meaning (or at least, whose meaning is always multiple or secondary to its role as a sign); it is a sign without contents. Art breaks up meaning, and thus the transmission of meaning. Art puts meaning in jeopardy while at the same time preserving the possibility of meaning and thereby creates a clearing or opening where we find ourselves as human and social beings, or, in short, as significant. This occurs because Art breaks up comprehension and thus breaks up tradition, interrupts tradition, but does not abolish tradition. Instead Art’s interruption of tradition opens a space wherein the community can then experience tradition and community as such. And thus traditions and communities are altered, including the alteration of being transmitted differently (for example, by writing as opposed to oral transmission or song or poetic recitation). But this function of Art has been usurped, and Art now is merely conserved and accumulated; accumulation and preservation of tradition becomes the vertiginous and the only relation humans have with their cultural traditions; accumulation of that which humans no longer know how to experience or know what to do with, accumulation of that which may or may not belong in the contemporary world. Thus, ultimately, culture itself becomes a culture of accumulation, or a glorified junk pile. Likewise life is without content and Agamben has written a book entitled The Man without Contents. Life is outside value, prior to value, valueless. That very thought is today intolerable as we know because “rights to life” or “human rights” have become one of the great political mobilizing techniques, and certainly Agamben is intent to show how this is not at all surprising given that life has been originally included in the political in the form of the ban, or abandonment.

It is as if Art has abandoned us, as if Art has lost us, and we now wander the earth without or as if outside any world. Indeed, Agamben in Profanations goes so far as to say that: “The museumification of the world is now an accomplished fact. One by one, the spiritual potentialities that defined people’s lives—art, religion, philosophy, the idea of nature, even politics—have docilely withdrawn into the Museum” [83-4]. The museum in fact is the exhibition not of Art but instead of the “impossibility of using, of dwelling, of experiencing.” He compares the World-as-Museum and tourists to the Temple and the Pilgrims who would journey to it. But the Pilgrims would have an experience of sacrifice that would reassert the proper relation between this world—their native homeland, as the profane (as that which is to be used and experienced as such)—and the Divine. But as bare life, ours is the pure form of separation and it is the separation from the possibility of dwelling in a homeland at all that is experienced by the tourist who has never been his or her zoē, his or her natal existence. Put another way, today we experience ourselves as tourists in even own homelands which we no longer experience as our own.



Let us return to Agamben’s understanding of State of Exception and Law. In the State of Exception the Law suspends itself. What is Law? Law is that which prescribes what one can and what one cannot do. What happens to Law in the State of Exception? The Law prescribes neither. The Law says nothing. The Law is silent. Remember the Roman home: the Father and the boy. Now, the Law prescribes when the father may be killed (when his being killed would be legal) and the Law prescribes when the father’s being killed would be murder (that is, illegal). If the father is killed, the Law can say it was legal and it can say it was not-legal. With regard to the boy, the Law says nothing. The Law suspends what it can do. It does not separate itself from what it can do; it merely suspends what it can do and thus becomes both pure actuality and pure potentiality at the same time. The Law has nothing to say about the legality or illegality of the boy’s being killed insofar as he is within the excepted zone of the family, and the killer is his father. The boy’s life is mere, bare, banned life, and not life properly (legally) speaking. The boy cannot protect himself from the silence of the Law. The boy is abandoned by the Law; he is without relation to the Law except in the exceptional form of relation that is the silence of the Law concerning his being killed. The relation is paradoxical: it is his life’s being completely exposed to being-without-relation to the Law. It is an exceptional form of relation; one in which the Law says nothing, has no significance (not for the boy, nor the boy for it) yet it remains in force. In HS Agamben uses Kafka’s parable “Before the Law” to exemplify this (and I emphasize the word “use”—he profanes the story; and I mention this because he has been criticized for departing from the Derrida’s reading of the same story. In fact, he is routinely criticized by historians, theological scholars, political scientists, political philosophers, and many others for not properly understanding the various source cases he uses. In fact, in the volume devoted to his work to which I contributed, Metaphysics and Death, I was one of only two contributors who was OK with his “method”. He takes actual cases and uses them as paradigms in order to show an intelligibility. This is something about his work which has simply not been understood.)

You probably know the story: A man from the country comes to the door of the Law. Before the Law stands a guard. The man begs for admittance to the Law. The guard says that he cannot permit admittance “at this time”. The man asks if he can gain admittance later. The guard says that “it is possible” and steps to one side of the door. The door itself is open. The man peers inside. The guard laughs and challenges the man to try to go inside but warns him that he is the least of the guards, that hall after hall there are other doors each guarded by guards each of whom is more powerful than the previous. The guard gives the man a stool to sit on. The man waits. He waits for years. He studies the guard closely, so closely that he comes to know even the fleas in the guard’s collar. He tries to bribe the guard, giving away everything he had brought with him from the country. The guard accepts but still refuses admittance. He says he accepts these things only to keep the man from “thinking that he has omitted anything.” Eventually the man grows weak and feeble with old age. He beckons to the guard that he has a final question. The guard says, “You are insatiable!” “What do you want to know now?” The man says “Every man seeks admittance to the Law, so why is it that in all these years no one but me has sought admittance here?” The guard shouts into the man’s ear because his hearing is almost gone: “No one else could ever be admitted here. This gate was made only for you. And now, I am going to close it.”

Agamben says “Kafka’s legend presents the pure form in which law affirms itself with the greatest force precisely at the point in which it no longer prescribes anything—which is to say, as pure ban. The man from the country is delivered over to the potentiality of law because the law demands nothing of him and commands nothing other than its own openness [… it] applies in no longer applying […] The open door destined only for him includes him in excluding him and excludes him in including him. And this is precisely the summit and root of every law” [49-50]. Further he completely reverses Derrida who says that the final scene presents “an event that succeeds in happening without happening” (or arrives without arriving, or that happens not to happen). Agamben says it is “precisely the opposite: the story tells how something has really happened in seeming not to happen …” [57], that the man succeeds in “having the door of the Law closed forever” by way of a “complicated and patient strategy” for which he “may have risked his life” [55]. The man has succeed in ending the relation of without-relation—his inclusive-exclusion from the Law—forever. The man is now without relation but not to a Law that was in force by suspending itself. The man was obscurely challenging the Law. He was neither obedient nor disobedient The guard said that it was “possible” he may enter later on but stated no conditions, nor did he say when. The Law prescribed nothing but its own power (in the words “it is possible”). The man was challenging the Law either to declare: You may now enter/or to declare: You may never enter; or, to “close” itself and the end the suspense.

It is the troublemaker who forces Law to reveal its power, to actualize itself. The mother says to the child, “don’t put beans in your nose or you’ll be punished by your father”. The obedient child lives under the Law as existing always in potentiality; the troublemaker puts beans in her nose and then suffers whatever power the Law brings down on her. She forces the Law to translate itself from potentiality to actuality and eventually hopes to force the Law to exhaust itself in actuality. (Eventually she is so disobedient that her parents give up on her and she is free to do as she pleases, while remaining their beloved daughter.) The man from the country is an extreme troublemaker who does not want to be exposed to the Law as potential nor does he want to be actually victimized by it and possibly exhaust it yet remain within it, for each cynically preserves the structure. He could have rushed the door, or tried to sneak in time and again. He wants to be without the Law by fulfilling the law himself in his life, his flesh, like the messiah. He paradoxically enters the Law only by virtue of its being closed forever, by being “too late”.

A Derridean will instead read the parable as exemplary of a “not yet” or a “to come”. They will see the Law as open in the same way that a text, like Kafka’s “Before the Law”, is open. Anybody who can read can read Kafka’s parable, anybody. It is a completely open text. There is no Law that has declared what the text means. In that way, the text is both completely readable and also completely unreadable; it is undecideable. Any one reading (like Agamben’s) violates the law of openness if it says “the text means this” rather than “the text means this but only to me”. The latter (Derridean reading) says that the text is both read and yet to be read. A ‘good’ Derridean reading always preserves a gap: the “to come” or the “not yet”.



Deconstruction and Text There is always a gap between the words on the page and our understanding of them. The application of understanding to the words produces a reading, more strongly, a judgment. Deconstructionists call this “violence” and the work of Deconstruction is to produce “undecideables” which thwart any judgment, any reading. Deconstruction has the effect of neutralizing understanding, or, it has the effect of suspending the work of understanding. Thus inadvertently, deconstruction has produced text as a kind of logo sacer. On the one hand the written work can be read by anybody at all, in any way at all—infinite “violence” can be done to it; on the other hand it is completely unreadable, merely refers to itself, the words merely say the words themselves, thus the words are august, consecrated to the gods, untouchable by us. In short, in deconstruction ‘text’ is the bare life of the written, of the communicated.



At any rate, that debate aside, Agamben is repeatedly attempting to “think the Being of abandonment beyond every idea of law (even that of the empty form of law’s being in force without significance)” and thus to “have moved out of the paradox of sovereignty towards a politics freed from every ban” [59]. This thinking occurs in his slender volumes like Profanations, The Coming Community, The Open, Means without Ends, and so forth in which he experiments with various ‘figures’.



§ Profanations In the section “Genius” Agamben returns to the question of life and of thinking life outside any relation to law or to forms of separation. His little piece here (I really don’t what to call these things: they are not essays or analyses; I would say that they are not formal but instead they are the experimental formulas of the happy Giorgio Agamben). What he is doing in this piece is inspired by Walter Benjamin’s notes on the notion of ‘character’. Benjamin says that character is the one thing I cannot will because it is continually being re-articulated by every act of will. I will this and will that and the sum total of what I will is my character, which I cannot will, but for which I must answer and which involves me in my fate. Agamben distinguishes “genius” even from that.

Genius is “our life, insofar as it does not belong to us”; it is “impersonal”, “pre-individual”, what “in us, goes beyond and exceeds us” and so on. It is not the life that originates from us (from what we will to do or not to do) but ourselves insofar as we originate from our life. Genius is not something we consent to but something we indulge and abandon ourselves to: indulgere genio. We must keep our own genius happy because “his happiness is our happiness”. When Agamben refers to favorite cigarettes, writing paper, certain wardrobe I am sure a psychoanalyst will think of the fetish, that which is disavowed, that which stands in for a lack which the subject cannot acknowledge but cannot give up. Agamben deals with the fetish in his book Stanzas in which he sees the fetish as an anguished compromise between the child’s perception of reality (mother does not have a penis) and his phantasm (which his psyche substitutes for the lack). The fetish object is both the presence of the nothingness and also the sign of its lack (which, as sign, is present). But the fetish object always revolves around the dialectic of satisfaction and dissatisfaction; that is around Desire as it operates unconsciously. The fetishist is at once satisfied by the compromise—women’s boots for example—but also unsatisfied since fetishists tend to become collectors and connoisseurs of the objects in an attempt to transform their anguish into an aestheticism. That kind of drive is foreign to Agamben’s articulation of genius.

Genius is Peter Pan (I do not know why Agamben did not think of this): “Genius’ youthful face and long, fluttering wings signify that he does not know time, that we feel him quivering as closely within us as he did when we were children, breathing in our feverish temples like an immemorial present” ; “in the face of Genius, no one is great, all are equally small” and “[Genius] is the presence within us of a part that is forever immature, infinitely adolescent, and hesitant to cross the threshold of any individuation”. Like Peter Pan, however close to us he may be, however much he is loyal to us and our lives, however he is so non-self-interested that he almost becomes one with us—he is not us, he is outside us, and he takes us to an outside where we meet others who indulge their own genius which is incomprehensible to us both, but which does not trouble us.

But then genius takes on duplicity in both Roman myth and in the Christian myth of the two guardian angels: one guides us to salvation, one to damnation. (Again, Agamben is irresistibly drawn to that which articulates itself in a separation. Language originally articulates itself as poetry or prose, life as zoē or bios… and seeks for a dissolving of both poles.) The resolution begins in love, where we love in the other neither his genius nor his character (and certainly not his ego) but his manner of evading each of these poles.

This leads to the point where we must separate ourselves from our genius, we refuse the requests of Peter Pan, however delightful they may be, and we resolve to live in the only world that can truly belong to us—outside of genius, character, or ego: human life in which a period of “unlearning” begins and in which the profane can originate.



§ In Praise of Profanation That which is profane is freed of sacred names and returned to common use after having been captured in the religious sphere, but one only reaches common use by passing through the profane. This piece is an examination of the relation “using and profaning”.

Religion separates things from common use and creates an autonomous sphere which is contaminated by the sacrificial act in which the sacred and the profane for moment are in the same body (the entrails reserved for the gods, the remainder of the body available to be eaten by men) and then returns to its autonomy and separation. The sacred rite is meant to be an experience of contamination that in fact purifies, or returns to the propriety of the separation of the below and the beyond, the earthly and the godly. (Christianity is an especially complex and vertiginous case of this, as Agamben discusses later, since the Christian God is himself at the same time a common man, a profane creature. With Christianity the sacrificial machine is pushed to a point of crisis. This explains why Christian ritual is especially precise and why its theology is quite intellectually dense.) Agamben makes the important point that the term religion does not derive from the Latin meaning “to bind” (which I have in fact seen in more than one scholarly text) but from the Latin referring to “uneasy hesitation” and “scrupulous attention”. The term religion means what the sacrificial rite performs: the insurance of the proper distinction between men and gods. It is “negligence” or “distraction” that is interesting. In negligence and distraction one insouciantly occupies a zone prior to the proper distinction which, in religion, must be scrupulously attended to. Play is a form of negligence and distraction. Play is a form of profanation. When play is captured and institutionalized, when distraction is organized into television programs, then we lose our opportunity to find in play (in negligence and distraction) a vocation. To return play to its original vocation—the negligent disregard of the proper/improper division—then becomes a political task.

Agamben then clarifies that that the secular is actually a repression of (and thus not a separation from) the religious. The underlying theological concepts remain, and the power structure is unaltered. He is drawing here specifically from Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology.

Agamben then returns to the homo sacer discussion and points out that homo sacer is he who has survived the distinction sacred/profane and becomes bare life. Bare life comes after, it is the survival of the distinction between men and gods; while negligence, distraction, profanation are prior to the distinction.

Agamben then employs Benjamin to move beyond Max Weber and state that capitalism is not merely a secularization of Protestantism (Calvinism, as we have discussed). But I want to point out that the analysis retains the concrete features of Weber’s analyses. Capitalism is itself religious and is a cult of the sans trêve et sans merci [relentless and merciless]. As in Weber, workdays and holidays are not distinct, money must relentlessly be made and capitalized on as Weber has described. Work and celebration of the cult coincide as work and the glorification of God—for the first time in the history of western culture—coincide, as I tried to argue when we looked at Weber. In this situation, one is always guilty of not working enough. Capitalism is a religious machine that, rather than be oriented toward redemption, produces guilt. And thus, the world is not so much transformed as it is destroyed. In capitalism, sacrifice, which is the division between divine and human, becomes an indifference. This is a tendency that already exists in Christianity since Christ is himself the indistinction of man and God. Capitalism, following from its Calvinist roots, exaggerates and exacerbates this tendency. It capitalizes on it.

The capitalist phase aims at creating something absolutely unprofaneable—something that cannot be returned to common use: the commodity which is the spectacular exhibition of the impossibly of common use. Instead of common use we have use separated into use value and exchange value. The consumer good is not used, it is consumed. That’s the problem. Agamben follows this with a discussion of impossibility of use in Roman Catholic history and in the Museum and the “Museumification of the world”. With the global loss of use comes the impossibility of profaning. But, just when all seems lost, Agamben then turns to try to save the possibility of profaning in the concluding pages of this piece.

He begins with a cat playing with a ball of yarn and how this activity mimics genetic inscription but at the same time liberates the cat from its destiny (to hunt, prey, kill, and eat) for a short time. Playing with a ball of yarn becomes a new use for the cat’s predatory nature. Something has been liberated from its apparent genetic destiny without in any way changing the cat’s behavior. This becomes paradigmatic of how a means can be liberated from an end and finds new employment, a new vocation. The cat’s abilities to stalk, pounce, claw, etc. are a means to capture food, and yet the cat can play with a ball of yarn just as assiduously, studiously, and sadistically.

I skip ahead a few pages...Language is also a means. To be sure, Agamben says, power can always capture language as a means of social communication, diffuse its ideology into it, and then induce voluntary obedience, as in Chomsky’s Manufactured Consent. But there is another issue, another form of control which in fact separates language from social communication altogether, transforming social communication into its own separate sphere. This is the apparatus of media which transforms the pure means of language (language is the means by which we communicate with each other) into an autonomous sphere which communicates only with itself. But in this way there is a political potential to be grasped: Separated from its natal function as a means of communication (i.e. as a means to an end) it now offers itself to us in a new and unprecedented way.

However, this potentiality has been captured, neutralized and institutionalized in the media spectacle and then becomes merely another commodity. Hence, language is no longer used, it is consumed just as the messianic faith of Paul has been captured and neutralized by the RC Church. The task would be to save this potentiality, interrupt the media machine itself while liberating language for a common use without returning it to its destiny as a means to an end.

I will forego further analysis but only say that Agamben does see forms of liberation that already exist but which have been captured and neutralized in various ways and proclaims that it is a political task to break the glass and save these potentialities for us to use commonly.