Quodlibet Giorgio Agambens Anti-Utopia PDF

Quodlibet: Giorgio Agamben’s Anti-Utopia
Carlo Salzani
abstract
The article analyzes the ethical and political stakes in Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming
Community. The book was first published in Italian in 1990 and was translated into
English in 1993. It was then republished in Italian in 2001, with a short new apostil by the
author that reaffirms its persistent and actual “inactuality.” In this text Agamben estab-
lishes the philosophical foundations of the long-lasting project started with the publica-
tion of Homo sacer (1995). Its republication in 2001 seems thus to reaffirm the politics
of his analysis of the past fifteen years. The argument revolves around the analysis of
the “whatever singularity” (qualunque in Italian, quodlibet in Latin) as the subject
of the “coming community,” a singularity that presents an “inessential commonality,
a solidarity that in no way concerns an essence.” Whatever must not be understood as
“indifference” but, rather, as “being such that it always matters.” The ethical and politi-
cal proposal consists in the call to adhere to this singularity without identity and repre-
sentation in order to construe a community without postulates and thus also without
“subjects.” The paradigm of this politics is identified in Nancy’s term inoperativeness
(inoperosità), a messianic “de-creation.” The inoperative whatever is directed toward a
politics che viene, à-venir as distinct from futura, future: It implies in fact the renuncia-
tion of construing images of the future—“utopia is the very topicality of things.”
Utopian Studies, Vol. 23, No. 1, 2012

Copyright © 2012. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
UTS 23.1_08_Salzani.indd 212 10/02/12 6:48 PM

carlo salzani: Quodlibet
The thought of Giorgio Agamben has been often accused of being utopian.
Antonio Negri, for example, branded Agamben’s core concept, “naked” or
“bare life,” as a “utopian escape”1 and then identified in State of Exception
(2003) a “feverish utopian anxiety.”2 Andreas Kalyvas accused his notion of
politics of dissolving “into an eschatological, utopian vision of social life,”
infused with strong theological and messianic overtones, which would make
of it a particular version of political theology.3 And Dominik LaCapra found
the strong separation of ethics and legal concepts in Remnants of Auschwitz
(1998) an “ecstatic, anarchistic Utopia” and identified the core of Agamben’s
thought in a “blank, Utopian, messianic (post)apocalypticism.”4 Agamben’s
work has attracted other, and ever harsher, criticisms, which I will leave
here aside, however, in order to analyze his relation to utopianism.5 Negri,
K alyvas, and LaCapra voice a quite common unease for a political project
that is deemed unrealizable, empty, even impolitic;6 “utopia” is here thus
spelled as an impractical, idealistic scheme for social and political reform. A more
precise definition is needed.
At the end of his essay on Surrealism (1929), Walter Benjamin
writes: “For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem
on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors. The socialist sees that
‘finer future of our children and grandchildren’ in a society in which all
act ‘as if they were angels’ and everyone has as much ‘as if he were rich’
and everyone lives ‘as if he were free.’ Of angels, wealth, freedom, not a
trace—these are mere images.”7 In a piece written two years later, “Der
destruktive Charakter” (1931), he insists that a radical, revolutionary poli-
tics must renounce optimistic, metaphoric contemplation: “The destruc-
tive character sees no image hovering before him.”8 Benjamin does not
employ the term utopia; it is clear nonetheless that a political project found-
ed on mere—and optimistic—images of the future is the target of his harsh
criticism. If political utopianism in fact originated—strongly influenced
by world travels and discoveries of new lands—by situating a political
alternative in a spatial displacement (a nonplace that is, however, another
place), at least from the Enlightenment it assumed the character of a “bet-
ter future” toward which a progressive politics should strive.9 If, follow-
ing Benjamin, we define “utopia” as a political project construed around
images of the future and rhetorically based on the syntagma “as if ” (als ob),
then Agamben’s project exudes an intrinsic and intense anti-utopianism. It
is true that there is no explicit attack on utopia in his work and even that,
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Utopian Studies 23.1
in the preface to Stanzas (1979), he defines the “philosophical topology”

presented as his method as “constantly oriented in the light of utopia”;10
however, the messianism in which his philosophical project is steeped con-
stitutes an implicit but evident rejection of utopianism.
The two components of our definition of utopia, the notions of
representation and time, have been the object of Agamben’s analysis and criti-
cism since the early stages of his career, and these took a strong political tone
at least from the publication of The Coming Community (1990). This unusual
and unorthodox book shaped the bedrock upon which the political project of
the Homo sacer series was built and will thus constitute the object of the pres-
ent analysis. The dismantling of the ontological pillars of the Western philo-
sophical and political tradition that the book operates on proposes a messianic
notion of politics, which renounces representation and upsets the temporal-
ity of political imaginary, thus undermining any political project construed
around images of the future.
1. Quodlibet
The Coming Community (La comunità che viene) was published in Italian in 1990,
in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Tiananmen protests, and
the dissolution of Eastern European socialism. However, more than a reflec-
tion on geopolitical changes, the book was a response to the political debate
about the idea of community originated in France by the publication in 1983
of Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay “The Inoperative Community,” followed the same
year by Maurice Blanchot’s response, The Unavowable Community, and again,
three years later, by Nancy’s expansion of the earlier ideas in book form.11 At
the center of the debate stood the notion of belonging and the question of
an idea of community immune to exclusion, isolation, and violence. Whereas
both Nancy and Blanchot approach the question from the Heideggerian
perspective of Mitsein (being-together), Agamben takes a surprising route
that leads to the disavowal of the very logic of belonging, identity, and
representation.12
The argument of the book revolves around the notion of qualunque,
which is the Italian translation of the scholastic Latin quodlibet and is ren-
dered into English as “whatever.” “The coming being,” states the first sen-
tence of the book, “is the whatever being.”13 Quodlibet, “whatever” but also
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“any” as in the expression “any being,” is the term that remains unthought in
the definition of the transcendentals but conditions the meaning of all other
terms. It considers singularity not in its indifference in regard to a common
propriety but in its being as such (tale qual è [CV, 9]); neither particular nor
universal, neither individual nor generic, it refers rather to the “singular”
and expresses a pure singularity. Pure singularity has no identity, Agamben
states, it is omnivalent (CV, 14): “It is not determined vis-à-vis a concept, but it
is not simply undetermined either; rather, it is determined only through its
relation to an idea, that is, to the totality of its possibilities” (CV, 55). What
Agamben calls “idea” is not that of the Platonic tradition but, rather, as he
writes, a “similarity” or “resemblance with no archetype” (CV, 42; emphasis in the
original), which thus severs any obligation to belonging.14 Its belonging, its
being-such, is only relation to an empty and undetermined totality. The most
common is what needs to be repeatedly approached and exposed, for the
most common is only in its approach, its exposure, its “coming.” Whatever
being is not its qualities; it is its exposure to all its qualities that each particular
quality resays or re-calls.15
This way of eluding the antinomy of singularity and universal-
ity is clearly exhibited in the example: An example is valid for all cases of
its genus and, simultaneously, is included among them. It is a singularity
among others, but one that, since it stands for all others, cannot be valid
in its particularity: “Neither particular nor universal, the example is a sin-
gular object that, as it were, shows itself as such, shows its singularity” (CV,
14; emphasis in the original). The Greek term for it, para-deigma (like the
German, Bei-spiel), poignantly expresses this being that is always beside itself
(para-, bei-), “since the proper place for the example is always beside itself,
in the empty space in which its unqualifiable and unforgettable life unfolds”
(CV, 14). The whatever singularities thus communicate only in the empty
space of the example, being bound by no common propriety, having aban-
doned all identity.
This issue is extremely important for the entire Homo sacer project, but it
is also extremely ambiguous and controversial: After the Foucauldian Kehre,
which finally produced Homo sacer, Agamben began working, like Foucault,
with “paradigms” (homo sacer, naked life, the state of exception, the camp, the
Muselmann, Christian oikonomia, etc.). In fact in Homo sacer this same argument
about the example is rehearsed as symmetrical to the exception, whereby
the exception constitutes an exclusive inclusion and the example, an inclusive
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e xclusion.16 This isomorphism between exception and example or paradigm,

the assumption of the camp as paradigm or nomos of modernity, and the
ambiguity of historical determinations in Remnants of Auschwitz have caused
no little controversy, and Agamben has responded with the three method-
ological essays that compose The Signature of All Things (2008).17 This issue
cannot be taken up here; for the present argument, however, it is important
to point out and emphasize this continuity, since the renunciation of identity
politics—though under different names—will mark the whole of Agamben’s
subsequent work.
This renunciation of identity and its politics does not involve resignation
but, rather, as it will be argued later, a new form of political action: Pure sin-
gularities “have deposed all identity in order to appropriate belonging itself ”
(CV, 14). In other words, the disappropriation of all propriety constitutes the
possibility for the appropriation of impropriety as such. And it is this appro-
priation of impropriety and inessentiality as the unique being that makes the
whatever singularities exemplar. The issue is in fact how to move beyond
the logic of belonging, beyond the idea of community based on “being in”:18
The task is to think a community without exclusion, inclusion, violence,
discrimination, or abandonment.19 Whatever is a void, a threshold, a finite
but at the same time indeterminable singularity and thus pure exteriority,
pure exposition: “Whatever is . . . the event of an outside,” ek-stasis (CV, 55–56;
emphasis in the original).
In this sense, far from striving toward a utopian self and an ideal
identity, Agamben asks us to welcome the historical transformations of
human nature that late capitalism wants to confine into the Spectacle,
because they constitute a possibility. The commodification of the body by
capitalist modernity liberated it from its theological model, conserving,
however, a similarity deprived of its archetype and transforming it into a
“whatever body.” This process did not involve the materiality of the body
but, rather, created a separated sphere, the image, and turned it into a mask,
the spectacle; the stake is to activate the co-penetration of body and image
in a way that they cannot be separated any longer and obtain thus a what-
ever body (see CV, 44). Agamben’s shocking proposal is thus to take on the
very impropriety and inauthenticity of the world’s petty bourgeoisie. In the
form of the petty bourgeoisie, he writes, humanity is probably facing its
own destruction, but it is precisely because of this that it represents also a
possibility:20
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Because if humanity, instead of seeking still a proper identity in the

by now improper and meaningless form of individuality, managed
to accede to impropriety as such, to make its being-such not an
individual identity and propriety, but a singularity without identity,
a common and absolutely exposed singularity—if humanity could,
that is, not be-such, in this or that particular biographical identity,
but rather only be the such, its singular exteriority and its face, then
humanity could accede for the first time to a community without
postulates and without subjects, to a communication that would no
longer know the incommunicable. (CV, 52–53)
This is for Agamben the political task of our generation, since, he writes
in a somewhat apocalyptic tone, the survival of the human species depends
on this new notion of community (CV, 53). The same tone—harshly criti-
cized by several readers21—marks the very conclusion of Homo sacer, where
Agamben prognosticates that unless we overcome the biopolitical impasse
of our time, we will face an “unprecedented biopolitical catastrophe.”22 In
both cases, the task involves an overcoming of the state and of the notion
of sovereignty, so that these remarks in The Coming Community can be read—
as will be emphasized throughout the essay—as an anticipation of the later
critique of sovereignty developed in Homo sacer: Having no identity and no
belonging, the whatever singularities cannot possibly build a societas; they
disavow the logic and workings of representation and sovereignty. The state
cannot tolerate such an antisovereign community without identity, without
distinctions and separations, without boundaries and qualities; therefore, the
“whatever s ingularity . . . is the foremost enemy of the state” (CV, 69).
2. Potentiality
The whatever singularity embodies in this sense what Leland de la Durantaye

defines as the core idea of Agamben’s philosophy: “potentiality.”23 The what-
ever being presents always a potential character; it is in fact constituted by
“an infinite series of modal oscillations” (CV, 21), But not in the mere sense
of the potentiality of becoming actual: “Properly whatever is that being
which can not-be, which can its own impotence” (CV, 33). The potency of
not-being differs from that of being because there cannot simply be a passage
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to its actuality; it has therefore as its own object potency itself—it is a potentia
potentiae (see CV, 34).
This is the core argument of Agamben’s interpretation of potentiality
and recurs in major and minor texts to sustain, as it were, his entire philo-
sophical project. It is thoroughly exposed in a paper first given at a conference
in Lisbon in 1987 and then published in Italian as “La potenza del pensiero”
(The potency of thought).24 Interpreting Aristotle’s Book Theta of Metaphysics,
Agamben remarks that “in its originary structure, human potentiality main-
tains itself in relation to its own privation, it is always—and in regard to the
same thing—potentiality of being and of not being, of doing and not doing.
This relation constitutes, for Aristotle, the essence of potentiality. Beings that
exist in a potential mode can their own impotence, and only this way they
possess their potency. They can be and do, because they are in relation to
their own nonbeing and nondoing.”25 Life is thus a potentiality that inces-
santly exceeds its forms and realizations, and Agamben’s political wager is
to center the coming politics on this surplus.26 That the whatever being is
a potential being means that it does not have to attain any essence, any his-
torical or spiritual vocation; it has no destiny. What it is and has to be “is the
simple fact of its own existence as possibility or potentiality” (CV, 39; emphasis in
the original). Existence is no essence and no destiny; it is, rather, an ethos, and
ethics means, in this sense, “to be [one’s own] potentiality, to exist [one’s own]
possibility” (CV, 40).
The central political question of human “essence” is further explored
in an essay that, almost twenty years later, rehearses the argument of “La
potenza del pensiero”: “L’opera dell’uomo” (“The Work of Man”).27 Human
beings have no ergon, writes Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, no opera, no
work: Ergon is strictly related to energeia, the term that, functionally opposed
to dynamis, constitutes the pair potency–act. Humans have no proper ergon,
no essence that constitutes their proper energeia, their being-in-act; humans
are thus argos, deprived of ergon, which means that their proper existence is
dynamis, potentiality.28 Melville’s scrivener Bartleby, who does not simply stop
writing but, rather, “prefers not to,” who does not write anything but his own
potency of not writing, is the figure that embodies this impotence that turns
onto itself and thus happens as a “pure act” (see CV, 35). Bartleby, Agamben
writes in the essay devoted to him, embodies perfect, absolute potentiality,
and as such, he is the figure of absolute contingency.29 Stefano Franchi and
Thomas Carl Wall insist, in this regard, on the notion of “passivity,” which
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I consider superfluous, since the notions of inoperativity and “use,” as will be

shown below, better identify Agamben’s politics.30
“Potential” is therefore the first meaning of the “coming” of the new
community: a community that has no being proper to itself except for its
bordering on all its possibilities, without destiny and without essence,
always expropriated, but as such inhabited by the impossibility of exclusion.
“Coming” as never present in the first place, the pure possibility of any rela-
tion whatever.31 If identity, with the hypocrite fiction of the irreplaceability
of the single, is opposed by the unconditional replaceability of the whatever
singularity and all its potentialities, then the coming community is an “abso-
lutely unrepresentable community” (CV, 24). There are no terms, concepts,
or representational axioms that could claim to represent it.32 The whatever
singularity as pure potentiality cannot be tied to classifying concepts, and
everything can be an example, its own example, absolutely interconnected
and absolutely replaceable.
This argument is fundamental for the Homo sacer project, primarily because
one of the core performances of sovereign power is not only to isolate and
keep apart potentiality and act, not only to separate human beings from their
potentiality, but also and more fundamentally to separate them from their impo-
tence.33 Moreover, in the new installments the whatever singularity is renamed
and becomes that form-of-life (forma-di-vita) in which it is never possible to isolate
naked life from its forms of life:34 “A life that is political, that is, oriented toward
the idea of happiness and integrated in a form-of-life, can be thought only from
the emancipation . . . from all sovereignty. The question of the possibility of a
nonstatist politics presents thus necessarily the form: Is it possible today, is there
today something like a form-of-life, that is, a life for which living itself would
be at stake in its own living, a life of potency?”35 That is, the only way to move
beyond biopolitics and the violent performance of sovereignty is to develop an
alternative ontology founded on a pure potentiality that is not forced into an
alternative with actuality and goes beyond every figure of relation.36
3. The Passion of Facticity
An important corollary to the potentiality axiom is the emphasis on the irre-

deemable contingence of the whatever singularities. Together with the ban
on representation and identity politics, this constitutes the strongest messianic
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objection to any political utopianism. Like Robert Walser’s creatures or Kaf ka’s
characters, the whatever singularities are neutral and impassive toward salvation
and redemption: There is no redemption for them, and they are unredeemable
because there is nothing to be redeemed in them (see CV, 12). To put it differ-
ently, the possibility of salvation begins only when we acknowledge that this sal-
vation can only be that of the profanity of the world, of its being-thus (CV, 73).
The second part of The Coming Community is entitled “The Irreparable”
(“L’Irreparabile”) and constitutes a little, fragmentary, and aphoristic trea-
tise of ontology.37 Irreparable means that the world is given irretrievably in
its own being-thus (esser-così), that it is precisely and only its own thus (così
[CV, 37, 73]). The irreparable is neither an essence nor an existence, neither a
substance nor a quality, neither a possibility nor a necessity: “It is not prop-
erly a modality of being, but rather it is Being that already always gives itself
in the modalities, is its modalities. It is not thus [così], but rather is the thus”
(CV, 75; emphases in the original). Irreparable is the world in its “eternal expo-
sition and facticity” (CV, 82). Exposition and facticity raise the question of
redemption as an ontological question: Redemption is not an event in which
what has been lost is recovered but, rather, is “the irreparable loss of what
is lost, the definitive profanity of what is profane” (CV, 85). In an enigmatic
and quasi-mystical tone that owes much more to Kaf ka’s and Benjamin’s
messianism than to Heidegger’s and Wittgenstein’s philosophy, Agamben
states: “We can have hope only in what has no remedy. That things are so and
so—this is still in the world. Yet, that this is irreparable, that this so [così] has
no remedy, that we can contemplate it as such—this is the only opening out
of the world. (The innermost character of salvation: that we are saved only
when we no longer want to be saved. Because of this, in this moment, there
is salvation—but not for us)” (CV, 85). Again, the last two aphorisms of the
book state, “When you realize the irreparability of the world, then the world
is transcendent,” and, “How the world is—this is out of the world” (CV, 88).
Redemption must be sought in the irreparable facticity of the world. The
world is thus abandoned to its thus, to its irreparability. However, this abandon-
ment does not mean indifference but, rather, is strictly connected to the question
of love, a love that has little to do with a psychological or emotional state but,
rather, constitutes an ontological mode, an ontological openness and relation
to the world.38 As Agamben states at the very beginning of the book, quodlibet,
though usually—and correctly—translated as qualunque, “whatever” in the
sense of “no matter what, indifferently,” etymologically means, to the contrary,
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that being that as such always matters. Quodlibet as qual-si-voglia, “what-so-ever”

but in the sense of “whatever-one-wants,” is in an original relation to desire.
The -libet of quodlibet comes from the Indo-European stem *lib, which appears
also in the Latin libere, libido, and libertas; in the German Liebe; and in the
Russian lioubit (love). The whatever singularity as whatever-one-wants is lovable
(amabile); the “coming” of the “coming being” is desire and awaiting. That the
whatever singularities are lovable spells the fundamental ontological relation as
a “love of facticity” and construes love as the core of the coming politics.
Love is never directed to this or that propriety of the loved one, but it
does not leave them aside either in the name of the generalness of the uni-
versal love. Love “desires its object with all its predicates, its being such as it
is” (CV, 10; emphasis in the original). The lovable whatever is the singular-
ity with all its proprieties, none of which, however, constitutes a difference.
Indifference, that is, nondifference vis-à-vis the proprieties, is what identifies
and disseminates the singularities and makes them lovable (see CV, 20–21).
This indifference to difference makes difference—and identity, inclusion,
representation—irrelevant:39 “To see something simply in its being-thus:
irreparable, but not for that necessary; thus, but not for that contingent—this
is love” (CV, 88). As for the Provençal poets, love is the “experience of the
taking-place of a whatever singularity” (CV, 25). The political consequences
are evident: The traits of a loved person are not unessential; their identity
matters completely to love. But, in a sense, they also do not, for if the person
changed slightly these traits, that would not matter to love. Love embraces
who the loved one is but also who she is not, when she is what she is but also
when she is not what she is. Love loves her whatever. Moreover—and this is
the fundamental, political point—love does not want to change the loved one
or repair her, fix her. Love abandons the loved one to herself, to her absolute,
lovable contingency.40
The themes of potentiality and love are brought together in a f undamental
essay on the concept of love in Heidegger, “La passione della fatticità” (“The
Passion of Facticity”), first delivered three years before the publication of The
Coming Community and thus a sort of preparatory study.41 Agamben argues
here, against a common assumption, that love, far from being absent from
Sein und Zeit, constitutes, in a sense, its central issue. It is what characterizes
the self-transcendence of the In-der-Welt-Sein (Being-in-the world), in which
the Dasein is always already construed as opened to the world beyond all sub-
jectivity (it is a Schon-Sein-bei-der-Welt, already-being-in-the-world, and this
221

constitutes its transcendence). Faktizität (facticity) is, in this context, what

characterizes the Dasein’s Verfallenheit (fallenness or fallingness), the condi-
tion of what dwells hidden in its own openness, of what is exposed in its very
withdrawing. Facticity is thus marked by that intertwining of latency and
illatency that is the experience of truth (a-letheia) and Being.
To cut a long analysis short, the Dasein has to be its own facticity, its
being-thus, and therefore facticity expresses the original ontological character
of the Dasein; at the same time, however, the Dasein can never appropriate
this being and is thus always already consigned to an original impropriety
(Uneigentlichkeit). To exist in the modus of facticity means to exist in the modus
of possibility, but of a possibility that is always also an impossibility, a radi-
cal impotence in regard to the world to which it is consigned. This expresses
what in Aristotle, as we have already seen, was called potentia passiva and is
thus passio, passion, the most radical experience of possibility (or, in the later
terminology, potentiality). This is the concept of love in Heidegger, the pas-
sion of facticity, the passion of being properly the improper, of abandoning
oneself to the inappropriable, in which the Dasein can (può) its own impo-
tence (impotenza).42 Love is “passion and exposition of facticity itself and of
the irreducible impropriety of being,” in which the human being reveals
itself as “the one who falls properly in love with the improper, who—unique
among living beings—can his own impotence.”43
To construe the coming politics around this love of irreparable factic-
ity does not mean, as de la Durantaye emphasizes, that nothing has to be
done and nothing in the world has to be bettered; to the contrary, accepting
the transience and profanity of the world, its irreparable facticity, is precisely
the “necessary precondition for addressing the situations that are most in
need of our attention and action.”44 The love of facticity, however, involves
a revolution in the temporality and modalities of political action, which has
attracted much criticism, especially from theorists on the left of the political
spectrum. I will return shortly to these criticisms, but first we need to analyze
the messianic temporality of the coming community.
4. Ho Nyn Kairòs
The “irreparable” also means, Agamben writes, that “utopia is the very topi-
cality of things” (CV, 86), and this is the only passage of the book where
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utopia is ever mentioned. This passion of facticity, this lack of the sense of
redemption, also determines the temporality of the coming community.
The 2001 Italian reedition of the book contains an apostil that reorients its
scope in the direction taken by Agamben’s project from the publication of
Homo sacer onward; or, rather, it emphasizes some of its traits that were, in
the first edition, “but a hypothesis” (CV, 92) and confers them the more accen-
tuated messianic overtones of the later work. A small clarification, confined
to the suspension of two parentheses, makes a fundamental point: “Coming
does not mean future” (CV, 92). The “coming” of the coming community is
devoid of the tension toward something that lies ahead, in the future, devoid
of a linear understanding of time that sees it as a cumulative progression.45
This “coming” has no teleological valences; it is like a letter with no addressee,
with no destination (see CV, 12). The coming community is not a future one
that we have to make. Its temporality is the interstitial time of waiting in
which the notion of what-one-is-waiting-for is unimportant and irrelevant.46
Agamben has best illustrated this notion of time, fundamental for his
whole project, in the book on St. Paul, The Time that Remains (2000).47 The
“technical” expression used by St. Paul to designate the messianic time is
ho nyn kairòs, “the time of now,” which repositions the redemptive project
from the future of the eschaton to the present of the messianic event.48 This
is neither chronological time nor the time of prophecy turned toward the
future, nor that of the apocalypses, the eschaton as the end of time; it is,
rather, “the time of the end” (TR, 63; emphasis in the original): “What interests
the apostle is not the last day, not the instant in which time ends, but rather
that time that contracts and begins to end . . . —or, if you want, the time
that remains between time and its end” (TR, 63). This time is not external to
chronological time but, rather, a portion of profane time that is subjected to a
contraction and is completely transformed; it is a rest, what remains between
chronological time and the apocalyptic eschaton.
To explain it, Agamben refers to an image: He tells the story, found
in Plinius, of the contest that took place between Apelles and Protogenes
about tracing the most sharp and perfect line. While the latter drew a line
so thin that it did not seem drawn by human hand, Apelles further divid-
ed this line in the middle with a new, even thinner and sharper line. Mes-
sianic time is like Apelles’s line, a caesura that, by dividing the very division
between chronological time and eschaton, introduces in it a rest exceeding
the division itself (see TR, 64). It is, importantly, the “operative time that urges
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within chronological time and labors and transforms it from within, the time
we need in order to complete time—in this sense: the time that remains to us”
(TR, 69; first emphasis added). As operative time, it is the time “in which we
grasp and perform our representation of time, it is the time that we ourselves
are—hence, the only real time, the only time we have” (TR, 68). Every moment
is the messianic now, or, as Benjamin would say, every second is “the small
gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter,”49 and this is not
the chronological end of time but, rather, “the present as demand of fulfillment”
(TR, 76; emphasis added). This means that salvation must not be sought in
the future or in eternity but in that contraction of past, present, and future
in which alone time can be grasped, in which it is made operative. Contempo-
raneità (a word that in Italian corresponds to the English cognate “contempo-
raneity” but also refers to “actuality”), Agamben glosses in a recent essay, is
“that relation to time that adheres to it through a lag and an anachronism.”50
The “coming” of the coming community is thus an “always coming”; it
exists in the time of the end. Its politics finds its place neither in the roman-
ticism of the past nor in the yearning for a utopian future but, rather, in a
profound presentness, in the realization that within the present lies the
possibility/potentiality of change and transformation. Radical change must
begin with the time of the present and in this world.
5. Shabbat
The politics that goes together with this messianic notion of time is not one
of “producing” a new community, a new identity, race, class, people, nation,
faith, world order, or earth; rather, it is one that Agamben calls “inoperative.”
This term has become, at least from the publication of Homo sacer (1995), the
pivot around which revolves the whole pars construens of his philosophical
and political project. The concept is contained, in nuce, in “Idea della politica”
(Idea of politics) in Idea of Prose (1985), which relates the condition of the
dwellers in limbo: Abandoned to the absence of God, to His forgetfulness,
they are unredeemably lost, but precisely this loss means that they have
no destiny; they live like letters with no addressee, in the joy of an inesti-
mable hope.51 “Idea della politica” is reproduced almost word for word in
the chapter “Dal limbo” (From limbo) in The Coming Community, to represent
the condition of the whatever singularities, indifferent to redemption because
224

irredeemable but as such embodying that life, simply human, that survives the
end of the politico-theological machine (see CV, 11–12). It is only in the 2001
apostil that Agamben renames this condition “inoperativity”: “Not work,
but rather inoperativity and de-creation are . . . the paradigm of the coming
politics” (CV, 92).
It is in Homo sacer that Agamben articulates explicitly this theme:
“Inoperativity” (inoperosità in Italian, but Agamben often uses the French
word) translates the French term désœuvrement, which was first coined by
Alexandre Kojève in a 1952 review of three novels by Raymond Queneau,
Pierrot mon ami (1942), Loin de Rueil (1944), and Le dimanche de la vie (1952).
Kojève argues that the three protagonists of the novels, whom he calls voyous
désoeuvrés (lazy rascals), embody in a sense the wisdom of man living after
the end of history.52 The article provoked the sarcasm of Georges Bataille,
who coined, in his correspondence with Kojève, the term homo queneulleusis
(association of quenelle, a sort of dumpling, with Queneau). The Bataille–
Kojève querelle had a great impact on the following generation in France, and
the term entered the philosophical debate, taking a central place in Nancy’s
and Blanchot’s reflections.53 In Homo sacer, Agamben proposes a personal
redefinition of désœuvrement: It cannot be merely read as the absence of
work/activity (assenza di opera) or, as in Bataille, as a form of negativity that
is sovereign insofar as it has no use (senza impiego); rather, it must be read as
“a generic mode of potentiality, which is not exhausted (like the individual or
collective action, intended as the sum of individual actions) in a transitus de
potentia ad actum.”54
In Means Without Ends (1996), then, the argument takes the central place
that it has retained in Agamben’s later works: Human beings as potential
beings, as we have seen, have no proper ergon; they are argos, without opera,
inoperative (inoperoso).55 Therefore, “politics is what corresponds to the essen-
tial inoperosity of human beings, to the radical absence of work of human
communities. There is politics because human beings are argos, not defined by
any proper operation—that is: pure potential beings, who cannot be exhausted
by any identity and any vocation.”56 The theme of the coming politics is there-
fore to interrogate the essential inoperosity and potentiality without trans-
forming them into a historical task, by simply assuming this exposition and
this creative indifference to any task as a politics assigned to happiness.
Again, this theme is central to the book on St. Paul. The messianic
vocation (klesis), Agamben explains, consists precisely in the re-vocation
225

of any vocation; however, this re-vocation does not destroy or annihilate

the factitious condition of the world but, rather, suspends it in the figure of
the “as if not” (hos me, come non): “It is not another figure, another world; it
is the passing of the figure of this world” (TR, 30). This hos me, “as if not,”
is precisely what deactivates the utopian project articulated, as Benjamin
emphasizes in the Surrealism essay, in the form “as if,” als ob.57 Use (uso) is
the form that this deactivation takes: “To live messianically means to ‘use’
the klesis, and the messianic klesis is, conversely, something that can only be
used and never possessed” (TR, 31). Importantly, this use in the form of the
as if not has not merely a negative connotation: It does not constitute a new
identity; rather, the “new creature” is nothing but the use and the messianic
vocation of the old identity. The old identity is not replaced by a new one but
only rendered inoperative and, in this way, opened to its true use (see TR, 33).58
The key term here is katargesis, which describes, in St. Paul’s epistles, the
“fulfillment” of the law at the arrival of the Messiah: It comes from argeo,
and thus from argos, and means “to render inoperative, to deactivate, to sus-
pend the effectiveness” (TR, 91). Argeo translates also, in the Septuagint, the
verb that signifies the Sabbath rest. The fulfillment in the use is thus désœu-
vrement, and messianic potency (or potentiality) is precisely that which is not
exhausted in its ergon but remains potential in a “weak” form.59 Katargesis
restores the works—the identities—to their potentiality by rendering them
inoperative.60
The relation potentiality–inoperosity is fundamental: “Inoperosity is not
inert; rather, it lets appear in the act the very potentiality that showed itself in
it. It is not potentiality that is deactivated in inoperosity, but only the aims and
modalities in which its practice had been inscribed and separated. And it is
precisely this potentiality that becomes now the organ of a new possible use,
the organ of a body whose organic unity has been suspended and rendered
inoperative.”61 What is rendered inoperative is an activity directed toward a
goal, in order to open it to a new use, which does not abolish the old one but,
rather, exposes and exhibits it. The essential connection between potentiality
and inoperosity means that the sabbatical suspension, which by rendering
inoperative the specific functions of the living being, transforms them into
possibilities, is the proper human praxis: “Contemplation and inoperosity
are, in this sense, the metaphysical operators of anthropogenesis: by freeing
the living human beings from their biological or social destiny, they open for
them that indefinable dimension that we are used to calling politics.”62
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This operation takes the name, in more recent texts, of “profanation”:

It implies the neutralization of what is profaned, which loses its aura of sacral-
ity and is restored to use. And the creation of a new use is possible only by
deactivating an old use, by rendering it inoperative: “The profanation of what
is unprofanable is the political task of the coming generation.”63 The new
use takes the forms of study, play, and festivity.64 In State of Exception (2003),
Agamben embraces Benjamin’s claim, made in the Kaf ka essay, that “the law
that is studied but no longer practiced is the gate to justice” and thus “the gate
to justice is study.”65 And this gate is opened by playing with the law, “like chil-
dren play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical
use, but rather to free them from it for good.”66 Play frees humanity from the
sphere of sacrality, but without abolishing it: What was sacred is restored to a
special use, different from the utilitarian form, which opens the gate for a new
happiness.67 Play and inoperosity are brought together in festivity: The inope-
rosity that defines festivity (the Shabbat) is not mere inertia or abstention but,
rather, “sanctification,” a peculiar modality of doing and living. Inoperosity
coincides with festivity insofar as festivity “consists in neutralizing and render-
ing inoperative human gestures, actions and works, and only this way making
them festive.”68 What defines festivity is not what is not done in it but, rather,
the fact that what is done is not so different from what one does every other
day but is freed and suspended from its “economy,” from the reasons and
aims that define it during the weekdays.69
What potentiality, love, presentness, and inoperativity mean for a politi-
cal project is a clear and emphatic rejection of any utopian projection into the
future. Radical politics is usually based on imagining that something very dif-
ferent from this world is possible and that the possibilities of this new world
lie in the future. To start all over, though, implies a de-cision, the drawing of
lines and demarcations between the old and the new, the past and the future,
and the violence that goes with it. For Agamben, to the contrary, it is in this
world, in the present, that we have to uncover the potentialities for the new
world, a supplementary world that exists already, in potential. The coming
community already exists, here and now, we just need to take a little break
from the world and let it “come.” And this implies rendering inoperative—and
available for a new “use”—all historical and utopian projects. Redemption is
not opera, work, but, rather, a peculiar sort of sabbatical vacation from all the
communities of the future, from everything about the future that demands
a production, from all the demands of the future. Like Melville’s Bartleby,
227

we should say, “I’d prefer not to,” and stop trying to perfect the world and to
construe images of the future.
This notion of messianic, anti-utopian political praxis not only has been
accused of being impractical, impolitic utopianism,70 or even a “negative
theology,”71 but has been attacked with particular vehemence by leftist
theorists. These criticisms cannot be examined in depth here, but a couple
of examples are in order. In a brief intermezzo on Bartleby’s refusal (which
only implicitly—but unequivocally—hints at Agamben), Hardt and Negri dis-
miss in Empire the Bartlebian politics of refusal: The refusal is only a begin-
ning and is “in itself empty”; solitary refusal “leads only to a kind of social
suicide.” “What we need,” they conclude, “is to create a new social body, which
is a project that goes well beyond refusal. Our lines of flight, our exodus
must be constituent and create a real alternative. Beyond the simple refusal, or
as part of that refusal, we need also to construct a new mode of life and above
all a new community.”72 In Commonwealth, they insist that Agamben’s analysis
of biopolitics falls back on Heidegger: “Agamben transposes biopolitics in a
theological-political key, claiming that the only possibility of rupture with
biopower resides in ‘inoperative’ activity (inoperosità), a blank refusal that
recalls Heidegger’s notion of Gelassenheit, completely incapable of construct-
ing an alternative.”73
From a different perspective, Slavoj Žižek insistently also chastens
Agamben’s messianic politics for renouncing the risks and responsibilities of
revolutionary emancipative politics and for being therefore a “utopian long-
ing for the ganz Andere (wholly Other)” and a “redemptive leap into a non-
mediated Otherness.”74 Agamben’s political philosophy presents for Žižek
“not so much a pessimism but a ‘negative’ teleology, in which the entire
Western tradition is approaching its own disastrous end, the only solution
to which is to await some ‘divine violence.’”75 Against Agamben’s reading of
Benjamin’s notion of “divine violence” in State of Exception,76 Žižek states:
“But what is Benjamin talking about? Revolution—that is, a moment when
you take the ‘sovereign’ (this is Benjamin’s word) responsibility for killing
someone. What does violence mean for Agamben? He responds with ‘playing
with the law’ and so on. Forgive me for being a vulgar empiricist, but I don’t
know what that means in the concrete sense.”77
I do not claim that Hardt, Negri, and Žižek are representative of “leftist
politics”; in their critique of Agamben, however, they do exemplify a com-
mon and recurrent frame. What these two brief examples show is that most
228

of the emancipative proposals coming from the Left—different and diverse as

they may be—have been able so far to fathom a political alternative only in
the identitarian form of a “making,” of a “creating,” which is consigned to the
futurist temporality of the “new”; in the end, they remain trapped within the
utopian frame proposed by Benjamin: Their political project is characterized
by, and limited to, images of the future, “a bad poem on springtime, filled to
bursting with metaphors . . . mere images.” Moreover, these proposals are
unable (or unwilling, though Hardt, Negri, and Žižek belong here perhaps to
a stigmatized minority) to escape the vicious circle of violence and retribu-
tion that encumbers the advent of a real alternative. Agamben’s proposal is
of course problematic and debatable, but it certainly infuses political praxis
with a real, revolutionary alternative that bursts open the Western political
imaginary.
6. Ein kleines wenig
Agamben’s rejection of utopia is beautifully exemplified in a parable about the

messianic kingdom that he quotes in the chapter of The Coming Community
called “Aureole” (“Aureoles” [CV, 45]) and which was told by Scholem to
Benjamin and by Benjamin to Bloch.78 Bloch reports the parable in Spuren
(Traces, 1930): “In order to establish the kingdom of peace it is not necessary
to destroy everything and create a completely new world; it suffices to move
just a little bit this cup or that twig or that stone, and so on with everything.
But this ‘little bit’ is so difficult to attain and its measure so difficult to find
that, for this world, human beings are unable to make it and it is necessary for
the messiah to come.”79 Benjamin’s version appeared in a short piece called
“In der Sonne” (“In the Sun”), published in 1932 in the Kölnische Zeitung, and
presents a slight—but important—difference: “The Hasidim have a saying
about the world to come. Everything there will be arranged just as it is with
us. The room we have now will be just the same in the world to come; where
our child lies sleeping, it will sleep in the world to come. The clothes we are
wearing we shall also wear in the next world. Everything will be the same as
here—only a little bit different.”80
As de la Durantaye acutely notes, in Bloch’s version the messianic king-
dom and this world are very close but nonetheless separate. Benjamin focuses
instead not on what is necessary to bring about the coming of the Messiah but,
229

rather, on what the world will be like after His coming: Everything will be the
same as now, only a little bit different. This tiny difference, Agamben glosses,
introduces a supplementary possibility in the irreparability of the world; it
restores the world to its potentiality (see CV, 46–47) and therefore represents,
de la Durantaye adds, the motor of the coming politics, “because it represents
the effort to see the world as nothing more than it is—to construct world
politics not on the basis of a sacred order to come, but instead on a profane
order that is already right before our eyes and that is the only world we have
ever known. . . . We have only this world and this life, and we have no time to
waste.”81 We do not need utopias. What we need is to uncover that “little bit”
that lies hidden in the potentialities of the present.
This “little bit” takes the name, from The Time that Remains onward, of rest
(resto). As we have seen, the messianic rest is the division that divides the division;
it is what prevents the parts and the whole from coinciding with each other:
The rest “is not the object of salvation, but rather its instrument, what properly
speaking makes it possible” (TR, 58). It constitutes a surplus of the whole with
respect to the parts and of the parts with respect to the whole; it is the unsavable
that makes salvation possible. By rehearsing the parable on the messianic king-
dom in The Time that Remains, Agamben emphasizes that the “little bit,” the tiny
difference, is decisive, insofar as it “results from the fact that I have grasped my
disconnection from chronological time” (TR, 69), that I am in the operative time
of now, the time of true action.82 Another name for this “little bit” in The Coming
Community is agio (ease), whose etymology denotes the space nearby (ad-jacens,
adjacentia), the empty space in which it is possible to move freely, in a spatial and
temporal sense (ad-agio means “slowly” in Italian): at ease. This agio names the
task of the coming politics, which Agamben summarizes in Hölderlin’s words:
“The free use of the proper is the most difficult task” (CV, 25).83
Notes
1. Antonio Negri, “Il mostro politico: Nuda vita e potenza,” in Il desiderio del mostro:
Dal circo al laboratorio alla politica, ed. Ubaldo Fadini, Antonio Negri, and Charles
T. Wolfe (Rome: Manifestolibri, 2002), 10.
2. Antonio Negri, “Il frutto maturo della redenzione,” Il Manifesto, July 26, 2003, 21.
3. Andreas Kalyvas, “The Sovereign Weaver: Beyond the Camp,” in Politics,
Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s “Homo Sacer,” ed. Andrew Norris
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 116.
230

4. Dominik LaCapra, “Approaching Limit Events: Siting Agamben,” in Giorgio

gamben: Sovereignty and Life, ed. Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (Stanford:
A
Stanford University Press, 2007), 155, 161.
5. For an intelligent overview of some of these criticisms, see Leland de la Durantaye,
Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 345–51.
6. Cf., for example, Carlo Formenti, “Immagini del Forse,” Aut Aut: Rivista di filosofia e
cultura 271–72 (1996): 22–27.
7. Walter Benjamin, “Der Surrealismus: Die letzte Momentaufnahme der
europaischen Intelligenz,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann
Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974ff.), 2(1): 308 (translated as
“Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” in Selected Writings, ed.
Michael W. Jennings [Cambridge: Belknap, 1997–2003], 2:216).
8. Walter Benjamin, “Der destruktive Charakter,” in Tiedemann and Schweppenhäuser,
Gesammelte Schriften, 4(1): 397 (“The Destructive Character,” in Jennings, Selected
Writings, 2:541).
9. Cf., among others, Bronislaw Baczko, Utopian Lights: The Evolution of the Idea of
Social Progress (St. Paul: Paragon House, 1989).
10. Giorgio Agamben, Stanze. La parola e il fantasma nella cultura occidentale (Turin:
Einaudi, 1979), xvi (trans. Ronald L. Martinez, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western
Culture [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993]). In what follows, I will use my
own translation of all of Agamben’s texts; when English translations are available, I will
point them out but will refer to the pagination of the Italian editions.
11. See Maurice Blanchot, La communauté inavouable (Paris: Minuit, 1983; trans. The
Unavowable Community [Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill, 1988]); and Jean-Luc Nancy,
La communauté désoeuvrée (Paris: C. Bourgois, 1986; trans. The Inoperative Community
[Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1991]). Other responses to the debate include
Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso, 1993); Jacques Derrida’s Politiques de l’amitié (Paris: Galilée,
1994; trans. The Politics of Friendship [London: Verso, 2006]); and Jean-Luc Nancy’s
follow-up in Etre singulier pluriel (Paris: Galilée, 1996; trans. Being Singular Plural
[Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000]).
12. For a brief comparison among Nancy’s, Blanchot’s, and Agamben’s approaches,
see de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 157–61.
13. Giorgio Agamben, La comunità che viene (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2001), 9
(trans. Michael Hardt, The Coming Community [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1993]); hereafter cited as CV in the text.
14. Cf. Zafer Arcagök, “Whatever Image,” Postmodern Culture 13 (2003), http://www.
iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.103/13.2aracagok.txt.
15. Cf. Thomas Carl Wall, Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben (New York:
State University of New York Press, 1999), 124–25.
16. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (Turin: Einaudi,
1995), 26–27 (trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
[Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998]).
231

17. Giorgio Agamben, Signatura rerum. Sul metodo (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2008;
trans. Luca d’Isanto and Kevin Attell, The Signature of All Things: On Method [New York:
Zone Books, 2009]).
18. Cf. Arcagök, “Whatever Image”; Vijay Devadas and Jane Mummery, “ Community
Without Community,” borderlands 6 (2007), http://www.borderlands.net.au/
vol6no1_2007/devadasmummery_intro.htm.
19. Cf. René ten Bos, “Giorgio Agamben and the Community Without Identity,” in
Contemporary Organization Theory, ed. Campbell Jones and Rolland Munro (Malden,
Mass.: Blackwell, 2005), 20.
20. This is a recurrent argumentative pattern in Agamben’s thought, borrowed, via Hei-
degger, from the incipit of Friedrich Hölderlin’s Pathmos: “Nah ist/Und schwer zu fassen
der Gott./Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst/Das Rettende auch” [The god/Is near, and hard to
grasp./But where there is danger,/A rescuing element grows as well] (in Sämtliche Werke,
vol. 2 [Munich: G. Müller, 1913–23], 180).
21. See, for example, LaCapra’s “Approaching Limit Events.”
22. Agamben, Homo sacer, 211.
23. de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 4. As de la Durantaye acutely notes, even if the
term was adopted by Agamben only in the late 1980s, it constitutes the evolution of a
permanent reflection that revolved first around the notion of “infancy.” See Giorgio
Agamben, Infanzia e storia. Distruzione dell’esperienza e origine della storia (Turin: Einaudi,
1979; trans. Liz Heron, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience [London:
Verso, 1996]); and Giorgio Agamben, Il linguaggio e la morte. Un seminario sul luogo della
negatività (Turin: Einaudi, 1982; trans. Karen Pinkus and Michael Hardt, Language and
Death: The Place of Negatività [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991]).
24. Giorgio Agamben, “La potenza del pensiero,” in La potenza del pensiero. Saggi
e conferenze (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2005), 273–87 (trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, “On
Potentiality,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy [Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1999], 177–84). The Italian text was published after the English translation, with
some additional reworking; therefore, the two texts do not correspond literally.
25. Agamben, “La potenza del pensiero,” 285.
26. For Agamben’s debt to Heidegger’s notion of Dasein in regard to potentiality, see
Paolo Bartoloni, “The Stanza of the Self: On Agamben’s Potentiality,” Contretemps 5
(December 2004): 8–15; and Jean-Philippe Deranty, “Agamben’s Challenge to Normative
Theories of Modern Rights,” borderlands 3, no. 1 (2004), http://www.borderlands.net.au/
vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm.
27. Giorgio Agamben, “L’opera dell’uomo,” in La potenza del pensiero, 365–76. The
essay was first published in the journal Forme di vita 1 (2004), thus after the publication of
Potentialities. The English translation, “The Work of Man,” was published in Calarco and
DeCaroli, Giorgio Agamben, 1–10.
28. See Agamben, “L’opera dell’uomo,” 365–66. See also Giorgio Agamben, Il regno e la
gloria. Per una genealogia teologica dell’economia e del governo, Homo sacer, vol. 2/2 (Vicenza:
Neri Pozza, 2007), 269 (trans. Lorenzo Chiesa and Matteo Mandarini, The Kingdom and
the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government [Stanford: Stanford
232

University Press, 2011]). In Remnants of Auschwitz, this lack of essence, this being that is
pure potentiality, translates into the axiom, taken from Blanchot, that “the human is the
indestructible that can be infinitely destructed.” See Giorgio Agamben, Quel che resta di
Auschwitz. L’archivio e il testimone, Homo sacer, vol. 3 (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998; trans.
Daniel Heller-Roazen, Remnants of Auschwitz [New York: Zone, 1999]).
29. Giorgio Agamben, “Bartleby o della contingenza,” in Gilles Deleuze and G iorgio
Agamben, Bartleby, la formula della creazione (Macerata, Italy: Quodlibet, 1993), 76 (trans.
Daniel Heller-Roazen, “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” in Agamben, Potentialities, 243–74).
Cf. Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben (Stocksfield, England: Acumen, 2008), 32.
30. Cf. Stefano Franchi, “Passive Politics,” Contretemps 5 (December 2004): 30–41; and
Wall, Radical Passivity.
31. Cf. Wall, Radical Passivity, 156.
32. Cf. Devadas and Mummery, “Community Without Community.”
33. See Giorgio Agamben, “Idea del potere,” in Idea della prosa (Macerata, Italy:
Quodlibet, 2002), 51–52 (trans. Sam Whitsitt and Michael Sullivan, Idea of Prose [ Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1995]); Agamben, Homo sacer, 52–56; Giorgio
Agamben, “Su ciò che possiamo non fare,” in Nudità (Rome: Nottetempo, 2009), 67–70
(trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, “On What We Can Not Do,” in Nudities
[Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011], 43–45). As de la Durantaye writes, “The
problem of potentiality is not a problem among others in Homo sacer; it is the problem
that gives its logic, and its paradoxes, to all others. And as the reference to Bartleby
makes clear, it involves thinking about potentiality in an unhabitual fashion”
(Giorgio Agamben, 233).
34. Cf. Colin McQuillan, “The Political Life in Giorgio Agamben,” Kritikos 2 ( July 2005),
http://intertheory.org/mcquillan.htm; and Jenny Edkins, “Whatever Politics,” in Calarco
and DeCaroli, Giorgio Agamben, 77.
35. Giorgio Agamben, Mezzi senza fine. Note sulla politica (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri,
1996), 17 (trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, Means Without Ends: Notes on
Politics [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000]).
36. Cf. Deranty, “Agamben’s Challenge to Normative Theories of Modern Rights.”
37. A note explains that this second, aphoristic part should be read as a commentary
to §9 of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (Das Thema der Analytik des Daseins [The theme of the
analytic of Dasein]) and to proposition 6.44 of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (“Nicht wie die
Welt ist, ist das Mystische, sondern daß sie ist” [It is not how things are in the world that is
mystical, but that it exists]) (CV, 72).
38. Love is a theme that recurs, in a minor mode, in many of Agamben’s texts; see
“Idea dell’amore” [Idea of love], in Agamben, Idea della prosa, 41. But most of all love
appears in the theory of knowledge to be found in Provençal love poetry, analyzed first
in the chapter “La parola e il fantasma” [Word and phantasm], in Agamben, Stanze,
73–150. Giorgio Agamben rehearses this theory in various posterior texts, from Categorie
italiane. Studi di poetica (Venice: Marsilio, 1996; trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, The End of
the Poem: Studies in Poetics [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999]), to Profanazioni
(Rome: Nottetempo, 2005; trans. Jeff Fort, Profanations [New York: Zone Books, 2007]),
233

to Ninfe (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2007) and finally Nudità. For a partial analysis of love
in Agamben, see Julian Wolfreys, “Face to Face with Agamben; or, The Other in Love,”
in The Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life, ed. Justin Clemens, Nicholas Heron,
and Alex Murray (Edinburg: Edinburg University Press, 2008), 149–63.
39. Cf. Arcagök, “Whatever Image.”
40. The short chapter “Idea dell’amore” in Agamben’s Idea della prosa thus defines love:
“to live in the intimacy of an extraneous person, and not in order to approach her, to
know her, but rather to keep her extraneous, even remote: inapparent—so inapparent
that her name contains everything. And, even in discomfort, day after day to be n othing
but the always open space, the timeless light in which that one, that thing, remains
exposed and confined” (41).
41. Giorgio Agamben’s “La passione della fatticità” (“The Passion of Facticity”) is a text
from a conference held at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris in 1987 and
published first in French in the Cahiers du Collège international de philosophie 6 (1988): 63–84;
then published in English as “The Passion of Facticity” in 1999 in Agamben, P otentialities,
185–204; then republished in French as the first part of Giorgio Agamben and Valeria
Mazza, L’ombre de l’amour: Le concept d’amour chez Heidegger (Paris: Payot e Rivages, 2003;
the second part is the essay “L’amour en retrait” by Mazza); and finally published in Ital-
ian in 2005 in Agamben, La potenza del pensiero, 289–320.
42. See Agamben, “La passione della fatticità,” in Agamben, La potenza del pensiero,
315–17.
43. Ibid., 318.
44. de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 199.
45. Cf. Bartoloni, “Stanza of the Self,” 13.
46. Cf. Arcagök, “Whatever Image”; Bartoloni, “Stanza of the Self,” 13.
47. However, a critique of chronological time grounded in Benjamin’s analysis of
historical time marks each and every one of Giorgio Agamben’s books, beginning with
the last chapter of his first book, L’uomo senza contenuto (Macerata, Italy: Quodlibet, 1994;
trans. Georgia Albert, The Man Without Content [Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1999]). Cf. also, for example, Agamben, “La parola e il fantasma”; the whole argument of
Agamben, Infanzia e storia; Giorgio Agamben, “Idea dell’epoca” [Idea of epoch], in Idea
della prosa, 71–72; and every installment of the Homo sacer series.
48. See Giorgio Agamben, Il tempo che resta. Un commento alla “Lettera ai romani” (Turin:
Bollati Boringhieri, 2000), 62 (trans. Patricia Dailey, The Time that Remains: A Commentary
on the Letter to the Romans [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005]); hereafter cited as
TR in the text.
49. Walter Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” in Tiedemann and
Schweppenhäuser, Gesammelte Schriften, 1(2): 704 (trans. “On the Concept of History,” in
Jennings, Selected Writings, 4:397).
50. Giorgio Agamben, “Che cos’è il contemporaneo?” [What is a contemporary?], in
Nudità, 21; emphasis in the original.
51. See Giorgio Agamben, “Idea della politica,” in Idea della prosa, 59–60.
52. See Alexandre Kojève, “Les romans de la sagesse,” Critique 60 (1952): 387–97.
234

53. The Kojève–Bataille querelle about the end of history appears, in Agamben’s
oeuvre, already in an excursus of Agamben, Il linguaggio e la morte, 64–67; and takes a
central place in two chapters of Giorgio Agamben, L’aperto. L’uomo e l’animale ( Turin:
Bollati Boringhieri, 2002), 12–20 (trans. Kevin Attell, The Open: Man and Animal [ Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2004]). The brief excursus in Il linguaggio e la morte discusses the
motif of the “sage at the end of history,” and it can therefore be argued that d ésœuvrement
is here already contained in nuce, though Agamben adopted the term i noperativity only
after his engagement with Nancy.
54. Agamben, Homo sacer, 71.
55. There is here a little problem in the translation from French into Italian and English:
Whereas désoeuvré is a deverbal, passive form, denoting dynamicity and, through the
prefix de-, privation (meaning therefore “deprived of ergon”), the Italian inoperoso and the
English inoperative are denominal, active forms, denoting static and, through the prefix
in-, inversion (meaning therefore “that has/presents/possesses no ergon”). I owe this
insight to Tommaso Detti. For a brief discussion of the translation of the term and its
different uses in Queneau, Kojève, Bataille, Nancy, Blanchot, and Agamben, see Franchi,
“Passive Politics,” 33ff.
56. Agamben, Mezzi senza fine, 109.
57. For a poignant critique of the philosophy of the als ob, see TR, 38–42.
58. See also Agamben, Il regno e la gloria, 271ff.
59. See also ibid., 184–85.
60. Significative is that, Agamben points out, Martin Luther translated St. Paul’s
katargesis as Af hebung, a term that was going to mark and determine the history of
modern philosophy. See TR, 94ff.
61. Giorgio Agamben, “Il corpo glorioso” [The glorious body], in Nudità, 144.
62. Agamben, Il regno e la gloria, 274.
63. Giorgio Agamben, “Elogio della profanazione,” in Profanazioni, 106 (trans. “In
Praise of Profanation,” in Profanations).
64. All these concepts, as Catherine Mills points out, must be related to an idea of
politics as the suspension of the relation between means and ends and as the redefinition
of human relations with objects (Philosophy of Agamben, 108).
65. See Giorgio Agamben, Stato di eccezione, Homo sacer, vol. 2/1 (Turin: Bollati
Boringhieri, 2003), 81–83 (trans. Kevin Attell, State of Exception [Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005]); Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kaf ka. Zur zehnten Wiederkehr seines
Todestages,” in Tiedemann and Schweppenhäuser, Gesammelte Schriften, 2(2): 437 (trans.
“Franz Kaf ka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” in Jennings, Selected Writings, 2:815).
66. Agamben, Stato di eccezione, 83.
67. See Agamben, “Elogio della profanazione,” 86–87. Agamben’s interest in play comes
of course from Benjamin and is present from his early works. Cf. the chapter “Mme
Panchkoucke o la Fata del giocattolo” [Mme Panchkoucke or the toy fairy], in the second
part of Agamben, Stanze, 65–71; the chapters “Il paese dei balocchi. Riflessioni sulla
storia e sul gioco” [The land of toys. Reflections on history and play] and “Fiaba e storia.
Considerazioni sul presepe” [Fairy tale and history. Remarks on the crèche], in Agamben,
235

Infanzia e storia, 67–92, 133–40; and “Idea dello studio” [Idea of study], in Agamben, Idea
della prosa, 43–45.
68. Giorgio Agamben, “Una fame da bue. Considerazioni sul sabato, la festa e l’inoperosità”
[Hungry as a bull. Remarks on Shabbat, festivity, and inoperosity], in Nudità, 154.
69. See Agamben, Il regno e la gloria, 262; see also de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 144.
70. See Formenti, “Immagini del Forse.”
71. See Deranty, “Agamben’s Challenge to Normative Theories of Modern Rights.”
Deranty equates Agamben’s rejection of all normative distinction, and especially his
rejection of any representability for the coming community, to a “negative theology” and
finally to the evanescence of politics.
72. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2000), 204; emphases added.
73. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge: Belknap, 2009),
58. Negri’s accusation of Heideggerism, together with much stronger criticisms of the
notion of “bare life,” recur in various texts; see, for example, Negri, “Il mostro politico,”
already quoted, and, among others, Antonio Negri, “Giorgio Agamben: The Discrete
Taste of the Dialectic,” trans. Matteo Mandarini, in Calarco and DeCaroli, Giorgio
Agamben, 109–25; and the interview Antonio Negri gave to Cesare Casarino, “It’s a Power-
ful Life: A Conversation on Contemporary Philosophy,” Cultural Critique 57 (Spring 2004):
151–81. On Negri’s critique of Agamben, see Brett Neilson, “Potenza Nuda? S overeignty,
Biopolitics, Capitalism,” Contretemps 5 (December 2004): 63–78.
74. Slavoj Žižek, “Objet a as Inherent Limit to Capitalism: On Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri,” lacan.com (2005), http://www.lacan.com/zizmultitude.htm.
75. SOFT TARGETS, Divine Violence and Liberated Territories: SOFT TARGETS
Talks with Slavoj Žižek, Los Angeles, March 14, 2007, http://www.softtargetsjournal.
com/web/zizek.php.
76. See the chapter “Gigantomachia intorno a un vuoto” [Gigantomachy concerning a
void], in Agamben, Stato di eccezione, 68–83.
77. SOFT TARGETS, “Divine Violence and Liberated Territories.” Žižek’s intense
and manifold engagement with Agamben’s philosophy cannot be explored or even
summarized here. For an introduction on the central issue of violence and excep-
tion, see Tzuchien Tho, “Politics and the Void: Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Žižek on
the State of Emergency,” in Philosophy Against Empire, ed. Tony Smith, Harry van der
Linden, and Jeffrey Paris (Charlottesville: Philosophy Documentation Center, 2006),
139–54.
78. Cf. Scholem to Benjamin, ca. 10–12 July 1934, in Walter Benjamin and Gershom
Scholem, Briefwechsel 1933–1940 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 154 (trans. Gary
Smith and Andre Lefevere, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem,
1932–1940 [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992]).
79. Ernst Bloch, Spuren (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), 260 (trans. Anthony A.
Nassar, Traces [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006]); my translation.
236

80. Walter Benjamin, “In der Sonne,” in Tiedemann and Schweppenhäuser, Gesammelte
Schriften, 4(1): 419 (trans. “In the Sun,” in Jennings, Selected Writings, 2:664).
81. de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 382.
82. On the notion of “rest” or “remnant,” see ibid., 298–302.
83. See also Agamben, “La passione della fatticità,” 319. For Hölderlin’s quotation—
“Der freie Gebrauch des Eigenes das Schwerste ist”—see Friedrich Hölderlin to Casimir
Ulrich Boehlendorff, 4 December 1801, in Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 5:320.
237

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Quodlibet: Giorgio Agamben’s Anti-Utopia

Utopian Studies, Vol. 23, No. 1, 2012

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in the preface to Stanzas (1979), he defines the “philosophical topology”

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e­ xclusion.16 This isomorphism between exception and example or paradigm,

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Because if humanity, instead of seeking still a proper identity in the

The whatever singularity embodies in this sense what Leland de la ­Durantaye

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I consider superfluous, since the notions of inoperativity and “use,” as will be

3. The Passion of Facticity

An important corollary to the potentiality axiom is the emphasis on the irre-

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that being that as such always matters. Quodlibet as qual-si-voglia, “­what-so-ever”

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constitutes its transcendence). Faktizität (facticity) is, in this context, what

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of any vocation; however, this re-vocation does not destroy or annihilate

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This operation takes the name, in more recent texts, of “profanation”:

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of the emancipative proposals coming from the Left—different and diverse as

6. Ein kleines wenig

Agamben’s rejection of utopia is beautifully exemplified in a parable about the

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4. Dominik LaCapra, “Approaching Limit Events: Siting Agamben,” in Giorgio

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e xclusion.16 This isomorphism between exception and example or paradigm,

The whatever singularity embodies in this sense what Leland de la Durantaye

that being that as such always matters. Quodlibet as qual-si-voglia, “what-so-ever”