Giorgio Agamben (1942– )

Giorgio Agamben is one of the leading figures in Italian philosophy and radical political
theory, and in recent years, his work has had a deep impact on contemporary scholarship
in a number of disciplines in the Anglo-American intellectual world. Born in Rome in
1942, Agamben completed studies in Law and Philosophy with a doctoral thesis on the
political thought of Simone Weil, and participated in Martin Heidegger’s seminars on
Hegel and Heraclitus as a postdoctoral scholar. He has taught at various universities,
including the Universities of Macerata and Verona and was Director of Programmes at
the Collège Internationale de Paris. He has been a Visiting Professor at various universities
in the United States of America, and was a Distinguished Professor at the New School,
University in New York. He caused a controversy when he refused to submit to the
“biopolitical tattooing” requested by the United States Immigration Department for entry
to the USA in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Agamben’s work does not follow a straightforward chronological path of development
either conceptually or thematically. Instead, his work constitutes an elaborate and
multifaceted recursive engagement with the problems introduced into Western
philosophy by the highly original and often enigmatic works of Walter Benjamin, most
notably in his book on German trauerspiel, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, but also
in associated essays and fragments, such as his “Critique of Violence.” This is not to say
that Agamben is not influenced by, nor engaged with, a number of other canonical or
contemporary figures in Western philosophy and political, aesthetic and linguistic theory.
He certainly is, most notably Heidegger and Hegel, as well as the scholarship that follows
from them, but also Aby Warburg’s iconography (Agamben worked at the Warburg
Institute Library in 1974-5), Italian Autonomism and Situationism (especially Guy
Debord’s influential Society of the Spectacle), Aristotle, Emile Benveniste, Carl Schmitt and
Hannah Arendt amongst others. Beyond this philosophical heritage, Agamben also
engages in multilayered discussions of the Jewish Torah and Christian biblical texts,
Greek and Roman law, Midrashic literature, as well as of a number of Western literary
figures and poets, including Dante, Holderlin, Kafka, Pessoa, and Caproni to name but a
few. This breadth of reference and the critical stylistics it gives rise to no doubt contribute
to the appearance of intimidating density characteristic of Agamben’s work. Even so,
Agamben’s engagement with these figures is often mediated by his deep conceptual and
thematic debt to Benjamin (he served as editor of the Italian edition of Benjamin’s
collected works from 1979 to 1994) evident in his central focus on questions of language
and representation, history and temporality, the force of law, politics of the spectacle, and
the ethos of humanity.

Table of Contents
1. Language and Metaphysics
2. Aesthetics
3. Politics
 4. Ethics
5. Messianism
6. References and Further Reading

1. Language and Metaphysics

As Agamben indicates in the 1989 preface to the English translation of Infancy and History,
the key question that unites his disparate explorations is that of what it means for
language to exist, what it means that “I speak.” In taking up this question throughout his
work, and most explicitly in texts such as Infancy and History, Language and Death, and
most recently, The Open, Agamben reinvigorates consideration of philosophical
anthropology through a critical questioning of the metaphysical presuppositions that
inform it, and in particular, the claim that the defining essence of man is that of having
language. In taking up this question, Agamben proposes the necessity of an“experimentum
linguae” in which what is experienced is language itself, and the limits of language become
apparent not in the relation of language to a referent outside of it, but in the experience
of language as pure self-reference.
Published in Italian in 1978, Infancy and History constitutes one of Agamben’s earliest
attempts to grasp and articulate the implications of such an as experience of language as
such. Consisting of a series on interconnected essays on concepts such as history,
temporality, play, and gesture, Infancy and History provides an importance entrance to
Agamben’s later work on politics and ethics, particularly in the eponymous essay of the
edition on the concept of infancy understood as an experiment of language as such. In
this, Agamben argues that the contemporary age is marked by the destruction or loss of
experience, in which the banality of everyday life cannot be experienced per se but only
undergone, a condition which is in part brought about by the rise of modern science and
the split between the subject of experience and of knowledge that it entails. Against this
destruction of experience, which is also extended in modern philosophies of the subject
such as Kant and Husserl, Agamben argues that the recuperation of experience entails a
radical rethinking of experience as a question of language rather than of consciousness,
since it is only in language that the subject has its site and origin. Infancy, then,
conceptualizes an experience of being without language, not in a temporal or
developmental sense of preceding the acquisition of language in childhood, but rather, as
a condition of experience that precedes and continues to reside in any appropriation of
language.
Agamben continues this reflection on the self-referentiality of language as a means of
transforming the link between language and metaphysics that underpins Western
philosophical anthropology inLanguage and Death, originally published in 1982.
Beginning from Heidegger’s suggestion of an essential relation between language and
death, Agamben argues that Western metaphysics have been fundamentally tied to a
negativity that is increasingly evident at the heart of the ethos of humanity. While this
collapse of metaphysics into ethics is increasingly evident as nihilism, contemporary
thought has yet to escape from this condition. Agamben seeks to understand and
ultimately escape this collapse through a rigorous philosophy of the experience of
language suggested in Infancy and History. In his analysis of Heidegger and Hegel,
Agamben isolates their reliance upon and indeed radicalization of negativity, by
casting Da and Diese as grammatical shifters that refer to the pure taking place of
language. Here, Agamben draws upon the linguistic notion of deixis to isolate the self-
referentiality of language in pronouns or grammatical shifters, which he argues do not
refer to anything beyond themselves but only to their own utterance (LD, 16-26). The
problem for Agamben, though, is that both Hegel and Heidegger ultimately maintain a
split within language – which he sees as a consistent element of Western thought from
Aristotle to Wittgenstein – in their identification of an ineffability or unspeakability that
cannot be brought into human discourse but which is nevertheless its condition. Agamben
calls this mute condition of language “Voice,” and concludes that a philosophy that thinks
only from the foundation of Voice cannot deliver the resolution of metaphysics that the
nihilism toward which we are moving demands. Instead, he suggests, this is only possible
in an experience of infancy that has never yet been: it is only in existing “in language
without being called there by any Voice” and dying “without being called by death” (LD
96) that humanity can return to its proper dwelling place or ethos, to which it has never
been and from which it has never left.
One further dimension of Agamben’s engagement with Western metaphysics and attempt
to develop an alternative ontology is worth mentioning here, since it is one of the most
consistent threads throughout his work. This is the problem of potentiality, the rethinking
of which Agamben takes to be central to the task of overcoming contemporary nihilism.
Citing Aristotle’s proposal in Book Theta of his Metaphysics, that “a thing is said to be
potential if, when the act of which it is said to be potential is realized, there will be nothing
im-potential (“that is, there will be nothing able not to be,” (in HS, 45) Agamben argues
that this ought not be taken to mean simply that “what is not impossible is possible” but
rather, highlights the suspension or setting aside of im-potentiality in the passage to
actuality. This suspension, though, does not amount to a destruction of im-potentiality,
but rather to its fulfilment; that is, through the turning back of potentiality upon itself,
which amounts to its “giving of itself to itself,” im-potentiality, or the potentiality to not
be, is fully realized in its own suspension such that actuality appears as nothing other than
the potentiality to not not-be. While this relation is central to the passage of voice to
speech or signification and to attaining toward the experience of language as such,
Agamben also claims that in this formulation Aristotle bequeaths to Western philosophy
the paradigm of sovereignty, since it reveals the undetermined or sovereign founding of
being. As Agamben concludes, ‘“an act is sovereign when it realizes itself by simply taking
away its own potentiality not to be, letting itself be, giving itself to itself’” (HS 46). In this
way then, the relation of potentiality to actuality described by Aristotle accords perfectly
with the logic of the ban that Agamben argues is characteristic of sovereign power, thereby
revealing the fundamental integration of metaphysics and politics.
These reflections on metaphysics and language thus yield two inter-related problems for
Agamben, which he addresses in his subsequent work; the first of these lies in the broad
domain of aesthetics, in which Agamben considers the stakes of the appropriation of
language in prose and poetry in order to further critically interrogate the distinction
between philosophy and poetry. The second lies in the domains of politics and ethics, for
Agamben’s conception of the destruction of experience and of potentiality directly feed
into an analysis of the political spectacle and of sovereignty. These also necessitate,
according to Agamben, a reformulation of ethics as ethos, which in turn requires
rethinking community.
 2. Aesthetics
In Language and Death, Agamben raises the question of the relation of philosophy and
poetry by asking whether poetry allows a different experience of language than that of the
“unspeakable experience of Voice” that grounds philosophy. From a brief reflection on
Plato’s identification of poetry as the “invention of the Muses,” Agamben argues that both
philosophy and poetry attain toward the unspeakable as the condition of language, though
both also “demonstrate this asunattainable.” Thus rejecting a straightforward
prioritization of poetry over philosophy, or verse over prose, Agamben concludes that
“perhaps only a language in which the pure prose of philosophy would intervene at a
certain point to break apart the verse of the poetic word, and in which the verse of poetry
would intervene to bend the prose of philosophy into a ring, would be the true human
language” (LD, 78). This thematic subsequently drives Agamben’s contributions to
aesthetics, and in doing so, the distinction between philosophy and poetry grounds a
complex exercise of language and representation, experience and ethos, developed
throughout his works in this area and designed to surpass the distinction itself as well as
those that attend it.
Agamben’s first major contribution to contemporary philosophy of aesthetics was his
acclaimed book Stanzas, in which he develops a dense and multifaceted analysis of
language and phantasm, entailing engagement with modern linguistic and philosophy, as
well as psychoanalysis and philology. While dedicated to the memory of Martin
Heidegger, whom Agamben here names as the last of Western philosophers within this
book, also most evidently bears the influence of Aby Warburg. Agamben argues in Stanzas
that to the extent that Western culture accepts the distinction between philosophy and
poetry, knowledge founders on a division in which “philosophy has failed to elaborate a
proper language… and poetry has developed neither a method nor self-consciousness” (S,
xvii). The urgent task of thought, and particularly that which Agamben names “criticism,”
is to rediscover “the unity of our own fragmented word.” Criticism is situated at the point
at which language is split from itself—in for instance, the distinction of signified and
signifier and its task is to point toward a “unitary status for the utterance,” in which
criticism “neither represents nor knows, but knows the representation” (S, xvii). Thus,
against both philosophy and poetry, criticism “opposes the enjoyment of what cannot be
possessed and the possession of what cannot be enjoyed” (S, xvii).
In order to pursue this task, Agamben develops a model of knowledge evident in the
relations of desire and appropriation of an object that Freud identifies as melancholia and
fetishism. In this, he also questions the “primordial situation” of the distinction between
the signifier and the signified, to which Western reflections on the sign are beholden. He
concludes this study—which encompasses discussion of fetishism and commodity
fetishism, dandyism, the psychoanalysis of toys, and the myths of Narcissus, Eros and
Oedipus amongst other things—with a brief discussion of Saussurian linguistics, claiming
that Saussure’s triumph lay in recognizing the impossibility of a science of language based
on the distinction of signified and signifier. However, to isolate the sign as a positive unity
from Saussure’s problematic position is to “push the science of the sign back into
metaphysics.” (S 155) This idea of a link between the notion of the unity of the sign and
Western metaphysics, is in Agamben’s view, confirmed by Jacques Derrida’s formulation
of grammatology as an attempt to overcome the metaphysics of presence that Derrida
diagnoses as predominant within western philosophy from Plato onwards. Yet, Agamben
argues that Derrida does not achieve the overcoming he hopes for, since he has in fact
misdiagnosed the problem: metaphysics. Metaphysics is not simply the interpretation of
presence in the fractures of essence and appearance, sensibility and intelligibility and so
on. Rather; rather, the origin of Western metaphysics lies in the conception that “original
experience be always already caught in a fold… that presence be always already caught in
a signification” (S 156). Hence, logos is the fold that “gathers and divides all things in the
‘putting together’ of presence” (S, 156). Ultimately, then, an attempt to truly overcome
metaphysics requires that the semiological algorithm must reduce to solely the barrier
itself rather than one side or the other of the distinction, understood as the “topological
game of putting things together and articulating” (S 156).
It is in the framework established here then that Agamben’s next work in aesthetics, The
Idea of Prose, might be said to achieve its real importance…. Published in Italian in
1985, The Idea of Prose takes up the question of the distinction between philosophy and
poetry through a series of fragments on poetry, prose, language, politics, justice, love and
shame amongst other topics. This enigmatic text is perhaps especially difficult to
understand, because these fragments do not constitute a consistent argument throughout
the book. In the light of the foregoing though, it is possible to say that what Agamben is
doing is performing and indeed undermining a difference between poetry and philosophy
by breaking apart the strictures of logos. In bringing into play various literary techniques
such as the fable, the riddle, the aphorism and the short story, Agamben is practically
demonstrating an exercise of criticism, in which thought is returned to a prosaic
experience or awakening, in which what is known is representation itself.

3. Politics
The most influential dimension of Agamben’s work in recent years has been his
contributions to political theory, a contribution that springs directly from his
engagements in metaphysics and the philosophy of language. Undoubtedly, Homo Sacer:
Sovereign Power and Bare Life is Agamben’s best-known work, and probably also the most
controversial. It is in this book that Agamben develops his analysis of the condition of
biopolitics, first identified by Michel Foucault in the first volume of his History of
Sexuality series and associated texts. In this volume, Foucault argued that modern power
was characterized by a fundamentally different rationality than that of sovereign power.
Whereas sovereign power was characterized by a right over life and death, summarized
by Foucault in the dictum of “killing or letting live,” modern power is characterized by a
productive relation to life, encapsulated in the dictum of “fostering life or disallowing it.”
For Foucault, the “threshold of modernity” was reached with the transition from
sovereign power to biopower, in which the “new political subject” of the population
became the target of a regime of power that operates through governance of the
vicissitudes of biological life itself. Thus, in his critical revision of Aristotle, Foucault
writes that “for millennia, man remained… a living animal with the additional capacity
for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a
living being in question” (HS1 143).
Agamben is explicitly engaged with Foucault’s thesis on biopower in Homo Sacer, claiming
that he aims to “correct or at least complete” it, though in fact he rejects a number of
Foucault’s historico-philosophical commitments and claims. Suggesting that Foucault
has failed to elucidate the points at which sovereign power and modern techniques of
power coincide, Agamben rejects the thesis that the historical rise of biopower marked
the threshold of modernity. Instead, he claims that biopower and sovereignty are
fundamentally integrated, to the extent that “it can even be said that the production of a
biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power.” (HS 6) What distinguishes
modern democracy from the Ancient polis then, is not so much the integration of
biological life into the sphere of politics, but rather, the fact that modern State power
brings the nexus between sovereignty and the biopolitical body to light in an
unprecedented way. This is because in modern democracies, that which was originally
excluded from politics as the exception that stands outside but nevertheless founds the
law has now become the norm: As Agamben writes, “In Western politics, bare life has the
peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusions found the city of men.” (HS 7)
Several theoretical innovations inform this thesis, two of which are especially important.
The first is a re-conception of political power, developed through a complex reflection
upon Aristotelian metaphysics and especially the concept of potentiality, alongside a
critical engagement with the theory of sovereignty posited by Carl Schmitt, which is
developed through Walter Benjamin’s own engagement with Schmitt. The second
innovation introduced by Agamben is his provocative theorization of “bare life” as the
central protagonist of contemporary politics.

Of the first of these, it might be argued that the key motivation within Homo Sacer is not
so much an attempt to correct or complete Foucault’s account of biopolitics, as an attempt
to complete Benjamin’s critique of Schmitt. In Political Theology, Carl Schmitt—the
German jurist infamous for joining the Nazi party and becoming one of its strongest
intellectual supporters—summarizes his strongly decisionistic account of sovereignty by
claiming that the sovereign is the one that decides on the exception. For Schmitt, it is
precisely in the capacity to decide on whether a situation is normal or exceptional, and
thus whether the law applies or not—since the law requires a normal situation for its
application—that sovereignty is manifest. Against this formulation of sovereignty,
Benjamin posits in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” that the state of emergency
has in fact become the rule. Further, what is required is the inauguration of a real state of
exception in order to combat the rise of Fascism, here understood as a nihilistic
emergency that suspends the law while leaving it in force.
In addressing this conflict between Schmitt and Benjamin, Agamben argues that in
contemporary politics, the state of exception identified by Schmitt in which the law is
suspended by the sovereign, has in fact become the rule. This is a condition that he
identifies as one of abandonment, in which the law is in force but has no content or
substantive meaning—it is “in force without significance.” The structure of the exception,
he suggests, is directly analogous to the structure of the ban identified by Jean-Luc Nancy
in his essay “Abandoned Being, in which Nancy claims that in the ban the law only applies
in no longer applying. The subject of the law is simultaneously turned over to the law and
left bereft by it. The figure that Agamben draws on to elaborate this condition is that
of homo sacer, which is taken from Roman law and indicates one who ‘“can be killed but
not sacrificed.” According to Agamben, the sacredness of homo sacer does not so much
indicate a conceptual ambiguity internal to the sacred, as many have argued, as the
abandoned status of sacred man in relation to the law. The sacred man is “taken outside”
both divine and profane law as the exception and is thus abandoned by them.
Importantly, for Agamben, the fact that the exception has become the norm or rule of
contemporary politics means that it is not the case that only some subjects are abandoned
by the law; rather, he states that in our age, “we are all virtually homines sacri.” (HS 115).
As provocative as it is, understanding this claim also requires an appreciation of the
notion of “bare life” that Agamben develops from the Ancient Greek distinction between
natural life—zoe—and a particular form of life—bios, especially as it is articulated in
Aristotle’s account of the origins of the polis. The importance of this distinction in
Aristotle is that it allows for the relegation of natural life to the domain of the household
(oikos), while also allowing for the specificity of the good life characteristic of participation
in the polis—bios politikos. More importantly though, for Agamben, this indicates the fact
that Western politics is founded upon that which it excludes from politics—the natural
life that is simultaneously set outside the domain of the political but nevertheless
implicated inbios politicos. The question arises, then, of how life itself or natural life is
politicized. The answer to this question is through abandonment to an unconditional
power of death, that is, the power of sovereignty. It is in this abandonment of natural life
to sovereign violence—and Agamben sees the relation of abandonment that obtains
between life and the law as “originary”—that “bare life” makes its appearance. For bare
life is not natural life per se—though it is often confused with it in critical readings of
Agamben, partly as a consequence of Agamben’s own inconsistency—but rather, it is the
politicized form of natural life. Being neither bios nor zoe, then, bare life emerges from
within this distinction and can be defined as “life exposed to death,” especially in the form
of sovereign violence. (compare HS 88)
The empirical point of conjuncture of these two theses on the exception and on the
production of bare life is the historical rise of the concentration camp, which, Agamben
argues, constitutes the state of exception par excellence. As such though, it is not an
extraordinary situation in the sense of entailing a fundamental break with the political
rationality of modernity, but in fact reveals the ‘“nomos of the modern’” and the
increasing convergence of democracy and totalitarianism. According to Agamben, the
camp is the space opened when the exception becomes the rule or the normal situation,
as was the case in Germany in the period immediately before and throughout World War
2. Further, what is characteristic of the camp is the indistinguishability of law and life, in
which bare life becomes the “threshold in which law constantly passes over into fact and
fact into law” (HS 171). This indiscernability of life and law effectively contributes to a
normative crisis, for here it is no longer the case that the rule of law bears upon or applies
to the living body, but rather, the living body has become “the rule and criterion of its own
application” (HS 173) thereby undercutting recourse to the transcendence or
independence of the law as its source of legitimacy. What is especially controversial about
this claim is that if the camps are in fact the “nomos” or “hidden matrix” of modern
politics, then the normative crisis evident in them is not specifically limited to them, but
is actually characteristic of our present condition, a condition that Agamben describes as
one of “imperfect nihilism.”
Importantly, in addition to this, Agamben argues that the logic of the “inclusive exclusion”
that structures the relation of natural life to the polis, the implications of which are made
most evident in the camps, is perfectly analogous to the relation of the transition from
voice to speech that constitutes the political nature of “man” in Aristotle’s account. For
Aristotle, the transition from voice to language is a founding condition of political
community, since speech makes possible a distinction between the just and the unjust.
Agamben writes that the question of how natural bare life dwells in the polis corresponds
exactly with the question of how a living being has language, since in the latter question
“the living being has logos by taking away and conserving its own voice in it, even as it
dwells in the polis by letting its own bare life be excluded, as an exception, within it” (HS
8). Hence, for Agamben, the rift or caesura introduced into the human by the definition
of man as the living animal who has language and therefore politics is foundational for
biopolitics; it is this disjuncture that allows the human to be reduced to bare life in
biopolitical capture. In this way then, metaphysics and politics are fundamentally
entwined, and it is only by overcoming the central dogmas of Western metaphysics that a
new form of politics will be possible.

This damning diagnosis of contemporary politics does not, however, lead Agamben to a
position of political despair. Rather, it is exactly in the crisis of contemporary politics that
the means for overcoming the present dangers also appear. Agamben’s theorization of the
“coming politics”—which in its present formulation is under-developed in a number of
significant ways—relies upon a logic of “euporic” resolution to the aporias that
characterise modern democracy, including the aporia of bare life (P 217). In Means without
End, he argues for a politics of pure means that is not altogether dissimilar to that
projected by Walter Benjamin, writing that “politics is the sphere neither of an end in
itself nor of means subordinated to an end; rather, it is the sphere of a pure mediality
without end intended as the field of human action and of human thought” (ME 117). In
developing this claim, Agamben claims that the coming politics must reckon with the dual
problem of the post-Hegelian theme of the end of history and with the Heideggerian
theme of Ereignis, in order to formulate a new life and politics in which both history and
the state come to an end simultaneously. This “experiment” of a new politics without
reference to sovereignty and associated concepts such as nation, the people and
democracy, requires the formulation of a new “happy life,” in which bare life is never
separable as a political subject and in which what is at stake is the experience of
communicability itself.

4. Ethics
Given this critique of the camps and the status of the law that is revealed in, but by no
means limited to, the exceptional space of them, it is no surprise that Agamben takes the
most extreme manifestation of the condition of the camps as a starting point for an
elaboration of an ethics without reference to the law, a term that is taken to encompass
normative discourse in its entirety. InRemnants of Auschwitz, published as the third
instalment of the Homo Sacer series, Agamben develops an account of an ethics of
testimony as an ethos of bearing witness to that for which one cannot bear witness. Taking
up the problem of skepticism in relation to the Nazi concentration camps of World War
II—also discussed by Jean-Francois Lyotard and others—Agamben castsRemnants as an
attempt to listen to a lacuna in survivor testimony, in which the factual condition of the
camps cannot be made to coincide with that which is said about them. However, Agamben
is not concerned with the epistemological issues that this non-coincidence of “fact and
truth” raises, but rather, with the ethical implications, which, he suggests, our age has as
yet failed to reckon with.
The key figure in his account of an ethics of testimony is that of the Muselmann, or those
in the camps who had reached such a state of physical decrepitude and existential
disregard that “one hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death”
(Levi cited in RA 44). But rather than seeing the Muselmann as the limit-figure between
life and death, Agamben argues that theMuselmann is more correctly understood as the
limit-figure of the human and inhuman. As the threshold between the human and the
inhuman, however, the Muselmann does not simply mark the limit beyond which the
human is no longer human. Agamben argues that such a stance would merely repeat the
experiment of Auschwitz, in which the Muselmann is put outside the limits of human and
the moral status that attends that categorization. Instead then, the Muselmann indicates a
more fundamental indistinction between the human and the inhuman, in which it is
impossible to definitively separate one from the other, and in that calls into question the
moral distinctions that rest on this designation. The key question that arises for Agamben
then, is whether there is in fact a “humanity to the human” over and above biologically
belonging to the species, and it is in reflection upon this question that Agamben develops
his own account of ethics. In this, he rejects recourse to standard moral concepts such as
dignity and respect, claiming that “Auschwitz marks the end and the ruin of every ethics
of dignity and conformity to a norm…. The Muselmann… is the guard on the threshold of
a new ethics, an ethics of a form of life that begins where dignity ends” (RA 69).
In order to elaborate on or at least provide “signposts” for this new ethical terrain,
Agamben returns to the definition of the human as the being who has language, as well as
his earlier analyses of deixis, to bring out a double movement in the human being’s
appropriation of language. In an analysis of pronouns such as “I” that allow a speaker to
put language to use, he argues that the subjectification effected in this appropriation is
conditioned by a simultaneous and inevitable de-subjectification. Because pronouns are
nothing other than grammatical shifters or “indicators of enunciation,” such that they
refer to nothing other than the taking place of language itself, the appropriation of
language in the identification of oneself as a speaking subject requires that the
psychosomatic individual simultaneously erase or desubjectify itself. Consequently, it is
not strictly the “I” that speaks, and nor is it the living individual: rather, as Agamben
writes, “in the absolute present of the event of discourse, subjectification and
desubjectification coincide at every point and both the flesh and blood individual and the
subject of enunciation are perfectly silent.” (RA 117)

Importantly, Agamben argues that it is precisely this non-coincidence of the speaking

being and living being and the impossibility of speech revealed in it that provides the
condition of possibility of testimony. Testimony, he claims, is possible only “if there is no
articulation between the living being and language, if the “I” stands suspended in this
disjunction” (RA, 130). The question that arises here then is what Agamben means by
testimony, since it is clear that he does not use the term in the standard sense of giving an
account of an event that one has witnessed. Instead, he argues that what is at stake in
testimony is bearing witness to what is unsayable, that is, bearing witness to the
impossibility of speech and making it appear within speech. In this way, he suggests, the
human is able to endure the inhuman. More generally then, testimony is no longer
understood as a practice of speaking, but as an ethos, understood as the only proper
“dwelling place” of the subject. The additional twist that Agamben adds here to avoid a
notion of returning to authenticity in testimony, is to highlight the point that while
testimony is the proper dwelling place or “only possible consistency” of the subject, it is
not something that the subject can simply assume as its own. As the account of
subjectification and desubjectification indicates, there can be no simple appropriation of
language that would allow the subject to posit itself as the ground of testimony, and nor
can it simply realise itself in speaking. Instead, testimony remains forever unassumable.

This also gives rise, then, to Agamben’s account of ethical responsibility. Against juridical
accounts of responsibility that would understand it in terms of sponsorship, debt and
culpabililty, Agamben argues that responsibility must be thought as fundamentally
unassumable, as something which the subject is consigned to, but which it can never fully
appropriate as its own. Responsibility, he suggests, must be thought without reference to
the law, as a domain of “irresponsibility” or “non-responsibility” that necessarily precedes
the designations of good and evil and entails a “confrontation with a responsibility that is
infinitely greater than any we could ever assume…” While it may seem as if Agamben is
leaning toward a conception of ethical responsibility akin to Emmanuel Levinas’
conception of infinite responsibility toward the absolute Other, this is not wholly the case,
since Agamben sees Levinas as simply radicalising the juridical relation of sponsorship in
unexpiatable guilt. In distinction from this, Agamben argues that “ethics is the sphere that
recognizes neither guilt nor responsibility; it is… the doctrine of happy life” (RA 24).

5. Messianism
Clearly then, the conception of politics and of ethics that Agamben develops converge in
the notion of “happy life,” or what he calls “form-of-life” at other points. What Agamben
means by this is particularly unclear, not least because he sees elaboration of these
concepts as requiring a fundamental overturning of the metaphysical grounds of western
philosophy, but also because they gesture toward a new politics and ethics that remain
largely to be thought. What is clear within this though is that Agamben is drawing upon
Benjamin’s formulation of the necessity of a politics of pure means and, correlative to
that, his conception of temporality and history, which taps a deep vein of messianism that
runs through Judeo-Christian thought. This vein of messianism emerges in Agamben’s
thought in a number of formulations, particularly those of “infancy,” “happy life” and
“form-of-life,” and the notion of “whatever singularities.” What is also common to all
these concepts is a concern with the figuration of humanity at the end of history, a concern
that Agamben develops in discussion of the debates between Bataille and Kojeve over the
Hegelian thesis of the end of history.
In the concept of “happy life” or “form of life,” Agamben points toward a new conception
of life in which it is never possible to isolate bare life as the biopolitical subject, which, he
argues ought to provide the foundation of political philosophy. As he states,

The “happy life”on which political philosophy should be founded thus cannot be either the
naked life that sovereignty posits as a presupposition so as to turn it into its own subject or
the impenetrable extraneity of science and of modern biopolitics that everybody tries in vain
to sacralize. This “happy life” should be rather, an absolutely profane “sufficient life.” that has
reached the perfection of its own power and its own communicability – a life over which
sovereignty and right no longer have any hold (ME 114-115).

Happy life will be such that no separation between bios and zoe is possible, and life will
find its unity in a pure immanence to itself, in “the perfection of its own power.” In this
then, he seeks a politico-philosophical redefinition of life no longer founded upon the
bloody separation of the natural life of the species and political life, but which is beyond
every form of relation insofar as happy life is life lived in pure immanence, grounded on
itself alone. This conception of a “form of life” or happy life that exceeds the biopolitical
caesurae that cross the human being is developed in reference to Benjamin’s conception
of happiness as he articulates it in “Theologico-Political Fragment,” a short text in which
he paints a picture of two arrows pointing in different directions but nevertheless
reinforcing each other, one of which indicates the force of historical time and the other
that of Messianic time. For Benjamin, while happiness is not and cannot bring about the
redemption of Messianic time on its own, it is nevertheless the profane path to its
realization – happiness allows for the fulfilment of historical time, since the Messianic
kingdom is “not the goal of history but the end (TPF 312). Drawing on this figuration,
Agamben appears to construe happiness as that which allows for the overturning of
contemporary nihilism in the form of the metaphysico-political nexus of biopower.

This debt also brings into focus Agamben’s reliance on the Benjaminian formulation of
communicability as such, or communicability without communication, a thematic which
emerges more strongly in Agamben’s somewhat anomalous essay published as The
Coming Community, in which he develops the notion of “whatever singularities.” It is here
that Agamben most explicitly addresses the rethinking of community that his early
analyses of language and metaphysics suggested was required. In taking up the problem
of community, Agamben enters into a broader engagement with this concept by others
such as Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy, and in the Anglo-American scene,
Alphonso Lingis. The broad aim of the engagement is to develop a conception of
community that does not presuppose commonality or identity as a condition of belonging.
Within this, Agamben’s conception of “whatever singularity” indicates a form of being
that rejects any manifestation of identity or belonging and wholly appropriates being to
itself, that is, in its own “being-in-language.” Whatever singularity allows for the
formation of community without the affirmation of identity or “representable condition
of belonging,” in nothing other than the “co-belonging” of singularities itself. Importantly
though, this entails neither a mystical communion nor a nostalgic return to a
Gemeinschaft that has been lost; instead, the coming community has never yet been.
 Interestingly, Agamben argues in this elliptical text that the community and politics of
whatever singularity are heralded in the event of Tianenmen square, which he. He takes
this event to indicate that the coming politics will not be a struggle between states, but,
instead, a struggle between the state and humanity as such, insofar as it exists in itself
without expropriation in identity. Correlatively, the coming politics do not entail a
sacralization of humanity, for the existence of whatever singularity is always irreparably
abandoned to itself; as Agamben writes, ‘“The Irreparable is that things are just as they
are, in this or that mode, consigned without remedy to their way of being. States of things
are irreparable, whatever they may be: sad or happy, atrocious or blessed. How you are,
how the world is—this is the irreparable….”(CC 90)

Agamben returns to this thematic within a critical analysis of the definition of man as the
being that has language in his recent book, The Open. Agamben begins this text with
reflection on an image of the messianic banquet of the righteous on the last day, preserved
in a thirteenth- century Hebrew Bible, in which the righteous are presented not with
human heads, but with those of animals. In taking up the rabbinic tradition of
interpretation of this image, Agamben suggests that the righteous or “concluded
humanity” are effectively the “remnant” or remainder of Israel, who are still alive at the
coming of the Messiah. The enigma presented by the image of the righteous with animal
heads appears to be that of the transformation of the relation of animal and human and
the ultimate reconciliation of man with his own animal nature on the last day. But for
Agamben, reflection on the enigma of the posthistorical condition of man thus presented
necessitates a fundamental overturning of the metaphysico-political operations by which
something like man is produced as distinct from the animal in order for its significance to
be fully grasped. Agamben concludes this text—which is pragmatically an extended
reflection on the Bataille-Kojeve debate—with the warning that what is required to stop
the “anthropological machine” is not tracing the “no longer human or animal contours of
a new creation,” but rather risking ourselves in the hiatus and central emptiness that
separates the human and animal within man. Thus, for Agamben, “the righteous with
animal heads… do not represent a new declension of the man-animal relation,” but
instead indicates a zone of non-knowledge that allows them to be outside of being, “saved
precisely in their being unsavable” (TO, 92). This articulation of the unsavable reiterates
a number of Agamben’s previous comments on redemption and beatitude and provides
some clearer articulation of his resolution of the dilemma of the post-historical condition
of humanity as distinct from those of his precursors. But how Agamben will develop this
resolution and the ethico-political implications of it in large part remains to be seen.

6. References and Further Reading

• Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community, tr. Michael Hardt, University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 1993; La communità che viene, Einaudi, 1990. (CC)
• Agamben, Giorgio. Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, tr. Karen E. Pinkus and Michael Hardt,
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1991; Il linguaggio e la morte: Un seminario sul luogo della
negatività, Giulio. Einuadi , 1982. (LD)
• Agamben, Giorgio. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, tr. Ronald L. Martinez, University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993; Stanze: La Parola e il fantasma nella cultura occidentale, Giulio
Einuadi, Turin, 1977. (S)
• Agamben, Giorgio. The Idea of Prose, tr. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt, SUNY Press, Albany,
1995; Idea della prosa, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Milano, 1985.
• Agamben, Giorgio. Infancy and History, Verso, London, 1993; Infanzia et storia, Giulio Einuadi, 1978
(IH)
• Agamben, Giorgio. Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, tr. Karen E. Pinkus, University of
Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1991; Il linguaggio e la morte: Un Seminario sul luogo, Giulio Einuadi, 1982.
• Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford
University Press, Stanford, 1998; Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, Giulio Einuadi, 1995. (HS)
• Agamben, Giorgio. The Man without Content, tr. Georgia Albert, Stanford University Press, Stanford,
1999; L’”uomo senza contenuto, Quodlibet, 1994.
• Agamben, Giorgio. The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford University
Press, Stanford, 1999. Categorie Italiane: Studi di poetica, Marsilio Editori, 1996. (EP)
• Agamben, Giorgio. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen,
Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1999. (P)
• Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz, tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Zone Books, New York, 1999; Quel
che resta di Auschwitz, (RA)
• Agamben, Giorgio. Means without End: Notes on Politics, tr. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino,
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2000; Mezzi sensa fine, Bollati Boringhieri, 1996. (ME)
• Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal, tr. Kevin Attell, Stanford University Press, Stanford,
2004; L’aperto: L’uomo e l’animale, Bollati Boringhieri, 2002 (TO)
• Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception, tr. Kevin Attell, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago; 2005; Il
Stato eccezione, Bollati Boringhieri, 2003. (SE)
• Benjamin, Walter. “Critique of Violence,” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed.
Peter Demetz, tr. Edmund Jephcott, Schocken Books, New York: 1978, 277-300. (TPF)
• Agamben, Giorgio. “Theologico-Political Fragment,” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical
Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, tr. Edmund Jephcott, Schocken Books, New York: 1978, 312.
• Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry
Zohn, Fontana, 1973.
• Foucault, M. History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, tr. R Hurley, Penguin, London: 1981.

Author Information:
Catherine Mills
University of New South Wales
Email: catherine.mills@unsw.edu.au
U. S. A.

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