An-archē and Indifference:

Between Giorgio Agamben and Reiner Schürmann

This essay explores Giorgio Agamben’s engagement with Reiner Schürmann, focusing in particular on
their ontological understanding of anarchy. Setting out from the lacuna in the literature on this issue, it
provides a close reading of the passages where Agamben addresses Schürmann, interrogates the role
of the arche in Agamben’s works and links his interest in Schürmann to his long-standing critique of
Derrida. Tracing these issues through Agamben’s and Schürmann’s texts, it becomes apparent that both
authors operate with a strikingly similar approach, even as they adumbrate different understandings of
the rapport between arche, anarchy and difference. Focusing on the epilogue of The Use of Bodies, the
essay argues in particular that Schürmann’s work can be seen as an incisive reference point in Agam-
ben’s recent theory of “destituent potential.” Here, arche and anarchy are positioned as the basic opera-
tive categories of the entire Homo Sacer project. With and against Schürmann’s attempt to think anarchy
as an interruption of identity through difference, Agamben develops his notion of anarchy as indiffe-
rence and inoperativity.

[Cite as: Malte Fabian Rauch, “An-archē and Indifference: Between Giorgio Agamben and Reiner

Schürmann,” forthcoming in Philosophy Today 65:3 (Summer 2021).]

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On the last pages of Giorgio Agamben’s The Use of Bodies, the concept of “true anarchy” is disclosed as

the political vanishing point of the entire Homo Sacer project.1 Reiner Schürmann, who is so far appar-

ently only a very occasional reference, suddenly appears here as one of Agamben’s decisive interlocu-

tors. Some of Agamben’s most careful readers—Jean-Luc Nancy and Étienne Balibar—have under-

lined the importance of this reference.2 In the general discussion of Agamben’s work, however, the

connection has scarcely received attention. Typical of this, Schürmann’s work has even been used to

approach Agamben’s notion of anarchy without mentioning his own explicit discussion.3 This essay is

an attempt to elucidate the importance of this engagement—for both the effect it had on Agamben’s

work, and for the readability of Schürmann’s work in the present.

The “anarchy” at issue here is of a particular kind. From the very beginning of Homo Sacer,

Agamben distinguishes it from the tradition of the “anarchist” critique of the state.4 His thinking of

anarchy, flickering on the margins but only coming to the forefront in the last volume, partakes in the

shift “from political philosophy to first philosophy,” which has been the founding gesture of his work.5

Departing from the usual politico-theoretical meaning of the term, “anarchy” in Agamben instead

problematizes the relation of theory and praxis this discourse implies, an approach that has its exact

corollary in Schürmann’s work. In a passage Agamben cites approvingly, Schürmann writes, for in-

stance, that the anarchism of Proudhon and Bakunin only sought to “displace the origin, to substitute

the ‘rational’ power, principium, for the power of authority, princeps—as metaphysical an operation as has

1Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies: Homo Sacer 4,2, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016),
275.

2Jean Luc-Nancy, “Restituer,” in Anoush Ganjipour (ed.), Politique de l’exil: Giorgio Agamben et l’usage de la métaphysique (Paris:
Lignes, 2018), 181–196; 194; Étienne Balibar, “Inoperosità: usage et mésusage d’une négation,” in ibid., 17–39; 26–27.

3 Saul Newman, “What is an Insurrection? Destituent Power and Ontological Anarchy in Agamben and Stirner,” Political
Studies 65:2 (2016): 284–299.

4Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1998), 12.

5 Ibid., 44.
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ever been.”6 Such, then, are the stakes in this debate: thinking anarchy ontologically, outside the para-

meters of metaphysics.

Given this constellation and the complete silence on the relation between Schürmann and

Agamben, it will be necessary to focus on the decisive passages where Schürmann makes his appear-

ance in Agamben’s texts and to construct the dialogue between the two through a micrological reading,

introducing the terms that underwrite the debate as we go along. The first section delineates the field in

which this debate takes place by examining a passage where Agamben situates his own project in rela-

tion to Schürmann by discussing the post-Heideggerian discourse on the arche. The discussion will then

have to turn to Agamben’s engagement with Schürmann at the beginning of The Kingdom and the Glory,

where the contours of their thinking of arche and anarchy will come into view, especially as they pertain

to the notion of difference. The final section offers a close reading of Agamben’s critical acknowl-

edgement of Schürmann in the epilogue of The Use of Bodies to establish that Agamben’s theory of

“true anarchy” can indeed be seen as a result of his dialogue with Schürmann.

I. Archē

In a recent essay on “What is a Command?” Agamben offers an archaeology of the linguistic impera-

tive. Towards the beginning of his investigation, he remarks upon the aporia of an arche-ology of

commandment, given that the Greek arche means both origin as first principle and command as order. It

is no coincidence that Reiner Schürmann is cited here, since his entire work could be described as a

meditation on the double meaning of arche as “beginning and commanding.”7 Agamben sketches two

developments in post-Heideggerian thought that pertain to this problem:

The first—which we could define as an anarchic interpretation of Heidegger—is Reiner Schür-

mann’s beautiful book, Le principe d’anarchie (The Principle of Anarchy, 1982), which is an attempt to

6 Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, trans. Christine-Marie Gros (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), 6. In Schürmann’s work, there are two approving references to Agamben’s The
Coming Community. See Broken Hegemonies, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
2003), 161, 647 n. 48.

7 Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting, 36.

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 separate origin and commandment in order to reach something like a pure origin, a simple ‘coming-

to-presence,’ severed from any historical command. The second—which it will not be illegitimate to

define as the democratic interpretation of Heidegger—is the symmetrically opposed attempt of

Jacques Derrida to neutralize the origin in order to reach a pure imperative, without any content but

the pure injunction: interpret!8

This brief passage indicates how high the stakes are, for Agamben, in reading Schürmann. For it is of

course above all Agamben’s own position towards the arche in the post-Heideggerian discourse that is

thus solicited. He alludes to this when he adds the following, deeply ironic gloss: “Anarchy has always

seemed more interesting to me than democracy, but it goes without saying that everyone here is free to

think as they believe best.”9 What appears in this brief interlude, like a nod to Schürmann against Der -

rida, is only, in fact, the most recent installment of Agamben’s sustained attack on deconstruction, here

further nuanced through the valorization of Schürmann. Up to this point, Agamben’s critique pivoted

on the notions of writing and trace, which, he argued, mistake difference for a contestation of pres-

ence, whereas difference is in fact an intrinsic element of the metaphysical machine.

Crucial for the reading developed here is how this critique is taken up in the two tightly argued

and sharply polemical pages dedicated to Derrida in The Time that Remains, since they focus explicitly on

the arche.10 There, Agamben begins by showing how in Derrida the “origin is produced as a retroactive

effect of nonorigin and a trace.”11 Since any signified in the position of the origin is, on Agamben’s

reading of Derrida, always already caught in the iterability of the signifier, the movement of differentia-

tion effaces the self-presence of the arche. Derrida indeed insists time and again on this bifurcation of

the origin through iterability, the quasi-transcendental logic of the trace, the play of difference that in-

terrupts any stabilization of a ground. Underivable from presence, unacceptable within the logic of

8Giorgio Agamben, “What Is a Command?,” in Creation and Anarchy: The Work of Art and the Religion of Capitalism, trans.
Adam Kotsko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019), 51–65; 54.

9 Ibid.

10Cf. also Giorgio Agamben, “Philosophical Archaeology,” in The Signature of All Things: On Method, trans. Luca D’Isanto
and Kevin Attell (New York: Zone, 2009), 81–111.

11 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2005), 103.
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identity, the “originary trace or arche-trace” denotes, he contends explicitly, not only the “disappearance

of the origin,” but the fact that “the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except

reciprocally by a nonorigin.”12 Thus the self-identical arche is always already split through an irreducible

difference, which Derrida is willing to term “originary,” at least in a provisional fashion: “Differance by

itself would be more ‘originary,’ but one would no longer be able to call it ‘origin’ or ‘ground,’ those

notions belonging essentially to the history of onto-theology, to the system functioning as the effacing

of difference.”13

Agamben then puts heavy pressure on the ontological presupposition of this deconstruction of

the origin, arguing that Derrida must assume that there is “still signification beyond presence and ab-

sence.”14 The Derridean trace, Agamben suggests here, must be conceived as anterior to identity and

being, as a play of difference that has always already contaminated presence, and as such drives the en-

tire deconstructive project. But despite its feigned lack of nostalgia, deconstruction thus still has, as At-

tell succinctly puts it, “recourse to a sort of structural memory of the origin in the form of the trace’s

‘zero degree’ of signification, which is not pure nonsignification and which is the true and unexitin-

gusihable of deconstruction.”15 Signification degree zero, hence differential oscillation—deconstruction

retains the memory of the arche through the conviction that signification, in the form of differential

oscillation, is absolute, irreducible, interminable. This precisely excludes, we may note in passing, a

thinking of the zero degree as found in Barthes’ “neutral,” where it comes to denote “the temptation to

thwart, suspend, to elude” differential oppositions.16 On Agamben’s reading, the deconstructive bifur-

cation of the arche therefore holds on to and mistakes a differential play “prior” to identity for a contes-

tation of metaphysics, whereas this movement, in truth, only deepens historically contingent divisions

and, worse yet, abstracts them into an insuperable and quasi-transcendental logic. This, then, keeps

12 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997),
61.

13 Ibid., 23.

14 Agamben, The Time That Remains, 103.

15 Kevin Attell, Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 245.

16Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977-1978), trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 7.
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metaphysics operative in a perpetual endgame as it sets up the imperative of following the endless de-

ferment of difference, “an infinite wandering or interpretation,” as Agamben had already put it in an

early allegorical rendering of his critique.17 Such is the full technical argument underwriting the allusion

cited above. In lieu of the arche as self-present origin comes to reign the command (arche) of interpret-

ing the differential movement of the trace.

Without quoting Derrida’s work on messianic time, Agamben, in The Time that Remains, infers

the temporal structure of indefinite deferral from the logic of the trace. In the following discussion, he

first summarizes the criticism of Derrida and then gestures towards his own stance towards the arche:

A signification that only signifies itself can never seize hold of itself, it can never catch up with a

void in representation, nor does it ever allow any thing to be an in-significance […] In our tradition,

a metaphysical concept, which takes as its prime focus a moment of foundation and origin, coexists

with a messianic concept, which focuses on a moment of fulfilment. What is essentially messianic

and historic is the idea that fulfilment is possible by retrieving and revoking foundation, by coming

to terms with it.18

In other words: the positing of an “originary” difference by means of the arche-trace cannot come to

terms with the arche, since it disallows for a historical revoking of the origin, a neutralization that Agam-

ben will think in terms of in-signifance, that is, as a suspension of difference—as indifference. Crucial-

ly, and certainly known to Agamben, Schürmann himself distinguished his own philosophical project

sharply from Derrida with reference to these exact same concepts: trace and origin. Just as Agamben

insists that despite its feigned lack of nostalgia, deconstruction retains a relation to the origin through

the assumption of the trace’s zero degree signification, so, too, does Schürmann argue that Derrida

cannot think the bifurcation of the arche through difference other than as trauma and loss—as a “bad

17Giorgio Agamben, “Pardes: The Writing of Potentiality,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 205–219; 209.

18 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains,103–104.

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awakening.”19 This, then, defines the stakes of Agamben’s qualified alignment with Schürmann against

Derrida: coming to terms with arche.

What does this entail? Much could be objected to in these readings of Derrida. Yet, one re-

proach that has been made frequently—that Agamben’s critique of deconstruction leads to the attemp-

ted return to an origin—is a misreading as willful as it is gross. His critique of differential scission as

“originary” is relentless, yet this critique is oriented, not by a return to identity prior to difference, but

by a suspension of identity and difference, a rendering indifferent of both of these poles.20 His align-

ment with Schürmann makes clear once more that coming to terms with the arche does not consist of

restituting an original unicity, but tracing an-archic exit strategies. Yet the proximity to, and distance

from, Schürmann will pivot—once more—on the place of difference in relation to the arche.

II. An-archē

Ever since Language and Death Agamben has, in fact, argued that the role of the arche or foundation in

the history of metaphysics directly contradicts the standard Heideggerian and Derridean narratives.21

Metaphysics, Agamben asserts, has not been defined by foundations, but by the positing of a negative

ground, an absence of foundation, a constitutive lack. In Language and Death, Agamben initially made

this argument in terms of a negative presupposition in language—the “Voice,” an unsayable element

that establishes the instance of discourse via a subtraction of the animal voice—, which he traced re-

lentlessly from Hegel to Heidegger and Derrida. As with several themes in his work, this argument was

then taken up, transformed and reinscribed in a more general register. Arguing for an isomorphism be-

19Schürmann, From Principles to Anarchy, 321–322 n. 44. On Schürmann’s relation to French philosophy, see Malte Fabian
Rauch and Nicolas Schneider, “Of Peremption and Insurrection: Reiner Schürmann’s Encounter with Foucault,” in Reiner
Schürmann, Tomorrow the Manifold: Essays on Foucault, Anarchy, and the Singularization to Come (Zurich: diaphanes, 2019), 151–
181.

20For the seminal exposition of Agamben’s critique of difference, to which my presentation of the issue is indebted, see
William Watkin, Agamben and Indifference: A Critical Overview (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).

21 On how Agamben’s early work on aesthetics sets up his engagement with negativity, see Malte Fabian Rauch, “Giorgio
Agamben’s Archaeologies of Contemporary Art: Negativity, Inoperativity, Suspension,” in Journal of Italian Philosophy 3
(2020).
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tween language and being Agamben asserts that “being takes place in the nonplace of the foundation

(that is, in nothingness), being is the ungrounded (das Grundlose).”22

The most far reaching implication of this reframing of the rapport between negativity and arche

is that the entire critique of metaphysics as foundationalism—including Heidegger and Derrida—is

insufficient precisely because it proved unable to see this and has by that token reproduced it. The criti-

cal correlates of anti-foundationalism—difference, multiplicity, alterity—cannot, for this very reason,

form the terrain from where metaphysics is contested. On the contrary, these forms of “exteriority”

furnish the very substratum of metaphysics; they are included by their exclusion, that is to say, by being

negated and posited as (non-)ground. We saw how this plays out in Agamben’s critique of Derrida’s

understanding of the arche-trace. And while Agamben does develop an immanent conception of lan-

guage in Infancy and History to overcome one predicated on negativity, the problem of a negative foun-

dation of being and the potential strategies of deactivating it by means of a different modality of priva-

tion turned into one of the most urgent concerns of the Homo Sacer project.

To delineate his approach from the different forms of anti-foundationalism, Agamben defines

the arche in his most sustained meditation on method—not as a chronological datum, substantial foun-

dation or retroactive effect of the trace—but as an “operative force within history,” which establishes a

“field of bipolar historical currents” by means of which paradigms become operative through the logic

of inclusive-exclusion.23 One of the key moments of the investigations of these forces occurs in The

Kingdom and the Glory. We will focus here on the argument that establishes a negative ground of ac-

tion—non-ground or an-arche—as the pre-condition and necessity for Western power. For it is in this

context that Agamben was bound to confront Schürmann for the first time, chronologically speaking.

The question Agamben’s archaeology addresses is why oikonomia has become the paradigm of Western

power. This investigation of the theological premises of this paradigm provides something like an ex-

tension of Foucault’s genealogy of modern governmentality, in whose tradition Agamben inscribes the

22Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. Karen E. Piktus and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1991), xiii.

23 Agamben, “Philosophical Archaeology,” 110.

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project.24 Thus the discussion leads, thematically and historically, into a remote area, but the terms

traced thus far will quickly reappear as the actual stakes of the argument.

At the beginning of his investigation, Agamben focuses on the role of “oikonomia” in the gene-

sis of the doctrine of the Trinity. In keeping with the standard analyses, he sees the doctrine as an at-

tempt to prevent the fracturing of the ontological unity of God into the three different persons, thus

saving monotheism from the re-emergence of a plurality of divine figures. The strategy elaborated by

the Church Fathers to this end was to assert that God, the substance, is ontologically one, but that he

acts through the triplicity of the Father, the Son and the Spirit. Yet this attempt to suture the split in the

ontological substance, Agamben claims, only shifted the scission to another level, resulting in a break

between ontology and praxis: “The caesura that had to be averted at all costs on the level of being

reemerges, however, as a fracture between God and his action, between ontology and praxis.”25 In the-

ological terms, this rift between ontology and praxis—which has as its paradigm the doctrine of creatio

ex nihilo, the creation of the world through the free action of God without any grounding in being—

necessitated the differentiation between the transcendent pole of sovereign power (theology) and gov-

ernance and administration as its immanent enactment (economy). These two poles are functionally

interrelated in what Agamben terms the “governmental machine.”

Thus, in Agamben’s archaeology, the ontological groundlessness of praxis becomes both the

paradoxical precondition and the necessary reason for the government of the world through oikonomia.

Insofar as the fracture between theology and oikonomia, being and action, “makes the praxis free and

‘anarchic’, [it] opens in fact, at the same time, the possibility and necessity of its government.”26 For the

function of oikonomia is precisely to govern through this paradox, such that the transcendent being of

power can perform divine praxis immanently without being present in the world. Power is thus consti-

tuted as a dual structure of heterogenous yet interconnected elements with a vacuous center. It is con-

stitutively anti-foundational, an-archic, predicated on an indistinction of founding and founded ele-

24For a nuanced discussion of the relation between Agamben and Foucault in this regard, see German Eduardo Primero,
The Political Ontology of Giorgio Agamben: Signatures of Life and Power (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), chap. 4.

25 Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Homo Sacer II, 2) (Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 53.

26 Ibid., 66.
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ments. According to Agamben, this “anarchic” legacy will determine how the entire apparatus of West-

ern governmentality will unfold down to the “invisible hand” of the modern economy and the biopo-

litical apparatus. Anarchy is what is included as it is excluded—as arche—in the constitution of govern-

ment: “Anarchy is what government must presuppose and assume as the origin from which it derives

and at the same time, as the destination toward which it is traveling.”27 Power is thus determined

through the topology of the inclusive-exclusion, the establishment of an arche through the division and

capture of anarchy.

Ostensibly, Agamben’s archeology of a break between ontology and action at the structural

core of Western power contradicts Schürmann’s entire philosophical project. For, on Schürmann’s

reading, the history of metaphysics has not been defined by division or negative foundations, but, on

the contrary, by strategies of grounding praxis in ontology, of “deriving a practical or moral philosophy

from a first philosophy.”28 Hence, while Agamben claims that Western metaphysics is predicated on a

negative ground, on an-arche, Schürmann contends the opposite: that it has been constituted by captur-

ing difference through a self-identical arche with absolute authority. The mechanism unifying the meta-

physical field is, on this account, the pros hen structure, the reference of phenomena to a principle of

unicity that occupies the functional position of the One. This establishes, throughout the trajectory of

metaphysics, an isomorphism between first philosophy and practical philosophy by securing the depen-

dence of the latter on the former: “The arche always functions in relation to action as substance func-

tions in relation to its accidents, imparting sense and telos to them.”29

More specifically, Schürmann’s archai unfold the dual meaning of the Greek term. They are the

origin of an epoch, since they found it; and they command or rule an epoch, since they are the ultimate

principle that grounds action, invest it with authority and intelligibility. This notion of “epoch” recodes

Heidegger’s history of being by translating the constellations of presencing or “concealing–unconceal-

ing” into “economies of presence.”30 The history of metaphysics appears, then, as a succession of

27 Ibid., 64

28Reiner Schürmann, “‘What must I do?’ at the End of Metaphysics: Ethical Norms and the Hypothesis of a Historical
Closure,” in Tomorrow the Manifold, 31–53; 42.

29 Ibid., 44.

30 Cf. Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting, 44–45.

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economies of presence each of which is governed by an epochal principle; they all freeze the event of

presencing (Anwesen) into an ontology of presence (Anwesenheit) by anchoring it in an arche. Whereas the

focal point—the signified of the arche—is continually dislocated throughout the history of meta-

physics—Nature, God, the Subject—the operative mechanism itself remains firmly in place. Each arche

captures difference by grounding it in a first philosophy with direct political ramifications: “From Pla-

to’s philosopher-king to Machiavelli, this pros hen reference defines the relations of the many subjects to

the one leader as it defines the relations of the many accidents to substance and, in general, of the sec-

ondary analogates to prime analogates.”31

Schürmann’s argument pivots on the claim that the structure of the metaphysical apparatus be-

comes visible only in its ruins, and that its deconstruction is hence an intensification of metaphysics’

own vector of disintegration. This place of terminal entropy, where metaphysics can no longer suture

action and being, is what Schürmann terms the “closure of the metaphysical field” to designate that the

archic referent as such withers away: “The anarchy that is at issue here is the name of a history affecting

the ground or foundation of action […]”32 This notion of anarchy operates, then, on an ontological

level, adumbrating an economy of presencing that would no longer be “archic,” freezing difference

through identity, but an-archic: without foundation, hence multiple. Insofar as the arche grounds action,

such an economy would be in excess of any schema that could attribute a telos to it; action, no longer

detained by the arche, would become goalless, without why or pre-determined sense. This, then, is a rad-

ical political philosophy of difference: the arche obeys a logic of identity that freezes things manifold,

whereas an-arche is a figure of difference, an interruption of presence as constant presence that disal-

lows any ultimate authority in the practical domain.

With an incisive designation, Schürmann describes this historical and systematic transition with

the syntagma “principle of anarchy.” This seemingly contradictory phrasing denotes that the contem-

porary site—in Heideggerian terms, the epoch of technology—is doubly determined through the vio-

lent disintegration of the archic economy (the regime of identity) and the onset of an an-archic one,

the opening of difference: “The deconstruction is a discourse of transition. By putting the two words

31 Ibid., 40.

32 Ibid., 45.
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‘anarchy’ and ‘principle’ side by side, one prepares oneself for this epochal transition.”33 Bifrontal—

archic and anarchic—the contemporary site is defined by a deterioration of all foundations on which

action could be grounded, on the one hand, and the inability move beyond the boundary of meta-

physics’ disintegration, on the other.

Against this backdrop, Agamben’s criticism of Schürmann, which occurs in a long scholium at

the end of the chapter on “Being and Acting,” will not come as a surprise. Given that, for him, power

is founded on a break between being and action, he argues that in this paradigm “no figure of being is,

as such, in the position of the archē,” which is quite exactly Schürmann’s position.34 For that reason, he

is bound to find an “insufficiency” in Schürmann’s attempt to think an “anarchic economy” as a form

of “praxis and history without any foundation in being,” notwithstanding the fact that he acknowledges

the beauty of Schürmann’s book and credits him with being the only post-Heideggerian philosopher

who has understood the importance of the term “economy.”35 In an highly suggestive passage, Agam-

ben first points to what he sees as the limit of Schürmann’s analysis and then gestures towards the van-

ishing point of his own theory:

But ontotheology always already thinks the divine praxis as lacking a foundation in being, and, as a

matter of fact, intends to find an articulation between that which it has always already divided. In

other words, the oikonomia is always already anarchic, without foundation, and a rethinking of the

problem of anarchy in our political tradition becomes possible only if we begin with an awareness

of the secret theological nexus that links it to government and providence. The governmental par-

adigm […] is actually always already ‘anarchic-governmental’. This does not mean that, beyond

government and anarchy it is not possible to think an Ungovernable, that is, something that could

never assume the form of an oikonomia.36

33 Ibid., 8.

34 Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 139.

35 Ibid., 64–65.

36 Ibid., 65.
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 The first thing to note about the strategy used here is that it is one of Agamben’s signature

moves: disqualifying a critique of ontotheology as insufficient through an “always already” inversion

that reframes a critique of metaphysics as but one of its modalities. It may be recalled that Agamben

uses this argument in almost exactly these term against Derrida, as he criticizes him for being unable to

see the negative ontological foundation of metaphysics.37 Is Agamben, then, simply making the same

argument against Schürmann? Does he disqualify his thinking of anarchy as yet another anti-founda-

tionalist philosophy of difference that is unable to see the negative ground of power as being always

already anarchic?

Yes and no. That Agamben is not arguing for a straightforward dismissal is evinced by his play-

ing off Schürmann against Derrida and further clarified by his insistence that he is not arguing for any

return to a foundation of action in being. Moreover, Agamben’s vision of the Ungovernable comes

conspicuously close to Schürmann’s thinking of action without telos. For Schürmann, as we saw, such a

praxis would be completely released from capture by the arche; it would be “a life ‘without why’ […] a

life without a goal, without telos.”38 Readers familiar with Agamben’s writing on inoperativity will rec-

ognize the striking parallels. The nature of man, Agamben writes, is such that he “appears as the living

being that has no work, that is, the living being that has no specific nature and vocation.”39 Accordingly,

Agamben describes, in The Kingdom and the Glory, the vision of life beyond the capture as a “sui generis

‘praxis’ that consists in rendering all specific powers of acting or doing inoperative.”40 In this vein, he

has outlined, over the last years, several strategies of deactivating different forms of capture in various

apparatuses, thus freeing the essential inoperativity, “a being of pure potentiality, which no identity and

no work could exhaust.”41

37 Agamben, Language and Death, 39.

38 Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting, 10. The “without why” is quoted from Heidegger, who borrows the phrase from
Meister Eckhart via Angelus Silesius. See Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 10, ed. Petra Jaeger
(Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann 1997), 57–58. Cf. Schürmann’s gloss in Wandering Joy: Meister Eckhart's Mystical Philosophy
(Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne, 2001), 61–62.

39Giorgio Agamben, “The Work of Man,” trans. Kevin Attell, in Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCarloli (eds.), Giorgio
Agamben: Sovereignty and Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 1–11; 2.

40 Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 251.

41 Agamben, “The Work of Man,” 2.

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 Whereas Schürmann thinks a capture of action through a rational anchorage in the arche, which

might eventually give way to a form of an-archic action freed from identity, Agamben analyzes a cap-

ture of action through the inclusive-exclusion of various apparatuses, which could be deactivated by a

praxis that would render them inoperative. Strange divergence and convergence. For what is, despite

their incongruent estimations of difference, the distinguishing feature between Schürmann’s anarchic

praxis and Agamben’s inoperativity? Both neutralize any kind of metaphysical foundation or pre-estab-

lished telos, both radically disentangle action from its anchorage in the subject. Hence, while on first

appearance Agamben’s archeology of the break between being and acting flatly contradicts Schür-

mann’s genealogy of disintegrating foundations, it is, upon closer examination, quite obvious that their

views of anarchy can be seen as almost convergent. Otherwise put, the critique of Schürmann ad-

vanced in The Kingdom and the Glory cannot quite show why the fact that Schürmann “misses” the topol-

ogy of the inclusive-exclusion really establishes a clear divergence between their approaches. In this

sense, it could indeed be said that the theory of destituent potential, developed at the very end of the

Homo Sacer project, further extends Agamben’s engagement with Schürmann in the project of rethink-

ing anarchy

III. Destitution

While The Kingdom and the Glory gives a clear account of the relation between power and anarchy,

Agamben’s comments on “rethinking” political anarchy in relation to inoperativity remain gestures of

sorts, promissory notes for a theory the author develops later. One can find the full articulation of this

thematic nexus in The Use of Bodies, especially in the book’s epilogue, where Agamben describes the

function of the inclusive-exclusion as the establishment of an arche in order to advance the correlative

notion of anarchy as its deactivation. Generalizing the theory of the inclusive-exclusion to the entire

field covered by the Homo Sacer project, Agamben writes: “The strategy is always the same: something is

divided, excluded, and pushed to the bottom, and precisely through this exclusion, it is included as archè

and foundation.”42 What Agamben had, as we saw, once conceived as the negative ground of meta-

42 Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 264.

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physics eventually turns into the operative logic of the inclusive-exclusion that captures one element—

anomie, bare life, impotentiality—to posit it as foundation. Thus anarchy becomes the arche through its

inclusive-exclusion. Against this backdrop, Agamben defines his signal concept, “destituent potential,”

which further develops his earlier concepts, “inoperativity” and “indifference.” Destituent potential is

defined as an operation of deactivating the ontological or political relations in order to “free” the inop-

erative element that has been captured. In an important passage Agamben writes:

[W]hat has been divided from itself and captured in the exception—life, anomie, anarchic poten-

tial—now appears in its free and intact form. Here the proximity between destituent potential and

what in the course of our research we have designated by the term “inoperativity” appears clearly.

In both what is in question is the capacity to deactivate something and render it inoperative […]

without simply destroying it but by liberating the potentials that have remained inactive in it in or-

der to allow a different use of them.43

Destitution is, then, the movement of suspending an inclusive-exclusion and precisely in this move-

ment “liberating”—a term Agamben uses with extreme caution—the potential that had been captured

in it. Again, this is not a “return” to some a primordial unicity or identity. Rather, destitution is con-

ceived as an indifferentiation of the inclusive-exclusion, such that the terms are not destroyed, but ren-

dered inoperative, dispossessed of their capture and thus made available for a different use. “True” an-

archy, for Agamben, is therefore not a residual difference that persists within identity or power. It does

not, as in Schürmann, denote the vindication of multiplicity preceding identity, but rather the suspen-

sion of the relation between arche and an-arche, power and anomy, difference and identity. Here, desti-

tution is thus disclosed as the equivalent of a modality of privation or suspension that can neither be

thought in the horizon of a restrictive economy nor located within the opposition of dialectical nega-

tion and Nietzschean affirmation.

As Agamben relies on the terms established in The Kingdom and the Glory to frame this project,

Schürmann’s thought is already implicitly at play in the above passage. We may note right here that

43 Ibid., 272–273.
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Agamben unfortunately doesn’t address the relation between Schürmann’s concept of anarchy and his

notion of destitution, which is all the more striking given that Schürmann is one of the few thinkers to

have developed a full theory of destitution and Agamben is usually very careful to examine the geneal-

ogy of his concepts. In Broken Hegemonies, Schürmann conceptualizes a “destitution without a rebel,

transgression without an offender, negation without speakers, expropriation without expropriators,” a

theory, in other words, that has suggestive resonances with Agamben’s conceptual strategy.44 But even

though Agamben briefly alludes to Broken Hegemonies, he still keeps the discussion restricted to The Prin-

ciple of Anarchy.

Having rehearsed the argument about the Paulinina hos me as a form of deactivation, Agamben

claims that it is this destituent potential, which “both the anarchist tradition and twentieth-century

thought sought to define without truly succeeding in it.”45 With a by now familiar gesture, Agamben

marks the lineage in which he inscribes his project, while claiming that the respective authors have not

gone far enough. He names the “destruction of tradition in Heidegger, the deconstruction of the archè

and the fracture of hegemonies in Schürmann, [and] what (in the footsteps of Foucault) I have called

‘philosophical archaeology’,” and defines their common concern as the deposition of the arche.46 Only

here, at the very end of the Homo Sacer series, Schürmann suddenly appears as important a figure as

Heidegger and Foucault for Agamben’s project. Taking up the argument from The Kingdom, Agamben

goes on to state that:

[T]he thought that seeks to think anarchy—as negation of “origin” and “command,” prin-

cipium and princeps—remains imprisoned in endless aporias and contradictions. Because

power is constituted through the inclusive exclusion (the ex-ceptio) of anarchy, the only

possibility of thinking a true anarchy coincides with the lucid exposition of the anarchy

44Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, 615. The second extraordinary parallel to Agamben concerns the role of the middle voice,
which Schürmann introduces in his last book as a possibility of thinking of his signal concept, “double bind,” an originary
conflict of natality and morality (ibid., 631). Agamben (The Use of Bodies, 277) relates the middle voice to his notion of use
and the modal ontology it implies

45 Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 274–275.

46 Ibid., 275.
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 internal to power. Anarchy is that which becomes possible only in the moment that we

grasp and destitute the anarchy of power.47

In this passage, Agamben, already referencing Schürmann’s terminology,48 sums up the archaeology of

The Kingdom and the Glory and supplies the link for a transition towards thinking a “true anarchy.” On the

most general level, arguing that anarchy cannot be the mere negation of the arche is tantamount to ar-

guing that anarchy cannot be a figure of difference that interrupts the identity of the arche. Correlative-

ly, “true anarchy” turns, first, into the bearer and political horizon of inoperativeness, something that is

caught in various apparatuses to guarantee their functioning, and, second, in the movement of indiffe-

rentiation that suspends the couple of identity and difference at work in this capture. Granted that the

preceding analysis has brought to light the anarchy internal to power, the argument now details how

this anarchy is destituted to make possible such a “true anarchy,” not as its negation, but as deactivati-

on, indifferentiation or alternative use. The elliptical gloss Agamben supplies is that “destitution coinci-

des without remainder with constitution; position has no other consistency than in deposition.”49

In the scholium that is supposed to shed further light on this passage, he at first reiterates the

double meaning of arche in ancient Greek as origin and command and then points to Schürmann’s “im-

portant book,” The Principle of Anarchy, which has attempted to “deconstruct this apparatus.”50 Even-

tually, he makes clear that the actual “limit” of Schürmann’s approach is, in his view, to position anarchy

as principle:

It is not sufficient to separate origin and command, principium and princeps: as we have

shown in The Kingdom and the Glory, a king who rules but does not govern is only one of the

two poles of the governmental apparatus, and playing off one pole against the other is not

sufficient to halt their functioning. Anarchy can never be in the position of a principle: it

47 Ibid.

48The explication of the double meaning of the Greek arche through the Latin princeps and principium is a recurring theme in
Schürmann’s work. See, for example, Heidegger on Being and Acting, 4.

49 Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 275.

50 Ibid.
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 can only be liberated as a contact, where both archè as origin and archè as command are ex-

posed in their non-relation and neutralized.51

But what does it mean to “liberate” anarchy as a contact? What difference does this introduce

to Schürmann’s analysis? As we have seen, the contradictory syntagma “principle of anarchy” is used by

Schürmann only to denote the “essentially bifrontal” status of the historical site where the metaphysical

apparatus falls apart.52 What Agamben cannot mean here, if one would not ascribe a simple misreading

to him is, then, that Schürmann has the wrong conception of anarchy in any trivial sense, as if he ar-

gued it would normatively advisable to conceive of anarchy as a principle. The whole purpose of the

concept is to describe the specificity of the epochal transition between the economy of arche (identity)

and the economy of anarchy (difference), where a “praxology” is no longer derived from an archic on-

tology but has not opened onto a purely an-archic presencing.53

The interpretation put forth here is, therefore, that Agamben’s substantive disagreement con-

cerns the kind of historicity or rather topology that is implied in Schürmann’s theory as it offers a de-

construction of archai to establish the epochally ambivalent anarchy of the contemporary site as an ero-

sion of identity through difference. One would, then, have to read Agamben’s comment as a critique of

Schürmann’s bifrontal analysis: the inclusive-exclusion of anarchy as arche against the topology of the

“principle of anarchy.” If this reading is correct, then Agamben is arguing here that since Schürmann

thinks anarchy as a principle, he must think it, first, as difference and, second, as epochally transitional.

For Agamben, this is limited, first of all because, as mentioned above, it remains oblivious to the fact

that difference functions as a modality of metaphysics. Second, and in consequence of this, Schürmann

thus empties out the normative force of arche, that is, neutralizes arche as command. But he mistakes

this entropic moment for the glimpse at a pure origin, an an-archic form of difference thus far obfus-

cated through archic economies of presence. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, because it is too

closely tied to a Heideggerian stage in history of being whose advent has to be awaited. Alone among

51 Ibid., 276.

52 Schürmann, Heideger on Being and Acting, 288.

53 Ibid., 295.
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post-Heideggerian thinkers, Agamben makes a programmatic call for actively ending metaphysics,

which here translates into the gap between Schürmann’s “principle of anarchy” as a stage in the history

of being and Agamben’s “true anarchy” as the definitive deactivation of metaphysics.

The essential limitation of Schürmann is, in Agamben’s perspective, thus not only that he

missed the inclusive-exclusion of anarchy, but that he remained caught in an ambivalent philosophy of

difference that views the present as “still enclosed in the problematic of presence, but already outside

the fief where presence functions as constant presence, as identity of self with self, as unshakable

ground.”54 For Agamben, this appears, if we recall his pairing cited above, as the mirror image of Der -

rida’s fault. Whereas Derrida neutralizes the arche as first principle to end with the command of endless

deferrals, Schürmann neutralizes the authority of the arche in order to glimpse fleetingly at an anarchic

difference beyond the field governed by the arche. The vanishing point of Agamben’s thinking is to

leave both of these poles behind, in order to actively reach a point beyond the frameworks defined in

terms of identity and difference: a point of in-difference. There he sees the possibility of constituting a

form-of-life where disintegration and constitution would coincide. Thinking the most difficult, most

utopian thought of his philosophy, Agamben thinks an anarchic praxis as a life that is inseparable from

its form because it is the destitution of any apparatus that has divided it through an inclusive exclusion:

“It is only in living a life that it constitutes itself as a form-of-life, as the inoperativity immanent in

every life.”55 Such a life would hold itself in suspense: undivided, ungovernable, dwelling in neutrality

and indifference.

This strategy is most certainly anathema for Schürmann. His cautious glimpse at a “life without

why” beyond the closure of the metaphysical field is agnostic, anti-voluntaristic, austerely topological:

“The ‘without why’ points beyond the closure; therefore it cannot be pursued.”56 His is a philosophy of

transitory times, and emphatically so. We witness, he writes, “a terra deserta that is no longer ours, a terra

incognita that is not yet ours, and a transition in which an entire collectivity lives as if holding its

54 Schürmann, “‘What Must I Do?’,” 43.

55 Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 277.

56 Schürmann, Heideger on Being and Acting, 10.

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breath.”57 Agamben’s “true anarchy” refers to an almost identical, yet quite different operation than

Schürmann’s “principle of anarchy.” In a movement that is neither a regression from terra deserta nor a

prolepsis to terra incognita, what emerges in destitution is a point of indifference, the exhibition of a

void, where anarchy would be nothing other than the different use of the given. Agamben insists that

there is no event to be awaited that would change the relation between being and praxis, and that at the

heart of every capture there is already an inoperativity that could be released by a destitutent praxis:

“What then appears is not a chronologically more originary unit, nor a new and superior unity, but

something like a way out. The threshold of indiscernibility is the center of the ontologico-political ma-

chine: if one reaches it and holds oneself there in it, the machine can no longer function.”58

Certainly this does not settle the case between Agamben and Schürmann, not least because

Agamben’s “positive” elaboration of this “way out” has remained elusively abstract, leaving him possi-

bly open, from Schürmann’s perspective, to the charge of voluntarism and a lack of historical sensitivi-

ty. Moreover, the link between anarchy and destitution in Schürmann’s work has remained unexplored

in this entire conversation so far. What imposes itself here for future investigation is an interrogation

of Agamben’s work and Schürmann’s late theory of the “singularization to come” and the “double

bind,” terms that cannot be set aside through the arguments Agamben has brought up in relation to the

“principle of anarchy,” not least because they distance themselves from the idea of a pure presencing

and are, like Agamben’s thought, conceived as a vindication of the primacy of potentiality. This essay

only attempted to open up, for the first time, the field of tensions and intensities that defines this dia-

logue and to show why it is Schürmann who suddenly appears as a central interlocutor at the end of

Homo Sacer for thinking anarchy.

57 Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, 555.

58 Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 239.

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