Agamben's Curio Cabinet, Animality, and the Zone of Indeterminacy

Only for the sake of the hopeless is hope given to us ± Walter Benjamin In a letter addressed to fellow German-Jewish intellectual Martin Buber on 23 February 1927, Walter Benjamin begins to explicate the relationship between theory and pure praxis in orthodox Marxism, and then continues, ³«I hope to succeed in letting speak the creaturely dimension«[thus far] I have succeeded in grasping and holding onto this new, alien language that resounds loudly through the resonating mask [Schallmaske] of a completely changed environment.´1 What, we might ask, is this µnew, alien language ¶ to which Benjamin refers? What is Benjamin invoking here with his conception of a µcreaturely dimension ¶? Indeed, what would it possibly mean to let this dimension µspeak ¶?

The Faculty Lounge of the Paris Institute of Critical Thinking, 2022

This text is a slightly reworked version of the introduction to my book Agamben and the Animal. It argues that with the publication of The Open: Man and Animal Agamben made an important contribution to academic debates surrounding animal exploitation and liberation, and the book was particularly important for introducing a new vocabulary and a new conceptuality into the lexicon of various fields. Despite the book’s substantial impact, however, Agamben abruptly abandoned the question at its center and left the rich potential of its core argument largely unexplored. Indeed, Agamben’s entire oeuvre—especially the new conceptuality he proposed in his twenty-year-long project Homo Sacer—is a rich source of unsaid and unthematized issues concerning the animal question, begging to be explored further. Though Agamben never escapes the dualisms of the Western tradition, he does indeed gesture or point towards their overcoming. This text traces some lines of possible exploration that Agamben did not pursue but pointed to in his work. https://parisinstitute.org/pointing-beyond-agamben-and-the-animal/

By means of a comparison between Derrida and Agamben on the question of the limits and the totality of language, I endeavour to show, contra both Esposito and Negri [And Badiou? cf. Logics of Worlds], the positive nature of Agamben's response to biopolitics. This takes the form of a repoliticisation of life in a way that escapes its submission to sovereign power, which does not appeal to a classical restoration of any norm that transcends the immanence of zoological life and its potentials. I attempt to show concretely what this repoliticisation means by developing Agamben's notion of immanent life understood as potentiality and I try to show concretely just what these most primordial potentials are. The first political possibility that bare life is to reacquire is witnessing. After the possibilities of being killed and killing itself, I show that this is the third most primordial possibility of man, and indeed, as communal, as the first possibility of language which opens us to another, it forms the first political possibility, the beginning of a repoliticisation of zoological life. Witnessing as the most primal form of language for Agamben transgresses the limits of language and moves into bare life itself: at this point we tie together the first and second halves of our paper, insofar as the moment of language's self-reference is most properly understood as an expression of its capacity to signify, its potentiality for signification, expressing the very fact of language's existence, prior to any actualisation of this potential; It is shown at least in Agamben's later work that the space of this potential (or one of them, in any case) is that of the subject, and his capacity to think. It is just this theory of subjectivity, which is also a theory of decision, and one which relates language to the bare life that can be excluded by a certain fictitious relation of the apparatus of language to animal life, that Derrida's work does not appear to possess. In general, Derrida's deconstruction of metaphysics, which Agamben takes to identify its foundation upon an abyss, is already contained within metaphysics itself, and hence does not succeed in indicating anything positive beyond it. Related to this, all Agamben deems Derrida to be capable of is the positing of a certain continuum between the poles of an opposition, most saliently, that between life and language, or life and law, while Agamben asserts that this is precisely to remain at the level of what the current, generalised state of exception wishes us to believe in, and it is the task of a genuine critic of metaphysics and of contemporary biopolitics, to work to open up a discontinuity between the two.

Journal for Cultural Research, 2019

The present work contends that Derrida’s critique of Agamben in The Beast and the Sovereign reveals a fundamental misconception of Agamben’s formulation of the notion of biopolitics. Agamben differentiates the term ‘biopolitics’ from biologism and argues instead that biopolitics ought to be viewed through the metaphysical inheritance of the ontological division already present in Aristotle’s articulation of the notion of life. Derrida’s position is one that refutes any such division. Through Agamben’s reading of Aristotle’s uses of the terms zoè and bios, and the distinction Aristotle makes between the simple fact of living (tou zen) and living well (tou eu zen), the article brings to light the fragility of the threshold while illustrating its operative function in the Aristotelian apparatus. Derrida contends that Agamben’s notion of biopolitics does not advance the Heideggerian discourse con- cerning the definition of man as animal rationale. The article argues that, on the contrary, for Agamben, Heidegger’s position remains biopolitical and does not overcome the metaphysical problem of presupposition. This article traces and unearths Agamben’s hidden reply to Derrida and draws a connection between Agamben’s for- mulation of a form-of-life and Deleuze’s conceptualisation of life as absolute immanence.

The Challenges of Autonomy and Autonomy as a Challenge (Kritika & Kontext), 2022

The concept of autonomy, once central to the self-understanding of modern philosophy, is under attack from at least two sides: (1) on the one side, there is a reawakened interest in naturalist philosophy, questioning the hybris of human self-understanding as being “above nature” and essentially free and rational; (2) on the other side, there is the feminist critique of autonomy as the wrongful generalization of a certain masculine/western understanding of the subject as independent person. Both aim at the core of what the term “autonomy” normatively stands for: the capacity for rational self-determination. We inherit this concept of autonomy from Kant and encounter a variety of post-Kantian variations of it. In my paper, I will turn to Hegel in order to show that, although conceptualizing autonomy as rational self-determination, in his Philosophy of Nature, he incorporates elements of both naturalism and relational autonomy. Under revision, his concept of spirit provides us with a picture of the human as self-conscious animal or nature grasping itself. His notion of autonomy then turns out to be surprisingly fruitful for current debates, enabling us to understand our animalistic nature and our fundamental interdependency in a way that is not opposed to such concepts as rationality, freedom, and autonomy. As I will try to show, re-reading Hegel thus allows us to reconceptualize autonomy in a way that accords with its critics.

Praktyka Teoretyczna

The article attempts to reconstruct the difference between the ontologies of Hegel and Deleuze. The question of nature and Man (as different from the human animal) in both philosophies can provide crucial insight into the fundamental ontological disparity between the two philosophies. Nature, according to Hegel, is truly external to the idea and (as such) is at the same time a moment in the movement of the concept becoming what it is. Deleuze, in contrast, goes back to pre-Kantian ontology without abandoning the transcendental level of analysis. This enables him to bestow upon nature real externality and to transform the dialectic into a mechanism of opening to the inexhaustible outside, not of confirming the primacy of the concept. The case of becoming-animal demonstrates the political implications of this ontological choice: it can be understood as a way of putting an end to “Man,” an enterprise compatible with abolitionist postulates.

The theme of this article concerns the claim that the way the animal is conceived and understood has implications for the way that certain categories of human being are treated. With reference to the work of a range of thinkers, including Derrida, Heidegger, Agamben Arendt and Bataille, the article shows that the distinctions human-animal, necessity-freedom, bare life-way of life, can have the effect of excluding from the polis (the origin of politics) both animals and certain categories of human being. Most of all, the article is a critique of the view that before a way of life can be arrived at basic biological needs (the needs of ‘bare life’) must first be satisfied.

Etica & Politica / Ethics and Politics XXII.3, pp. 71-86, 2020

Potential or potentiality is the central idea of Agamben’s philosophy and informed from the very beginning his work, though implicitly at first. If the term entered Agamben’s vocabulary only in the mid 1980s, it constitutes nevertheless already the logical structure of the experience of infancy, which is in fact not the actuality but the potentiality of speech. And it already marked, in Heideggerian fashion, human exceptionality: if only human beings have infancy, it is because only humans have the potentiality not to speak, that is, to remain in in-fancy. This is, for Agamben, the very structure of potentiality – not only the potentiality of something, but that not to do or be something –, and it is what gives humans a freedom denied to nonhuman animals. The article analyses the concept of potential in Agamben’s philosophy, highlighting its fundamental anthropocentrism and logocentrism. However, with the “biopolitical turn” of the 1990s and the publication of The Open in 2002, Agamben progressively seeks a way to overcome this still metaphysical structure, and will find it in the concept of “outside of being” which precisely concludes The Open.

Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2021

This article develops a Hegelian account of self-consciousness by grounding it in being animal. It draws on contemporary naturalist and rationalist philosophy to support a transformative picture of the relationship between selfconsciousness and animal purposes, setting work by Danielle Macbeth, Terry Pinkard, Michael Thompson, and Matthew Boyle into dialogue with two passages from Hegel’s Aesthetics. Because we are conscious of them as such, the article argues, our ends are never simply given to us and must be determined, which means working them out collectively. But this makes dependency a structural feature of human life, as attaining the right relation to our ends means finding ourselves through the eyes of others instantiating our lifeform. Grounding these Hegelian insights in a naturalistic understanding of organic norms, we see that we should not oppose the self-transparency afforded by rationality to the opacity of animal drives. The article concludes that the mark of rationality is not the capacity to transcend or control animal instinct but that we can be problems to ourselves. Spiritual life is just natural life: natural life finding itself problematic.