Between Art and the Polis: Between

Agamben and Plato

KALLIOPI NIKOLOPOULOU
State University of New York, Buffalo

Abstract: In The Man Without Content, Giorgio Agamben makes a few but poignant
references to Platos understanding of art. Because arts impact was powerful, Plato
deemed art dangerous and subordinated it to politics. In contrast, Agamben argues,
modern art enjoys the privilege of formal autonomy at the cost of losing political significance. This essay develops the Platonic dimension in Agambens thought: whereas
Platonic censorship recognizes arts power by way of prohibition, the modern culturalist
tolerance of art is symptomatic of arts reduction into commodity and of the public
indifference toward it.

Ban and Bare Life in The Man without Content and Homo Sacer1

he question of art, at least from the moment art became subject to question,
seems to be that of a threshold, of a boundary. Asking whether art is good
or bad for common morality, Plato set a boundary between good imitation (exemplarity) and bad imitation (artistic deception), and banned art from the polis.
Instead of Platos morally laden question, the more secular modern spectator asks
a seemingly different one, which concludes likewise with yet another boundary:
confronted with a work of abstraction, (s)he is compelled to ask, is this art or
gibberishthereby putting art in the tribunal of taste, where the lines between
good art and bad art,high art and low art, art and non-art, are to be drawn.
Upon second glance, however, this modern boundary between art and non-art
turns out to also designate an anxiety about arts deceptive character: our suspicion
that art poses as art when in fact it is not. Consequently, even the modern question, which seems to be concerned exclusively with the nature of the artwork itself
rather than its moral or political implications, can be referred to an ethico-political

2011. Epoch, Volume 16, Issue 1 (Fall 2011). ISSN 1085-1968.

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dimensionthat of art cheating its public. Thus far we are not so removed from
Platos anxiety. Whether in the sphere of politics or of aesthetics, art appears only
as subject to judgment. Art is an impostor that threatens the city either by offering improper contents for public consumption or by remaining illusory even
when its contents are commendable, or worst of all perhapsand this is the
predicament of the modern spectatorby its perversion of imitation, since art
can also imitate itself in addition to imitating nature or the world at large. Hence,
the paradox of art being what it is not (non-art) precisely by being exceedingly
what it is supposed to be: a masterful imitation of everything, including of itself.
Yet, even though the fear of dupery may be a reason shared between the
Platonic expulsion of art from the city and the modern preoccupation with arts
authenticity, the anxiety about art is experienced differently in these two moments.
Agambens argument implies that the compulsion to distinguish art from nonart, a compulsion owing in part to the increasingly idiosyncratic vocabulary of
modern art, is symptomatic of the forgetting of the Platonic distinction between
art and politics andto be more preciseof the forgetting of the reasons behind
Platos condemnation of art. As we will see, Platos ban on poetry, although it has
instituted aesthetics, does not itself stem from an aesthetic understanding of art.
In other words, though it reads as a verdict, it is not rooted in a thinking of art
through a judgment of taste, as with the modern critic or spectator. Agamben is
well aware of this fact, and it is because of this that he finds Platos ban a more
appropriate response to the impact of poetry than art criticisms culturalist tolerance, a tolerance afforded by the eclipse of art and its diminishing impact on
us. Indeed, Agamben maintains that, despite the current proliferation of artists
and artworks, art has withdrawn from the public arena at the very moment that
the boundary separating art from politics was revoked. Now that political art is
everything but a scandal, arts effect on the political is minute compared to the
time of its Platonic contestation.
More than questioning the efficacy of specific, self-proclaimed political artists, Agamben is concerned with the possibility of art in general to participate
in our political reality. This is why he refrains from defining what kind of art
may be more properly politicalas, for instance, Theodor Adorno did, thereby
remaining within the confines of aesthetic theorization. The a-political aspect of
modern artnamely, its exceedingly subjective and formal characterwhich
Adorno, through a negative dialectical twist, identified (and so redeemed) as
the most politically radical ones, are read in Agamben for their irrecuperable
reserve from politics. Thus, the formal masterpieces of high modernism are no
less privative of politics than programmatic art is, the art Adorno dismissed for
not being genuine, for being an imposture in addition to being complicit with
political exploitation. Setting aside the fact that even much of explicitly political
art remains opaque and irrelevant to the general public, I would emphasize that

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for Agamben this very distinction between two kinds of artwhat Adorno calls
autonomous or difficult art and committed art2marks once again the
withdrawal of art from our political horizon.
Autonomous art does not necessarily identify a resistance to current politics
or an alternative vision of reality; rather, it names the modern, and perhaps most
decisive, rift between art and politics. This rift is most decisive in modernity
precisely because it conceals itself as rift, insisting instead on a continuous relation between art and philosophy. (Insofar as every politics qua rational discourse
is predicated upon philosophy, it follows that this continuity between art and
philosophy is then translated into one between art and politics.) However, in
thus concealing the difference of art from politics, the rift becomes all the more
exacerbated. Ironically, the very term autonomy, borrowed from the juridicopolitical vocabulary of sovereignty, disjoins rather than conjoins art to politics.3
Consequently, if for Agamben the negativity of autonomous art says anything of
politics, it says so not in offering any models of resistance vis vis mass entertainment, but in disclosing, through its stark retreat into itself, the fact that the
horizon of politics is itself at stake.
In what follows, I will concentrate on the philosophical threshold between art
and politics that Agamben draws as a result of a more primary separation, the
Platonic difference (diaforav) between philosophy and poetry that ended in the
banishment of poetry from the polis. The complex motivations and repercussions
of this banishment structure Agambens subsequent elaborations of the threshold
between art and politics. In speaking of the threshold as a limit that separates
what lies on either side of the divide but also invites and risks overstepping, we
should note an interesting chronological fact in the development of Agambens
reflections: the thought of the threshold in relation to art in The Man without
Content, published in Italy in 1994, precedes andI would saygrounds the
juridico-political elaboration of the threshold in Homo Sacer, published a year
later. Let me then cite two recurring examples of this conceptual crossing-over
between the two books, two examples that also contain in a nutshell Agambens
critique of aesthetics.
Firstly, the legal no-mans land of the refugee, which is described as an indiscernible state between life and death in Homo Sacer, has its precedent in the
nothingness of the terra aesthetica (56) of The Man without Contentnamely,
the scientific and objectifying spaces of art theory and the museum, where art
lives on as undead, withdrawn even from the pretense of relating to its audience.
Secondly, Agambens concern with the isolability and political appropriation of
natural lifewhat he calls bare lifein Homo Sacer also finds its roots in his
analysis of art. In The Man without Content Agamben maintains that the political
reduction of the human being to a natural being is symptomatic of a more profound ontological slippage from poesis to praxis. In other words, the forgetting of

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poesis (the bringing of something into being) in favor of praxis (the labor toward
self-sustenance) occasioned a simultaneous reduction in the political register
from the category of the human being to the category of natural life.4
Agamben describes the poetic principle with a quotation from Platos Symposium and proceeds shortly thereafter to establish the difference between poesis
and praxis as two different modes of productionnamely, as creating/making
versus doing/operating: In the Symposium Plato tells us about the full original
resonance of the word poivhsi~: any cause that brings into existence something
that was not there before is Poivhsi~. Every time that something is pro-duced,
that is, brought from concealment and nonbeing into the light of presence, there
is poivhsi~, pro-duction, poetry (5960). Agambens insistence on the hyphen in
the term pro-duction serves exactly to differentiate between these two modes of
producing. On the one hand, there is poetic pro-duction, where the prefix pro-
suggests the revealing of something previously invisiblea characteristic that
is common to both nature and to works of art. This mode of pro-duction allows
then both for a connection with nature (phusis) as well as for a differentiation
from it. Pro-duction acknowledges the difference of a natural process (let us say
the blossoming of a flower) from a work of art (let us say the painting of a flower)
in that the former originates in itself, whereas the latter originates in human
skill (techne), yet all the while refers human work back to nature insofar as both
nature and artwork obey the same creative principle of bringing forth something
hitherto nonexistent. On the other hand, there is the form of production without
the hyphen, an activity that relies solely on techne as the hallmark of the works
unbridgeable difference from nature. In other words, the difference of the works
origin from that of a natural process (which the term techne used to designate
without denying the common poetic principle behind natural and human works
alike) is now absolutized as techne blocks any relation between human artifice and
nature. Modern technology is, of course, the most obvious example of this form of
production, which yields products and consumer goods as opposed to artworks.
The pervading aspect of this latter mode of production is largely responsible
for our forgetting of the poetic mode of making: We are so accustomed to this
unified understanding of all of mans doing as praxis that we do not recognize
that it could be, and in other eras has been, conceived differently (68). Unlike
praxis as a labor of self-sustenance, poesis has to do with the birth of something
else, thus being a relational activity: [T]he work of art is not the result of a doing, not the actus of an agere but something substantially other (e{teron) than the
principle that has pro-duced it into presence (73). Whereas praxis presents itself
in the productthat is, the product simply mirrors its productionthe act of
making an artwork recedes in front of the work and lets the work be an entity on
its own right. This exteriority that inheres in the making of an artwork provides
the most profound link between art and politics.

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Both these aforementioned issuesnamely, arts banishment in the no-mans

land of academic and museal institutions, and the philosophical slippage from
the category of the human being to that of vital lifeare crucial to Agambens
argument against aesthetics. It is rather evident how he arrives at his critique of
aesthetics from the former issue: the central concern of an academic or curatorial
(that is, an aesthetic) encounter with art is not art, but judgment, since art serves
as a mere object of study, appreciation, and connoisseurshiphence, an object of
evaluation either for commercial or discursive use. How he arrives at his aesthetic
critique from the issue of vitalism is less apparent, though in a certain sense, this
issue reiterates his previous criticism in reverse. Insofar as the slippage from
human being to vital activity is for him symptomatic of the displacement of the
poetic being by the practical, self-sustaining organism, this point translates in the
realm of aesthetics as follows: the forgetting of poesis as ontologically transformative experience entails the triumph of the aesthetic man as man of tastethe
sensuous appreciator and consumer of art.5 In Agambens own formulation,Our
appreciation of art begins necessarily with the forgetting of art (43).
As I have suggested above, despite the continuity of these categories of the ban
and bare life from The Man without Content to Homo Sacer, I believe it is the former
book that presents us with a more urgent but also more ambivalent problematic,
precisely because it is concerned with the poetic rather than the political side of
the threshold. For instance, regardless of how we may judge the theoretical and
ethico-political merits of positing the camp as the exclusive biopolitical paradigm
of modernity in Homo Sacer, Agamben invests it with a descriptive certainty and
even a prognostic value for our times. There is no similar gesture in The Man
without Content, where we are left with the uncertainty of the future of art that
both puts at stake as well as opens the horizon for a rethinking of the human.
This is, then, the principal ambivalence running through The Man without
Content: though art has already been driven to irrelevance, obsoleteness, and
illegibility by aesthetics, and though we have no glimpses yet of what the future
holds for it or for us, art continues to be the placeholder of truth not least because
its historical itinerary delineates the changes in our conception of truth as well.
To be sure, art is displaced by art theory, and to be equally sure, art itself has consciously embraced and appropriated this displacement by turning itself into its
opposite: non-art. Agamben, indeed, gives a number of modern examples where
art is reduced to its opposite. In the most obvious of these examples, Duchamps
ready-mades, art empties out its contents and reduces its relation to truth to the
blank universal of formalization. As such, modern art appears often in Agambens
text as a writing under erasure. However, even this state of utter destitution, and the
threat of disorientation it carries within it, are eventually interpreted as arts proper
mode of disclosing our current reality. Endangered and endangering us through
its withdrawal, art offers a tenuous, largely unnoticed disclosure of nothingness,

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but a disclosure nonethelessin Agambens terms, the coming into presence of

privation itself (64). This is why each time Agamben discusses the Hegelian end
of art, he concludes with the Heideggerian question as to whether such an end
does not also mark the beginning from where we are called to think the destiny
of art and, hence, human destiny: Does it really mean that art has become for us
a thing of the past? That it has faded into the darkness of the twilight? Or does it
not rather mean that it has completed the circle of its metaphysical destiny and
has reentered the dawn of an origin in which not only its destiny but the very
destiny of man could be put in question in an initial manner? (54).

Without
In his article Five Remarks on Aesthetic Judgment, which is concerned with
the impact of Kantian aesthetics on modern art, Thierry de Duve defines the
borders of modernity in terms of the limitlessness of its art: we are within modernity, when anyone and everyone can be an artist.6 This is decidedly not the
Nietzschean world of art for artists only, a world of Dionysian joy and terror, of
poetic interest and passion, with which Agamben begins his book,7 but still, de
Duve and Agamben do agree on the point of modern arts limitlessness and of its
trespassing of all thresholds. Less exuberant in his diagnostic, however, Agamben
writes: Limitless, lacking content, double in its principle, it [art] wanders in the
nothingness of the terra aesthetica, in a desert of forms and contents that continually point it beyond its own image which it evokes and immediately abolishes in
the impossible attempt to found its own certainty (56). Utter democratization,
one is tempted to say, with its destruction of all limits, comes at the expense of
criteria, thus signaling the impossibility of comparison and of judgment itself.
Arts dispersal is no more the fecund dissemination of truth but a veritable
dismemberment. Orpheus begets the man without content, the modern artist,
whose creative experience amounts to the endless production of art without truth,
without internal necessity.
However, this is hardly the meaning behind Agambens analysis of modern art,
and we should not be hasty in assuming that a return to criteria and judgment
will guarantee the proper limits between true and fake art. To the contrary, it
is our thinking of art through judgment, our expectation that an artwork ought
to fit certain pre-established criteria, that has destroyed this other limit of art, this
limit that for Agamben marked first and foremost arts political possibilities. The
question then becomes, what is this other limit or, even better, where is it located?
I suggest that it is located at the moment where the work emerges outside of what
sprang it forth, where the work comes into its own from without its point of origin.
It is most likely the place Agamben calls in the above passage the beyond [arts]

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own image, a place that is both continually evoked by and inaccessible to the
work of art once the work has become exactly that: a work, an entity unto itself.
This discussion of the without begs the question of the origin, about which
Agamben writes:
What does originality mean? When we say that the work of art has the character
of originality (or authenticity), we do not simply mean by this that this work
is unique, that is, different from any other. Originality means proximity to the
origin. The work of art is original because it maintains a particular relationship to its origin, to its formal ajrchv, in the sense that it not only derives from
the latter and conforms to it but also remains in a relationship of permanent
proximity to it. (61)

We must note carefully Agambens choice of words: originality in a work of art

has to do with the works particular relationship to its moment of origination, a
relationship, furthermore, of permanent proximity. In order for the work to have
a relationship to its origin, it must be that the work is different from its source, but
their difference from each other is cast in terms of an indelible linka kind of
fidelity, or affiliation in the sense of derivation (filiation) and affinity in the sense
of a permanent bond (connatural attraction). Thus, a work of art does not simply
reduplicate its originating principle the way labor is reduplicated in a product, but
lets its tie to its origin appear by keeping the origin near but always at a certain
distance, a certain reserve. Since I have already mentioned the relation of artwork
to phusis as it is elaborated by Agamben, the following simile from nature may
give us a sense of the kind of relationship the artwork bears to its origin: such
relationship is much like the one between the blossom and its root. The blossom
is permanently connected to its root, yet the root remains invisible below the
ground, and when seen, it disarms the lay eye with its striking dissimilarity to
its offspring, the flower.
The articulation of this precarious proximity between origin and artwork,
which accounts for the subsequent difference between art as poesis and art as
techne, had already preoccupied Plato and marked a certain rift between his
thinking of art in the Ion and in the Republic. In the former work, the proximity
between the artist, the work, and its divinely inspired origin is so strongindeed,
it is described in terms of magnetic attractionthat the distance between them
is collapsed.8 The artist and his work are divine just as the original inspiration
that brought forth the work was divine. This cancellation of the distance results
in part to arts favor, but with the proviso that art sacrifice its name. That art is
a misnomer for what Socrates seeks to define in this dialogue is emphasized
by the choice of art under discussion: poetry. The privileging of versification
owes to the fact that Socrates is interested in the event of poesis, which in Greek
is synonymous with versification, and not in the notion of art as skill. Socrates
repeatedly attributes the rhapsodes virtuosity not to art (tevcnh), or knowledge

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(ejpisthvmh), but to what he calls divine power (qeiva duvnami~) (Ion 533d) or
divine dispensation (qeiva/ moivra/) (Ion 534c). He thus explains to Ion:
[T]his is not an art in you, whereby you speak well on Homer, but a divine
power, which moves you like that in the stone which Euripides named a
magnet, but most people call Heraclea stone. For this stone not only attracts
iron rings, but imparts to them a power whereby they in turn are able to do
the very same thing as the stone, and attract other rings; so that sometimes
there is formed quite a long chain of bits of iron and rings, suspended one
from another. (533de)

Later on, Socrates again rebuts Ions claim that his talent is an art based on
knowledge: Now if you are an artist and ... you only promised me a display
about Homer to deceive me, you are playing false; whilst if you are no artist, but
speak fully and finely about Homer, as I said you did, without any knowledge but
by divine dispensation which causes you to be possessed by the poet, you play
quite fair (542a).
That poetry is not art in the sense of skill or craft as is horsemanship, fishing, and so on, but divine lot, forms the crux of this dialogue.9 It turns out that
Socrates main reason for distrusting the term art as an adequate description
of such creative activity has to do with the singularity of this poetic activity, a
singularity that contrasts with the term art as a genusnamely, as a general
gathering of the skills involved in a particular craft. Socrates emphasizes this
singularity of poetrys divine lot when he says that [o]ne poet is suspended from
one Muse, another from another. ... And from these first ringsthe poetsare
suspended various others, which are thus inspired, some by Orpheus and others
by Musaeus; but the majority are possessed and held by Homer (536b). Thus,
from each specific combination of poets held together, various chains of poetic
legacy emerge. One would suspect that all these chains would add up to the same
genus of art, the art of poetry, but Socrates resists exactly this gesture. Poetic
utterances cannot be subsumed under a common know-how the way that all
fishing techniqueswhether used on rivers, lakes, or the seaform together
the art of fishing, since poetry is not the result of know-how, but of a singular
divine gift. This is why Ion is instantly moved by recitations of Homer, but remains
indifferent to discourses on any other poet. Homer attracts him for no reason in
the strict sense of reason as rational cause; instead, Homer is simply befitting to
Ions emotional sensibility.
Furthermore, it is only as such, as not-art, and as divine gift alone, that poetry
escapes the deception of which it could otherwise be accused, since it purports
to know actions and events beyond its scope of expert competency. Though
Socrates does not explicitly accuse poetry of deception in this dialogue, he does
suggest repeatedly that Homers description of other arts, such as medicine,
charioteering, or fishing, may not be correct (538bd). The reason, however,

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25

that deception is a lesser concern hereif a concern at allhas to do with the

fact that poetry is not viewed as a techne, as a product of intelligent deliberation, and therefore is not responsible for errors of intellection. In other words,
in this Platonic scenario, Socrates rescues poetry from its delusional character
by removing it from the realm of art qua productionhence also reproduction
and imitationand keeping it through this magnetic attraction as close, if not
coincident, to its divine origin. The elimination of techne from the event of poesis
entails the simultaneous elimination of the distance between origin and work. As
techne does not mediate the divine frenzy that inspires the poet, he and his work
are immediately coincident with their source. The divinely inspired poet is then
celebrated for his gift, but the stage is now cleared for the next scenario, where
poetic madness becomes a political liability.
Thus we come to this latter, more fatal of Platos readings from his Republic,10
which is also the one Agamben quotes in the opening chapter of The Man without
Content. Here again, poetry is synonymous with divinity, but this time the poet is
not simply the light and winged and sacred thing Socrates sees in the Ion (534b),
but a terrifying creature, whose madness threatens the rational order of the city:
If a man who was capable by his cunning of assuming every kind of shape
and imitating all things should arrive in our city, bringing with himself the
poems which he wished to exhibit, we should fall down and worship him as a
holy and wondrous and delightful creature, but should say to him that there
is no man of that kind among us in our city, nor is it lawful for such a man to
arise among us, and we should send him away to another city, after pouring
myrrh down over his head and crowning him with fillets of woo[l]. (Platos
Republic 398a as quoted in Agamben, The Man without Content, 3)11

His divine calling may earn him a precious moment of adoration, but it does not
spare the poet from the exile to which the polis must ultimately condemn him
for his flight of fancy. Though the fate of the poet is markedly different from the
Ion to the Republic, in both cases Platos agon unfolds around the articulation of
the relation between origin and artwork.
I would suggest that it is this very proximity to which Plato fell prey, and so
felt compelled to equate the work with the divine terror (qei`o~ fovbo~) that is its
source. And yet, in thus falling prey to a quick immediacy, Plato was not so far
removed from the truth when he spoke of art in terms of terror: even if art is not
coincident with its terrible source but only proximate to it, art still induces another
kind of terror. In fact, the works terrifying strangeness is due to (and not in spite
of) this simultaneous nearness and distance with which the work holds on to its
origin. What is uncanny about an artwork is precisely its departure from its place
of origin, its capacity for dissemblance. To recall the example of the flower and its
root, we could say that arts power of dissimulation disturbs even more so than

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the unsettling feeling we may have at the sight of the muddy and entangled root
of our most beloved blossom.
Hence, even though Plato seems to dwell on the proximity rather than the difference between the artwork and its beginnings, the intimation of this difference
marks the strangeness of his own definition of art as imitation in the Republic,
and his partial expulsion of art, for not all art is banished from his ideal city.
Let us then turn our attention to Platos notion of imitation, with which I began
this essay on art and politics, since this notionconnected as it is in Plato with
deceptiondrives his political judgment against art.
Art in Platos Republic is defined and condemned as imitation, thus as an incomplete, false, and illusory disclosure of reality, which corrupts the city. However,
as I also mentioned at the start of the essay, despite Platos association of imitation
with deception, he is not against all imitation. In the Republic, he distinguishes
between good and bad imitation in story-telling, all the while encouraging good
imitation for its pedagogical importance12 in the polis: the stories on the accepted
list we will induce nurses and mothers to tell to the children and so shape their
souls (Rep. II.377c). Even poetry would be allowed in the polis if it produced
good imitations, that is, if it produced characters and values that would foster
civic consciousness. Indeed, Agambens citation of the poets expulsion from the
city stops short of the interesting exception Plato makes immediately afterward:
but we ourselves, for our souls good, should continue to employ the more austere
and less delightful poet and taleteller, who would imitate the diction of the good
man and would tell his tale in the patterns which we prescribed in the beginning,
when we set out to educate our soldiers (Rep. III.398b, my italics). We want a
poet, Plato seems to say, who is less of a divine creature and more of an ordinary
artisan, a skilled worker of words, an imitator, who knows how to obey certain
rules and pre-established criteria in order to produce texts of pedagogical value.
Strangely, the logic of the Ion is inverted in the Republic: whereas calling the poet
an artist was a misnomer in the former dialogue, now Plato wishes for a poet
who is precisely an artist, a technician, and in being that, he is also a responsible
pedagogue and citizen. Imitation, after all, can serve rational purposes and be
subject to checkthis is its goodnesswhereas divine inspiration is thoroughly arbitrary and therefore threatening.
Consequently, the problem of the Republic is that the poets usually present us
with bad imitations, namely, bad examples to follow. This apparently simple statement, however, discloses something extremely complex in Platos theory of art. It
says first and foremost that arts definition as imitation hinges less on its previous
relation to an original it was supposed to copy, and more on its own status as the
origin of future imitative acts by the citys youth, who will take poetic characters
as role models. But the question still remains: if art is the origin of other acts, what
is its origin? Whence these terrible plots and unseemly characters? Platos logic

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27

pushes us to take a leap: I suggest that if his critique of poetry as bad imitation
does not always stem from its being a poor imitation, from its not reproducing
nature successfully, then it stems from the exact opposite principlenamely, from
arts wish to escape imitative stature altogether. Not only would art disclaim any
possibility of its imitation by life, but it would show this impossibility in the very
fact that it, itself, does not bear a simply imitative relation to an exterior source.
Put differently, it is arts flight from the imitation of an external original, its wish
to have its own origin, which is termed bad imitation. Paradoxically then, it is
the counter-imitative, rather than the imitative impulse of artas it has been
so often supposedthat lies at the bottom of its illusory character for Plato. It
is in this light that we can understand why Plato condemns insistently Homers
depiction of the pettiness of the gods as offering a bad example: Homer evokes
and invokes the gods, and in that sense he is their origination; after all, it would
be impossible to copy down the gods the way one is said to copy in painting a
natural creature. But this appropriation of its own origin is what ultimately puts
art at risk in Plato.
Here is summarily the abyss that art faces in these two dialogues: whereas in
the Ion poetry is spared the verdict of deception through an insanity plea based on
its identification with its mad, divine source, in the Republic art can only survive
as good imitation of an origin(al) so distant from it that it belongs to an entirely
different plane than the workthe so-called natural, empirical plane. The precariousness of this fine border between origin and work leads Platos thought to
these two extremes: utter coincidence in divine madness, which renders art holy
but politically unreliable, or the impregnable hierarchy of a higher original in
nature and its lower imitation in the work of art, which makes art appropriate
for the average citizen at the expense of denying it its higher destiny of inspired
revelation. In thus considering this without, which is also the wherefrom of
the work, Plato faced the great fear that, locked in this paradox, art risks always
being without content: without political content as a holy endeavor, and without
genuine truth-content as a political prop. Today, it is also between these withouts
that Agamben rehearses the whither of modern art.

Whither?
Indeed, content-less art is the essence of art today. What could be more artistic
than art for its own sake, art that does not look for a referent outside its own
workingsmodernitys dream of a self-reflexive poetics? Duchamps Fountain
exemplifies the issues surrounding arts absolute self-enclosure. Intentioned in
large part as a scandal, Duchamps piece raises a host of questions: by what criteria
is it art, or is it not, and what does it mean to reduce art to this very question of
non-being? The lowest object of utility, a urinal, claims the status of an aesthetic

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work, thus also claiming the space of an impossible universalfor what kind of
truth or shared affect can such an ironic solipsism disclose? The question of affect
is inextricable from the question of content, and this is why de Duve is right to
point out that, faced with the hollowness of the ready-made, one cannot speak
about the content of ones affect, but simply about the presence of an indeterminate
feeling of having something to do with art (de Duve 1999: 20).
This is also for Agamben the enigma of modern art: how could it be that when
utensils and art occupied two distinctly different worlds, art succeeded in permeating many more aspects of the ordinary human life, when at present so much of
politically engaged art seems incapable of voicing legibly a single concern? Let us
be warned against the tendency of thinking that Agamben is nostalgic either for a
return to the Greek polis, or for a genuine kind of prolet-art. He is rather asking the
following simple, yet poignant question: why is it that for all the politicization of
art nowadays, our political institutions are hardly affected, let alone threatened in
the way Plato was afraid they would be by a group of poets? Why, when there was
a boundary between art and the public, the exchange between these two worlds
was constant, but now that the boundary is lifted, art remains hermetically sealed
from the world it once opened up?
De Duves solution to the problem constitutes Agambens question. For de Duve,
modern art has the deictic function of the proper name. I baptize something as
artI say, this is artwhere the word art is a proper name whose bearers
one can only designate by pointing (de Duve 1999: 19). Consequently, and in accordance with Kants insistence on the non-conceptuality of aesthetic judgment,
art is ... not a concept, but a collection of examplesdifferent for everyone
(de Duve 1999: 20). In my own list of favorites, Duchamps urinal is established
as art by virtue of metonymy and then analogy: in my list, it is contiguous to
Michelangelos Sibyls, Mozarts Requiem, and so on, and this contiguity guarantees
some sort of resemblanceDuchamps Fountain is art just like its neighbor, the
Delphic Sibyl, is art; otherwise it would not be in the same list. This argument
does not fare as well with Agamben, since for him the figure of the collector is
not so unproblematic. As a disinterested spectator, who judges this to be art and
that not to be art, the collector for Agamben figures arts decline. The collectors
appearance marks the moment when art loses its original relation to truth and
becomes a collectiblea site for the exercise of taste, an endangered species to
be rescued and appreciated on the dusty display shelf.
Furthermore, exemplarity is also at stake, since in de Duves scheme, the
exemplary is operative only within the subjective frame and logic of a single
individual collection. An example is supposed to be normative, and thus utterly
legible by itself, not by association. An example legitimizes the link among the
other listed items; it does not draw its force by being associated with them. In
other words, the example stands as the representative of the collection by having

Between Art and the Polis: Between Agamben and Plato

29

a metaphorical rather than a metonymic relation to the whole. For Agamben, the
withdrawal of art into the museum or the collection is precisely its withdrawal
from exemplarity and representativeness. It is in not representing anything but
the limitless freedom and subjectivity of the artist, who proceeds unaccountable to anyone else, including to his or her own material, that contemporary art
presents us with the problem of our destiny. Eventually, de Duve also accepts to
some extent this double-edged sword of modernity. He writes that, the fact that
one can be an artist without being a painter, or sculptor, or poet, or musician, [is]
a fact that I still think one must not stop marveling at or worrying over (24).
The Man without Content performs this simultaneous movement of marveling
and worrying over the fate of art. The fact that art offers us a world and at the same
time endangers this world brings us back to the logic of the threshold, of the fine
line, in Agambens text. As I mentioned earlier on, Agambens argument relies first
and foremost on the Platonic threshold between poetry and the polis that results in
the banishment of the former from the latter. This banishment Agamben correctly
interprets not as a simply negative expulsive move, but as Platos profound understanding of the divine terror to which art exposes us, and which may endanger
the citys rational rule. In other words, Plato the censor emerges as a figure who
is truly affected by the work. He cannot pretend to respect, appreciate, or judge
art from a safe distance because he feels the shuddering truth of the artwork all
too near. Over and against the tasteful but disinterested collector, the menacing
censor emerges implicitly as an example of a spectator who is all too interested
in the work and who, tormented by it, yields art its dues by way of prohibition.
Indeed, the figure of the censor is the one that bridges the split between
spectator and artist, a split Agamben attributes to Kant and to modern aesthetics in general. Whereas Kants ideal spectator has a detached eye, Platos censor
is interested in the work to the point of being afraid that he will be swept away
by itand in a sense he already is. He thus confronts the work as his enemy. But
the only other person who also sees in the work his mortal enemy is, as Agamben
remarks, the artist:
For the one who creates it, art becomes an increasingly uncanny experience,
with respect to which speaking of interest is at the very least a euphemism,
because what is at stake seems to be not in any way the production of a beautiful work but instead the life and death of the author, or at least his or her
spiritual health. To the increasing innocence of the spectators experience in
front of the beautiful object corresponds the increasing danger inherent in the
artists experience, for whom arts promesse de bonheur becomes the poison
that contaminates and destroys his existence. (5)

The censor is a powerful version of the dream of the spectator as artist. For, after all,
which great artist would not be relieved to be rid of art? Plato and Rimbaud share
the same dream, which is the same nightmare. To understand this pro-ductive13

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Kalliopi Nikolopoulou

logic of censorship means to also understand why Agamben begins The Man
without Content with a reading of Nietzsche that re-emphasizes the importance of
the artistnamely, of the creative principleover and against the post-Kantian
world of spectatorial reception. Such an initiatory gesture should not be dismissed
as a conservative exhuming of the artist after the death sentence conferred upon
him/her by postmodern aesthetics. Agamben is actually doing the opposite of
reclaiming the cult of genius, which is itself a Kantian category. The genius, the
misunderstood and monadic artist, is a symptom of modernity, which, in granting
infinite freedom and subjectivity to the artist, conveniently isolates him from the
polis in a fashion more efficacious and insidious than Platos outright but pained
verdict. Agambens is a different understanding of the artist as someone who is
endangered and ultimately annihilated by art, but who, accordingly, can never be
as disinterested to this art as the Kantian spectator is expected to be.
It should be noted at this point that Agambens reading of Kant is itself very
interested and, in fact, strategic. Agamben espouses Nietzsches refutation of the
Kantian distinction between the empirical and the transcendental, which aligns
the empirical with interest, contingency, and thus the need for concepts, and the
transcendental with disinterest, universality, and thus freedom from conceptual
determination. Though Nietzsche finds Kants valorization of disinterest to be
responsible for the culture of indifference toward art, it should be said that for
Kant this distinction between the empirical and the transcendental was to serve
the opposite purpose: it was meant to guarantee a deeper engagement with art
than the facile pronouncement of the bourgeois subjects taste. In other words,
contrary to the notion that the disinterested posture amounts to an indifferent, disengaged aesthetic experience, disinterest ensured that the work not be
encountered as an object whose mere purpose was to satisfy the spectators
subjective inclinations. Nietzsche attacks Kant because he is not convinced of
such a scheme. In turn, Agamben follows Nietzsches polemic because he seems
to be less interested in Kants philosophical intentions and more in the historical
and discursive legacy of Kants rhetoric, namely, the rise of a public indifference
to art that was concomitant with and symptomatic of Enlightenment aesthetics.
Thus, for Agamben, the split effected by Kant between artist and spectator in
modern aesthetics, a split between risk and judgment, between terror and detachment, gives way to a number of other splits that I can only mention in passing
heresplits that usually collapse onto themselves leaving us with nothing. The
artist/spectator division splits the artists themselves into Terrorists and Rhetoricians,14 the latter insisting on form much like the spectator, the former on pure
and unmediated content (8). The spectator is also internally split. In a rhetoric that
resonates with Marxs critique of alienation, Agamben describes the alienation of
the spectator from himself and from the object of his judgment: The spectators
is the most radical split: his principle is what is most alien to him; his essence is

Between Art and the Polis: Between Agamben and Plato

31

in that which, by definition, does not belong to him (24). What does not belong
to him is the creative experience, which he utterly lacks, but which does not stop
him from pronouncing judgments. This is judgment without justification, an
inessential and illegitimate judgment, since the judge cannot grasp the artwork
he/she judges. Moreover, he/she cannot grasp it not because of poor taste and
lack of connoisseurship, but because art is not to be known or grasped in that
manner at all. At any rate, the spectatorial judgment has been rendered virtually
redundant by modern art, which internalizes and performs its own judgment by
making it its sole content. As if all this were not enough, despite his/her judging
agency, the spectator ends up a rather passive figure, ultimately relinquishing
complete freedom to the artist, who is after all his/her own best judge. Indeed,
even if I, the common spectator, do not deem this as art, I do at the minimum
concede that poetic license has no borders whatsoever. An artist is an artist who
is a critic who is an artist, and this infinite tautology constitutes, or rather evacuates, his/her content.
This tautology is the modern symptom of the forgetting of the difference
(diaforav) between poetry (and, in a sense, art in general) and philosophy (judgment, reflection, political thought). This difference, as Plato suggests, was operative
not only in his thought, but possibly much earlier, since already for him it is an old
quarrel (palaia; mevn ti~ diafora; filosofiva/ te kai; poihtikh`/) (Rep. X.607b). As
I mentioned in the beginning of my essay, Agambens exploration of the relation
between art and politics hinges precisely on this modern philosophical collapse
of the artistic and critical faculties that, in turn, is responsible for the political
paradox of modern artnamely, the fact that art becomes politically impotent the
more it is invested with political urgency. Agamben implies that once the Platonic
quarrel between philosophy and poetry was settled, the artist is ironically robbed
both of art (art becomes non-art) and of politics (illegible art cannot have any
shared truth-content). This is the case, of course, because the quarrel is all but
settled. Plato attempted to resolve it at first, and his solution was to side entirely
with philosophy and expel art from the city. However, expulsion is no settlement,
and in this sense his failure is also to his credit, for a gesture as radical as his
preserves the difference between these two realms. Modern aesthetics toowith
Hegel as its cornerstonetook wholeheartedly the side of philosophy, but this
time not by expelling art, but by subsuming it under philosophy, by making the
artist a critic. When such differences were tacitly observed, Agamben seems to be
suggesting, when the artist was revered but was also bound by the choice of his
material and held accountable by it and by his public, art mattered. In the present age of infinite aesthetic subjectivity, where everyone could potentially be an
artist, we are ironically left not with abundance, but with the poverty of art both
at its producing and receiving ends. In Agambens own example, compared to
Renaissance church paintings that involved the pope, the faithful, and reflected a

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Kalliopi Nikolopoulou

general spiritual life (156), political art today resembles a voice in the desert. Yet
before we rush in to judge Agambens attitude as conservative and sentimental,
let me point out one last turn in his analysis, a doubly edged turn from where this
threshold between art and politics demands to be thought in his text.
On the one hand, Agamben accepts the Hegelian proposition that art is no more
the necessary medium for the disclosure of truth, while on the other he maintains
that even in its withdrawal art remains disclosive not only of its own destiny,
but of human destiny as well. This happens in part because of Agambens own
emphatically Hegelian reading of Hegels end of artnamely, a reading posited
from a retrospective vantage point: Hegel thinks about art in the most elevated
manner possible, that is, from the perspective of its self-transcendence (53).
Consequently, Agamben configures the Hegelian end of art as a (re)beginning: His [Hegels] is in no way a simple eulogy, but is rather a meditation on
the problem of art at the outer limit of its destiny, when art loosens itself from
itself and moves in pure nothingness, suspended in a kind of diaphanous limbo
between no-longer-being and not-yet-being (53). To read Hegel this way is to ask
with him the question of art inceptually from its end: has art ever been? Has art
ever existed in any other way than in relation to two sorry metaphysical alternativeseither as a servant to the concept, or as a merely sensuous thing designed
to appeal to our taste? In this light, Hegels end of art, usually understood to be
synonymous with the reign of aesthetics, is reconsidered: it reads retroactively
as an end of our idea of art, that is, as an end of art qua aesthetics; it means, as
Agamben writes, that art has ended only in the sense that it has completed the
circle of its metaphysical destiny (54). After all, Hegel is not the origin, but the
culmination of Western aesthetics, and his thought itself needs to be thought from
that point of culmination, as the completion and thus also the consummation of
the aesthetic understanding of art. Therefore, reading with rather than against
Hegel, Agamben calls for a destruction of aesthetics (6) as a first step toward a
more originary understanding of art as poesis.
The problem with aesthetics in general is that it cannot conceive of art in any
other way than the merely sensuous. Hegel is also complicit in this, even as his
thought can be read to surpass aesthetics. Whether Hegelian or post-Hegelian,
aesthetics respectively condemns or celebrates art for its sensuous aspects: for
Hegel, the contingency of the sensuous renders it an inadequate mode for disclosing the idea; for post-Hegelian aestheticians, most notably Adorno, the excess of
the sensuous promises to relieve us from the oppressiveness of conceptual abstraction. In separating the sensuous from the conceptual, both branches of aesthetics
seem to uphold a certain aspect of the Platonic difference, albeit without Platos
recognition of the troubling super-sensuous, yet non-conceptual, nature of art.
For all of Platos idealism, which opposed the sensuous to the Idea, he saw that art
represents a third possibility, one in which the super-sensuous does not have the

Between Art and the Polis: Between Agamben and Plato

33

Idea as its only and necessary synonym.15 This third possibilitynamely, that
art is something thought-provoking but non-conceptualis its poetic possibility.
Let us remember that the divine lot of poetry Socrates was speaking about in the
Ion refers precisely to this notion of art: the divine is beyond the sensuous, yet it
equally does not belong to the realm of concepts that govern techne.
The destruction of aesthetics as arts most recent limit opens up an indeterminate future for art, one through which art could possibly reclaim its originary
status. It follows that such a reclaiming would demand an equally originary
understanding of limits and of the difference between art and philosophical
discourse as genuine differencethus also proximityand not as dialectical
opposition. The Man without Content is an approach toward this between of
art and philosophy, or art and politics. Naturally, its chapters also unfold as
encounters between Nietzsche and Kant, Aristotle and Marx, Hegel and Diderot,
and less obviouslywhich is why I have undertaken the project to elaborate
herebetween Plato and Agamben himself.

Notes
1. While I refer to several concepts from Homo Sacer in this comparison, all quoted
passages from Agamben and their parenthetical citations refer to The Man without
Content. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: On Sovereignty and Bare Life, trans.
Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998); and Giorgio
Agamben, The Man without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1999).
2. See Theodor Adornos reading of Brecht in Commitment, in Notes to Literature II,
ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, European Perspectives (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 7694.
3. Similarly, regarding the autonomy of art in antiquity, Edgar Wind notes that Platos
suspicion of the arts was inextricably tied to a particular historical development of
his timesnamely, the gradual distancing of the arts from one another. As they grew
isolated within their autonomous domains, the arts targeted different registers of the
soul, fragmenting the human being and fostering discord. See Edgar Wind, Qei`o~
Fovbo~ (Laws, II, 671D): On Platos Philosophy of Art, in The Eloquence of Symbols:
Studies in Humanist Art, ed. Jaynie Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 120; here,
67.
4. The political dichotomy between bios (the political life) and zoe (the animal, bare
life), which Agamben reads as concomitant of the ontological split between poesis
(associated with truth and political existence) and praxis (associated only with
sensuous existence) proves problematic in that Agamben attributes it to Aristotle.
While in Homo Sacer Agamben charges Aristotle with the construction of a binary
that isolates sensuous life from political existence, thus making the body vulnerable
to state violence, in The Man without Content he invokes Aristotle favorably to support his alignment of praxis with vitalism and poesis with truth:

34

Kalliopi Nikolopoulou
The essential character of poiesis was not its aspect as a practical and voluntary process but its being a mode of truth understood as unveiling, aj-lhvqeia.
And it was precisely because of this essential proximity to truth that Aristotle,
who repeatedly theorizes this distinction within mans doing, tended to
assign a higher position to poiesis than to praxis. According to Aristotle, the
roots of praxis lay in the very condition of man as an animal, a living being:
these roots were constituted by the very principle of motion (will, understood
as the basic unit of craving, desire, and volition) that characterizes life. (689)

Aristotles concepts, however, are not simple binaries. As he held poetry in high esteem,
Aristotle also insisted on the tragic characters as figures of praxis (Poetics, trans. Stephen Halliwell, Loeb Classical Library [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1995], 1448a). For a critical view of Agambens misreadings of Aristotle on the bios/
zoe distinction, see James Gordon Finlayson, who argues that Agamben transforms
Aristotles gradational concepts into clear-cut binaries (Bare Life and Politics in
Agambens Reading of Aristotle, The Review of Politics 72 [2010]: 97126). For the
limited purposes of my argument here, which does not draw on the concepts of praxis
and bare life beyond this introductory comparison of Agambens two books, I will
not pursue further this otherwise meritorious critique of Agambens assumptions.
5. The difficulty of this argument involves primarily Agambens counter-intuitive
disjoining of vitality from creativity. When it comes to art, Agambens Heideggerian
dislike for the vital undermines the Nietzschean overtones of his opening chapter,
since Nietzsches model of the creator exalts natural robustness. Hardly would Nie
tzsche associate vitality with the weakened, decadent, over-refined man of taste as
Agamben does here.
6. Thierry De Duve, Five Remarks on Aesthetic Judgment, Umbr(a) 1 (1999): 1332;
here, 24.
7. The first chapter of The Man without Content, entitled The Most Uncanny Thing,
discusses the uncanninness inherent in Kantian disinterestnamely, that the artist
who is most interested in the artwork turns out to be, because of this interest, arts
most inappropriate beholder.
8. Plato, Ion, trans. W. R. M. Lamb, in The Statesman, Philebus, Ion, Loeb Classical Library
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1925), 40647.
9. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns observe that up until the time of Socrates,
in all the arts in Athens the emotions and intellect had worked together. There was
a balance of power. That is the uniqueness of Greek art; it is an intellectual art. In the
Ion Socrates disputes the possibility of such a balance (Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds., Prefatory Note to Ion, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, Bollingen
Series [New York: Pantheon, 1963], 215, original italics). To say that Greek art is an
intellectual art may be an overstatement. Instead, the sense of this fragile balance
between intellect and emotion, exteriority and interiority, has been often celebrated
in later theorizations of Greek art in the West. Either way, however, the interesting
point Socrates introduces in this dialogue is the very difference between cognition
and affect. Whether art was more or less intellectual or emotional before did not
matter much, because the difference between intellection and emotion as such was
not yet in place.

Between Art and the Polis: Between Agamben and Plato

35

10. Plato, The Republic, trans. Paul Shorey, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930 and 1935).
11. The English translation of Agambens book includes a typographical error. Plato
writes about fillets of wool (ejrivw/ stevyante~) (Rep. III.398a), and not fillets of
wood, crowning the poet.
12. Although this issue falls beyond the scope of this essay, it is important to note that the
problematic of imitation in Plato becomes even more complex once we take into account his description of education as the imitation of good or bad behavioral models.
In other words, if art is deceptive because of its imitative quality, and educationthe
very process of instilling ethical and political principles in the future citizenis
itself based on imitation, then any simple equation of imitation and deception is
immediately foreclosed, or Plato would run the risk of undermining entirely his own
ethico-political stakes in education.
13. I use the hyphen in Agambens vein and in order to stress the poeticthat is, generative and affirmativeaspects of Platonic censorship.
14. Agamben borrows this distinction from Jean Paulhan.
15. Although The Man without Content renders Kant responsible for the turn away from
art and toward judgment, it is of course Kant who preserves in modern aesthetics this
Platonic sense of a non-conceptual supersensuousness; the most obvious instance
comes from the Third Critique, where Kant defines the judgment of the beautiful as
intelligible but non-conceptual. See Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans.
Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), 44.

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