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Agamben as a Reader
ADAM KOTSKO AND CARLO SALZANI
TRADITION
Reading a text is a cultural act embedded within a centuries-old tradi-
tion, which presupposes a set of norms and practices and a cultural
heritage to draw from. From his very beginnings as a philosopher in
the late 1960s, Agamben inserted himself into a philosophical lineage
of critique of the Western cultural heritage – and hence also of its
cultural practices of transmission and reception. His first book, The
Man Without Content, is in this sense paradigmatic: the critique of
the present predicament is construed as an investigation (later called
‘genealogy’ or ‘archaeology’) of its conceptual and ideological roots.
Moreover, the critique of apparently circumscribed phenomena (here
aesthetics) partakes in a much wider critique of Western ‘metaphysics’
as a whole, considered from its very inception. Finally, if the present
is experienced as ‘crisis’, as the extreme and decisive limit of an ‘alien-
ating’ course (‘metaphysics’), the overcoming of the crisis is neither
sought in a regressive return to more ‘authentic’ historical-cultural
stages, nor in a complete rupture that would clear off all traits of the
present, but rather in a full and conscious assumption of this present
as one’s ‘own’.
For our purposes, it is not important that in The Man Without
Content this methodology is still ‘incomplete’ (since the strongly
Heideggerian approach still leads Agamben to postulate modernity as
a radical rupture to be overcome in order to regain a more ‘original’
condition); what is important is rather the fact that the critique of
metaphysical ‘nihilism’ ends up in a critique of tradition and of the pos-
sibility of transmissibility itself. This is a sort of general ‘pattern’ that
Agamben’s subsequent works will follow point-by-point. Beginning
with Stanzas, however, the gap that separates tradition from its trans-
missibility will be extended from modernity to the ‘original’ structure
of metaphysics itself. In Stanzas, the gap is that between knowledge
itself and its object, which, in the fourth and last ‘stanza’ on semiology,
is declined as the metaphysical (and thus ‘originary’) fracture between
signifier and signified (S 135–58). Here Agamben’s strategy vis-à-vis
this crisis of tradition and transmissibility is identified with ‘critique’:
the project of bridging this gap through a word and a knowledge which
merge – and thus deactivate the separation between – philosophy and
poetry, knowledge, possession and enjoyment, towards a ‘liberated’
approach – and ‘use’ – of knowledge and tradition.
The last essay of Infancy and History, ‘Project for a Review’, connects
with the last chapter of The Man Without Content and with the project
of Stanzas by calling for a ‘“destruction” of literary historiography’
(IH 143). Confronted with the irreparable fracture between the cultural
heritage and its transmission, the task of the never-published review
(and of the ‘coming philosophy’) would be to perform a philological
Aufhebung of mythology and transform it into a ‘critical mythology’,
an ‘interdisciplinary discipline’ assimilated to ‘critique’, into which all
human sciences would converge and whose goal would be a ‘general
science of the human’ (IH 146–7). More generally, the thread holding
together the essays collected in Infancy and History is precisely to
confront the modern ‘destruction of experience’ – that is, of a fecund
relation to tradition and cultural heritage – while trying to prepare a
‘likely ground’ in which the ‘germinating seed of future experience’
can mature (IH 15). The reflections about the loss of experience are an
extension of those about the crisis of tradition, and the whole theory
of ‘infancy’ connects with the previous – and subsequent – attempts to
rethink language beyond the deadlock of Western metaphysics.
Language and Death does not depart from this pattern, since the
whole analysis of the metaphysical link that binds language (that is,
Western tradition) and ‘negativity’ (or death) aims at an overcom-
ing of this ‘original’ structure – and thus of Western tradition as
such – towards a liberated ‘post-historical humanity’ (LD 104). The
final excursus is particularly important insofar as it sketches and con-
tains in nuce the core problems of what, a decade later, will become
Agamben’s ambitious political project, and also anticipates its innova-
tive and ground-breaking vocabulary: the problem with Western tradi-
tion is that its ‘original’, metaphysical ‘negativity’, its ‘groundlessness’
(LD xiii), entails a ‘sacrificial’ self-grounding, a foundation in sacrifice,
and thus a paradigmatic sacrum facere that is intrinsically violent and
leads to the ‘inclusionary exclusion’ of the homo sacer and to the sac-
rifice of ‘bare life’. The task of the coming philosophy is thus to over-
come the sacer, the negative and ineffable foundation, and to invent
a praxis and a speech ‘transparent to themselves’ (LD 106). At this
stage – and throughout the 1980s – Agamben’s project focuses on a
‘linguistic’ critique and a ‘linguistic’ project of overcoming of Western
tradition, and through various essays (some of which were later col-
lected in the first part of Potentialities, but also in the literary-poetic
studies of The End of the Poem) and philosophical ‘experiments’ on
and with language (the most important and ‘successful’ being Idea of
Prose) he will consistently carry on the critique begun with The Man
Without Content.
S T U DY
Reading as a cultural act – and especially as a philosophical practice –
culminates in study. Study is a learned set of techniques and strategies
This idea derives in fact from Benjamin, who, in his 1934 essay on
Kafka (and in his correspondence with Scholem), emphasised the mes-
sianic charge of study, and in his short reading of Kafka’s ‘The New
Advocate’ compared Bucephalus’s renunciation of the practice of the
law in order to immerse himself in its study to an opening up of a way
towards justice. Agamben famously took up this interpretation in State
of Exception in order to identify the task of the coming philosophy: not
a destruction (of law, of tradition, of the cultural heritage) followed
by a proactive new foundation, but rather its deactivation. ‘What opens
a passage toward justice’, he writes, ‘is not the erasure of law, but its
deactivation and inactivity [inoperosità] – that is, another use of the
law’ (SE 64). The same point is made in ‘K.’, where Agamben briefly
rehearses his famous interpretation of Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’ in
Homo Sacer (HS 49–57), adding, however, an unexpected twist: here
what is at stake is not the study of the law, but rather ‘the long study
of its doorkeeper’ in which the man from the country was immersed
throughout his long sojourn before the law. ‘It is thanks to this study,
to this new Talmud’, Agamben writes, ‘that the man from the country
– in opposition to Josef K. – was able to live to the very end outside
the trial’ (NU 31). And it is from the ‘trial’ of tradition that this new
Talmud releases the scholar of the coming philosophy.
C I TAT I O N
This new Talmud jams the workings of the cultural machine in a number
of ways, and one of its peculiar strategic tools is a disruptive theory
of citation. Agamben has often struck his (mostly Anglo-American)
readers as not always complying to the strict rules of academic citation,
not always citing his sources explicitly or properly, declining at times to
name them altogether, and leaving it to the reader to figure them out for
themselves. However, in Agamben this is not the snobbish sloppiness of
the esoteric ‘saintly scholar’ who clouds in obscurity a wisdom reserved
to the ‘initiated’ (a still quite common practice in Italian academia),
but rather a specific strategy of disruption of this very authoritative
tradition.
The last chapter of The Man Without Content opens with a theory of
citation that refers back to Benjamin’s own idiosyncratic citation style
– without citing it properly. Agamben starts the chapter with a quota-
tion from Benjamin’s One-Way Street: ‘Quotations in my work are
like wayside robbers who leap out, armed, and relieve the idle stroller
of his conviction’ (MC 104). Benjamin’s theory, Agamben glosses, did
not subscribe to the traditional aims of citation (‘to transmit [the] past
and allow the reader to relive it’), but was rather based on the idea of
Entfremdung, whereby alienating a fragment of the past from its his-
torical context ‘makes it lose its character of authentic testimony and
invests it with an alienating power that constitutes its unmistakable
aggressive force’. The true ‘authority’ of a quotation rests precisely on
the ‘destruction of the authority that is attributed to a certain text by
its situation in the history of culture’, and its ‘true content’ emerges
precisely from this violent alienation (MC 104).
Subscribing to Benjamin’s theory, Agamben aims at disrupting what
in Stanzas he calls the ‘vicious circle of authority and citation (the
authority is the source of the citation but the citation is the source
of authority)’, which has transformed cultural transmission (and
contemporary academia) into an ‘“authoritarian” counterfeit’ (S 74).
Throughout his career he has waged a war against ‘academic prose’
because this shelters itself behind a normative blandness, thereby
distancing itself from an authentic experience of language, and in
the 1980s he attempted a series of experiments with language that
renounced the whole apparatus of traditional philosophical prose and
that are exemplified by the complete absence of references in Idea of
Prose. In an interview that he gave for the publication of this book he
said:
of the ‘textual […] and not mere conceptual correspondence’ (TR 144)
between Benjamin’s theses and Paul’s letters, he draws attention to the
identical structure of Benjamin’s ‘dialectical image’ and Paul’s concept
of typos: both signify a temporal structure ‘wherein an instant of the
past and an instant of the present are united in a constellation where
the present is able to recognize the meaning of the past and the past
therein finds its meaning and fulfilment’ – and the messianic kairos
is precisely this ‘typological relation’ (TR 142). However, this rela-
tion depends on a ‘historical index’, whereby the image and the typos
become ‘legible’ and ‘knowable’ only at a certain time, which Benjamin
called ‘the now of legibility (or knowability)’: every text ‘contains a
historical index which indicates both its belonging to a determinate
epoch, as well as its only coming forth to full legibility at a determinate
historical moment’ (TR 145). This thesis constitutes a true ‘theory of
reading’ that Benjamin proposed and refined throughout his life, and by
concluding The Time that Remains on this note, Agamben also reveals
something about his own ‘theory of reading’: his reading (and citing)
practice obeys a logic of ‘legibility’ (and ‘citability’) which, by wrench-
ing its source from its historical context, ‘actualises’ it – as Benjamin
would say – by transforming it into something of his own.
E N T W I C K L U N G S FÄ H I G K E I T
What Benjamin called ‘actualisation’ is inflected by Agamben
through a peculiar term that he derives from Ludwig Feuerbach:
Entwicklungsfähigkeit, ‘capacity for elaboration’. In the preface to his
Darstellung, Entwicklung und Kritik der Leibnitz’schen Philosophie
(Presentation, Development and Critique of Leibniz’s Philosophy,
1837), Feuerbach called the ‘essential’ task of philosophy that of
‘immanent elaboration’, which makes of the ‘capacity for elaboration
[Entwicklungsfähigkeit] the very mark of what philosophy is’. The
elaboration is, for Feuerbach, the ‘decipherment of the true meaning
of a philosophy, the unveiling of what is positive in it, the presenta-
tion of its idea within the historically determined and finite conditions
which have defined this idea’; therefore ‘[t]he possibility of elaboration
is the idea itself’.4 This is why, for example, unlike Leibniz’s, Locke’s
philosophy does not possess this capacity for elaboration, because in it
everything is already stated and self-contained.
Agamben cites Feuerbach’s thesis in various interviews and in the
preface to The Signature of All Things precisely to define his relation
to the authors who have marked his life and career. The point of this
relation lies in something the source has left ‘unsaid’: this is ‘the germ,
what has been left unsaid and can thus be developed, resumed. I have
always followed this line.’5 This ‘germ’ is the ‘potentiality’ of a work
that, while present, remains unstated and undeveloped, and thus is left
for others to unveil and elaborate in different ways. It is also, as for
Feuerbach, what marks and distinguishes the true ‘idea’ of a work (ST
7–8).
This, however, leads to a relation and interaction between the phi-
losopher and his sources that borders on a commingling: as Agamben
again states in the preface to The Signature of All Things, ‘[i]t is pre-
cisely when one follows such a principle that the difference between
what belongs to the author of a work and what is attributable to the
interpreter becomes as essential as it is difficult to grasp’ (ST 8). The
philosophical ‘idea’, which lies in potentia in a work, can be taken in
directions unforeseen – and perhaps undesired – by the author, and thus
transformed into something no longer attributable to them. This point
marks many of the controversial ‘corrections’ of other philosophers’
ideas that Agamben has proposed in his career (most [in]famously of
Foucault, but also of Benjamin, Heidegger and others). But, to return to
Feuerbach, this is precisely the true task of philosophy: ‘Elaboration is
difficult, whereas critique is easy. […] True critique lies in elaboration
itself, because the latter is possible only through the separation of the
essential from the accidental, of the necessary from the contingent, of
the objective from the subjective.’6
Finally, Agamben also applies this practice to his own works and
ideas: archaeology, he writes, ‘must retrace its own trajectory back to
the point where something remains obscure and unthematized. Only a
thought that does not conceal its own unsaid – but constantly takes it up
and elaborates it – may eventually lay claim to originality’ (ST 8). Each
completed work – including the author’s own – contains within itself
something left ‘unsaid’ which demands to be further elaborated and
taken up, perhaps by someone else. It is therefore telling that Agamben
warns the readers of the final volume of the Homo Sacer series that they
will not find a ‘conclusion’ in this book: his twenty-year-long investiga-
tion, ‘like every work of poetry and of thought, cannot be concluded
but only abandoned (and perhaps continued by others)’ (UB xiii). This
is a quotation from the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti that Agamben
had been repeating in interviews, conferences and seminars during the
years leading up to the publication of The Use of Bodies.7 The ‘poten-
tiality’ of a work is not exhausted by the last brushstroke or the last
word – in fact, it can never be exhausted, and its true philosophical
‘idea’ lies precisely in its inexhaustible potential which traverses epochs
and generations. If, as Agamben states, ‘philosophy does not have a
content purely of its own’,8 then this Feuerbachian ‘idea’ is perhaps the
true ‘idea of philosophy’.
T H E S T RU C T U R E O F T H I S VO L U M E
Each chapter of the present volume provides an overview of the most
important passages in which Agamben addresses the source in ques-
tion, then discusses any ways in which Agamben’s reading is unique
or distinctive. The work is divided into three broad sections: the first,
‘Primary Interlocutors’, features more lengthy essays on Agamben’s
most important sources; the second, ‘Points of Reference’, includes
figures who are discussed in a more occasional or secondary way;
the third, ‘Submerged Dialogues’, focuses on figures who seem to be
lurking in the background of Agamben’s arguments even though he
mentions them only fleetingly, if at all.
Yet a final remark is in order, namely about the rationale that led us
to include and, more importantly, exclude some of Agamben’s sources.
While we hope that few readers of Agamben would dispute the figures
included in the first section, the second (or even the third) section of this
volume could have included any number of other figures: for example,
Augustine, Averroes, Maurice Blanchot, Odo Casel, Hobbes, Furio Jesi,
Max Kommerell, Lévi-Strauss, Emmanuel Levinas, Nicole Loraux, Erik
Peterson, Rilke, Jacob Taubes, Yan Thomas, Wittgenstein, to name
only a few possibilities. We would have liked to include many more
figures, but felt that we had to balance inclusiveness with the need to
prevent the volume from becoming unwieldy.
There is no one answer as to why any given figure was left aside in
favour of another. In some cases, the decision came down to the con-
tingencies of the editors’ academic networks: there were times when we
simply could not find someone who was both able to address a certain
figure and able to produce the chapter within a reasonable amount of
time. Yet that consideration only came up for figures we viewed as
less essential – if we could not have found a suitable author to cover
Aristotle or Schmitt, for example, we simply would not have pursued
this project at all – and several factors contributed to that determi-
nation. For instance, while recognising that this distinction is often
blurred, we did not generally commission chapters about figures whom
Agamben treats primarily as scholars rather than as philosophical
interlocutors. In some cases, this standard seemed easy to apply (Casel,
Thomas), while in others it was more difficult to decide (Loraux,
Peterson). We also tended to cut figures whose influence was limited
to only one or two of Agamben’s works (e.g., Kommerel, Levinas or
N OT E S
1. Giorgio Pasquali, ‘Il testamento di Teodoro Mommsen’ (1951), in Pagine
stravaganti di un filologo, vol. II, ed. Carlo Ferdinando Russo (Florence: Le
Lettere, 1994), pp. 383–96.
2. And in fact ‘The Idea of Study’ was reprinted, one year after the publication
of Idea of Prose, as the fourth of the ‘Quattro glosse a Kafka’ [‘Four Glosses
on Kafka’], under the title ‘The Students’; cf. Giorgio Agamben, ‘Quattro
glosse a Kafka’, Rivista di estetica 26 (1986): 37–44, here pp. 42–4.
3. Adriano Sofri, ‘Un’idea di Giorgio Agamben’, an interview with Giorgio
Agamben, Reporter, 9–10 November 1985, p. 32.
4. Ludwig Feuerbach, Darstellung, Entwicklung und Kritik der Leibnitz’schen
Philosophie, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3: Geschichte der neuern
Philosophie, part 2, ed. Werner Schuffenhauer (Berlin: Akademische
Verlag, 1969), pp. 3, 4 (emphases in the original).
5. Roberto Andreotti and Federico de Melis, ‘I ricordi per favore no’, an inter-
view with Giorgio Agamben, Atlas 420 (9 September 2006): 2.
6. Feuerbach, Darstellung, Entwicklung und Kritik der Leibnitz’schen
Philosophie, p. 4.
7. See, for example, the interview by Juliette Cerf of 10 March 2012,
‘Le philosophe Giorgio Agamben: “La pensée, c’est le courage du dés-
espoir”’, http://www.telerama.fr/idees/le-philosophe-giorgio-agamben-la-
pensee-c-est-le-courage-du-desespoir,78653.php (accessed 24 April 2017).
Giacometti repeated this statement on several occasions, for example in
the film interview with Jean-Marie Drot, Un homme parmi les hommes:
Alberto Giacometti (1963).
8. Gianluca Sacco, ‘Intervista a Giorgio Agamben: dalla teologia politica
alla teologia economica’, 8 March 2004, qtd. in Leland de la Durantaye,
Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2009), p. 9.