Critique of Giorgio Agamben (2006)

Critique of Agamben Daniel Ross

“It is a question not of struggling against the instrumentalization of language but of resisting the very reduction of an instrument to the rank of means.” Bernard Stiegler

Philosophy adopts the task, usually as the task par excellence, of seeking the meaning of virtue—that is, it asks how judgment is possible, given the finitude of foresight. Human beings face this problem from the moment consciousness seems like something separate from and exterior to the body, the moment when thought first appears to be the body’s sovereign. But, as Martin Heidegger liked to say, questions arise only when they become possible, that is, necessary. Virtue became questionable during a crisis, a crisis of the polis and of sophistry, of law and language—a crisis arising as writing was transformed from mnemonic tool into a system for the public support of individual consciousness. This new use of writing created the appearance of a gap: on the one hand between law and justice (the polis makes the law, but is this law just?); on the other hand between speaking and knowing (the sophist speaks about all things, but can he speak truthfully about any one thing?). This gap signaled the inauguration of the possibility of interpretation, and thus one effect was the invention of philosophy. Nevertheless, philosophy has devoted itself ever since to seeking ways out of this crisis of law and language, thereby adopting the task of thinking the justice of truth and the truth of justice.

The persistence of this crisis describes the Western situation, philosophy constituting one of its most persistent symptoms, yet persistence should not be confused with permanence: what begins can change or end. It is not news that human life is pursuing a doubtful, possibly catastrophic, path, nor that the gap between law and justice has not appreciably narrowed, nor that those who speak most loudly (that is, with the greatest publicity) usually know the least. But nor is it news that, however much remains in common from the Greek polis till today, this is nevertheless a crisis which unfolds historically. The question for philosophy is whether its self-understanding as inheriting this crisis and adopting this task has formed the conditions through which it is able constantly to renew itself, or whether on the contrary this self-understanding now constitutes a limit impeding our capacity to measure up to today’s ethical task. Insofar as Giorgio Agamben is a philosopher, he too inherits this situation, which he too understands in terms of law and language. To put it as summarily as possible, his description of the Western situation is that the law remains in force without significance, and the task is to invent the means to exit this situation. That law is in force without significance implies, first of all, a crisis of sovereignty: its symptoms are the tendency of the state of exception to become the rule, and the emergence of the camp as the spatial embodiment of this new paradigm. This diagnosis was massively applicable to many of the existing geopolitical tendencies at the time of its formulation, but has also proven prescient with regard to events transpiring since. The development of Agamben’s description of the contemporary form of the crisis of law and language, however, is the result of a long process of philosophico-political reflection. Evaluating his account requires consideration of more than just those texts devoted to explicating the “state of exception.” We will therefore trace a line through his corpus, at key points along which a comparison with the work of Bernard Stiegler will prove an essential counterweight. In the penultimate paragraph of the most recent of his works to be translated into English, State of Exception, Agamben argues that life and law do not form an opposition, that law does not emerge from out of an original state of natural human life. They are, rather, constituted together in a single gesture. In the language of Gilbert

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Simondon, law and life exist “transductively”: each of the “opposing” terms exists as a term only through the operation constituting them both, in this case the operation of the “machine” of sovereignty. From this machine has emerged the politics of presupposition and foundation. In unmasking the “fiction” of sovereignty, then, we find ourselves not in a state of nature before law, but in a strange and inaccessible location: at the origin, perhaps, but an origin to which we have no other access than through those terms constituting its originary fracture. With the institution of the state of exception as the rule, we find ourselves faced with a future in which this inaccessible location for the first time shows itself as such: But disenchantment does not restore the enchanted thing to its original state: According to the principle that purity never lies at the origin, disenchantment gives it only the possibility of reaching a new condition.1

Exposing the origin does not enable its return, but is the chance of attaining a new condition, that is (continuing the Simondonian terminology), the possibility of another individuating movement. We begin with this most recent assurance because this is precisely what our reading will question. Such statements, indubitably present in Agamben’s text, perhaps represent only a counter-tendency to its actual thrust. Assurances about the impossibility of returning to a pure origin seemingly arise in spite of what remains the hegemonic tendency, which is to insist on the necessity of the infinite leap, an insistence consisting secretly of nothing but the dream of dwelling again at the origin. In question is not whether philosophy ought to dwell in that zone of indistinction between interior and exterior, but why this is always named as the zone of language, and why the consequent task is understood as the intensification of this zone, as though this ensured the final materialization of the infinite, as, for instance, a praxis materializing the event of infinite justice.

1 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2005 [2003]), pp. 87–8.

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1 Agamben’s first book, The Man Without Content, concerns the status and future of art, grasped as encompassingly as possible. Thus he turns to the Heideggerian motif of poiesis, that is, production, before its distribution into the forms of artistic and technical production. In the first of his descriptions of the contemporary crisis, he states that production is that which, today, “determines everywhere the status of man on earth, understood from the point of view of praxis, that is, of production of material life.”2 Here, therefore, Agamben identifies our crisis with technology, a thought which will continue to occupy him, but which is perhaps never taken up as such, and may in fact be the question Agamben’s works are constantly secreting behind them. To the Heideggerian technological problematic are added the Marxist themes of alienation and division of labor. The rise of modern technology relegates art to a derivative sphere of existence, imprisoning it within “aesthetics”; this is the alienation of expression. At the same time, it divides the producer from the consumer, that is, the artist from the spectator. Art is today reduced to the form of spectacle, against which it struggles and with which it plays (in the form of pop art and the ready-made). But this working-against and playing-with reflect an essentially blocked path, symptoms of a desire without a way through. Insofar as art remains praxis, the material production of life, “willed action,” the question for art is whether it can re-discover its potential, the power that originally granted its space. Agamben attributes this power to “rhythm,” grasped along Hölderlinian lines. Rhythm implies, first, flow, that is, flux, the flux of psychic and somatic life. But applied to the artwork, rhythm means not the continuity of flow but its interruption: “when we are before a work of art or a landscape bathed in the light of its own presence, we perceive a stop in time, as though we were suddenly thrown into a more original time.”3 At stake with the artwork is to escape the ceaseless 2 Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999 [1970]), p. 59. 3 Ibid., p. 99.

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flow of instants through being “arrested” and hurled into an “authentic temporal dimension” where “the poetic status of man on earth finds its proper meaning.”4 This eminently Heideggerian gesture establishes the experience of authentic temporality as the ground for a proper appropriation of one’s humanity, that is, of our poietic condition, that is, of the human power of praxis. Only because he attains, in the poetic act, a more original temporal dimension is he a historical being, for whom, that is, at every instant his past and future are at stake.5

It is, then, a question of an experience, the experience of a truth—that artist and spectator were not originally opposed. But art today, imprisoned in the inauthentic eternal present of aesthetics and technicity, finds this origin obscured, destining art to senseless wandering. Such a loss reflects the “destruction of the transmissibility of culture.”6 Given that the archives have never been so ample, and continue to expand, this is less a matter of recording the past than of its “life,” that is, the opening of an “inadequation” between what is transmitted and its “vital force.”7 What is being destroyed is the capacity to draw from one’s heritage any criterion of judgment. “Culture” is today continuously overtaken by an ever-accelerating technological evolution threatening our ability to rely upon the lessons of tradition, that is, of recorded accumulated experience. This approximates a first formulation of the thought of law as in force without significance. The process of adopting the past one has not oneself lived becomes increasingly fraught, thereby disengaging us from the chance of a future. If this is the diagnosis of a crisis, what is the corresponding task? Asking about the task of art today, Agamben states, means asking about its task “on the day of the Last Judgment,” that is, the 4

Ibid., p. 101. Ibid. 6 Ibid., p. 107. 7 Ibid. 5

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day on which history ceases to accumulate, when all accounts are reckoned, the moment of final responsibility.8 In other words, it is no longer a question of what to transmit, and can only be (this is the first of Agamben’s Benjaminian supplements to Heidegger) the task of transmitting transmissibility itself: “only the perennially late stubbornness of a messenger whose message is nothing other than the task of transmission can give back to man, who has lost his ability to appropriate his historical space, the concrete space of his action and knowledge.”9 Here we have all the themes with which we will be occupied: the relation of inauthentic and authentic temporality, the question of human potentiality, and the notion that the coming task is the transmission of transmissibility. The question, as it will always be, is of an equivocation in relation to temporality, whether we must rediscover authentic temporality or learn a new technique for living with inauthenticity, what this means about our relation to the origin, and how this translates into something resembling “politics.” This equivocation is visible in the conclusion to The Man Without Content, which states that by transforming the principle of man’s delay before truth into a poetic process, art succeeds once again in transforming man’s inability to exit his historical status […] into the very space in which he can take the original measure of his dwelling in the present […] art, at the furthest point of its destiny, makes visible its original project.10

On the one hand, Agamben wishes to think before or beyond the separation of artistic and technical production. On the other hand, the conjunctions “original measure” and “original project” suggest that, if art remains the arresting medium through which authentic temporality is accessible, the condition of this access may turn out to be a final escape from technicized aesthetics. The suspicion remains

8

Ibid., p. 113. Ibid., p. 114. 10 Ibid., pp. 114–5. 9

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that for Agamben technology denaturalizes authentic temporality, rather than constituting the condition of any access to it.11

2 In The Man Without Content the political question is articulated as the possibility of an experience of truth. What matters today is the possibility of undergoing, not yet another novel or spectacular distraction, but an actually new experience. Agamben’s critique of those philosophical trends following in Heidegger’s wake is grounded in his sense that they neglect and forget this question and necessity of experience. In Idea of Prose he will complain that phenomenological descriptions of the present are currently lacking, that “the last persuasive description of our states of mind and heart dates from more than fifty years ago.”12 Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture appeared ten years after Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, and it is not incidental that Agamben’s book opens by describing a medieval malady amounting to a state of impoverished experience. Acedia corresponds less to the everyday meaning of “sloth” than to the frightened withdrawal in the face of the task of responsibility, a withdrawal due less to a perversion of the will—the desire for the object remains—than to the loss of the way leading there. Symptoms include torpor (a somnolent stupor), verbositas (garrulity, idle talk), curiositas (the insatiable need for new sensations), and desperatio (the dark certainty of being condemned to one’s own destruction).13 Heidegger’s delimitation of the average everydayness of das Man is 11

Cf. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth & George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998 [1994]), p. 179. 12 Agamben, Idea of Prose, trans. Michael Sullivan & Sam Whitsitt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995 [1985]), p. 89. 13 Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993 [1977]), pp. 4–5.

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thus a singular case of a phenomenological description approaching the recollection of acedia, which is otherwise forgotten by an epoch lacking the taste for its own experience. Insofar as acedia names the inability to attain an object of desire (a blocked passage), it is a form of what will come to be called melancholia. But, reading Freud, melancholy is nothing but a form of mourning, that is, a form of the process of suffering the loss of a libidinal object. The peculiar character of melancholy, however, is that the lost object fails to appear—the melancholic never quite knows the cause of their suffering. Melancholia is, then, a form of mourning in which the lost object is absent, that is, anticipated. In this way Agamben describes the essential temporality of the phenomenon, and its anticipatory or imaginative character is also the explanation of its spectrality, the fact that “the strategy of melancholy opens a space for the existence of the unreal and marks out a scene in which the ego may enter into relation with it.”14 Agamben rightly concludes that this begs the question of the object as such. What is an object (of desire), if it is neither out there (in the world), nor within our own “interior,” but is, rather, anticipated? What is the genesis of the object as such? If melancholy is a process whereby we mourn an object that only arrives (if it does) after us, then perhaps understanding this requires reflection on those objects preceding us, that is, preceding our entry into subjectivity.15 Thus Agamben introduces the theme of “transitional objects,” those first things the child separates out in the process of constituting an external world and, therefore, an internal world. These are those preliminary things, the toy and the fetish, lying between oral eroticism and a proper object relation. Such things constitute a “third area,” composing the relation between interior and exterior, subject and world, who and what, and as such these can never be limited to the sphere of individual subjectivity, since they are immediately also 14 Ibid.,

p. 20 But this might also have been a moment at which Agamben considered that which precedes us in general, the already there as such, as constituting the ground of the possibility of mourning as such, that is, of the feeling for mortality. 15

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“cultural.” The question of the thing is thus inseparable from the question of the human: Like the fetish, like the toy, things are not properly anywhere, because their place is found on this side of subjects and beyond the human in a zone that is no longer objective or subjective, neither personal nor impersonal, neither material nor immaterial, but where we find ourselves suddenly facing these apparently so simple unknowns: the human, the thing.16

The fetish and the toy are the traces and the means of the process by which humanity and thing enter into a kind of maieutic, in which each proceeds from out of its relation to the other. Insofar as this is Agamben’s argument, we must grant that the origin of the human does not, for him, precede the origin of the thing, that is, the artifact. Thus here we find a possible defense against the charge that he maintains a secret fidelity to the notion of a pure origin. But can he hold onto this thought, expressed here psychoanalytically, when it comes to the politico-philosophical question of the task as formulated in later works, or even at the conclusion of this one? “Thing” and “human” are constituted as terms from out of a “third area,” that is, from out of a milieu lying between them. Thus Agamben turns to a medieval theory of sensation according to which the outside world impresses its forms upon the senses, but also according to which these impressions are not directly received by consciousness, passing there on the contrary by way of a third area, the faculty of phantasy (also spelled as the imaginative virtue). Phantasy (imagination) is the medium through which subject and object, human and thing, are composed: “The image, ‘painted as if on a wall’ in the heart, of which Giacomo speaks, is perhaps precisely this ‘phantasm’.”17 The consequence of this theory of sensation for medieval psychology is that the object of my desire does not lie “outside,” nor is it merely unreal and subjective—rather, it contains an irreducible 16 Agamben, Stanzas, p. 59. 17 Ibid.,

p. 71.

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phantasmatic element. When I love, I love an inscribed image, and this forms the basis by which perception may be retained—as “icon,” image of an image—in memory. Phantasmatic inscription grants the possibility of remembrance. And because what returns does so by way of the phantasmatic icon, it contains a constitutive openness, a kind of liberation, which is why it is, as well, the condition of intellection.18 But just as melancholy opened the space for the appearance of the unreal, so too the phantasm opens the space not only for the infinity and inexhaustibility of love and knowledge, but for all those unreal specters culminating in the evils of acedia. This negative potentiality of the phantasm is expressed, for example, in narcissism, on the condition that we understand it less as self-love than as a form of mis-taking an image, that is, as a distorted relation to the image. But if the threat of distortion hangs over sensation and desire as such, in what way is it ever possible to appropriate the object as such, which is seemingly utterly inappropriable? How is it possible not to succumb to the perversions of desire, given the shadow cast by the imaginative virtue? The object of my love, painted only in my heart, may not in fact exist, yet it consists, and I suffer this difference between existence and consistence as the question of my relation to the love object, the question of how to maintain fidelity to what, failing to exist, nevertheless in-sists.19 The solution of the medieval poet is to re-inscribe the phantasm, that is, to write love poetry. Poetry, as another milieu, a “third area,” itself a “thing,” can be the material site of a durable fixing of the phantasmatic image, and thus the site of an ideal healing of the fracture between desire and object.20 The poem provides a space for enjoyment of the inappropriable in material form. The poem is a prosthesis of memory and imagination—a prosthesis of desire. By exteriorizing desire—an exteriorization that lasts, but which is not necessarily the final word (because what I love does not exist)—it sets desire in a form to which I can return, that is, continue to read, interpret, enjoy. I can maintain, that is, a consistent 18 Ibid.,

p. 76.

19 Cf. Stiegler,

Passer à l’acte (Paris: Galilée, 2003), p. 66.

20 Agamben, Stanzas, p. 128.

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fidelity, continue to believe in the object of my love. Despite its materiality, however, the poem must still be re-inscribed in our hearts in the course of reading. The poem is a way of “shoring up” attachment, yet nothing guarantees that what is fractured by desire may be healed by poetry. Perhaps this is why, Agamben concludes, the history of poetry tends toward mourning, and the impossible love object yields to the funereal lost object, the poem becoming finally the site of the Mallarméan absence of all bouquet.21 Why has Agamben constructed this account of something like a melancholic tendency in the history of Western experience? The final three pages are the first of his reckonings with grammatology and deconstruction, as though Derrida’s thought embodies the latest and most extreme epoch of this tendency. Agamben notes that the essence of Derrida’s project is “the affirmation according to which the originary experience is always already trace and writing,” and acknowledges it as a salutary critique of the Western metaphysical inheritance.22 Nevertheless, he makes plain that this critique aims for but does not accomplish the step back beyond metaphysics, citing Heidegger’s “greater prudence.” “Placing writing and the trace in an initial position means putting the emphasis on this original experience, but not transcending it.”23 We shall leave aside the question of whether grammatology has ever claimed or desired such transcendence. Agamben’s revision of grammatology insists that writing must not be placed in the “initial position,” that the origin of signification is a “fold of presence,” the fracture of which constitutes the human as such. But what is at stake in the difference between beginning with the trace or with a fold that 21

Ibid., pp. 129–30. Agamben does not stress clearly enough that the poem—an invention enabling the maintenance of my relation to the love object—is in fact the means by which I am able to experience the love object at all, the means by which the love object itself is invented. If the history of poetry reveals a tendency toward exposing the insufficiency of this form of relation, this is less evidence of an inherent lack in the nature of desire than it is proof that desire depends on technical conditions which are, essentially, historical, that is, engaged in a process of individuation. 22 Ibid., pp. 155–6. 23 Ibid., p. 156.

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becomes a fracture? Is this not precisely the thought of grammatology and deconstruction? However that stands, Agamben understands these stakes as, again, a matter of rhythm, of harmonia as “the just order that governs the rhythm of the universe.”24 Understanding the fold that becomes the fracture in terms of harmonia or “originary articulation,” he maintains, means that the step back beyond metaphysics “becomes really possible.” Yet Agamben hesitates, and this “real possibility” is immediately deferred: if the task of thought is to rediscover a “community of thought and poetry,” he nevertheless concludes, in the final line of the text, that this possibility must, “for the moment, remain at a distance.”25

3 Even if Agamben’s attempt to distinguish his project from grammatology is ultimately unsuccessful, it nevertheless exposes the possibility that something remains unresolved in Derrida’s thought. Stiegler has shown that this possibility is best approached by understanding différance as the difference and delay that life as such is. That life is différance means that it is the organization of matter, opening a space in which entropy is delayed. Life is the emergence of negentropy, that is, of a temporality consisting in nothing other than the programmed struggle against physical entropy. The thought of différance is thus immediately a critique of anthropocentrism, since the gramme, authorizing the thought of program, can thus be found on both sides of the division between animal and human.26 But if the program is equally constitutive of DNA and computer programming, nevertheless Derrida will also write that the trace articulates the living upon the non-living, that is, inaugurates the potential for organized inorganic matter—artifacts, technics.27 If the 24 Ibid.,

p. 157.

25 Ibid. 26 Cf. Stiegler,

Technics and Time, 1, p. 137. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976 [1967]), 27

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trace is the difference of life itself, how can it also be the specific difference of what is commonly called “man,” the fact that humanity is that which differs and delays nature by inventing prosthetic supplements (tekhne, nomos, thesis, freedom, spirit, etc.)? Agamben’s thought is perhaps operated on by Derrida’s hesitation, affected by the feeling that Derrida is unable to think the experience of the human as such. We should credit the sincerity of this feeling. But the form in which Agamben pursues this question of the human is always to ask about language as the specifically human potential, rather than, say, understanding this potential on the basis of the existence of dimensions of memory and imagination progressively opened up by the history of human artifactuality. This difference will prove critical. This difference is expressed in the preface Agamben writes to a later edition of Infancy and History: The double articulation of language and speech seems, therefore, to constitute the specific structure of human language. Only from this can be derived the true meaning of that opposition of dynamis and energeia, of potency and act, which Aristotle’s thought has bequeathed to philosophy and Western science. Potency—or knowledge—is the specifically human faculty of connectedness as lack; and language, in its split between language and speech, structurally contains this connectedness, is nothing other than this connectedness.28

Being that species cast into language, human beings are at once connected to a world yet separated from it. This is the potential for knowledge, that is, potential as such. But as potentiality, knowledge is also the inevitability of doubt: nothing guarantees the truth of my p. 65; cf. Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, p. 139: “To articulate the living onto the non-living, is that not already a gesture from after the rupture when you are already no longer in pure phusis? There is something of an indecision around différance: it is the history of life in general, but this history is (only) given (as) (dating from) after the rupture, whereas the rupture is, if not nothing, then at least much less than what the classic divide between humanity and animality signifies.” 28 Agamben, Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London & New York: Verso, 1993 [1978]), p. 7. The preface was written in 1988–9.

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words, nor that I express the truth of myself. From this derives the potential for all human violence, but equally the potential for ethics and politics. For Agamben the best expression of the existence of language is human life—that is, ethos, polis, oikia, all those supplements to physis—that is, human life as challenge and task. The Stieglerian question to be addressed to this analysis is why potential is derived from language, rather than the other way around. This is also a Promethean or Epimethean question: when the qualities are distributed to the different species, Epimetheus discovers he has forgotten to leave any for humans. Human beings are thus creatures originally lacking potential, without defense. Fire, that is, tekhne, is donated by Prometheus as an ambiguous, stolen gift, in compensation for this fault. From this exteriorized, prosthetic potential, human beings discover or invent speech and politics (as dialogue and communal feeling capable of delaying the human susceptibility to destructive eris). Stiegler poses the critical question (in terms that resonate with Agamben’s account of the prosthetic medieval poem): Humankind, we might say, puts into effect what it imagines because it is endowed with reason, with logos—that is, also with language. Or should we rather say that it is because it realizes what it imagines—as we said a moment ago, because it lies outside itself— that humanity is endowed with reason, that is, with language? Is it tekhne that arises from logos, or the reverse? Or rather, is it not that logos and tekhne are modalities of the same being-outsideoneself?29

Is there any sense, in other words, in determining the structure of potentiality, of human power, from out of the articulation of language and speech, as though it were possible to describe a sequence from language to potential? What is human potentiality other than the potential to accumulate experience, and transform what is accumulated, through imagination, into the possibility of acting on the future, that is, into (technical) anticipation? To derive potentiality from language seems already to presuppose potentiality as such, and

29 Stiegler,

Technics and Time, 1, p. 193.

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implicitly to repeat the metaphysical gesture that tries to save logos from tekhne. Agamben, for whom potentiality is crucial, never ceases to derive this from language. In “Infancy and History” he again reflects on our contemporary crisis, that is, the acedic, desperate poverty of experience. At stake is the potential for another experience, to have an experience, and this is formulated in terms of language. Language, as what operates subjectivity in the form of pronominal utterance (“I think…”), is also the obstacle standing in front of our potential for experience, and (in terms he will use in another book) is therefore equally the operator of a desubjectification. The question, then, is the possibility of experiencing that gap opened by language, which exposes the possibility of a time (for the individual or the species) when one was human but not yet linguistic. Experience as such, then, would essentially be “the simple difference between the human and the linguistic.”30 This is the question of human infancy. Infancy, in Agamben’s sense, names the difference between the animal and the human. Animals, creatures without infancy, are fully within language, in the sense that no gap remains between themselves and their sounds or gestures, and in the sense that for animals there is no moment before language. Human beings, on the other hand, begin (individually and as a species) without language, yet with the potential for it, that is, with the potential for entering and adopting language, and constituting oneself in language. The question of the relation between the animal and the human is thus the question of what precedes them. Animals are preceded by their genetic code, of which the individual is the phenotypical expression. The animal’s behavior is genetically programmed—in its “language,” nothing is transformed or altered. Man, on the other hand, is preceded by linguistic potential, and by the language which as a child he will learn: he can and must learn to say “I.” Human beings, that is, are characterized by a “double

30 Agamben, Infancy

and History, p. 50.

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inheritance,” splitting them at their source: endosomatic versus exosomatic inheritance.31 Since the potential for speech is endosomatic (genetic), whereas the actual adoption and use of speech is always an exosomatic process, Agamben’s concept of infancy implies a “zone of indistinction” between these, that is, a zone of indistinction between the interior and exterior of the human as such. This is significant, firstly, because such a zone of indistinction will be constantly evoked by Agamben to characterize both the sovereign and homo sacer, those figures exposing the zone of indistinction between the interior and exterior of law in its relation to life. But, secondly, this is significant because Agamben here fails to ask the anthropogenetic question it implies: if human beings are “characterized by” a double inheritance, that is, if both their genes and their language precede them, does this imply that the exosomatic precedes the human? This is precisely the question raised by the citation from Stiegler, and its implication is that, if so, then the exterior properly precedes the interior, that is, the human is nothing but its constitution through that “outside” consisting in all the prostheses of logos, nomos and tekhne.32 Rather than interrogating the genesis of the split between endosomatic and exosomatic inheritance, Agamben is concerned with the relation between them. The figure of “resonance” reappears: 31 Ibid.,

p. 56. Agamben seems to recognize this in The Open, where he notes that, although the human has conventionally been distinguished from the animal by the fact of language, this fact is not “natural” but historical— language is an “historical production.” He then notes that, although this suggests that subtracting language from man should thus erase the difference between them, such a thing, man prior to his linguisticity, is in fact inconceivable. But if Agamben seems to grasp that the problem lies in deciding the historical priority of anthropogenesis and exosomatic inheritance, he is unable to pursue this problem, preferring simply to insist on a “fracture” between human and animal which “cannot be mended from either side.” Against such an insistence, Stiegler would prefer to think the process of the co-invention of the human and the artifact, the who and the what. Cf. Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004 [2002]), p. 36. 32

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between the potentiality and actuality of language there is a resonant “process of actualization.” What is the resonating medium? We can […] conceive of endosomatic and exosomatic, nature and culture, as two distinct systems which, resonating in language, produce a single new system. There must, however, be a mediating element which enables the two systems to resonate. This element is what Jakobson described as the phonomatic level of language (or, in learning terms, what Chomsky constructs as universal generative grammar).33

Making visible that which falls between endosomatic and exosomatic inheritance is thus identical to the task delimited in Agamben’s first book: the transmission of transmissibility. Now, as mentioned, Agamben is unconcerned with the question of genesis, a fact exposed by the thought there are initially “two distinct systems” which through a process of resonance become one system. How could we ever understand this initial separation of nature and culture, interior and exterior? This is the antithesis of a transductive relation, even if it also sounds as though it were precisely the thought struggling for audibility in Agamben’s discourse. But this struggle fails, because the medium of resonance, the milieu of potentiality, is only grasped linguistically (phonomatics, universal grammar). That is, the milieu is conceived as an ideality or transcendentality (communicability or transmissibility as such), reflected in the fact that the conclusion of “Infancy and History” takes the form of a discussion of Lévi-Strauss, that is, Kant. This amounts to an evasion of the fact and the mystery of exosomatic inheritance. This residual transcendentalism is expressed elsewhere in Infancy and History as a Heideggerian gesture opposing authentic to inauthentic temporality. In “Time and History,” for instance, vulgar, empty, chronological (that is, calculable) time is explicitly opposed to the authentic temporality of history and decision.34 And in “Project for a Review” he states that quantifiable time must be set against authentic time (with a Benjaminian inflection—authenticity is the possibility of a dialectic at a standstill); the task is to recover the 33 Agamben, Infancy 34 Ibid.,

and History, p. 58.

pp. 104–5.

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potential for authenticity, that is, a “new infancy for Western culture.”35 The question that must be asked of Agamben’s account of infancy is the relation of potentiality and temporality. We shall see how close Agamben comes to thinking this as a technical relation, and yet how far short he falls of just such an understanding.

4 This thematic relating language and potentiality continues in a sequence of texts from around 1984 to 1990.36 In “The Idea of Language,” this is again prompted by a reflection on the character of contemporary experience, specifically on Nietzsche’s “death of God.” This can only mean, Agamben says, that we no longer have a name for language, that we are, today, thrown into language without divine guarantees, thus into increasing doubtfulness. As such, however, we are the first people to become completely conscious of language. 37 From this crisis Agamben draws the task: community and politics may no longer be founded on a presupposition as the substance of language; what unites human beings could today only be language “itself.” The philosophical task is thus to present the Idea of language, that is, the transmission of transmissibility, the milieu itself (but, again, the milieu as Idea, as ideality).38 “Tradition of the Immemorial” opens by expressing a similar thought:

35 Ibid.,

p. 150. Cf., “The Idea of Language” (1984), “Tradition of the Immemorial” (1985), “On Potentiality” (1986), “The Passion of Facticity” (1988), “Pardes: The Writing of Potentiality” (1990), and “Philosophy and Linguistics” (1990), among others, all included in Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. & trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 37 Agamben, “The Idea of Language,” in Potentialities, p. 45. 38 Ibid., p. 47. 36

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Every reflection on tradition must begin with the assertion that before transmitting anything else, human beings must first of all transmit language to themselves.39

And this question of linguistic potential, the question of the transmission of that which enables transmission, as opposed to any question merely concerning language in general, is immediately identified as properly philosophical: Philosophy concerns itself with what is at issue not in this or that meaningful statement but in the very fact that human beings speak, that there is language and opening to sense.40

The entire question of Agamben’s particular philosophy lies in how we understand this doubling: “language and opening to sense.” Must language itself precede the first artifact, the first tool, or, for that matter, the baby’s bottle (which might be thought to constitute the first entry of the individual into tradition)? Agamben never asks: if there is an opening to sense which is something other than linguistic, how does this fact bear upon language as such? Contemporary experience is of a sending without message. The crisis of sovereignty is expressed here as a crisis of presupposition and foundation. But the destruction of tradition and the absence of a foundation for truth has until now, according to Agamben, itself been thought in a presuppositional way—such is his characterization of the thought of the trace and originary writing, “in which our age has remained imprisoned.”41 Yet, again, if this is the danger, it is the chance, thus the task is to think community beyond presupposition and foundation, to think the transmission of truth, “not a thing but an unconcealment.”42 Agamben’s earlier insistence on the inextricability of the human and the thing seems forgotten in a Heideggerian gesture opposing authentic experience (transmission 39

Agamben, “Tradition of the Immemorial,” in Potentialities,

p. 104. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 42 Ibid.,

p. 111. p. 110.

19

“itself”) to the experience of things, that is, technics. On this basis the logic of his text operates an infinitization, such that any transmission of “things,” any claim of inheritance leading to a project, can only be a “betrayal,” a betrayal we can only avoid by adopting the task of transmitting, precisely, the unsayable.43 In “On Potentiality,” this theme is treated in relation to its essential philosophical source: Aristotle’s reflection on the nature of perception. We can see, hear, touch, smell, and taste, but do we not always sense something, the perceptible, in other words, color, sound, texture, fragrance, flavor? Each of the senses requires that to which it is sensitive. Yet is there not also some shadowy form of perception even in the absence of that which our senses are capable of receiving? Can we not see, for instance, darkness, the fact of darkness, the absence of the visually perceptible? What this question shows, according to Agamben, is that potentiality does not simply signal nonbeing, the not-being-there of color in darkness, but rather the existence of non-being, the presence of an absence.44 Potentiality exists. The point is to understand the meaning of this existence. What exactly is it we “see” in darkness? It is in order to address this question that Aristotle introduces the diaphanes, usually translated as “the transparent,” that through which all visibility takes place. But Agamben emphasizes that by diaphanes Aristotle does not mean transparent bodies (air, for example) but that which makes visibility possible: light is then the actuality of the diaphanes; darkness, “we may therefore say, is in some way the color of potentiality.”45 Diaphanes is the name for the perceptibility of perception itself, the perceptibility of perceptual potentiality. And if potentiality and perceptibility are also names for knowledge, then the question for man, the knowing animal, is the perceptibility and potentiality of knowing this kind of darkness too (boredom, evil).

43 Ibid.,

p. 115. “On Potentiality,” in Potentialities, p. 179. 45 Ibid., p. 180. 44 Agamben,

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Thus the question of the human and the animal raises itself here as well. Animals perceive, but they lack the potential for knowing proper to humans. What animals know, they know in actuality, fully, constantly. Human beings are the animal for whom knowing is like seeing, a potential, which means something of which I can be deprived, analogous to closing my eyes or going blind. What is peculiar to human beings is this kind of potentiality, that is, this kind of impotentiality—ignorance, idiocy. Other living beings are capable only of their specific potentiality; they can only do this or that. But human beings are the animals who are capable of their own impotentiality. The greatness of human potentiality is measured by the abyss of human impotentiality.46

The particular human capacity is to act beyond one’s nature, contrary to what one knows specifically (as a member of a species). This is another version of the theme of infancy, as Agamben would say, or of being-in-default, as Stiegler spells it. Stiegler’s philosophy, too, draws sustaining breath from the question of the diaphanes, although compared to Agamben, perhaps, he draws it mild. Stiegler emphasizes the relation between the types of souls—vegetative, sensory, intellective—noting that for Aristotle the higher two are most of the time only so in potential. That is, the sensory (animal) soul bears a constant tendency to regress to a vegetative state (while sleeping, for instance), while the intellective (human) soul is constantly threatened by its tendency to dwell merely in sensibility. It enacts its potentiality only intermittently, when participating in the divine, that is, in knowing the truth.47 For Stiegler, too, the philosophical question concerns the conditions of passage from potential to act and, like Agamben, this is framed as the question of perceiving the diaphanes, the perceptibility of perception or, as Stiegler puts it, the milieu. And why is the question that of perceiving the perceptible as such? Because the diaphanes, whether of the senses or of intellection, is that which, as 46 Ibid.,

p. 182, emphasis in original. Passer à l’acte, p. 31.

47 Stiegler,

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the perceptible, as that which is closest to us in the act of perceiving, is that which is least visible, most easily overlooked (what the fish never notices is water).48 Both Agamben and Stiegler note the curious fact that De anima does not discuss the diaphanes of intellection, that is, the human milieu properly speaking, what Agamben calls “the actuality of the potentiality to not-think,” and Stiegler spells as the possibility of knowing the noetic milieu. The philosophical question par excellence, for both these philosophers, is to locate this possibility of perceiving the diaphanes of knowing. Agamben’s answer to this question, drawn from Aristotle, lies in grasping that potentiality which, in coming to actuality, nevertheless preserves itself as potentiality. But preserving itself as potentiality requires that, in coming to act, it exhausts the regressive impotentiality constantly threatening human potentiality. In what situation could potentiality come to actuality yet preserve its potentiality? Reading from De anima, Agamben concludes that it is “science,” that is, proper knowing, which is a perpetual potential to pass into the act of contemplation, to participate in the divine, and therefore a gift that, surviving actuality, is at the same time its own conservation and salvation.49 The most telling aspect of this resolution of the question of the intellective milieu is the theme of conservation. It names for Agamben the perpetual possibility of thought, and this is indeed a properly Greek understanding of philosophy as the potential for a life lived entirely as contemplation. But it is, as well, symptomatic of Greek temporality, insofar as Greece is preoccupied with dwelling with the eternal, thus escaping its own feeling for tragic mortality. To “preserve,” “conserve,” and “survive” the potentiality to know can only mean my endless capacity to draw from the well of accumulated experience, that is, from what I have learned. But, contra Plato, is this perpetual and constant possibility not threatened precisely to the extent that my memory is finite, which is why “science” is also a tradition, depending on memory supports such as written texts? Such supports form the means of combating the irreducible entropic 48 Ibid.,

p. 32. “On Potentiality,” in Potentialities, pp. 183–4.

49 Agamben,

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tendency to fall into a merely sensible state. Just as the poem forms the condition of maintaining the consistence if not the existence of the loved object, so too the supports of memory upon which science relies are the actual, material basis of that endless and perpetual possibility of returning to the lessons of experience, both my own and those which are not mine, but which I adopt. We are still operating here within the rubric of infancy, but the thought of dynamis and energeia can no longer be derived only from language. We must, rather, pass into an understanding of infancy as the doubled fact of man’s delayed maturity (his physis as constituted without developed potentialities) and his advanced prematurity (tekhne as the totality and inexhaustibility of his prosthetic potentials).50 What matters are the material supports of our fallible memories. The structure of potentiality is not first of all the structure of language, but rather that of inscription as such, that is, of any milieu whatsoever—before and after language—through which significance is exteriorized (the chipped pebble, for instance, bearing the trace of the gesture of the hand that worked on it). Thus Stiegler, too, found himself forced to resume the question of the noetic milieu: Now, it appeared to me that this milieu was that of language. I set myself to reading Saussure and Wittgenstein. Later the milieu 50 Agamben comes closer to this thought in “The Idea of Infancy,” in Idea of Prose, trans. Michael Sullivan & Sam Whitsitt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995 [1985]). Infancy is there grasped as an open prematurity, that is, one that exceeds all endosomatic programming and opens human beings to “world.” And this experience of world, enabled by our prematurity, can only be retained exosomatically, that is, according to a process of exteriorization (tradition, technology). But the politicophilosophical task as it is formulated here is, for Agamben, to cease wandering through tradition. Now, even if this is understood as a matter of “taking up as such” our original infantile openness, this is nevertheless thought as a universal, no longer deferred, language (98). A certain amount of risk seems inherent to such a formulation of our task, specifically, that of endorsing the deterritorialization and disindividuation currently unfolding across the planet, on the grounds of finally overcoming the burden of individuation as such. How is this not a return to origins, and is it not precisely the intensification of precisely what most afflicts the human condition today?

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became for me that of the artifact, of the supplement in general, of which language (through which is produced the everyday experience of logos) would be one dimension, but of which technical artifacts (consisting of things) would form another dimension.51

That is, the question of the milieu of potentiality is the question not of the ideal or transcendental aspect of language, but specifically of the materiality of the ideal. Technics, as Stiegler says, is the condition of life that knows. With the thought of double inheritance Agamben might have made the leap to seeing that the anthropogenetic question necessarily concerns systems of memory rather than merely representation (of, say, oneself to oneself). The human is constituted precisely through the exteriorization of memory, that is, technics, insofar as this names the potential to turn what is remembered, through imagination, into the transformative potential for foresight. Agamben does not pursue the question to the point of recognizing that the artifact, as that which opens the dimensions of memory and anticipation, is the opening of human temporality. In “Pardes: The Writing of Potentiality,” however, Agamben approaches as closely as he ever has to this constellation of relations. He is concerned, once again, with the question of what it means to think the potential to think (that is, to perceive the noetic milieu), but this concern emerges, precisely, out of the contemporary “crisis of terminology,” that is, from the fact that language no longer offers guarantees of sense, including philosophical sense. Deconstruction is here acknowledged as that thought most radically taking this crisis into account, suspending the terminological character of philosophical vocabulary while nevertheless continuing to operate with that terminology. But deconstruction thereby amounts to a call to another experience of language.52 Agamben, then, returns to the question of potentiality and of the perception of perceptibility, but with the supplementary question 51 Stiegler,

Passer à l’acte, p. 33. Agamben, “Pardes: The Writing Potentialities, pp. 208–9. 52

24

of

Potentiality,”

in

of the writing of potentiality. If Aristotle could write his works on the potentiality of thought and language, he could do so only by dipping his pen in nous, that is, in “pure potentiality” (in the noetic milieu). This is the famous image of the tabula rasa. But if Aristotle can thereby perceive the potential for thought, he can do so only by suffering the receptivity of the blank slate, that is, the potential to not write. The potential to write is the possibility of leaving the possibility of not-writing. Once this potential is perceived as such, one begins, almost automatically, to write, “as if the letters wrote themselves on the tablet.” Now, this is to raise the question not only of the artifact, or, indeed, of the artifactuality of consciousness (knowing is a form of writing on the soul, just as feeling is a form of painting on the heart 53), but also of the artifact as subject of the process, as the who “dictating” the what of human thought, that is, human existence. It is thus no surprise that Agamben returns here to the question of the “trace.” The trace, he says, is nothing less than the most rigorous attempt to reconsider “the Aristotelian paradox of potentiality, the gesture of the scribe who dips his pen in thought and writes solely with his potentiality (not to write).”54 The trace is a potentiality, a potentiality that experiences itself, a writing tablet that, as nothing but the potential to write, suffers its own passivity and formlessness. But what then could it mean, Agamben asks, to experience a potentiality? Can we even speak of experience in such a context? It is a question, again, of the existence of non-being, between something and nothing. That is why the trace is not even properly a name but

53

This way of putting things might suggest an opposition between knowing and feeling, writing and painting. But if so, then we must immediately re-compose, or deconstruct, this opposition. Doing so will mean re-conceiving the noetic as no longer a matter of opposing intellective and sensible apprehension. This is precisely the task Stiegler undertakes in Mécréance et discrédit 1. La décadence des démocraties industrielles (Paris: Galilée, 2004), part IV, where he thinks the noetic as the “sensational” (as opposed to the sensible), the noetic act as “exclamatory,” and the noetic soul as susceptible to sensationalism. 54 Agamben, “Pardes: The Writing of Potentiality,” p. 216.

25

rather, short of a word or a thing, something like the pure potential to signify. Agamben spells this as “the materialization of a potentiality”: The potential to think, experiencing itself and being capable of itself as potential not to think, makes itself into the trace of its own formlessness, a trace that no one has traced—pure matter.55

Pure matter: that is, the milieu of materialization, that which receives form, in other words, the khora of Plato’s Timaeus. The writing tablet on which nothing is written, which is thus the potential to not think and therefore the potential to think, is nothing other than the thought of the khora. Insofar as this is also Derrida’s trace, it is “something like the experience of an intelligible matter.”56 And insofar as grammatology is something other than an interpretative practice dedicated to infinite deconstruction—that is, insofar as it concerns a decisive event and experience of matter—it opens onto an ethics.57 This most perfect of Agamben’s texts, in which he seems to re-evaluate his judgment of grammatology, most closely approaches thinking the artifactuality and technicity of the trace, that is, the experience of the milieu of thought.58 If Agamben’s thought falls 55 Ibid.,

p. 218.

56 Ibid. 57 Ibid.,

p. 219. The thought of “materialization” here approaches what Stiegler describes as his own materialism. Having in an earlier epoch been a materialist in the properly Marxist sense, Stiegler finds he can no longer hold on to that sense (and this passage goes some way to elucidating the thought of the “materiality of the ideal” already mentioned). Passer à l’acte, pp. 65– 6: “I cannot say that today I am a materialist in that sense, but I must say that I remain a materialist, in the sense of a materialism which does not deny the spirit, but which poses that the spirit, while not reducible to matter, is always conditioned by it. ‘Not reducible to matter’ signifies there is a process, produced in matter, but irreducible to physical laws, or even biological ones: there is a play of mnemonic layers which are at the same time biological, psychic and hypomnesic, and which require formalizations for which the resources of the natural sciences remain irreducibly insufficient. “I preserve the word spirit to qualify this process insofar as it concerns a process of return [revenance] where, in particular, what returns is moved by what I call the unreal consistence of that which, while certainly not 58

26

short here, it is only because, like Derrida, he hesitates to think the historicity of the writing tablet, that is, of the trace, the fact not only that paper supplants the tablet, but that writing itself represents only a particular epoch in the prosthetic history of humankind. But this hesitation will continue to work its effects in Agamben’s thought, as an inability to grasp the etiology of law’s being in force without significance, in turn leading him to cast the politico-philosophical task as an infinite and transcendent leap rather than, for instance, asking about materializations of the trace to come, that is, about the milieus of the future. This is the decisive difference between Agamben’s analysis and Stiegler’s, even if the latter, too, believes that each epoch of technical individuation requires a-transcendental leaps, through which we operate the process of technical individuation, that is, make decisions and make a difference.

5 These consequences are evident in The Coming Community, which again features, near the beginning, the tabula rasa that writes itself as the pure potentiality of thought. The entire book is an interrogation of the ethics following from this thought, that is, from the fact that, as potentiality to think and not-think, human beings are constituted by a lack—they feel a debt, they in a way fail themselves and must appropriate this failing, that is, exist potentially.59 Such is the potential for ethics, failing which, such is the potential for evil. And this potential failure—deciding to remain in a deficit of existence, or taking the potential to not-be as foundation, or repressing potentiality—appears today as “the absurdity of individual existing—for example, justice—is irreducible, and does not cease, therefore, to consist: one cannot renounce it, and it is an essential motor of all human life—and the condition of desire. That which con-sists therefore does not cease to return [revenir] as in-sistence, legacy of prior generations and responsibility of a heritage.” 59 Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis & London: Minnesota University Press, 1993 [1990]), pp. 43– 4.

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existence.”60 Its most visible manifestation is the reduction of existence to visibility as such, to an “everyday exhibition,” that is, spectacle. Spectacle, transforming the world into an image, is the process by which the “mercantile economy” attains “absolute and irresponsible sovereignty,” and can thus “manipulate collective perception and take control of social memory and social communication, transforming them into a single spectacular commodity.”61 This is, in other words, an account of the destruction of transmissibility and tradition that has occupied Agamben at least since 1970. The spectacle, he concludes, is the form in which humanity is probably heading toward destruction. This sovereignty of the image, insofar as it is a challenge to those sovereign systems grounded in writing (law, say), might be thought as an evolution of the systems of the trace, as a new epoch of the noetic milieu, necessitating a political task devoted to understanding this evolution in order to counter its destructive aspects. Indeed, Agamben argues that the violence of the spectacle is countered by the fact it is, as well, a positive possibility, for the first time making possible the experience of “one’s own linguistic being,” “language itself,” “the very fact that one speaks.”62 But the understanding of the spectacle as a species of linguistic milieu, rather than as another milieu possessing its own dynamic, determines his interpretation: the spectacle is understood only as an intensification of linguistic experience, as an extreme linguistic event. And thus if the spectacle contains a positive possibility for Agamben, this consists in taking this process of intensification to the limit: Only those who succeed in carrying it to completion—without allowing what reveals to remain veiled in the nothingness that reveals, but bringing language itself to language—will be the first citizens of a community with neither presuppositions, nor a State.63

60 Ibid.,

p. 64. pp. 79–80. 62 Ibid., p. 83. 63 Ibid. 61 Ibid.,

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How could this gesture of “completion” be defended? Is this not transcendentalism, that is, the dream of a return to origins, to the moment of the gap into which our linguisticity is poured, that is, to our originary infancy? The price paid for reducing the question of the noetic milieu to language is that politics can only be thought as the intensification of destructive tendencies to some absolute point. This failure to think further into what Agamben calls the spectacle marks the philosophico-political project he takes up from this point, a project notable for the absence of analysis of the spectacle, even though such analysis seems constantly presupposed.

6 Politics is that technique invented in response to the potential for human beings either to fall into discord and war or, in dialogue and with feelings for mutuality and justice, to come together. The beginning of politics is thus found in those supplements to physis through which, in Agamben’s terms, man becomes that species which, in language, “separates and opposes himself to his own bare life.” 64 As such, the origin of politics is anthropogenesis itself, insofar as human beings are constituted through a process of inventing an exterior determining the form of its interiority. This is nothing other than the thought of the process of exteriorization that Stiegler adopts from André Leroi-Gourhan and extends (philosophically). Agamben has essentially three theses in Homo Sacer. The first is that politics emerges out of the indistinction of interior and exterior. Sovereignty, that is, power, is the form of what emerges from this distinction. He is utterly aware that sovereignty is founded on the distinguishability and indistinguishability of the inside and the outside of the law. Thus his second thesis is that the activity of sovereign power is the production of this articulation between law and life, the production of the difference between the inside and the 64 Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998 [1995]), p. 8.

29

outside of the law, and the possibility of passage between them. It is not that the sovereign recomposes what has been distinguished, but that he decides this difference through the work of the sovereign machine, which is thus the mechanism by which he founds and unfounds the law in the state of exception. The third thesis of Homo Sacer is that this structure is today undoing itself as the state of exception becomes the rule, which is to say that the distinction between interior and exterior, law and life, is collapsing. Short-circuiting the relation between law and life previously operated by the sovereign, the permanent state of exception operates, rather, directly on the biopolitical mass, confusing and confounding law and life. The symptoms of this tendency are all those juridico-political obsessions grounded in the reduction of existence to the barest of bare life—immigration, the camp, humanitarianism, medical and genetic technologies—but more generally the tendency to forget that human existence is a matter of technique and savoir-vivre, and not simply the satisfaction of basic or artificially-induced needs. The basis on which Agamben is able to construct these theses is the structural relation between law and language. That is, law shares with language the difference between the system (the rules of grammar; the rules of law) and enactment (speech; trial and judgment), that is, a difference between a synchronic and a diachronic aspect. Classical sovereignty operates in the gap between the synchronic and the diachronic, between system and performance. This is the very meaning of political sovereignty; this is its power. Sovereignty, in other words, operates through a milieu, and the exposure of sovereignty in the permanent state of exception brings this milieu into visibility. Agamben derives from this the necessity of living within this visibility of the milieu, that is, we must not return to a conception of sovereignty as the operator of potentiality, but rather learn to dwell within potentiality as such. The task must therefore be to think potentiality without actuality, that is, to think beyond every

30

figure of relation. “Yet it is this very task that many, today, refuse to assume at any cost.”65 Since law and language are constantly understood as two faces of the same system, Agamben can never account for why law, today, is in force without significance. If we know it has something to do with spectacle, we never learn very much about how because, constantly reducing the spectacle to language, it becomes simply the operation of language against itself. In “Form-of-Life” Agamben posits the crisis of sovereignty and the question of politics today as the question of whether a form of life, that is, a life of power, remains possible.66 What is at stake with the “absurdity of individual existence” is thus clearly not restricted to juridico-political sovereignty but is, rather, potentiality as such, movement—(psychic and collective) individuation. Had the problematic of law and language been derived from a reflection on potentiality itself, then instead of conceiving the philosophico-political task as thinking beyond all relation, it may, on the contrary, have been understood as that of reinvigorating the chances of individuation, that is, of rerelating, in the absence of which we are witnessing the very destruction of politics, that is, existence, individual and collective. What Agamben does conclude from the thought that potentiality is life, that thought is power, is that the inscription of social knowledge into the productive processes must be distinguished from intellectuality as an antagonistic power.67 This opposition, the one he is for, is thus between two kinds of knowledge: political, truthful, just knowledge, as opposed to technical or economic knowledge. Because communicativity always means for Agamben language, he can only repeat the metaphysical gesture opposing the philosopher to the sophist as the opposition of language and technics. Had he grasped that technics is the very potentiality of language—it is not that technics in the form of the spectacle is destroying truth in the 65 Ibid.,

p. 47. Agamben, “Form-of-life,” in Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti & Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000 [1996]), p. 9. 67 Ibid., p. 11. 66

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form of language, but rather that another epoch of the trace is emerging—he may have concluded that what matters is recomposing these oppositions. Politics today is more properly conceived as the task of harnessing those potentials contained within all systems of communication as such, in the hope of forming a counter-tendency to today’s hegemonic tendency toward disindividuation, rather than hoping for a messianic salvation if the latter tendency is driven to the point of absolutely destroying the potential for existence as such. One cannot live without the feeling of (individual and collective) sovereignty; in the face of its exhaustion or dissipation, the political question becomes the possibility of its re-invention.

7 Is this to suggest that there is nothing infinite about politics or ethics or justice? This question is best posed through reading Remnants of Auschwitz, the text of Agamben’s that pushes the question of the ethical task beyond all ethical systems, and that tries to rethink the infinity of this task. At the same time, it is nothing but the continuation of the analyses pursued in Homo Sacer. Remnants of Auschwitz pursues the aporia of testimony, that is, the fact that it is impossible to testify to one’s own death, that those bearing witness for the dead lack the experience of that to which they testify. But this aporia does not only apply to the “instant” of death: it also refers, today, to the gas chamber, a black hole of experience. The threshold of the gas chamber constitutes an event horizon—having crossed this threshold one is still alive, yet, insofar as no-one survived, nothing, no light and no life, escaped to testify to the experience of the chamber’s interior. Thus insofar as there is a witness and a testimony to the phenomenon of the gas chamber, what language bears witness to is an experience for which there is, essentially, no language. To this “paradigm of the extermination,” however, Agamben wishes to add another, that of the Muselmann, the camp member so deprived of dignity, so starved, so ill, that he enters a condition in

32

which it is no longer possible to communicate. He is so removed from all the qualities of life, according to Primo Levi, that when the Muselmann succumbs, one hesitates before calling his death “death.” The Muselmann is thus the site of a biopolitical experiment which, according to Agamben, introduces a logic different from that of the gas chamber, even if it remains a question of an injunction to speak about that which exceeds experience and speech: “only if language bears witness to something to which it is impossible to bear witness, can a speaking being experience something like a necessity to speak.”68 Our question will be the basis on which these two paradigms, that of extermination and that of the Muselmann, are separated, and the consequences of this separation. The basis of this differentiation is, again, determined to be linguistic. Our infancy means we must learn to say “I”: we must enunciate our identity, and thus the act of subjectification immediately introduces a division into the self, which is to say that the constitution of subjectivity is at the same time desubjectifying. To announce myself as an “I” is necessarily to give an advance upon myself, to grant myself credit before I am myself, and thus to enter into a debt, for which I am, henceforth, owing. Subjectification is essentially temporal; it names my entrance into human time, that is, into potentiality. But if this is to offer oneself an advance, to place oneself in debt, to be originarily owing or at-fault, then this is, as Agamben says, the potentiality for shame. Shame is the hidden structure of consciousness and subjectivity precisely in the sense that it means being consigned to an unassumable debt.69

68

Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999 [1998]), p. 65. 69 Ibid., p. 128. This is exactly the structure, we might add, of aido (shame as the sense of modesty requiring respect for others) that the myth of Prometheus as told by Plato describes as the heritage of the gift of technics, that heritage which, along with justice, first introduces the potential for politics, that is, for an end to eris. And the sense or feeling for aido and dike, we must stress, are not qualities given to man, but rather potentialities, precisely as the potential to suffer the questions of dike and aido. Cf. Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, pp. 200–4.

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Shame, then, reflects something like the difference and deferral of subjectivity, the fact that I must live as though I were a constituted individual, even though I never finally achieve this, because my tendency toward individuality inevitably confronts a disindividuating counter-tendency. It is a question of différance, and of the trace, that “no place” in which the living being is able to render itself linguistic. In Agamben’s terms, the human being exists in the impossibility of conjoining his language and his being, his humanity and his inhumanity. But far from authorizing the infinite deferral of signification, Agamben argues that this is precisely what opens the space for testimony. Testimony comes not from the possibility of speech adequate to my existence, but rather out of the inadequation between my language and myself. And it is precisely because the relation (or, rather, non-relation) between the living being and the speaking being has the form of shame, of being reciprocally consigned to something that cannot be assumed by a subject, that the ethos of this disjunction can only be testimony—that is, something that cannot be assigned to a subject but that nevertheless constitutes the subject’s only dwelling place, its only possible consistency.70

This gesture appears intended as an exit from the aporias of the trace, that is, of writing as the deferral of signification. In its place lies testimony, but a testimony conscious of its own shame, that is to say, its necessity and insufficiency, but also its potential for consistency. The paradigm of extermination turned on the thought of the gas chamber as a black hole of experience, an event horizon which, once crossed, fatally closes off all possibility of communication—no illumination reaches us from the interior. All that remains are those traces short of such description, the remnants of the gas chambers, the paperwork documenting those who were consigned to their ends, the statements of the Sonderkommando who saw and removed the bodies but were not themselves gassed. But these would be the traces only of an absolute past, that is, one absolutely unknowable as such, even if they are sufficient to make certain our perception of an absolute 70 Agamben,

Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 130.

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darkness, the certainty that there is something we don’t know, but which we must believe. With the paradigm of the Muselmann, on the other hand, Agamben wants to think a different kind of survival, one that does not, so it seems, end in this resignation to an absolutely past past. When I, the survivor, speak about the Muselmann, the one beyond communication, I speak about something exceeding knowledge, and thus I am the one who becomes inhuman. The Muselmann, on the other hand, who loses the power of speech as well as all human qualities, becomes, in fact, the true human, the only human. The human and the inhuman in effect change places. Being fully human is determined by Agamben as the impossible coincidence of experiencing my own destruction and expressing that experience, without remainder. And the impossibility of this coincidence distributes the human and the inhuman toward two equally impossible poles. Between the witness and the Muselmann, therefore, another zone of indistinction between the human and the inhuman opens up. If the human is always before or beyond the human (in advance or in delay of the human), through whom pass the currents of subjectification and desubjectification (the tendencies toward individuation and disindividuation), then the “ridge” between these currents is the place of testimony.71 This is a ridge not of potentiality, the potential to speak, but rather of an impotentiality, testament to our capacity of achieving our own infancy. Insofar as the language of the witness functions, it is dead; insofar as it fails to signify, it survives. Agamben wants to establish that the “remnants” of Auschwitz are not the archaeological traces but the witnesses. Insofar as the witness testifies to the existence of the Muselmann, rather than the extermination, that is, testifies to the “whole witness,” the impossibility of bearing witness ceases to be a mere privation and “becomes real,” an impossibility that ends up absolutely existing as such. Thus “in the concept of the remnant, the aporia of testimony coincides with the aporia of messianism.”72 71 Ibid., 72 Ibid.,

p. 135. pp. 163–4.

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This is an ethics trusting in the thought that justice means something other than an infinite archive. The problem with deconstruction, it seems, is that, limited to writing and the trace, there can only be the signs of the past, but never actual testimony. Those survivors who are really alive, who were really there, and who testify to what it is really impossible to testify, somehow escape this aporia: testifying to the destruction of the possibility of speech, yet existing (or consisting), this testimony constitutes proof of the impossible, that is, it proves its consistency and fidelity, and thus proves that we must be faithful to it. This tortured thought emerges, perhaps, out of a fear of the trace, as though it names the inexorable fading of the lived past into an absolute past from which nothing can be drawn. The trace, as the condition of possibility of the organization of memory, is the condition of possibility of anticipation, that is, of programming the future, of the future we hope will meet our expectations. And, indeed, we might think, how could this be anything other than a limited past, authorizing a limited, thus insufficient, future? The trace, on this reading, represents the blocked path of salvation, the condemnation of the absolutely lost and forgotten to being lost and forgotten. But if we may ever justly speak of salvation, Agamben is arguing, it could only be for those who, precisely, are unsavable as such.73 And the mechanism of this salvation is via that becoming-real of the impossible which the survivor’s testimony to the existence of the Muselmann represents. For Heidegger, the irreducible inadequation at the heart of my existence amounts to the fact of Dasein’s mortality, that is, to the knowledge and anticipation of my unknowable death, but what Heidegger (and Agamben) do not make plain is that this knowledge depends on the human capacity to adopt experiences not my own, which are only knowable, precisely, prosthetically. This is why the trace is not only a question of experience, but is irreducible to experience. Those traces which remain, the prosthetic remnants we have, are what inform us of the existence of a past we cannot adopt, a 73 Cf. Agamben,

The Open: Man and Animal, p. 82.

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past which escapes us. Traces make possible our knowledge that there is an absolute past, thus an irreducibly phantasmatic past, since it cannot, for us, exist (even though, insofar as we know it escapes us, it consists). But then this is, as well, the condition not only of what we can program, but of knowing the finitude of all programming. Stiegler: The improbable cannot be reduced; there is always an excess over the programmatic, an excess that animates it in the first place. This is why testimony is always testimony of the living insofar as it is living. But let us remember that the inverse is true as well. The living witnesses because it is prosthetized.74

In other words, there is no exit from the question of belief and fidelity, even for the living witnesses, who must trust the truth of their memory, and on the basis of this trust know how to be faithful to it— but this is, then, an “intelligence of faith” and, as such, technical. 75 Every belief calls upon the absolute past, and thus calls for an impossible, but necessary, fidelity. And thus every fidelity and every judgment calls for the absolute future: “the absolute future qua the very messianicity of the messianic.”76 That is why Stiegler asserts that, if justice does not exist, it nonetheless con-sists and in-sists, and does so precisely as reference to an absolute past that itself refers to an absolute future, but a doubled reference possible only through the traces and the tools that we have. The difference between Agamben’s two paradigms (of extermination and the Muselmann) cannot be expected to survive this thought.

74 Stiegler, “Derrida and Technology: Fidelity at the Limits of Deconstruction and the Prosthesis of Faith,” trans. Richard Beardsworth, in Tom Cohen (ed.), Jacques Derrida and the Humanities (New York & Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 261–2. 75 Ibid., p. 263. 76 Ibid., p. 258.

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8 Agamben returns in State of Exception to the “structural analogy” between language and law—the system of rules must exist outside the world, separated from the enactment of that system in the world, an enactment which must nevertheless presuppose the consistency of the system in order to be effective. This is the separation and essential relation between the synchronic and the diachronic aspects of language and law. But in State of Exception Agamben explains that the ground of this analogy lies in the fact that this structure is common to all “social institutions,” which always involve a process of “desemanticization” separating norm and praxis. The work of civilization is nothing other than the unfolding of this process, one consequence of which is always the creation of a space between what is separated, that is, an anomic zone of suspension between interior and exterior in which the state of exception is, each time, located.77 It thus becomes clear that this is the general structure of potentiality as such, that is, the genealogy of power is the history of the evolution of exteriorization. But if law is a moment or an epoch in this history, then the question is less of an exit from desemanticization than of the future of this process, specifically, the question of whether it has a future. Such a thought suggests that if the state of exception is becoming the rule, this is indeed a collapse of the process of individuation that law has always been, a process that, like language, works itself out in the play between its synchronic and diachronic aspects. And it suggests, furthermore, that the permanent state of exception may be a systemic reaction or convulsion, reflecting the increasing impotence of juridical systems, which are today constantly confronted by the fact that the performative potential of the audiovisual technical system, and the technical system generally, constantly runs ahead of the potential to legislate the world. Agamben is certainly correct whenever he recomposes interior and exterior, that is, understands them as elements of a single process. Yet he does not make explicit enough that what remains after 77 Agamben, State of

Exception, pp. 36–7.

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this recomposition must then always be the question of temporality. By referring constantly and monolithically to language, rather than addressing the historical and technical question of the epochs of signification, this question of human time is evaded. And for this reason it cannot occur to him to analyze the relation of the audiovisual systems to the linguistic system—he can only suggest the need for a law surviving its own “deposition.” This is to conceive the law as a remnant. Agamben immediately phrases this as the question of the fate of law after its messianic fulfillment, which relates it not only to the problematic of Remnants of Auschwitz, but equally to the question of the fate of art as it is posed in Agamben’s first book. This fate must be anything other, as usual, than a process of infinite deconstruction that can never get to the bottom of the law. The law may not be justice, he says, but could be the pathway toward it, if a “new use” could be found for law. It is a question of finding a way in which, though no longer binding or commanding, law could continue to be useful, that is, potent. Law’s survival depends on the dawning of an age in which it becomes something we play with, perhaps in the way a child plays with disused objects, perhaps more studiously. Such an eventuality might be understood as a de-functionalization of law, but a de-functionalization immediately unleashing juridical potentiality through a process of re-functionalization. According to Agamben, this would be the passage that leads law, finally, to justice.78 Agamben has postulated his structural analogy as broadly as possible, as the relation of law and life understood in the most ample sense. Nevertheless, when we arrive at the final paragraph, these terms remain intact, and “opening a space” for politics will mean showing “law in its non-relation to life and life in its non-relation to law.” At stake always throughout his work is the difference between understanding opposing terms transductively, and understanding them according to their non-relation. Rather than grasping humankind as the composition of somatic and psychic elements, or of biological, social and technical potentials, for Agamben it is a question of the disjunctive “incongruity” of these elements, their “immediate relation in a non-coincidence.”79 The political task is always for Agamben a 78 Ibid.,

pp. 63–4.

79 Agamben, The Open:

Man and Animal, p. 16 and p. 83.

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matter of intensifying disconnection, which is a kind of freezing of the relation, hence his attraction to Benjamin’s “dialectic at a standstill,” from which we will explode in the passage from law to justice. For Agamben this is the possibility of “deactivating” the law, at which point it becomes a “pure means.”80 How should the phrase “pure means” strike our ears? What is pure in pure means, and what are its means? The question is whether there is a way of hearing “pure means” as something other than the revenge and final sovereignty of technics, against which there would no longer be any “human” recourse. Insofar as it is a question of overcoming the separation of law and life in the passage to justice, this sounds like nothing other than the destruction of the political factum as such, and the triumph of the destruction of psychic and collective individuation, that is, the triumph of the destruction of existence, in its potentiality. If there is another way to hear Agamben’s pure means, it can only be by thinking positively what is meant by the need to find a “new use.” But this will mean suspending the axiom of his thought by which potentiality is always derived from language. Agamben, concerned at all times with the singularity and primacy of the phenomenon of language, constantly returns to the difference between the synchronic system and the diachronic necessity of utterance. From this he abstracts particularly the necessity of the shifter, words whose reference is determined only by the situation of their use. And from this he moves invariably to one particular shifter, the word “I,” implied in every act of speech. Now, even if subjectivity is both implied and invented in the act of speech, such a reflection does not travel far enough into the question of the genesis of language, the genealogy of its differentiation from the sounds produced by animals. The movement from (animal) sounds to (human) language is a process, involving the de-functionalization of the signal and its refunctionalization as the word. A word, firstly, must be already and still there, that is, it depends upon a “past that lasts,” that is, upon

80 Agamben, State of

Exception, p. 88.

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memory, upon a stabilization of meaning.81 This amounts to the synchronic character of language, its being already-there, but as synchrony this is still essentially temporal. Secondly, a word must be shared, that is, not merely individual or private, but relying upon or itself elaborating a collective milieu. Third, a word must be generalizable and indeterminate, capable of application more than once, available for use within a horizon of possible situations. These characteristics amount to the essential technicity of the word. To be in possession of the word is necessarily already to be a technical being. The word, as a tool, projecting an indeterminate horizon, necessarily refers past itself, to another word or another tool, to a grammar, to a world, to world as such, that is, temporality. The word, synchronic and diachronic, drawing upon an already-there and projecting onto a horizon of future use, being nothing but this memory of past use and capacity for further use, and instituting and constituting a collective milieu, is therefore not itself permanently stable but rather metastable, capable of undergoing further individuation and re-functionalization. Again, this describes the essential technicity of language, but where technicity definitely does not mean an analytical power divorced from synthetic poiesis. Falsely separating language as a means from its “creative” potential grasps the genesis of language from out of a distinction emerging only in a much later epoch, an epoch which may itself only be a moment of metastable equilibrium within the history of the individuation of milieus of individuation. Systems of language, of writing, and audiovisual systems such as television are all forms of exteriorization, that is, of placing ourselves outside and in front of ourselves. They are milieus operating to durably fix the passage of flux, that is, experience. And this fixing is, indeed, the condition of possibility of determining the form of our experience, of calculating it, measuring it, that is, of fleeing everything in experience which exceeds the calculable. But this process of exteriorization is just as much the condition of possibility of knowing our indetermination, the determinate indetermination that

81 Stiegler,

Technics and Time, 1, p. 166.

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characterizes human existence as such.82 Whether I read a book or a poem, watch a film, or simply hear myself speak, I am engaged with a form of exteriorization, with an inscription of experience, and this means the potential to return to this experience, to re-sume, reinterpret, re-flect, re-consider, and thus come to know that there is more than one determination (more than one interpretation of the poem, the film, my words). And if a poem or a film produces a different experience the second time I read or watch it, this can only be because I am no longer exactly who I was first time around. Only in this way can I discover an “irreducible inadequation” in my experience, that is, that I exist according to a determined indetermination, that is, temporally.83 And thus the shifter “I” should be understood as the prosthesis by which I refer to myself, and as that which makes possible my sense of existence, or rather my consistence, since I am nothing but my way of pro-posing the inachievable unity of the flux of my experience. Of course, since what we are talking about is the constitution of myself, I can never be the absolute author of this proposal, for which I remain, nevertheless, responsible. Today’s crisis is indeed one of experience, that is, a crisis of the destruction of experience, and the “spectacle” is indeed the means of that destruction. Agamben, in The Open, understands the human being as that animal which has awoken to its own captivation within the circuit of its milieu, which knows its captivation. With the advent of the spectacle, however, all those historical potentialities keeping human beings awake to their captivation (he names poetry, religion, philosophy) have been eclipsed, undermining historicity, that is, existence. Today, inactivity and impotentiality reign, and there can be found, everywhere, those who grope “for an inheritance and a task, an inheritance as task.”84

82 Ibid.,

p. 222. Cf. Stiegler, “Persephone, Oedipus, Epimetheus,” Tekhnema 3 (1996), pp. 76–7. 84 Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, pp. 76–7, emphasis in original. 83

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But what is the relation between spectacle and the destruction of existence and temporality? If by spectacle we name our captivation by the techniques of the audiovisual system, then the question is to understand this process. It is a question of understanding what it is about experience as such that makes us available for such captivation. And this means understanding the ways in which the flux of consciousness is able to enter into or be entered by another flux, that flux constituted by the programs of the audiovisual system, programs which are nothing but, as Stiegler calls them, “industrial temporal objects.”85 Consciousness does not simply exist, opposed to the body and struggling for sovereignty over it. Consciousness has a genealogy, the process of its separation from the body, a process taking place incredibly slowly and, in the case of humankind, prosthetically, that is, via milieus of exteriorization. This history of separation is the evolutionary process liberating memory, that is, the increasing potential for retaining past experience in present experience, the increasing tendency for existence to appear as something like the unity of a flux, to be, that is, conscious. The différance of consciousness and the body thus names a transductive relation, meaning that insofar as we can speak of the body in its distinction from consciousness, this is a relation in which both terms are constituted by the relation. The unconscious, then, would be that zone of indistinction between body and consciousness, that which composes and regulates the rhythms of psychic and somatic existence.86 But if this means that the unconscious is the seat of desire, then this too must be understood as a différantial process: this is why consciousness, as intentional, is motivated, and also why desire, insofar as it is liberated from the drives, is adoptive. For Husserl, temporal objects such as melodies are the condition of knowing temporality, because the immediate retention of the musical note “just past” in present perception makes the 85 Stiegler, Aimer, s’aimer, nous aimer: Du 11 septembre au 21 avril (Paris: Galilée, 2003), pp. 37–41. 86 Cf. Stiegler, “Technology, Power, Hypomnemata,” paper delivered at University of California Irvine, 4 May 2006.

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successivity of existence indubitable.87 But industrial temporal objects, such as the programs of the audiovisual system, are also part of the global technical system generally, which is to say, a system of production organized around the possibility of achieving economies of scale. Mass production, however, depends upon the possibility of anticipating consumption, that is, of predicting and expecting consumer behavior, that is, upon performatively capturing and channeling desire toward consumption.88 The programs of the audiovisual system thus employ persuasive (that is, sophistic) techniques, perfected over the course of the last century, which access the unconscious (the seat of desire, regulator of consciousness and the body, that is, of what we know and do). These programs aim to influence the character of individual and collective experience in order to divert desire away from forms of sublimation and toward the immediate desublimating satisfactions of expenditure, that is, to exacerbate the tendency of the noetic soul to regress to a merely sensible state, to make it decreasingly temporal. With the advent of that process ushering in the permanent state of exception, it is not simply a question of the convergence of law and life, but of the fact that both are increasingly mediated by and submitted to the dictates of an audiovisual system devoted to inducing the mass adoption of consumer behavior.89 87

Cf. Stiegler, “Persephone, Oedipus, Epimetheus,” Tekhnema 3 (1996), pp. 81–2. 88 This performativity is crucial to understanding why the trace is never reducible to experience. The performativity of the media amounts to the fact that the character of experience (the unity of flux, of successivity) is determined in advance by the prostheses of experience. In other words, temporality, the perception of duration, is never just a question of primary retention, but rather the essence and the fact of primary retention depend upon material traces overdetermining the selection involved in perception as such. 89 Cf. Daniel Ross, “Traumas of the Image,” theory@buffalo 10 (2005), pp. 87–8: “In the permanent state of exception, law and life are not just (re)converged, but law, politics, and life are utterly submitted to the system controlling and conditioning the market of human consciousness and human experience. It could be said that the recent ‘wars’ in Afghanistan and Iraq are the very mechanism for ushering in the latest phases of this movement toward a permanent state of exception. It is surely significant,

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The unconscious, however, if it can indeed be captivated and channeled—that is, controlled, and thus rendered collectively predictable—is nevertheless the definition of that in us which remains uncontrollable, an uncontrollability which is the heart of psychic and collective individuation.90 In other words, for all the effort expended in perfecting such techniques, unintended negative consequences recur at an individual and a collective level. And these unintended consequences form the crisis of contemporary experience, including maladies such as torpor, verbositas, and curiositas, symptoms of our attempts to determine the indeterminate, to flee the indeterminacy of existence. More generally, however, these consequences are, firstly, the desperatio haunting the world, that is, the sense that I and we no longer exist, that our passage is definitively blocked, that consequently I and we no longer matter, thereby permitting any and all behavior, however homicidal, suicidal, or shameless; and, secondly, acedia, that is, impotence and demotivation, the destruction of will and exhaustion of desire.91 These tendencies represent the collapse of diachrony and the reduction of existence to hyper-synchrony, that is, to the impossibility of my and our becoming (even if this also results in “hyperdiachronization,” that is, the decomposition of the social, culminating in violent and explosive attempts to force one’s own existence, however fleetingly).92 Only through understanding this process is it possible to understand why law, as a process of social exteriorization, remains in force yet without any chance of attracting belief, fidelity, or credit. The potential intensification of these conditions is the crisis threatening the world. The task can only be to find the conditions of a new diachrony, to re-introduce and re-compose the chances of desire then, that these wars have—from their causes and justifications to their planning, methods, execution, and aftermath—been thoroughly overdetermined by the dictates of the televisual image and the requirements of marketing.” 90 Stiegler, “Technology, Power, Hypomnemata,” paper delivered at University of California Irvine, 4 May 2006. 91 Cf. Stiegler, Aimer, s’aimer, nous aimer, p. 52. 92 Ibid., p. 89.

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and of “willed action,” to invent, that is, a politics which would also be necessarily an aesthetics. The technical system today works to reduce all behavior to consumer behavior, but only succeeds in producing acedic and desperate immiseration for individuals and populations. What potentials the system contains must be harnessed in order to compose other tendencies, which would thus exist only in relation to those hegemonic tendencies with which and against which they nevertheless struggle. Today’s political task is to propose and invent a process of psychic and collective re-individuation, without imagining, however that this process could ever finally eliminate the tendency toward disindividuation, the fundamental possibility of which stems from the fact that the noetic soul is essentially susceptible to regression. Agamben remains both intensely pessimistic yet somehow still too optimistic. His pessimism is manifest in his insistence that anything short of the most extreme measure is a betrayal. Yet he continues to optimistically operate with that ancient philosophical machinery the gears of which are set to move from consideration of our general crisis to elaboration of the task which would be its final resolution. The situation is indeed dire, but by relating crisis and task in the grand sense in which Agamben never fails to do, he continues to profess the belief that a singular antagonistic act might yet overthrow those entropic tendencies befalling humankind, finally accomplishing the passage from law to justice. It may well be that the future for humankind depends on a thoroughgoing transformation of the conditions of psychic, collective and technical individuation, that these conditions as they are presently unfolding are nearing collapse, and that the required transformation amounts to a revolution of those conditions. Nevertheless, the way toward such a revolution could only be via the systems and processes which exist—it could not be a matter of exacerbating those tendencies destroying, precisely, the resonance between the psychic, the collective and the technical, tendencies which are therefore destructive of existence as such.

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The philosophical machinery moving from crisis to task has from the beginning worked by identifying with the truth of language at the expense of the technics of power, but this has always constituted philosophy’s limit, that is, its perpetual mistake, one which has today become eminently visible. The means of this mistake, which has always also been the engine of philosophy’s individuation, was to fail to see any connection between technology as a means, as availability for use, and technique as that which opens worlds, opens the world. If what we lack are persuasive descriptions of our state of heart and mind, if what we require is a new form of persuasion, then inventing a future for politics is also a matter of (sophistic) technique, that is, a technical question. In an epoch in which the cinematic, televisual, and digital image is the most potent instrument by which desire is accessed and influenced on a planetary scale, overcoming this mistake and this limit amount to the question of philosophy’s survival.

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