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Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 7, no. 1, 2011, pp. 87-103.
BEYOND OBJECTS, BEYOND SUBJECTS:
GIORGIO AGAMBEN ON ANIMALITY,
PARTICULARITY AND THE END
OF ONTO-THEOLOGY
Colby Dickinson
KU Leuven
ABSTRACT: The work of Giorgio Agamben could perhaps best be described as an original
extension of the onto-theological critique that has dominated much of the last centurys
philosophical endeavors. For him, this fundamental critical perspective extends itself toward the
deconstruction of traditional signifcations, including the boundaries said to exist between the
human and the animal as well as between the human and the divine. By repeatedly unveiling
these arbitrary divisions as being a result of the state of original sin in which we dwell, Agamben
aims to advance philosophical discourse beyond representation and toward a pure encounter
with the myriad of faces always ever present before us. In this sense, he works toward redefning
revelation as being little more than an exposure of our animality, something which indeed
lies now unveiled at the real root of our being. This animality is in fact locateable beyond the
separation of being into form and content, a division which is rather indebted to the onto-
theological representations that have governed the discourse of being.
By focusing instead on the manner in which paradigms could be said to operate over and
against the (sovereign) rule of representations, he articulates a movement from particularity to
particularity that resists the temptation to universalize our language on being. In this sense, then,
the analogical logic of the paradigm, expressed always through the absolutely singular, exposes
the beings which we all are before another, rather than violently condense any given (whatever)
being into a formal representation. By thus determining the contours of the paradigmatic
expression, this essay intends to unite several loose strands of Agambens thought in order to
demonstrate the consequence of this line of inquiry: that the end of representation, often criticized
as a form of political nihilism, is the only way in which to develop a justifable ethics, one beyond
the traditional binary divisions of subject and object, or of universal and particular. In the end,
as Agamben illustrates repeatedly, there is only the thingness that each thing is, and which must
be safeguarded in its precarity, thus paving the way (through a messianic intervention) for an
ethical discourse to appear.
It is a fnal gesture toward the messianic, then, toward a religiously-infected terminology
which hovers over his entire oeuvre, that will ultimately guide Agambens political project
back toward its canonical moment most clearly identifable within the Christian heritage. As
COSMOS AND HISTORY 88
his reading of Benjamins relationship to Saint Paul indicates, there is much to be discerned for
him in the transition from Judaic law (with its representational logic) to Christian forms of life
(with its paradigmatic focus). Rather than be content with a simple re-afrmation of Christian
claims, however, Agamben deftly maneuvers his own position toward one of exposing the logic
of Christianity as that which reveals a deep investment in a pantheistic worldview, one which
theology can no longer aford to ignore.
KEYWORDS: Agamben; Butler; ontotheology; animality; pantheism
INTRODUCTION
For Walter Benjamin, it was the act of remembrance, in contrast to the search for scien-
tifc-historical fact, that guaranteed history could never be entirely atheological.
1
There
would always be some viewpoint external to history that would impart meaning to it. In
this sense, the representations (semblances) which seem to solidify any sense of cultural
intelligibility are given their meaning by viewpoints which must appear in some fashion
to be theological, whether they are identifed with a particular religious tradition or not.
2

They are also, as Benjamin made clear toward the very end of his life, undone by those
weak messianic forces moving through history that run counter to all theological-ideo-
logical readings of history, all myths of progress.
3
His co-opting of a religious (messianic)
terminology which seems to split or divide the theological from within can be established
as a reading of history that attempts to grant power to those oppressed groups or persons
who are otherwise muted within history, by any ofcial historical record, that is, occluded
by the strong narratives of progress and victory which dominate most historical accounts.
Remembrance, by this count, will always thus appear to have two faces, that of the victor
and that of the loser. This is more than a subtle reminder of the inherent contentiousness
of any historiographical act.
4
Indeed, acts of remembrance are often nationalistic, racist,
colonialist or patriarchical. They are possibly also, however, stories of liberation, surviv-
1. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA,
Belknap, 1999, p. 471. Something of his lifelong theological viewpoint can also be seen in something like
his relation to scripture, for example, as witnessed in Brian Britt, Walter Benjamin and the Bible, New York,
Continuum, 1996. Benjamins bringing of the theological into relation with the historical is also discussed
at length in Stphane Moss, The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem, trans. Barbara Harshar,
Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2009. See also, Susan A. Handelman, Fragments of Redemption: Jewish
Thought and Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem, and Levinas, Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press, 1991
and Eric Jacobson, Metaphysics of the Profane: The Political Theology of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, New
York, Columbia University Press, 2003.
2. Benjamins juxtaposition of historical semblances or representations against his version of dialectical
materialism, which focused rather on the singularities of history brought forward in messianic time is testi-
fed to throughout The Arcades Project, see especially, his notes sketched toward the end of his life, gathered
under the title Materials for the Expos of 1935, no. 25, p. 918.
3. Cf. Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, (eds.),
Selected Writings, vol. 4, 4 vols., trans. Edmund Jephcott et al., Cambridge, MA, Belknap, 2003.
4. Cf. the development of this notion in relation to Benjamins conception of history in Matthias Fritsch,
The Promise of Memory: History and Politics in Marx, Benjamin, and Derrida, Albany, NY, State University of New
York Press, 2005.
COLBY DICKINSON 89
al, testimony and truth, functioning often as, to borrow the theologian Johann Baptist
Metzs phrase, dangerous memories to those persons remaining in power.
5
Insofar as all
acts of remembrance are stories begging to be believed, they are certainly ideological,
some more just in their fdelity to truth, others less so. Moreover, some are more violent
to the precarious construction of identities today, some less so; for identities, no less than
stories, are built upon these acts of remembrance passed along through time.
6

It is in such a light that I would consider taking up Judith Butlers recent engagement
with Benjamins work, and, more specifcally, with the much discussed term messianic.
Like Benjamin before her, Butler has striven to defend the excluded and marginalized
fgures of history whose very presence serves as a sort of messianic force undoing our
normative cultural (and often legal) representations.
7
Though her use of the term mes-
sianic has been somewhat limited, there lingers in it a profound connection to what
has been stated above concerning Benjamins use of it.
8
Illustrated by the context of her
work on gender and its undoing, there is a specifc way in which she attempts to under-
mine the practices of repetition that constitute identity which has a strong resonance
with Benjamins approach to history.
9
As she has cleverly depicted it, in terms of human
identity, there is no copy of an original ontological form that simply waits to be (re)pro-
duced in the present, but only copies of copies, carefully crafted representations of the
(gendered) human being which change over time inasmuch as they are disseminated
among particular social groupings. Early on in her work, and as she explained in the
context of creating gender trouble: The subject is not determined by the rules through
which it is generated because signifcation is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process
of repetition that both conceals itself and enforces its rules precisely through the produc-
tion of substantializing efects.
10
Her conclusion, that our identities are performed rather
than natural, thus draws its strength from these acts of repetition which are easily de-
constructed. This leads her to conclude that: Ontology is, thus, not a foundation, but a
normative injunction that operates insidiously by installing itself into political discourse
as its necessary ground.
11

5. Cf. Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, trans. J. Mat-
thew Ashley, New York, Crossroad, 2007. This idea is developed further in relation to Metzs theology in
Bruce T. Morrill, Anamnesis as Dangerous Memory, Collegeville, MN, Liturgical Press, 2000.
6. This is nothing less than the reality of the contentious (political) realm of representations which can be
said to shape our sense of self (subjecthood). Cf. an account of self-narration, and as will be subsequently im-
plicit in what follows, Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, New York, Fordham University Press, 2005.
7. From the outset, Butlers work has been aimed at undoing the normative (gendered, racial) divisions
within our world. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 10th anniversary
ed., London, Routledge, 1999; Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, London, Routledge, 1993;
Undoing Gender, London, Routledge, 2004.
8. Cf. her stated interest in the messianic which she puts forth in the Afterward to Ellen T. Armour and
Susan M. St. Ville, (eds.), Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler, New York, Columbia University Press,
2006. She has subsequently developed this thematic more explicitly in her lecture on religion given at
Utrecht University in January 2010.
9. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 188.
10. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 185.
11. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 189.
COSMOS AND HISTORY 90
Ontology, in Butlers eyes, would seemingly be little more than a word utilized his-
torically to mask the ruses of any attempt to ground a given social normativity through
a particular (theological in Benjamins words) reading of history. The critique she uti-
lizes, then, can be seen in this light as one aligned against the western ontotheological
project and opening, as Annika Thiem highlights, toward the ethical.
12
And this is ul-
timately what unites her work, in a certain sense, with Benjamins conceptualizations
of history and theology, a proximity which she herself has recently acknowledged by
making reference to Benjamins use of messianic time in order to formulate a revolu-
tionary critique of state (representational) violence.
13
In essence, the division of gender unveiled by Butler as creating an arbitrary binary
representation is an ephemeral ontotheological line which says nothing about an alleged
ontological essence of being-male or being-female (if there even were such states of
being, which she of course claims there are not), but rather is constituted as a theologi-
cal (hegemonic) bid for power on behalf of those who most strictly establish and guard
the boundaries.
14
Her deconstructive act, then, because it deals with an ontotheological
platform, and much like Derridas work before her, has something of a messianic struc-
ture to it; that is, it exposes the fault lines of any normative ontotheological claims from
within, and is, in like manner, a challenge to the sovereign powers that be.
15
Butler has subsequently brought this unmasking of binary representations to the
threshold of formulating an ethics, though pulling up short of a fuller critique of the
onto-theology which pervades so much of western representational logics.
16
In what
follows, however, I wish to demonstrate how the work of Giorgio Agamben actually
takes up this fuller onto-theological critique yet in-line with Butlers observations, and
despite any diferences between them, pursues this line of thought further in order to
deconstruct the parallel dichotomous logics at work in the arbitrary divisions estab-
12. Annika Thiem, Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy, and Critical Responsibility, New York,
Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 9f.
13. Cf. her taking up of Benjamins Theses on history, his use of messianic time and the messianic poten-
tial for the disruption of state power, in Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, London, Verso,
2009, pp. 134-5. See also her related essay on Benjamins notion of violence entitled Critique, Coercion,
and Sacred Life in Benjamins Critique of Violence in Hent de Vries and Lawrence Sullivan, (eds.), Politi-
cal Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, New York, Fordham University Press, 2006, pp. 201-219.
14. She later extends this arbitrary signifcation of gender to include the divisions of race which could be
said to found the intelligibility of society in some sense. See Judith Butler, Changing the Subject in Sara
Salih, (ed.), The Judith Butler Reader, Oxford, Blackwell, 2004, pp. 333-34.
15. The concept of a messianic without messianism runs as a theme throughout Derridas later work.
In essence, Derrida sought to develop an open-ended conceptualization of time that cannot be foreclosed
upon in history, thus distancing him from any concrete, historical messianism within any particular reli-
gious tradition. Cf. his Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International,
trans. Peggy Kamuf, London, Routledge, 1994, p. 74f. See also the elaboration of the concept in John D.
Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion, Bloomington, IN, Indiana University
Press, 1997.
16. Though Butler has engaged more recently with some theological motifs, including Joseph Ratzingers
(Pope Benedict XVIs) views on homosexuality, she advocates within the same pages that religion is only
one of many felds attempting to deal with the multiple historical tensions that constitute the subject under
state rule. Butler, Frames of War, pp. 117-121 and 149f.
COLBY DICKINSON 91
lished between the human-animal and the human-divine.
17
I will therefore argue that
Agambens taking-up of this thematic follows quickly on the heels of Heideggers onto-
theological critique, though it perhaps also points toward, in a more Kantian register,
the only possible grounds for the existence of theologythough perhaps a particular
brand of Benjaminian theology at that.
18
In this manner, I hope to show how Agamben
begins to form a position of immanent materialism that is perhaps perceivable as a sort
of pantheistic animality, an openness to the thing-ness of all created things and the
only way left toward approaching the divine once the messianic forces working within
history have dismantled the myth of division which any subsequent myth of progress
founds itself upon.
ON HUMAN-ANIMAL REPRESENTATIONS
The work of the contemporary Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben could perhaps best be
described as an outright extension of the onto-theological critique that has dominated
much of the last centurys philosophical endeavors. For him, this fundamental critical
perspective extends itself toward the deconstruction of traditional (normative) signifca-
tions, including the boundaries said to exist between the human and the animal as well
as between the human and the divine. By repeatedly unveiling these arbitrary divisions
as themselves being a result of the state of original sin in which we dwell (the state of sig-
nication itself), Agamben aims to advance philosophical discourse beyond representa-
tion and toward a pure encounter with the myriad of faces always ever present before
us, in their sheer nudity as it were.
19
In this sense, he works toward redefning revela-
17. On their diferences, one could note, for example, how they difer on notions of sovereignty pre-exist-
ing the state of exception. See Elena Loizidou, Judith Butler: Ethics, Law, Politics, London, Routledge, 2007,
p. 98f. Butler, for her part, has also sought to critique Agambens all-pervading conceptualizations of sov-
ereignty and bare life in her discussion with Gayatri Spivak in Who Sings the Nation-State?, Oxford, Seagull,
2007. Their positions in general, however, do converge on multiple interlocking points, and so, interestingly,
Eric L. Santner seeks to combine Agambens fundamental insights on bare life in relation to gender found
in Butlers work in his On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2006.
18. Agambens critique of ontotheology seems to take its cue most directly from Heidegger whose work
seems to have charted a specifc course for Agamben. On Heideggers use of the term ontotheology, see
Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Vol. IV: Nihilism, David Farell Krell, (ed.), trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, 4 vols., San
Francisco, HarperSanFrancisco, 1982, p. 209f. as well as Iain Thomson, Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology
and the Politics of Education, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005. It should also be noted, however,
that Agamben has consistently, though opaquely, insisted that the work of Benjamin played the role of rem-
edy to the poison in Heideggers writings, and thus, that the two must be read in conjunction throughout
his own work. See Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction, Stanford, Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2009, p. 310f.
19. Cf. the numerous places where Agamben takes up his critique of signifcation, often in explicit refer-
ence to what he sees as Derridas commitment to it. See, for example, Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and
Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez, Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press,
1993, p. 156f; Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron, London, Verso, 1993, p. 9;
The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey, Stanford, Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2005, 102f. In essence, his critique attempts to demonstrate that the act of signifcation itself
violently enters one into a world of representations that in fact mutes the singularity that each person is. In
COSMOS AND HISTORY 92
tion as being nothing more than an exposure of language itself as it attempts to limit
and contain our animality, something which indeed now lies unveiled at the real root of
our being. What Agamben seems to be after, then, is a presentation of the post(because
pre-)human.
20
This animality within us is in fact locateable beyond the separation of
being into form and content, a division which is rather indebted to the onto-theological
representations that have governed all discourse on our (human) being.
In his work on the human-animal divide entitled The Open, his most extensive treat-
ment of the subject thus far, Agamben goes to great lengths in order to illustrate how
the construction of the human subject rests upon a platform of division and separation,
one which has no substance in and of itself other than its ability to signify.
21
Indeed, the
space that is said to ofer such a signifcation is decidedly empty, having no content per se,
only bearing its position as a pure functionality of separating and dividing.
22
This is the
place for Agamben to locate the origin of language, as well as of our original sin. This
site of language, being also the site of our sin, is produced through our (self)distancing
from our animality, which also in efect produces the unique character that distinguishes
humanity from its animality. This is the originary ground of the ontotheological par ex-
cellence.
23
That is, the human subject, in order to appear as such, must constantly state
its distinction from the other animals, even if such distinctions become more and more
difcult, or even impossible, to make. The human being must remove him/herself from
the animal world in order to be human, the original act of transcendence if ever there
was one.
Utilizing his characteristic genealogical approach, and thus ranging in his sources
from Aristotle and Heidegger to the founder of taxonomy Carolus Linnaeus and the bi-
ologist Jakob von Uexkll, Agamben continuously circulates around his target of the his-
torical fabrication of the human subject, performing an analysis which renders humans
as being truly without content in terms of any alleged ontological essence. They are
precisely without content in the sense that there is nothing inherent to their nature
which can render them unique (or, sovereign) among the animal kingdom. Indeed, their
borders are mobile, seemingly permeable, and thus in great need of defense, as often
contrast to this, Agamben seeks on multiple occasions to contribute toward an exposure of being before the
face of another, something he describes as our more proper state of nudity. See Giorgio Agamben, Nudits,
trad. Martin Ruef, Paris, Rivages, 2009.
20. Cf. Giorgio Agamben, The Idea of Language in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2000, p. 39f.
21. Agamben most directly addresses the animal/human boundary in his work The Open: Man and Animal,
trans. Kevin Attell, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2004, which also, at times, deliberately directs the
questioning of this arbitrary separation to the human/divine border as well. See also his remarks in Giorgio
Agamben, Means without Ends: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, Minneapolis,
MN, University of Minnesota Press, 2000, p. 93.
22. His remarks on the state of exception elsewhere should be read in this context. Cf. Giorgio Agamben,
State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005.
23. Cf. the notion of our original sin being a state of separation from our animality is explored in Giorgio
Agamben, Idea of Prose, trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt, Albany, NY, State University of New
York Press, 1995, p. 95f; The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt, Minneapolis, MN, University of Min-
nesota Press, 1993, p. 80.
COLBY DICKINSON 93
the weakest arguments are in need of the most powerful, emphatic and yet absolutely
empty justifcations, their force as it were.
The ceaseless need to rearticulate the boundaries between human and animal, a
boundary which cannot really be said to exist as such, is thereby exposed as the an-
thropological machinery which institutes what we call humanity. It is a boundary de-
pendent upon humankinds ability to construct its own image within a more originary
zone of indiference, what he will elsewhere call a zone of indistinguishability or a site
of pure potentiality.
24
It is here that the anthropological machine engages in a cease-
less articulation between human and animal, man and non-man, speaking being and
living being.
25
Humankind thus becomes sovereign within (over) the animal kingdom
because it alone can draw a distinction of some sort between human and animal, de-
spite the fact that no substantial or quantifable distinction can really be established as
such. This, indeed, is what his genealogical analysis seeks to uncover: the division of life
itself, forged in the cracks of the human being, without justifcation or even the poten-
tial for being clearly delineated as identifable. It was this very lack of identifability, in
fact, which led taxonomists such as Linnaeus to attempt a categorization of humans as
the animal which has the unique capacity to recognize itself as human, and so, therefore
by this logic, must be human.
26
Consequently, each statement that attempts to articulate
our being proceeds from this fractured sense of self that lies deep within, a state that
has historically yet been defned as sin. The uniqueness of Agambens claim here is that
this is not simply an ontological proposition (hence, both biological and philosophical),
but a theological one as well (hence, sinful), and thus it is truly onto-theological. On-
totheology is therefore defned as a reaction to the originary zone of indistinction, that
is, to the caesura at the heart of our being in which we constantly dwell and which we
wish to transcend by positing ourselves as (sovereign) subjects. Ontotheology is given
its reign, then, over the ambiguity of our condition as animals so that the human being
might be born.
What becomes evident for Agamben in all of this is that a deeper ontological rift is
opened up through this investigation into the boundary between animal and human, a
rift which likewise threatens to engulf the entirety of the western rational and theologi-
cal project. As he summarizes the nature of the problematic:
It is as if determining the border between human and animal were not just one
question among many discussed by philosophers and theologians, scientists and
politicians, but rather a fundamental metaphysico-political operation in which
alone something like man can be decided upon and produced. If animal life and
human life could be superimposed perfectly, then neither man nor animaland,
perhaps, not even the divinewould any longer be thinkable.
27

24. Cf. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford,
Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 47f; State of Exception, p. 31; The Open, pp. 37-8; Profanations, trans. Jef
Fort, New York, Zone, 2007, p. 79.
25. Agamben, The Open, pp. 37-8.
26. Cf. Agamben, The Open, p. 26.
27. Agamben, The Open, p. 21.
COSMOS AND HISTORY 94
An entirely immanent reading of history is opened up through this refection, one
that likewise directly impinges upon what we have come to understand as being the
domain of the theological. Hence, his reading of Benjamins weak messianic force is
essential to unmasking the rather arbitrary strength of signifcation.
28
Only a messi-
anic dislodging of the boundaries between human and animal, as between human and
divine, could point toward something like the arbitrariness of division itself. Much like
Foucaults famous ending to The Order of Things where he declares that man is a recent
invention, the invention of homo sapiens is, for Agamben, neither a clearly defned spe-
cies nor a substance; it is, rather, a machine or device for producing the recognition of
the human, something which the messianic forces moving through history are capable
of disrupting.
29
This is so because, as Agamben will elsewhere state, the messianic is an
entrance into that zone of indiference where the human-animal and human-divine
divisions are created, an entrance that also reveals the true nature of such a zone, as
the contentless, unpronounceable potentiality that exists within all created things.
30
It
is the blank slate upon which so much of our signifcations are carved, that is, where
the anthropological machinery continues to produce our self-identity.
31
It is pre-historic
inasmuch as it is pre-linguistica radical manner of moving beyond (as before) the
ontotheological indeed.
For this reason, he is able to take up the messianic vocation elsewhere as a coun-
ter movement to these productions and a chance to return to our animality. Co-opt-
ing a religious terminology, though in some contrast to Derridas adaptation of the
same concept, Agamben utilizes a discourse of the messianic as a suspension of all
sovereign decisions regarding the construction of representations in general. Essen-
tially, the messianic forces moving through history, much as they were for Benjamin,
are those weak forces established as counter to the sovereign narratives of a purer
ideological script. If stripped to their barest form, it is possible to view these messianic
forces, as Agamben does, as even capable of stripping down our sovereign notions of
transcendence and humanity. The messianic is, by this count, a movement of im-
manence, or, if one prefers, a zone of absolute indiscernability between this world and
the future world.
32
It is a chance for a redemption which can be said to precede cre-
ation.
33
The messianic issues in a generic potentiality, a being-without-content as
such which more accurately presents created things by not trying to identify or repre-
sent them.
34
The messianic vocation is therefore also the revocation of every vocation
28. Cf. Agamben, The Time That Remains, p. 102f.
29. Agamben, The Open, p. 26. Cf. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences,
New York, Vintage, 1970, pp. 386-7.
30. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 26f.
31. Agamben himself deploys the image of the blank slate as a metaphor for our pure potentiality in a
short tale on the philosopher Damascius in Idea of Prose, pp. 31-4. For an elaboration upon this theme, see
also Anthony Downey, Zones of Indistinction: Giorgio Agambens Bare Life and the Politics of Aesthetics
Third Text, vol. 23, no. 2, 2009, pp. 109-25.
32. Agamben, The Time That Remains, p. 25.
33. Such is what Agamben has recently claimed in his essay Cration et salut in Nudits, pp. 9-22.
34. Agamben, The Time That Remains, p. 26.
COLBY DICKINSON 95
and a dwelling in the indiscernability of our situatedness which is ultimately all we
have.
35
It is also, however, the only viable ethical option which is present to humanity,
if humanity is willing to embrace this coming political task which risks the very def-
nition of humanity. As he puts it,
To render inoperative the machine that governs our conception of man will
therefore mean no longer to seek newmore efective or more authentic
articulations, but rather to show the central emptiness, the hiatus thatwithin
manseparates man and animal, and to risk ourselves in this emptiness: the
suspension of the suspension, Shabbat of both animal and man.
36

Though critics such as Dominick LaCapra have been concerned about the nature of his
making this a political task for future generations, the messianic act of dividing (signi-
fed) divisions themselves, something which Agamben discerns at work in the writings of
both Saint Paul and Benjamin, is an entrance into the zone of indistinction that yet must
not be foreclosed upon with the ease of perpetuating violent representations; rather, it
must be kept open and allowed to expose itself for what it is beyond the political sphere
entirely.
37
Instead of being an opening to a truly political nightmare, as LaCapra envi-
sions, it is, in this fashion, rather an end to the political as we know it, something which
has certainly earned him (and perhaps rightly) the label of being a political nihilist at
times.
38
Despite this seemingly harsh criticism, for Agamben it is only at the point of dis-
solving politics that the only true ethical task may be carried out, as a ceasing entirely of
our indebtedness to the anthropological machine. If there is an ontology at work here,
it is to be found in this movement of openness, a certain regression beyond representa-
tion and politics, a poverty of being that (in Heideggerian terms) shares with the animals
poverty of world.
39
It is a willingness to enter into a poverty of being that the messianic
35. Agamben, The Time That Remains, p. 23, de-emphasized from the original. This messianic vigor, then,
seems to condense what he has stated elsewhere as a Deleuzian-Spinozistic reduction of philosophical in-
vestigation to a plane of absolute immanence. As he considers it, Theria and the contemplative life, which
the philosophical tradition has identifed as its highest goals for centuries, will have to be dislocated onto a
new plane of immanence. It is not certain that, in the process, political philosophy and epistemology will
be able to maintain their present physiognomy and diference with respect to ontology. Today, blessed life
lies on the same terrain as the biological body of the West. Giorgio Agamben, Absolute Immanence in
Potentialities, p. 239.
36. Agamben, The Open, p. 92. See also, Andrew Benjamin, Particularity and Exceptions: On Jews and
Animals, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 107, no. 1, 2008, pp. 71-87.
37. Cf. Agamben, The Time That Remains, p. 138f. LaCapras critique, in this regard, seems to misperceive
Agambens stated intentions of going beyond the political, which precludes any foray into dangerous, uto-
pian political movements. Just how this form of living without politics is achievable, however, remains to be
seen. See Dominick LaCapra, History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University
Press, 2009, p. 162f.
38. Cf. Ernesto Laclau, Bare Life or Social Indeterminacy? and William Rasch, From Sovereign Ban
to Banning Sovereignty both found in Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli, (eds.), Giorgio Agamben:
Sovereignty & Life, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2007, pp. 22 and 107 respectively. Catherine Mills
also draws attention to the viability of his end to politics in the conclusion to her The Philosophy of Agamben,
Stocksfeld, Acumen, 2008.
39. Cf. Agamben, The Open, p. 49f. See also, the idea of regression explored by Agamben in his essay
Philosophical Archaeology, in The Signature of All Things: On Method, trans. Luca DIsanto with Kevin Attell,
COSMOS AND HISTORY 96
points toward, what has elsewhere been suggested as resembling a certain Franciscan
ontology in his work.
40
IMMANENCE, OR MATERIALISM AS A PANTHEISTIC ANIMALITY
In contrast to the traditional transcendent claims of ontotheological speculation,
Agambens work seems poised to present what Antonio Negri has referred to as a re-
newal of the theological-political in the Spinozian way, what could otherwise perhaps
be labeled as a theology of immanence potentially latent within his writings. This is
something which seemingly does point in many ways to a potential re-enchantment
of our post-religious world.
41
Agambens understanding of immanence is therefore,
and as might be anticipated from what has already been stated above, wrapped within
his conception of a zone of indiference, indistinction and exception, a zone seem-
ingly forever marked by the repeated attempts to transcend its ambiguity and to posit
an ontotheological grounding through its various act of signifcation. The divisions of
gender, of race, of human and animal, as well as of human and divine are all scored
within this zone, and, as he makes clear, it is a zone of suspension which should, as the
present ethical task before us, be itself constantly suspended until it remains as only
the pure potentiality that it most truly is, and without any identifcation to distort it.
42

It is a realm then beyond representation, a presentation of the particularity that all
things irreducibly are. As Agambens later work on paradigms demonstrates, the way
to reconcile the caesura or scission or fracture at the heart of the human being (our
sinful state) is to do away with the dichotomous logics that this (representational)
schema has brought us. Instead therefore of relying upon the false duality of the uni-
New York, Zone, 2009, p. 81f. LaCapra criticizes Agambens linkage of the animal with the Muselmann of
the concentration camps, which seems to him to collapse the diversity of animality onto a blanket scheme
of bare life. He therefore charges Agamben with lacking the nuance necessary to deal with animality in its
various species. Though there would seem to be truth to this statement, it should also be noted that Agam-
bens primary target here is really the machinery which produces the monolithic division between human
and animal which Agamben is quick to criticize himself. Whether or not Agamben fails to take up the di-
versity of animality itself remains, then, in some sense as an almost separate issue. For a similar critique of
Agambens alleged anthropocentric claims, see also Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal
from Heidegger to Derrida, New York, Columbia University Press, 2008, p. 79f.
40. As Lorenzo Chiesa has put it, the heroic homo sacer of politics is silently turned into the homo mes-
sianicus of Christian religion. Furthermore, according to this interpretation, Agambens notion of weak
[faible] being, a being characterized by a presentative poverty, could qualify his ontology as Franciscan.
Lorenzo Chiesa, Giorgio Agambens Franciscan Ontology in Lorenzo Chiesa and Alberto Toscano, (eds.),
The Italian Dierence: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics, Melbourne, re.press, 2009, p. 162. Alain Badiou has also
referred to Agambens work as being Franciscan in its ontology in his Logiques des Mondes: Ltre et lvnement,
2, Paris, Seuil, 2006, p. 584.
41. Antonio Negri, Sovereignty: That Divine Ministry of the Afairs of Earthly Life, Journal for Cultural and
Religious Theory, trans. Gabriele Fadini with Robert Valgenti, vol. 9, no.1, 2008, p. 100. LaCapra, for one,
has termed Agambens utopian project one that attempts to re-enchantment our world. LaCapra, History
and Its Limits, 167.
42. Cf. how all of these themes are brought together and interwoven throughout the short text Means
Without Ends.
COLBY DICKINSON 97
versal/particular (or of form/content, or lawfulness/exemplarity), we should learn to
respect the absolute singularities that present themselves before us.
43

By focusing instead on the manner in which paradigms could be said to operate
over and against the (sovereign) rule of representations, he articulates a movement from
particularity to particularity that resists the temptation to universalize our language on
being, indeed to be pre-linguistic as it were.
44
In this sense, the analogical logic of the
paradigm, expressed always through an absolute singularity, exposes the beings (what
Agamben calls forms of life) which we all are before another, rather than violently con-
dense any given (or whatever) being into a pre-scripted representation.
45
By thus de-
termining the contours of the paradigmatic expression as the end of representation, and
which is thus often criticized as a form of political nihilism, Agamben seeks to discern
the only way in which to develop a justifable ethics, one beyond the traditional binary
division of subject and object. In the end, as Agamben illustrates repeatedly, there is
only the thingness that each thing is, and which must be safeguarded in its precarity
through a messianic revocation of all representative identifcations.
It is an almost Levinasian sounding proposition that therefore appears to us, as an
ethics of the face is established as the only ontological determination truly available to
us, a presentation of the animality that we are.
46
If humanity allows itself to venture here,
into the pure realm of things beyond representation, then it may be capable of embrac-
ing its true vocation beyond vocation, the culmination of the messianic forces working
through and throughout history. It would provide, then, a purely immanent dwelling
inasmuch as it would also seek to eradicate the traditionally theologicalhence, to pro-
fane our world of its ontotheological claims, which he seeks to express in his conceptual-
ization of the coming task of profanation. There is no doubt that a profound rereading
of humanity is at work here, from its smallest philosophical distinctions to its greatest
religious aspirations.
Revelation, by this score, is reworked until it is little more than the attempt to articu-
late what cannot be articulated through language, which is, for Agamben, the inexpress-
ible fact of languages existence.
47
We dwell in language as we dwell in our world and it
was our ability to uniquely posit ourselves in and through language that set us apart from
the animals. Yet, how language is, that it is, is something we are barred from expressing
in language. Accordingly, as he will join to our sense of being-in-the-world, How the
world isthis is outside the world.
48
It is, again, the external theological which grants it
43. Cf. the central thesis in Giorgio Agamben, What is a Paradigm? in The Signature of All Things, p. 20.
44. This pre-linguistic stage is what, initially, gave rise to his use of the term infancy as the state toward
which our regression should be directed. See Agamben, Infancy and History as well as the essay on regression,
Philosophical Archaeology, pp. 81-111. Cf. Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, p. 90f.
45. Cf. his characterization of whatever being in The Coming Community, p. 1f., as well as his brief com-
ments on forms of life in Means Without Ends, p. 3f. It should also be noted that the much anticipated fourth
volume of his Homo Sacer project will be devoted to developing the notion of a form of life in greater detail.
46. Agamben, Means Without Ends, p. 91f. On Levinas ethics, see Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Innity:
An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburg, PA, Duquesne University Press, 1969.
47. Agamben, Potentialities, p. 39f.
48. Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 106.
COSMOS AND HISTORY 98
meaning, and which Agamben here seeks to bring to its conclusionits profanation as
it were. Transcendence, as the term which was historically used to attempt to describe
this purely immanent fact of our existence, something which we could otherwise not
express, can now be exposed as the pre-eminent concept that became the cornerstone
for positing the various theories of sovereignty, both politically and theologically, and
which are seemingly in decline today.
49
Both of these varied and analogous attempts to
concretely embody transcendence failed to perceive its true nature as merely being an
attempt to exit our immanent state of animality.
Hence, in the context of a series of condensed political aphorisms, Agamben is
given over to state that the transcendent is not a supreme entity above all things;
rather, the pure transcendent is the taking-place of every thing.
50
That a realm of things could
exist, that it could dwell at all in a space of potential indistinction, this is the princi-
ple of transcendence toward which theology, in its explorations and justifcations for
Gods existence, and the Good which is likewise to be found there, has tried to point.
As he renders it,
God or the good or the place does not take place, but is the taking-place of the
entities, their innermost exteriority. The being-worm of the worm, the being-stone
of the stone, is divine. That the world is, that something can appear and have a
face, that there is exteriority and non-latency as the determination and the limit
of every thing: this is the good. Thus, precisely its being irreparably in the world
is what transcends and exposes every worldly entity.the good is not somewhere
else; it is simply the point at which they grasp the taking-place proper to them, at
which they touch their own non-transcendent matter.
51
Hence, inverting the crafted historical conceptions of theology, Agamben is able to de-
clare that salvation, as he will defne it, is a purely profane interest, the coming of the
place to itself .
52
Religion therefore becomes a content-less project in light of this fun-
damental disclosure, without doctrine, without dogma, without need of oscillating be-
tween the transcendent and the immanent as between the universal and the particular.
53

What had been presumed to be transcendent is now rendered inoperative and a dynam-
ic immanence is revealed to be already at work within the profane order.
Revelation does not mean revelation of the sacredness of the world, but only
revelation of its irreparably profane character. (The name always and only names
things.) Revelation consigns the world to profanation and thingnessand isnt this
precisely what has happened? The possibility of salvation begins only at this point;
it is the salvation of the profanity of the world, of its being-thus.
54
49. Though Agamben has chosen to focus his remarks upon the decline of the oath in both religious and
legal settings, the associated sense of transcendence that accompanies the oath seems to be included in this
eclipse. See his Le sacrament du langage: Archologie du serment, trad. Jol Gayraud, Paris, Vrin, 2009.
50. Agamben, The Coming Community, pp. 14-5, emphasis in the original.
51. Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 15.
52. Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 15. Cf. also Agamben, Profanations, p. 73f.
53. Cf. Agamben, The Time That Remains, pp. 136-7.
54. Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 90.
COLBY DICKINSON 99
The whatever nature of things, the very thing-ness of all things, becomes seen as
the created matter which is only redeemable through an encounter with the messianic
disruption of representations formed within this zone of indiscernability that is the lo-
cation only of our pure potentiality for being which we need not actualize in any sense.
Only a pure potentiality, then, could be said to safeguard a things thing-ness, refusing
to attach a more or less violent representation (its actuality) of any sort to its existence,
any onto-theological marker. In essence, we are led then to a theory of thingness which
exalts the presentation (exposure) of our animality before an other who is to be wit-
nessed bereft of all representations, in our nudity.
55
If the divine could be said to exist
over and beyond the ceaselessly articulated division between human and divine, then it
would presumably only be demonstrable insofar as it is encounter-able in the face of the
other. Perhaps, then, a purely immanent ontology is possible, but it is a realm wherein,
if we are capable of dwelling in it, is inexpressible because without inherent (theological)
meaning. It cannot be universalized or communicated as such; it can only be respected
in its absolute singularity. It is, again, a site of pure potentiality that is as blank as the
tablets upon which we would place our words.
A total (pure) immanence subsequently arises within the profane order that cannot
be surpassed by any notion of transcendence or its commonly associated sacrality. It
dissolves the traditional (onto)theological and ofers an unmediated opportunity to en-
counter the O/other before us. If we are to encounter the divine, then, it would only
be through such an opening to this world beyond representations. And for this reason,
This is why those who try to make the world and life sacred again are just as impious
as those who despair about its profanation. This is why Protestant theology, which
clearly separates the profane world from the divine, is both wrong and right: right
because the world has been consigned irrevocably by revelation (by language)
to the profane sphere; wrong because it will be saved precisely insofar as it is
profane.
56
There is only the profane order, just as there is only a movement from particular-
ity to particularity, collapsing the dichotomies of western logic with the same basic
premises. There is only the profane, or the immanent, and this is the only place where
anything like the divine is encounterable. This is what will allow Agamben, in an
otherwise rather enigmatic section of his work The Coming Community, to declare that:
The worldinsofar as it is absolutely, irreparably profaneis God.
57
And this would
appear to be the real revelation that Agamben has been working toward all along, a
sort of pantheistic animality that is beyond the transcendence historically utilized to
establish the human being or the subject with which western thought is all-too-famil-
iar. What he is seeking to develop then is really just a letting of the thingness of each
thing be, a task that pushes toward establishing a theology of immanence in his work.
The moment we fully embrace this realm beyond all representation, the moment we
55. Cf. Agamben, Nudits, p. 95f.
56. Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 90.
57. Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 90.
COSMOS AND HISTORY 100
dissolve transcendence and therefore immanence as well, is the moment we embrace
a materialism beyond the animal-human or human-divine dichotomies, a materialism
that can only as such be divine.
CONCLUSION
It is Agambens fnal gesture toward the messianic, and likewise toward a religiously-
infected terminology which hovers over his entire oeuvre, that will ultimately guide his
political project back toward its canonical moment, one most clearly identifable within
the Christian heritage. As his reading of Benjamins relationship to Saint Paul indicates,
there is much to be discerned in the transition from Judaic thought (with its represen-
tational logic) to Christianity (with its paradigmatic focus), as Agamben seems to read
it.
58
Rather than be content with a simple re-afrmation of Christian claims, however,
Agamben deftly maneuvers his own position toward one of exposing the logic of Chris-
tianity as that which reveals a deep investment in some form of a pantheistic worldview,
one which theology can no longer aford to ignore.
Theology has been portrayed by Agamben throughout as an historical attempt to
articulate a boundary between God and humanity, to produce an onto-theology that,
under his gaze, seems now rather only to indicate the artifciality of the boundary itself,
the fact that there really is no boundary ontologically existent as such. Though it has
historically fallen to the various human disciplines of thought (biology, politics, theol-
ogy, etc) to manufacture representations which appear to draw a more or less absolute
distinction, according to Agamben, that time has come to an end. This is not, as he will
repeatedly state elsewhere, an attempt to secularize our world, but rather an efort of
profanation, a returning of things once deemed sacred to their more proper use among
human-beings.
59
And though his project is certainly aimed toward dissolving the west-
ern onto-theological project, there is yet another veil to be removed, one that reveals the
deeply Christian core within his work: the veil that tore from top to bottom exposing the
presence thought to dwell in the holiest of holiesan originary act of profanation upon
which Agambens work is seemingly founded and that has come to defne the Christian
legacy.
60
And, in the end, perhaps without its onto-theological presuppositions, maybe
theology could be, or even already is, closer to embracing certain forms of pantheistic
materiality than even it would at times like to admit.
61

58. If Agambens understanding of signifcation in light of Pauline theology is read in conjunction with
his use of monastic life as an exemplary form of life, what we come across is a particularly Christianized
philosophy which Agamben seems to endorse, though being cautious to directly endorse such an under-
standing. See his The Time That Remains as well as his essay What Is a Paradigm? in The Signature of All
Things, p. 9f.
59. Cf. Agamben, Profanations, p. 77.
60. Cf. Mark 15:38.
61. Though the scope of the essay does not here permit a fuller examination of theologys possible inter-
ests in exploring a theology of immanence, sufce it to say that various feminist theologians, as only one
example among many, have often championed this theme in their writings, including Mary Dalys early
challenges in Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Womens Liberation, Boston, Beacon, 1973, Grace
COLBY DICKINSON 101
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