The Figure of This World: Agamben and the Question of Political Ontology

228 Pages·2014·1.54 MB·English

by  Mathew Abbott

THE FIGURE OF
THIS WORLD
Crosscurrents
Exploring the development of European thought through engagements with the
arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences
Series Editor
Christopher Watkin, University of Cambridge
Editorial Advisory Board
Andrew Benjamin
Martin Crowley
Simon Critchley
Frederick Depoortere
Oliver Feltham
Patrick ffrench
Christopher Fynsk
Kevin Hart
Emma Wilson
Titles available in the series:
Difficult Atheism: Post-Theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy
and Quentin Meillassoux
by Christopher Watkin
Politics of the Gift: Exchanges in Poststructuralism
by Gerald Moore
The Figure of This World: Agamben and the Question of Political Ontology
by Mathew Abbott
Unfinished Worlds: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics and Gadamer
by Nicholas Davey
The Becoming of the Body: Contemporary Women’s Writing in French
By Amaleena Damlé
Forthcoming Titles:
Sublime Art: Towards an Aesthetics of the Future
by Stephen Zepke
Philosophy, Animality and the Life Sciences
by Wahida Khandker
Visit the Crosscurrents website at www.euppublishing.com/series/cross
THE FIGURE OF
THIS WORLD
Agamben and the Question of
Political Ontology
Mathew Abbott
EDINBURGH
University Press
© Mathew Abbott, 2014
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF
www.euppublishing.com
Typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon by
Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire,
and printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CRo YY
4
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 8409 0 (hardback)
ISBN 978 o 7486 8410 6 (webready PDF)
The right of Mathew Abbott
to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Series Editor’s Preface vii
Introduction: The Figure of This World 1
1. The Question of Political Ontology 13
2. The Poetic Experience of the World 33
3. The Myth of the Earth 58
4. The Unbearable 80
5. The Creature before the Law 106
6. The Animal for which Animality is an Issue 123
7. Understanding the Happy 144
8. The Picture and its Captives 162
9. The Passing of the Figure of This World 179
Bibliography 201
Index 214
Acknowledgements
I gratefully acknowledge the commitment, assistance and critical acuity
of John Grumley throughout this project. I would like to thank Paolo
Bartoloni and Diego Bubbio for their generous help. I would also
like to thank Robert Arculus, Thomas Battersby, Edward Cavanagh,
Ross Grant, Fiona Jenkins, David Kishik, Paul Livingston, Nathan
McGinness, Alex Murray, Benjamin Noys, Aaron Nyerges, Robert
Sinnerbrink and Kedar Vishwanathan for giving advice on the mate­
rial presented here. To my family and friends for helping me continue:
thank you. Most of all I would like to thank my beautiful wife Emilie -
your love, support, patience and humour were conditions of this book’s
possibility!
Material from this book was first published in Colloquy: Text,
Theory, Critiques the International Journal of Philosophical Studies;
Literature and Politics: Pushing the World in Certain Directions (edited
by Peter Marks for Cambridge Scholars Publishing); Angelaki: Journal
of the Theoretical Humanities; and Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical
Philosophy. I thank the editors of these publications for their permis­
sion to republish.
This project was completed with the aid of a Travelling Scholarship
from the Marten Bequest (Poetry).
I dedicate this book to my parents, Neil and Lindy.
vi
Series Editor's Preface
Two or more currents flowing into or through each other create a
turbulent crosscurrent, more powerful than its contributory flows
and irreducible to them. Time and again, modern European thought
creates and exploits crosscurrents in thinking, remaking itself as it
flows through, across and against discourses as diverse as math­
ematics and film, sociology and biology, theology, literature and
politics. The work of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek,
Alain Badiou, Bernard Stiegler and Jean-Luc Nancy, among others,
participates in this fundamental remaking. In each case disciplines
and discursive formations are engaged, not with the aim of perform­
ing a pre-determined mode of analysis yielding a ‘philosophy of x’,
but through encounters in which thought itself can be transformed.
Furthermore, these fundamental transformations do not merely seek
to account for singular events in different sites of discursive or artistic
production but rather to engage human existence and society as such,
and as a whole. The cross-disciplinarity of this thought is therefore
neither a fashion nor a prosthesis; it is simply part of what ‘thought’
means in this tradition.
Crosscurrents begins from the twin convictions that this remaking is
integral to the legacy and potency of European thought, and that the
future of thought in this tradition must defend and develop this legacy
in the teeth of an academy that separates and controls the currents
that flow within and through it. With this in view, the series provides
an exceptional site for bold, original and opinion-changing mono­
graphs that actively engage European thought in this fundamentally
cross-disciplinary manner, riding existing crosscurrents and creating
new ones. Each book in the series explores the different ways in which
European thought develops through its engagement with disciplines
across the arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences, recognising
that the community of scholars working with this thought is itself
spread across diverse faculties. The object of the series is therefore
vii
viii Series Editor's Preface
nothing less than to examine and carry forward the unique legacy of
European thought as an inherently and irreducibly cross-disciplinary
enterprise.
Christopher Watkin
Cambridge
February 2011
Introduction:
The Figure of This World
Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world,
do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the
infinite extent of our relations.1
Things are. Philosophy is constitutively ill equipped to own up to this
fact, which is both banal and singularly inexplicable.
This is because it is a very particular kind of fact. Specifically, it is
not the kind of fact that can be represented, not the kind of fact that
we can know.
Yet this is not because it is ineffably ‘beyond language’. It is because
our relation to it goes deeper than representation and knowing, because
this very particular fact makes a particular kind of claim on us.
This claim is political in a fundamental sense. It bears on our being
in common, as we share exposure to it.
In this book I define ‘political ontology’ as the clarification of the
problems outlined in the above eight sentences. I demonstrate what
such a practice of thought would entail via critical readings of a set of
modern philosophers - Heidegger, Levinas, Benjamin, Nietzsche and
Wittgenstein - all of whom, I work to show, deal with their conse­
quences. Running alongside these readings, and the primary motivation
for them, is a concern with presenting a defence and development of
the thought of contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben.
Reading Agamben in light of these philosophers, and in the terms of
political ontology, will show how his work turns on an attempt at
thinking the question of being, and clarify his positive political phi­
losophy. In this book, then, I demonstrate how and why Agamben’s
‘coming politics’2 will require us to rethink our relation to the question
raised by being.
The philosophical method in play here is inspired in part by
2 The Figure of This World
Heidegger and in part by Wittgenstein, In particular I am concerned
with the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics, which term I define as
follows: 'metaphysics' is a name tor modes of thought that pass over,
cancel out, presuppose or obligate the question of being (Heidegger
says metaphysics 'does not think the difference’3 between being and
beings'. Thinking non-metaphysically, then, means thinking from out
of a proper response to this question; first and foremost, this means
thinking from out of a position in which one is able to let it become
a question (acknowledging that there are not only beings, but also the
fact of their being). This leads to a problematisation of the idea of
foundation, because the question of being, insofar as it does not have
an answer, undermines it, What I take from Wittgenstein is the idea
that philosophy should be practised in an auto-critical mode, the idea
that it should be concerned less with solring philosophical problems
than with changing our relation to them. Yet if Wittgenstein was
more concerned with traditional philosophy's desire to establish and
defend claims about mind and meaning* and took his alternative philo­
sophical practice to involve working to loosen our attachments to such
metaphysical pictures (turning 'the axis of our investigations . . . about
the fixed point of our real need'4), then here I am more interested
in loosening our attachment to the metaphysical schemes (pictures)
that underlie certain of our political concepts, and with working to
show' how our relation to one very particular question might be trans­
formed. As with Heidegger's, Wittgenstein's thought is exemplary of
the attempt at thinking beyond die need to philosophically account for
human life, beyond the mad desire to found it on certainty. The ques­
tion of being, if properly faced, shows that our relation to the world is
epistemically and ontologically unassured. And though this is perhaps
more difficult to bring out, it also shows that this is not (does not
need to be) a cause for fear or horror. Indeed, as Wittgenstein's work
indicates* this lack of assurance is itself the condition of the possibility
of a particular kind of happiness. If there is no reason for being, then
being is gratuitous; the word 'gratuitous' shares its etymological root
with 'grace'.
This book distinguishes itself from much of the literature on
Agamben's work by its continuing emphasis on the 'positive' aspects
of his philosophy.5 Agamben of course is infamous for presenting a
'staggering'6 critique of modern liberal democracies, and indeed his
most trenchantly critical work - Homo Sacer - is his most influential.7
Yet it is important to read Agamben's critique in light of the idea of
transformation that motivates it.8 Drawing on Benjamin, Agamben
repeatedly links this with 'messianism'. Unfortunately this (aids itself to