topologies of abandon: locating life in the philosophy of giorgio agamben

236 Pages·2017·1.75 MB·English

by  Chris Keene

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TOPOLOGIES OF ABANDON: LOCATING LIFE IN THE
PHILOSOPHY OF GIORGIO AGAMBEN
A dissertation presented by

LUKE GEORGE LAYZELLE
In partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DPhil.
in English and Philosophy

Supervised by
Michael Jonik
Peter Boxall

UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX
SCHOOL OF ENGLISH
January 2017
DECLARATION:

I hereby declare that this thesis has not been and will not be, submitted in whole or
in part to another University for the award of any other degree.

_____________________________________
Luke George Layzelle
30th January 2017
ABSTRACT
In the forty years separating Stanzas and the recently published final instalment of the Homo
Sacer series, The Use of Bodies, Agamben has regularly turned to topological figures in
pursuing his critical analyses of the biopolitical horizon of modernity. Topologies of
Abandon provides the first sustained analysis of the topological orientation of Agamben’s work,
developing an alternative spatial genealogy of a series of key concepts and figures in
Agamben’s thinking. The thesis considers a series of conceptual topoi explored by Agamben
and argues that his theoretical project consists of a series of interrelated investigations into the
configuration of place and localisation: the ontological space of the exception, the location of
the subject within language, and the place of life in contemporary configurations of power. In
my analysis of each of these topologies I argue against the common conception of Agamben’s
work as providing a pessimistic and negative diagnosis of contemporary forms of biopolitical
governance from which there exists little hope of emancipation. Paradoxically, the potentiality
that marks Agamben’s utopic topos of life is found in the place of an abandonment, and it is by
exploring the negative and privative topologies of abandon in Agamben’s work that the thesis
seeks to re-orient future readings of the largely misunderstood affirmative dimension of this
philosophical project. The thesis provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of
Agamben’s use of topological figures throughout his body of work. Considering Agamben’s
methodological use of paradigms, signatures, and archaeology from a topological perspective,
the thesis reconsiders the relationship between the biopolitical studies of Agamben and Foucault
on this basis. The project situates Agamben’s topological interest within the context of a wider
critical-philosophical turn to the field in the twentieth-century, showing that Agamben’s work is
influenced by the topological current informing philosophies of the lifeworld and the
metalogical inquiries of structuralism. The thesis also reconsiders Agamben’s relationship with
the thought of his former teacher Heidegger in terms of the two thinkers’ shared interest in a
‘topology of being’. Following the topological thread running throughout Agamben’s oeuvre, I
demonstrate how from his earliest works Agamben seeks to map out an affirmative topos of life
that perforates the surfaces and limits of its philosophical, juridical, and political determinations.
Contents

Introduction
Harmonia 1
Critical Diagnosis: Against Difference 3
Recuperative Negation: Philosophical Archaeology 7
Dislocating the Present 14
Topological Thinking 18
The Topological Turn 26

Chapter One
An Introduction to Agamben’s Topologies
Topological Figures: An Overview 32
Agamben’s Topologies 49

Chapter Two
Topology of the Paradigm: Dislocating the Historical Present
Introduction 60
Topology of the Paradigm 61
Philosophy at the Border 75
Historical Philology 80
Signs Without Content: Theory of Signatures 94
Conclusion: Archē: Reactualization of the Past 106
Chapter Three
The Topos of Biopower: Deforming Homo Sacer, Affirming Bare Life
Introduction 110
The Shadow of Sovereignty 115
The Sacred Remainder 124
‘Privation is like a face, a form.’ 133
An Event that Never Stops Happening 138
Sovereignty and Biopolitics 147
Locating Life 153
Conclusion: A topological Affinity? 161

Chapter Four
The Structure of the Lifeworld: Life Encounters Form
Introduction 165
Lebenswelt 167
Facticity: Heidegger and the Topologie des Sein 178
The Forms Thought Takes 189
Discovering Topological Space 192
The Use of Language 199
Conclusion: Topology of the Subject 204

Epilogue: Form-of-Life
Bibliography
1

Introduction

Harmonia
In the closing pages of Stanzas Agamben provides a memorable image of human life as ‘the
topological game of putting things together and articulating’ (S, 156). Tracing the notion of
‘putting together presence’ to its origin as a modality of being in the ‘dawning language of
Greek thought,’ Agamben suggests that this activity took the name of ‘harmonia,’ derived from
the terms harmodzo and ararisco which ‘originally meant “join” or “connect” in the carpenter’s
sense’ (S, 156-7). As Agamben notes, the experience of community and of language in the
topology of harmonia is in a certain sense paradoxical: it is an ‘agreement’ in a ‘juxtaposition,’
and ‘implies the idea of a laceration that is also a suture, the idea of a tension that is both the
articulation of a difference and unitary’ (S, 157). The ‘topological game’ of harmonia evoked in
these pages gestures towards a region in which two seemingly opposed actions appear to enter
into a ‘zone of indistinction’, and is as such a figure whose singular modality ‘intervenes in the
dichotomies of logic’. (ST, 20) Twenty years later, in Homo Sacer I, Agamben is still seeking to
investigate a series of ‘complex topological relations’ (HS, 19) within which ‘the very sense of
the belonging and commonality of individuals is to be defined’ (HS, 22), and Agamben will
once again turn to a series of topological figures in order to grasp the paradoxical logic of the
sovereign exception and the peculiar position of the eponymous homo sacer. What are we to
make of this recurrence of interest in topology at either end of the Agambenian corpus?
I have chosen to open this study with the figure of harmonia, as it provides an image or
form of thought through which we can get an initial grasp of the two central philosophical
movements of Agamben’s thinking. Furthermore, the image provides a remarkably prescient
distillation of the role and function of topology within his work. In this introduction, I shall
briefly outline the two Agambenian ‘movements’, which I describe here as ‘critical-diagnostic’,
and ‘recuperative’, and provide an overview of topological thinking as I approach and deploy it
2

here. In so doing I will refer to some of the critical thinkers who have also turned to topology in
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, so as to provide an initial sense of how I see this
‘topological turn’ comprising a backdrop against which we can set the topological insistence
informing Agamben’s philosophical project. My guiding hypothesis here is that topology plays
an important role in both the critical-diagnostic and recuperative registers of Agamben’s project.
Topology, I will be arguing, can be seen to form a crucial part of the critical-diagnosis of
western metaphysical thinking that Agamben has developed during the course of forty years of
research, and has an equally important part to play in the subsequent attempt to develop a
recuperative approach to the emergence, organisation, and persistence of this tradition, with a
view to fundamentally altering our understanding of it and the form of life to which it consigns
us.
My interest in following this topological thread is borne in large part out of a sense that
the affirmative possibilities presented in Agamben’s work have been overlooked or simply
ignored in the majority of critical responses it has generated, and that this somewhat myopic
dismissal of Agamben’s work as a resource for critical-progressive thinking has fermented in
the past decade. In a number of studies there has, helpfully, emerged a growing interest in
providing a more attentive analysis of the affirmative and emancipatory dimension of
Agamben’s thinking. The works of Alex Murray, Thanos Zartaloudis, and William Watkin, are
the most significant responses to Agamben’s work to have attempted to resist this tide of
(mis)interpretation, and have provided readers with a more considered and in-depth analysis of
the range and ambitions of Agamben’s body of work.1 And in the work of Miguel Vatter,
Jessica Whyte, Claire Colebrook and Jason Maxwell,2 to name some of the most recent
examples, there appears a shared insistence on redressing the one-sidedness of much critical
response to Agamben’s work, a body of largely hostile literature that has focused almost

1 Alex Murray, Giorgio Agamben. Routledge: London, 2010; Thanos Zartaloudis, Giorgio Agamben: Power, Law and the Uses of
Criticism. Routledge: London, 2010; William Watkin, The Literary Agamben: Adventures in Logopoiesis. Continuum: London,
2010; Watkin, Agamben and Indifference.
2 Jessica Whyte, Catastrophe and Redemption. State University of New York Press: Albany, 2013; Claire Colebrook and Jason
Maxwell, Agamben. Polity Press: Cambridge and Malden, 2016; Miguel Vatter, The Republic of the Living. Fordham University
Press: New York, 2014.
3

exclusively on the first instalment of the Homo Sacer series. As each of these works is at pains
to point out, in much of the critical literature the onus has been placed on the problem of
sovereignty and what is perceived as Agamben’s wholly negative depiction of bare life and the
emancipatory possibilities that exist in contemporary political formations.3 Such responses to
Agamben’s work offer little in the way of a wider consideration of the philosophical gestation
of his critique of sovereignty, nor the emancipatory potential that Agamben finds in the figure
of bare life. As Agamben’s work continues to develop its radical call for a new form of political
life, and as a growing number of scholars consider this call in terms of the full, variegated
breadth of Agamben’s forty years of research, the sense is that a different thinker offering a
different (though by no means unproblematic) set of possibilities is now emerging. In this study,
I am working on the basis of the same conviction that the emancipatory orientation in Agamben
has been under-theorised and that as such there exists an undiscovered Agamben, one whose
work provides a series of compelling possibilities for contemporary thought. More specifically,
my working hypothesis here is that in seeking to develop these last, the importance of topology
for such a reorientation in approach to Agamben’s work has yet to be fully explored. A
sustained study of the influence of topological thinking upon Agamben is, I contend, both a
timely and necessary addition to the scholarly debate surrounding this ambitious and
provocative historical-philosophical project.

Critical Diagnosis: Against Difference
It is fitting that two of Agamben’s more extended engagements with topology occur in Stanzas
and Homo Sacer I, two texts which provide an approximate bookending of his philosophical
project, for as I shall argue in this thesis there is an abiding topological orientation in
Agamben’s work, one which crucially informs the development of his methodology and the
gestation of a series of key concepts. Perhaps the most significant of these last, and the one

3 For the initial and predominantly critical responses to Homo Sacer I see: Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio
Agamben's Homo Sacer. Ed. Andrew Norris. Duke University Press: Durham and London, 2005; and Giorgio Agamben:
Sovereignty and Life. Eds. Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli. Stanford University Press: Stanford, 2007.