Thursday, November 03, 2005
(11:21 AM) | Old - Doug Johnson:
The Open: Essentialism, Experimental Knowledge, Poverty
First of all, inverted gnostic sex as an answer to biopower? Donkey shit. I’d still prefer Saint Fist-a-fuck. Seriously, besides the invocation of Benjamin does it seem to anyone else like the ending of §18 and §19 are almost completely out of tune not only with the with the rest of the book but with Agamben’s work generally? And where is the section on Deleuze? I read the suggestion on Heidegger and Deleuze as opposite sides of the same coin (right in midst of the hinge in §§9 & 10 from intro to serious business) to mean that Agamben intended, and indeed owes his readers, something on Deleuze after the stuff on Heidegger. Doesn’t it seem like, after spending his entire life in the stacks, Agamben emerged, fell in love, got laid, and shortened a section that should have been on Deleuze into two sappy sections on the surpassing wonders of sexual fulfillment (p. 83-84) and two paintings by Titian?Jodi’s post very helpfully allowed me to pinpoint a discomfort I’ve long had with Agamben, but had yet to be able to name. He does reject Foucault’s historical understanding of biopower in favor of an essentialized account. I’ve long griped about the fact that Agamben is so good at treating the problem of biopower from all kinds of trick angles, but that he always pulls some Derridean crap when it comes time to suggest a way forward. Still, I’ve long puzzled over precisely what Agamben is after with respect to nuda vita and have also felt like there is something unnameable amiss with his understanding of biopower. As long as he was talking about Camps, neomorts, musslemen, and state’s of exception all the while referring back to Foucault on biopower I could assume that he generally accepted Foucault’s account and that all the stuff about homo sacer and exceptional states in Roman times were ways of creatively illuminating the present situation. Not so. Agamben is on board with the Heideggerian-Derridean project of total destruction of the entire Western Metaphysical project. That’s all well and good if that’s your bag. It’s not mine (though I also have no stake in propping it up), and I don’t think destroying logocentrism will solve any of our political problems. I am going to come right out and insist that the problem of Biopower has nothing to do with ontological baggage. Let’s have a look at the slim foundations of Agamben’s claim for such (Jodi also talked about letting Agamben get away with far too broad of brush strokes).
-§6 Cognitio experimentalis – so Aquinas suggests that God provided animals to prelapsarian man “in order to draw from their nature an experimental knowledge” and Agamben immediately plays the holocaust card: “Perhaps concentration and extermination camps are also an experiment of this sort, an extreme and monstrous attempt to decide between the human and the inhuman” (p.22). Completely unfair; totally does not follow.
-§16 Animalization – in some ways the densest and the sloppiest section. Here Agamben makes brief reference to Heidegger’s politics before a long paragraph (top of p. 76) that subtly marries Foucauldian language from vol. 1 of Hist. o’ Sex to Agamben’s project of bare life. Again we are cued to the guilt of Aquinas and the entire Western metaphysical tradition as mention is made of “the great totalitarian experiments of the twentieth century”. The final three paragraphs of the section assume in sermonic fashion that it is ‘de-ciding’ between man and animal that generated these atrocities and that is also behind “genome, global economy, and humanitarian ideology ... the three united faces of this process of [biopower today].”
I just don’t buy it. There isn’t enough here to establish the link between metaphysics and totalitarianism. Foucault is way more persuasive for me on the genesis of biopower in an odd concert of projects, movements, and economies. Now if Agamben had reached lower, say for instance ‘metaphysics = animal cruelty’, then he could have been far more persuasive.
Nevertheless, one cannot help but return to what has been said by Matt Christie regarding how brilliant and engaging a writer Agamben is. In spite of it’s major flaw, The Open is a book I’d be more than pleased to read again. The scope of material Agamben can synthesize in under 100 pp. is amusing (in the most profound sense of the word). In two respects, especially, The Open proves more than worthy:
1) The upshot of the Uexküll material is to capture the Umwelt of Being and Time in a striking manner. Just as State of Exception provides an inestimable advance in our understanding of Benjamin’s “Theses on History” via a historicization of their place in a Schmitt-Benjamin dialogue on sovereignty, so future readings of Being and Time will likely take on new dimensions as a result of a fresh understanding of its relationship to the 1929-30 course, etc. Can anyone at all compete in any sense with Agamben in this regard?
2) §12 Poverty in World – During Sovereignty Week, Discard introduced a discussion of poverty that I very little understood at the time. He has since finished a paper on “Poverty and Potentia in Negri” that is a real gem, the germ seed for what should be an extraordinarily rich dissertation. Drawing especially from the second essay in Time for Revolution (“Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudo”), Discard develops potentia as something other than a mere lack of actuality and poverty (at least of a certain kind) as a virtue rather than as mere lack (for interests of our discussions of biopower, the paper ends in a reading of Negri against Negri, precisely with respect to biopower. Here Discard makes use of one of the mere handful of folks who actually seems to get Foucault’s discussion of biopower, Mario Lazzarato). In any event, I discard/negri on poverty on my mind when I came to §12. Most of the section assumes an understanding of poverty as lack (and this is fair enough since poverty as virtue requires a certain level of intentionality). However, there is one quote from Heidegger that marvelously tracks with discard’s negrian conception of poverty. Agamben suggests that an animal's 'not being able to have-to-do-with is not purely negative, in fact in some ways it is a form of openness' before quoting this from Heidegger:
For not-having-to-do-with ... presupposes a being open ... . The animal
possesses this being-open in its essence. Being open in captivation
is an essential possession of the animal. ON the basis of
this possession it can do without [entbeheren], be poor, be determined
in its being by poverty (p. 55, italics, ellipses, etc. in
Agamben).Now here is a line of thinking animal-humanity-poverty worthy of further pursuit.
