Intimacies of Exile

James D. Lilley (bio)
University at Albany

A review of Agamben, Giorgio. The Use of Bodies. Trans. Adam Kotsko. Stanford UP, 2016.

At the close of The Use of Bodies, Giorgio Agamben describes a peculiar mode of thinking that is less concerned with any fixed outcome, goal, or particular purpose than it is with the purely formal dimension of its ponderings: a hiatus that thinking installs in the normal operation of the everyday, a fragmentation of the actual through which something (necessarily vague, shimmering at the threshold of possibility) might emerge. At stake in the style of such thought is not only the cogency and coherence of Agamben’s massively influential Homo Sacer series, which The Use of Bodies attempts to conclude in a complex intertextual manner. Such a dimension of thinking also plays a pivotal role throughout Agamben’s varied attempts to reanimate the potentialities of philosophy, politics, ethics, language, the body, nature, art, and love. After all, “Politics and art,” as Agamben avers, “are not tasks nor simply ‘works’: rather, they name the dimension in which works . . . are deactivated and contemplated as such in order to liberate the inoperativity that has remained imprisoned in them” (278). But what does such contemplative deactivation look like, in what ways has “inoperativity” been fettered in the past, and how might this work of thinking ultimately free it from its chains? These are some of the most important questions that drive both the form and the content of The Use of Bodies.

Before we look at the movement of Agamben’s thought across the three sections of his book, it might be helpful to return—as the author does on several occasions—to the central claim of the work that inaugurated his Homo Sacer series. Here we learned that the history of Western philosophy is rooted in a particular form of relation between two new dimensions of life, zoè and bios, that define for Aristotle in De anima the sphere of politics (196). In the same way that, in The Open, Agamben explores the movement of an “anthropological machine” that obsessively polices the threshold between animal life and its properly human form, we might say that politics in Homo Sacer names the machine that governs the relation between the mere, natural fact of living (zoè) and the particular, political form of life (bios) (29). This form of life can exist only insofar as it is distinguished from bare life; but at issue here is not simply a matter of formal classification and demarcation: what is peculiar and new (even modern) is the way that these two terms relate to each other. Instead of a simple, binary opposition between zoè and bios, Agamben argues that Aristotle relates these conceptual couples in the manner of what he (following Jean-Luc Nancy) calls the “ban.” More akin to a state of exception than to utter indifference or unbridled otherness, “the relation of exception is a relation of ban. He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable. It is literally not possible to say whether the one who has been banned is outside or inside” (28-29). Homo Sacer shows how this paradoxical form of sovereignty has continued to pattern our political destiny in the West, and most famously dwells on the ways in which of the “ban” is transformed by more recent, biopolitical accelerations, where the abandoned homo sacer no longer dwells along the exceptional outskirts of the polis but is instead included among its population. As such, Agamben’s assessment of modern forms of community and politics mirrors the nomos of the concentration camp. Put more formally, then, the “ban is the simple positing of relation with the nonrelational” (29).

If Homo Sacer offers a genealogy of the ban and shows how it has foreclosed the potential for properly political forms of mobilization and resistance, in The Use of Bodies Agamben offers readers something that his originary text could only gesture toward: a critique of the ban itself. As he anticipated in Homo Sacer, such a critique would “have to put the very form of [the ban’s] relation into question, and to ask if the political fact is not perhaps thinkable beyond relation” (29). For example, Agamben now finds in Plotinus (in many ways the unexpected hero of his text) “a new and more enigmatic figure of the ban. . . . in which bare life is . . . transformed and inverted into something positive, having been posed as a figure of a new and happy intimacy” (236). Plotinus’s reworking of the ban opens onto “a superior politics” insofar as it “no longer has the form of a bond or an exclusion-inclusion of bare life but that of an intimacy without relation” (236).

Here and throughout the text, The Use of Bodies challenges readers to rethink the potentialities of how we relate to life. The first part is concerned with a specific dimension of that relation, use, and the ways in which a certain mode of use (what Agamben will call “use-of-oneself”) resists capture and escapes the logic of exchange (33). The second part explores our relation to life from a more formal, ontological perspective; in chapters that foreground a dazzling array of different approaches to the relationship between existence and essence, Agamben shows how only a radically new, modal ontology can help Western philosophy avoid its dangerous pitfalls and troubling aporias. In the final, third part, Agamben outlines the particular relation to life that such a modal ontology demands, a “form-of-life” that is not so much “defined by its relation to a praxis (energeia) or a work (ergon) but by a potential (dynamis) and by an inoperativity” (247). It is the same peculiarly inoperative, non-directional effort that we originally located at the heart of Agamben’s challenge to thinking—and that here becomes identified with the task to “think contemplation as use-of-oneself” (64).

I want to conclude by briefly following some of the major developments of this style of thought over the three parts of The Use of Bodies. If the goal of the book is to “liberate the inoperativity that has remained imprisoned” in the concepts of Western thought, it is hard to imagine a more audacious starting point for such a project than the notion of use itself (278). In what ways is it possible to contemplate, let alone deactivate, a concept that seems so inseparable from the work of praxis and the instrumentality of operation? Even stranger—and destined to stir controversy—seems Agamben’s choice to turn to the figure of the slave in Aristotle as the paradigmatic articulation of a “dimension of use entirely independent of an end” (12). Although ultimately perverted by the institution of slavery, Aristotle’s slave here functions for Agamben as a salutary figure of relation between the master and his world. Whereas the work of the human being is constituted, according to Aristotle, by “‘the being-at-work of the soul according the logos‘,” Agamben argues that the slave is differentiated from his master solely in terms of the “use of the body” (5). With respect to this particular term, however, “use must . . . be understood not in a productive sense but in a practical one: the use of the slave’s body is similar to that of a bed or clothing, and not to that of a spool or plectrum” (12). Thus emptied of productive content and instrumental intent, the slave that remains names an utterly impersonal form of intimacy—an inessential and purely formal possibility for “mediating one’s own relation with nature through the relation with another human being” (14).

Of course, such an inoperative dimension of the intimacies of life must be repressed and abandoned by the originary “anthropogenic operation” of Western thought, which seeks to capture experience solely in terms of the dialectical opposition between zoè and bios (14). But here, and throughout The Use of Bodies, Agamben insists on the possibility that such a purely formal notion of use still persists, stowed away beyond the spectacle and its myriad commodifications of the relationship between public and private life. This is why he is so interested in the notion of the clandestine in Debord, Foucault, and de Sade—and in seeking out the “political element that has been hidden in the secrecy of singular existence” (xxi). Indeed, Agamben points to Benveniste’s analysis of the Greek verb “to use” (chresis) in order to illustrate that even the word itself, in its refusal to adopt an active or passive form, gestures toward a purely relational mode of language that “does not seem to have a proper meaning but acquires ever different meanings according to the context” (24). Readers of Agamben might recognize here a line of argument reminiscent of the discussion of “whatever being” in The Coming Community. Agamben’s approach to chresis in The Use of Bodies productively extends and develops some of the most provocative insights regarding the ontological and political potentialities of “Whatever” (quodlibet). At stake in his earlier text, as in his most recent work, is a mode of relation both immanently singular in terms of the specific mediations it facilitates and yet purely formal and content-less, what The Coming Community calls “a solidarity that in no way concerns an essence” (18-19). If the style of this earlier work is more suggestive and elliptical, in The Use of Bodies Agamben compliments these mannerisms with a more exhaustive and systematic methodology that mirrors the parts, sections, sub-sections, and thresholds at work in Homo Sacer. The effect is just as impressive, and, for this reader at least, there is a sense that Agamben has managed to bring together threads of argument that had been developed not only in the series of books that The Use of Bodies ostensibly closes, but also in a number of his other important works such as Potentialities, The Time that Remains, Means Without Ends, and The Man Without Content.

It is not unusual to find Agamben working in the archives of Medieval philosophy and theology, seeking out extremely nuanced concepts that might be capable of deactivating key tendencies and habits of the Western philosophical tradition. In The Use of Bodies more than anywhere else we watch as he mobilizes an array of neo-Platonic, Stoic, Epicurean, and scholastic thinkers in order to adumbrate the contours of a different ontological tradition, a tradition that thinks existence and essence without the aporias and biopolitical impulses implicit in our current approaches to language, history, life, self, and the landscape. It is the sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit priest, Francisco Suárez, not Alfred North Whitehead, whom Agamben credits with the idea that, “Mode is therefore an affection of the thing” (155); and it is the theologian Bartholomew des Bosses who takes the position, in his correspondence with Leibniz, that “existence is not an entity but a mode of being, which does not add to the essence anything but a modification” (158). In addition to uncovering and connecting a rich vein of thought dedicated to exploring an ontology of mode and relation rather than substance and essence, in the second part of the book Agamben revisits more familiar ontological terrain in the work of Plato, Foucault, and, most extensively, Heidegger and Plotinus. The method here, as elsewhere in the book, is to deactivate certain tendencies within their work and demonstrate their shared commitment to a modal ontology—even if these thinkers themselves, as in the case of Heidegger, were ultimately unable to develop their ideas in such a fashion. It is as if Agamben here plays the role of Levinas at Davos, seeking to “find a way out of the master’s [Heidegger’s] thought” (189) by carefully re-reading “Da-sein . . . not [as] a substance but something like an activity or a mode of existing that the human being must assume in order to approach the truth” (177). At other times Agamben channels Plotinus who, when faced with the aporias inherent in the zoè/bios distinction, “profoundly transforms Aristotelian ontology: yes, there is a unique substance, yet this is not a subject that remains behind or beneath its qualities but is always already homonymically shared in a plurality of forms of life, in which life is never separable from its form and, quite to the contrary, is always its mode of being” (218).

What this all means in terms of the pressing need to reconfigure the contours of the polis and reconfigure its central political concepts is, perhaps inevitably, rather opaque. The Use of Bodies is unlikely to satisfy those readers of Agamben in search of a specific manifesto for political action; indeed, the final pages declare such a translation of ideas “into act” something “that is not within the scope of this book” (278). The closest Agamben comes to defining explicitly political concepts comes in his discussion of “intimacy” and “destituent power” in the final section of the book. Borrowing Plotinus’s expression of an intimacy in which one is “‘Alone by oneself'”—”We are together and very close, but between us there is not an articulation or a relation that unites us. We are united to one another in the form of our being alone”—Agamben approaches intimacy as “a political concept” insofar as it has the potential to deactivate the dead-ends of our current political and ontological choices, “rendering them inoperative” (236, 239). “What then appears,” Agamben concludes, is “something like a way out” and “if one reaches it and holds oneself there in it, the machine can no longer function” (239). Here, as in his discussion of destituent potential (which “means interrogating and calling into question the very status of relation”), it is hard not to picture Melville’s Bartleby, a character strangely absent from The Use of Bodies but far from alien to the Agamben corpus (271). In Potentialities, this scrivener functions for Agamben as a model for a certain kind of contemplative deactivation: an “idea of thought thinking itself, which is a kind of mean between thinking nothing and thinking something, between potentiality and actuality” (251). “Thought that thinks itself,” Agamben continues, “neither thinks an object nor thinks nothing. It thinks a pure potentiality . . . ; and what thinks its own potentiality is what is most divine and blessed” (251). While undoubtedly lacking from the perspective of political actuality, Agamben’s work has always preferred to make its home in this threshold between the potential and the actual. There is no better example of the blessings of such thought than The Use of Bodies.

Works Cited

• Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003.
• —–. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.
• —–. The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004.
• —–. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.