7/27/2019 'A New Use of the Self'- Giorgio Agamben on the Coming Community

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/a-new-use-of-the-self-giorgio-agamben-on-the-coming-community 1/15

'A New Use of the Self':Giorgio Agamben on the Coming CommunityJessica Whyte (bio) 

Heaven and Hell, however, hang together.

 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment .

 Amongst the voluminous speculations on the 'world to come' that have accompanied messianicprophecies, one stands out, not for the extravagance of its predictions, but for the very banality of itsaccount of redemption. In The Coming Community , Giorgio Agamben recounts the following tale, astold by Walter Benjamin to Ernst Bloch: "The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that sayseverything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come;where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in thisworld, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different."

1 There is no

doubt something disappointing about such an image of redemption, particularly when placedalongside Christian promises of "a new heaven and a new earth" [Rev 21:1], in which "there shall beno more death, neither sorrow nor crying" [Rev 21:4]. Nonetheless, in offering a vision of the world tocome that is intimately connected to our world, it seems to foreshadow the possibility of  changing our 

world, even if, as it were, only a little. And yet, as this tale was passed down by tradition, andultimately passed from Gershom Scholem to Benjamin to Bloch, the question of the nature of thechange that would be required, and that of the agency that could accomplish it, received different,and often contradictory, emphases. In Bloch's recounting of the tale—which introduces a slight, yetdecisive, alteration into the version previously told by Benjamin—if the world to come will be just likethis world, this does not mean that the little difference that would constitute it is easy to accomplish. All that is necessary to establish this new world, Bloch suggests, is the slight displacement of a stone,a cup or a brush. "But," he writes, "this small displacement is so difficult to achieve and its measure isso difficult to find that, with regard to the world, humans are incapable of it and it is necessary that theMessiah come."

2 

What would it mean, for us, today, to imagine a redeemed world in which everything "will be as it isnow, just a little different"? In what would this difference consist, and how would it be possible to

achieve it? And what inflection would it give to the very idea of "redemption"? In the second thesis of his "On the Concept of History," Benjamin offers a vision that seems to owe something to theHassidic tale: in contrast to a utopia whose inspiration lies outside this world, he suggests that our own times thoroughly color our image of happiness. "The kind of happiness that could arouse envy inus," he writes, "exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to,women who could have given themselves to us."

3 Moreover, Benjamin makes clear that, "our image

of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. "4 By deriving our vision of 

happiness from the world in which we find ourselves, it becomes possible to eschew a model of redemption premised on divine intervention and to imagine a form of immanent social transformation,indeed, a form of politics. In treating Agamben's work, however, such an approach is complicated byhis unrelentingly bleak diagnosis of this world. What would it mean to take our vision of happinessfrom a world whose paradigmatic instance is the concentration camp? What does it mean to suggestthat the new form of life necessary to save us from catastrophe resembles nothing so much as the lifewe live today—a life typified by biopolitics, the normalisation of the state of exception and unceasingcommodification? In what follows, I suggest that, in Agamben's view, it is precisely from this world—amidst what Agamben, following Guy Debord, terms the "society of the spectacle"—that we must findour vision of happiness.

In spectacular society, Agamben suggests, all solid foundations, whether for law or for language,have been hollowed out, and all the nations of the earth have been driven towards a single destiny,typified by the "transformation of politics and of all social life into a spectacular phantasmagoria."

5 And

yet, at this point, he points us in a startling direction: suggesting that planetary humanity nowcomprises a global "petty bourgeoisie," each of us living out the "absurdity of individual existence," he

7/27/2019 'A New Use of the Self'- Giorgio Agamben on the Coming Community

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/a-new-use-of-the-self-giorgio-agamben-on-the-coming-community 2/15

simultaneously offers this petty bourgeoisie—for whom authenticity, the proper, vocation, differencesof language, custom and character "no longer hold any meaning"—as the precursors of a new form of life.

6 In outlining the possibility of this new life, Agamben offers a task that, in its apparent modesty,

echoes Benjamin's version of the Hassidic tale: "Selecting in the new planetary humanity thosecharacteristics that allow for its survival, removing the thin diaphragm that separates bad mediatizedadvertising from the perfect exteriority that communicates only itself —this," he writes, "is the politicaltask of our generation."

7 From this enigmatic suggestion, we can discern that if the petty bourgeoisie

is the cipher for Agamben's hopes this is because its world—our world—somehow resembles his ownversion of the world to come, indeed, resembles it more so than has any other point in history. Whenthis resemblance has been noted by critics, it has often been greeted with perplexity, and with thesuggestion that Agamben's redemptive vision is simply a restatement of the predicament from whichhe wishes to free us. This is clear in Slavoj Žižek's question: "[a]re we not encountering in our socialreality what Agamben envisages as a utopian vision?"

8 and, in a less critical tone, in Antonio Negri's

view that, in The Coming Community , "the experience of redemption was presented asdystopia."

9 Here I will suggest that while these thinkers are right to highlight the proximity of 

 Agamben's diagnosis of our time to his account of a new form of life, such critiques remain limited tothe extent that they do not examine the immanent dynamic in our own time that he sees as enablingsuch a life. In what follows, I outline that dynamic, which, in Agamben's view, nullifies substantiveidentities, making possible, for the first time, a community of pure singularity without exclusion. While Agamben's account of the spectacle enables us to see possibilities for a transformative relation to our 

own time, and to avoid nostalgic attempts to return to past certainties, I suggest it is inadequatelyattentive to the differential temporality of spectacular capitalism, in which the post-modern co-existswith a resurgence of social forms, identities and classes that, in the heady days of progress, werebelieved to have been consigned to the past. Capital, I suggest, not only undermines naturalisticfoundations for identity but also creates new identities that are bound up with both reactionary andemancipatory political claims. Therefore, I suggest, any attempt to formulate a politics, or acommunity, without identity must be attentive to the ways in which politicized forms of identitycontinue to function as markers of differential power, and must resist the teleological temptation tosee such politicized identities as archaisms, destined to be washed away by the nullifying power of capitalism.

Debord coined the term "the spectacle" in the late 1960's to define "the moment when thecommodity has attained the total occupation of social life."

10 If Agamben sees this as the most

adequate term to designate our own time, this is because, like Debord, he believes that we are livingthrough a period in which everything has been expropriated and offered up for consumption, in whicheverything "that was directly lived has moved away into representation," in which there is nothing'authentic' or 'natural', and no spaces, political or otherwise, that have not been thoroughly subjectedto the logic of commodification.

11  Agamben's critique of the spectacle is unrelenting. Nonetheless, it is

conducted in the name of those possibilities that he believes are not only captured but also createdby the domination of the commodity form. Here I would like to examine only one of those possibilities,which Agamben frames as "a new use of the self." The idea of  useplays an important, if largelyunexamined, role in Agamben's account of the new form of singularity without identity that he terms"whatever being" and in the potential community he terms the "coming community."

12 This concern

with a singularity that "makes use" of itself, rather than being bound within a naturalized and/or politicized identity, is guided by a concern to think a life of potentiality that could escape the hold of sovereign power. In Agamben's view, a politics premised on substantive or factual identities fixes its

subjects, juridicizing politics by making it a process of apportioning juridical rights and representingpre-given constituencies rather than a field of possibility and transformation in which we could hope tobe other than we are. Consequent to this fixing of identities, politics is reliant on sovereign power togrant rights and represent social classes, and presupposes exclusionary forms of belonging andborder-control to police the borders of identity and entitlement. In order to escape such a politics, hethus believes it is necessary to contest both the fixity of personal identity and the substantivization of community as a communityof (women, Australians, etc.), which, in his view, brings into operation themechanism of inclusive exclusion of what he terms the sovereign ban. Thus, a new use of the self would entail the denaturalization and desacralization of the self, which would thus exist as a puresingularity, rather than as an instance of a particular identity. Agamben terms such a singularity—

7/27/2019 'A New Use of the Self'- Giorgio Agamben on the Coming Community

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/a-new-use-of-the-self-giorgio-agamben-on-the-coming-community 3/15

which is neither universal, and thus enshrined in the 'rights of man', nor particular, and thus able toclaim sectional rights—"whatever being" and sees it as marking the possibility of a human communityfree of any essential condition of belonging, common destiny or work, or principle of inclusion andexclusion—a being-together of existences, rather than a community of essence, as Nancy describesit.

13 

It is noteworthy, and I would like to focus on this, that Agamben's account of "whatever being" restson the claim that the spectacle has produced a "classless society," albeit one which parodies theMarxian version; "there are no longer social classes," he writes, "but just a single planetary pettybourgeoisie in which all the old social classes are dissolved."

14 Outlining the extraordinary stakes in

his engagement with this figure, Agamben writes: the "petty bourgeoisie is probably the form in whichhumanity is moving toward its own destruction. But this also means that the petty bourgeoisierepresents an opportunity unheard of in the history of humanity that it must at all costs not let slipaway."

15 It is doubtful that any thinker, broadly speaking of the left, has ever placed such grand hopes

in what Marx saw as a "transitional class," typified by "moral indignation."16

 In contrast to Marx's belief that such "transitional classes'" would fade away, enabling a struggle between "two great hostilecamps,"

17 the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, in Agamben's view, the "petty-bourgeoisie has inherited

the world and is the form in which humanity has survived nihilism."18

 Unlike Marx's, Agamben's pettybourgeoisie is a product, or better, a remnant, of the process of expropriation carried out by thespectacle. Agamben provides an evocative image of this expropriation: nothing "better resembles the

condition of this new humanity," he writes, "than advertising footage from which every trace of theadvertised product has been wiped out."

19 The petty-bourgeoisie is the inheritor of a process of 

nullification, it would seem, which has torn down the divisions of identity, and rendered stablesubjectivities and naturalized vocations meaningless. If it represents an opportunity, however, this isbecause it is precisely in its vacuity, in its indifference to identity and to national dreams that Agamben locates the germinating seed of "whatever being." What the nihilism of the spectaclereveals, he suggests, is precisely the insubstantiality, the inessential nature, of human being. For thefirst time in history, it is possible to discern that human being is inessential being, or, as Thomas CarlWall writes, "being expropriated is human being."

20 

When Agamben wishes to explain "whatever being," he does so through a discussion of love.Love, he suggests, can be understood neither through the particular properties of the loved one nor through a neglect of these properties.

21 Yet while whatever beings have no unitary identity that would

enable them to form a community premised on a logic of inclusion or exclusion, neither are theymarked by what Agamben terms the "incipit generality" of concepts like "universal love" (andpresumably also universal human rights), which can only subsume singularity in universality.

22 In

contrast, he writes, "the lover wants the loved one with all of its predicates , its being such as it is. Thelover desires the as only insofar as it is such —this is the lover's particular fetishism."

23 In an unusual

twist, Agamben links this theory of love directly to his account of the potentiality of language: love, hesuggests, is simply "seeing something in its being-thus"—in its being-in-language. Being-in-languageis, for Agamben, the "non-predicative property par excellence ," existing in a realm prior to thoselinguistic judgments that must divide into classes in order to signify.

24 This means that a community of 

such "lovable" beings would itself be without presuppositions (and classes). While this being may bemodelled on love, it is in the society of the spectacle that he believes it is germinating; "contemporarypolitics," he writes, "is this devastatingexperimentum linguae that all over the planet unhinges andempties traditions and beliefs, ideologies and religions, identities and communities."

25 It is within this

process of nullification, Agamben believes, which expropriates the very potentiality of language, butthereby frees it from its abandonment as the foundation of particular languages and peoples, that thepossibility of such a community appears for the first time.

While Agamben gives his own inflection to the relation between community and love, it isnonetheless worth asking how his coming community compares to Christian attempts to found acommunity in love. Adam Thurschwell has suggested that if "the coming community is a community of love, it is one so far from being modelled on the Christian 'community of love' that its members haveforgotten God's very existence."

26 While it is true that the coming community is not striving for heaven

but content in limbo, existing between good and evil in blissful vacuity, it is in Paul, who preached

7/27/2019 'A New Use of the Self'- Giorgio Agamben on the Coming Community

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/a-new-use-of-the-self-giorgio-agamben-on-the-coming-community 4/15

love against the law, that we find the inspiration for the free use of the self that Agamben believeswould lead humanity to its "second, happier, nature."

27 In I Corinthians, we read, "Let every man

abide in the same calling wherein he was called. Art thou called being a slave? care not for it: but if thou mayest be made free, use it rather" (I Cor. 7:17-22). While it would be possible to read thephrase "use it rather" to signify a use of freedom, Agamben argues that what is to be used is thecondition of slavery itself, which is nullified by the messianic vocation, stripped of meaning whileremaining factually unchanged.

This interpretation, in which we can find an analogue for his account of the status of identity andclass in the society of the spectacle (and here it is worth noting that Agamben has elsewhere referredto our own time as the messianic era) rests on a reading of the following Pauline passage, in whichhe finds what "may be his most rigorous definition of messianic life":

28 

But this I say brethren, time contracted itself, the rest is, that even those having wives may be as not [ hosme ] having, and those weeping as not weeping, and those rejoicing as not rejoicing, and those buying asnot possessing, and those using the world as not using it up. For passing away is the figure of this world(I Cor. 7:29-32).

In this "as not" (hos me ), Agamben sees "the formula concerning messianic life" and the model for anullification which revokes factical positions and identities in the same act as maintaining them.

29 The

Pauline "as not," he suggests, serves not to establish a new vocation or condition but to place each

vocation in tension with itself, preparing its end. To depict this messianic urgency, Agambensuggests, "Paul uses a peculiar expression that gave his interpreters much to ponder: chresai 'makeuse'."

30 To live the messianic life is to use , Agamben suggests, referring not to a naturalized form of 

use, such as that which would attain to simply living out the station in life granted by a combination of biology and chance, but to a form premised on the hollowing of substantive vocations introduced bythe messianic one. "Use:" Agamben writes, "this is the definition Paul gives to messianic life in theform of the as not ."

31 The messianic life, Agamben suggests, is premised on the expropriation of 

every juridical/factual identity "(circumcised /uncircumcised, slave/free, man/woman)" through the asnot.

32  And yet, he writes this "expropriation does not, however, found a new identity; the 'new

creature' is none other than the use and messianic vocation of the old. "33

 Thus, the one who "uses" afactical condition does not establish a new condition, but continues to inhabit the empty form of theold one. Agamben makes this clear by returning to the example of the slave, stressing that, in Paul'sexhortation to use , the factical-juridical condition of the slave is not negated in such a way that a newfactical-juridical condition could be established in its place. The point of use is thus not to establish anew identity that could in turn be granted rights and legal status, but, to take up the old identity "asnot," thus transposing it "to a zone that is neither factual nor juridical, but is subtracted from the lawand remains as a place of pure praxis, or simple 'use' ('use it rather!') "

34 

 Agamben derives the substance of this reading of the hos me from Heidegger, who devoted asignificant component of his 1921 lecture course to Paul and the "Characteristics of Early ChristianLife Experience."

35 Heidegger too reads I Corinthians to say that the slave should remain a slave,

suggesting that in the enactment of a Christian life, "something remains unchanged and yet isradically changed."

36 For Heidegger, what is decisive for Paul is "not the anticipation of a future

event," but a "complex of enactment," a way of being in a world that is unchanged, yet radicallychanged.

37 For Paul, Heidegger writes, "the parousia depends on how I live."

38 What Heidegger terms

the "authentic complex of enactment" of the Christian is thus defined by the hos me (the as not); theChristian, he writes, does not "cling to this world" but instead divests all that is worldly of 

significance.39 In The Time That Remains , Agamben briefly mentions Heidegger's lecture course,and his contention that the slave should remain a slave, and cites the following important passage:

These directions of meaning, toward the surrounding world, toward one's calling, and toward that whichone is, in no way determine the facticity of the Christian. Nevertheless, these relations are there, they aremaintained, and thus first appropriated [zuggeeignet ] in an authentic manner .40 

 Agamben devotes less than half a page to Heidegger's lecture course, but what he does say is highlysignificant not only in understanding the extent of his own departure from the thinker to whom hededicated his early work Stanzas , but also for helping us to understand why, despite his own(Heideggerian) suspicion of "use," demonstrated in that early book, he comes to formulate the need

7/27/2019 'A New Use of the Self'- Giorgio Agamben on the Coming Community

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/a-new-use-of-the-self-giorgio-agamben-on-the-coming-community 5/15

for, not an appropriation, but a new use. It is in his lectures on Paul, Agamben suggests, thatHeidegger anticipates what will become the dialectic of the proper and improper, or authentic andinauthentic, (eigentlich and uneigentlich ) in Being and Time . What matters about this "dialectic" for our purposes is that the "authentic does not have any content other than the inauthentic" but is simplya modified way of seizing upon the inauthentic.

41 The Christian way of life, for Heidegger, Agamben

suggests, is determined not by the content of worldly relations, but by the way in which theseinauthentic, or improper, relations are "appropriated in their very impropriety."

42 

 After briefly summarising Heidegger's argument, Agamben writes, nonetheless, "for Paul, what isat stake is not appropriation but use, and the messianic subject is not only not defined by propriety[authenticity], but he is also unable to seize hold of himself as a whole, whether in the form of anauthentic decision or in Being-toward-death."

43  A full engagement with Heidegger's account of 

authenticity is beyond the scope of this paper. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that Heidegger'saccount of inauthentic life is central to Agamben's account of spectacular society: in a fragmentfrom Idea of Prose , the latter writes "if we want to look for an image of our estrangement and socialmisery, it is still to the description of everyday life in Sein and Zeit ."

44 What is essential in Agamben's

substitution of use for appropriation, however, is that for him there is no possibility of either recoveringor creating a form of authenticity or propriety. Thus, there is no great decision and no destiny; all thatis possible is to make use of the inauthentic, nullified identities revealed by the society of thespectacle. If Agamben sees the spectacle as an unprecedented opportunity, however, this is because

it is in the dreams of authenticity that he locates both the desire to fix and determine a humanessence, and the concomitant expulsion (or at worst, extermination) of all that is deemed inauthentic,or improper; "every affirmation of the authentic," he writes, "had the effect of pushing the inauthenticto another place, where morality would once again raise its barriers…every consolidation of the wallsof paradise was matched by a deepening of the infernal abyss."

45 Humans, Agamben suggests in an

essay on Heidegger, neither originally dwell in the proper (which would assume a form of authenticity,an essence, a destiny), nor nihilistically inhabit the improper. "Rather, human beings are those whofall properly in love with the improper."

46 To fall in love with the improper, is to learn not to treat

existence as a property, and to be open to the possibilities that flow from having nothing we have tobe. It is not a fact but an embrace, or an experience, of potentiality. It is to be, in Agamben's terms,"whatever."

If we return to the Benjaminian account of salvation, we should ask what inflection it is given by

 Agamben's theorisation of use. In The Coming Community , he offers a description of salvation thatcan help shed light on this: gesturing to Kafka, he writes, the "innermost character of salvation is thatwe are saved only at the point when we no longer want to be. At this point, there is salvation, but notfor us."

47  Agamben's profane salvation is thus found between good and evil, in the zone of 

indistinction in which such terms lose all meaning. We are saved only at the point at which weabandon all dreams of destiny and substantial belonging, at the point at which the claim of the stateto save us from the dangers of the state of nature is undone by the blurring of the border betweennorm and exception, at the point at which we are "unsavable."

48  Agamben would therefore agree with

Paulo Virno's observation that danger manifests, for the most part, as a form of refuge, as "ahorrifiying strategy of salvation."

49 Those who seek salvation in the arms of the state, or in the

assertion of a particular form of identity or exclusionary belonging, are, Agamben writes in an essayon Heidegger, like the "unnamed animal protagonist" [of Kafka's "The Burrow"] who is "obsessivelyoccupied with constructing an impregnable burrow, which reveals itself, little by little, to be instead a

trap with no way out."

50

 This means that salvation, in Agamben's view, begins withcollapse of thenation-states and their collective identities, which claimed to offer 'homes' for 'peoples' but provided"only lethal traps."

51 What remains, in the wake of this process of nullification and expropriation is

what he terms "the un-saveable that renders salvation possible, the irreparable that allows the comingof the redemption," that is, a life in which there is nothing left to save—the life of the global petty-bourgeoisie.

52 

To speak of redemption, however, is not, in this context, to speak of the sacred, but instead toreturn us to the "small displacement" of which Bloch doubted humans were capable. In contrast to theview that only the Messiah can bring about the world to come, Agamben premises the possibility of a

7/27/2019 'A New Use of the Self'- Giorgio Agamben on the Coming Community

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/a-new-use-of-the-self-giorgio-agamben-on-the-coming-community 6/15

new use on a particular form of praxis he terms profanation . Calling on the authority of the Roman jurists, who, he writes, "knew perfectly well what it meant to profane," he cites Trebatius who notesthat "profane is the term for something that was once sacred or religious and is returned to the use or property of men."

53 Here, we see the crucial relationship between use and the sacred, and indeed

 Agamben defines sacred or religious things as those that have been removed from the use of men,and placed in a separate sphere, subject to a "special unavailability. "

54 In line with his earlier account

of the homo sacer , who is excluded from both the realm of men and the realm of the gods, he arguesthat what is essential in sacrifice is always thethreshold that must be crossed from the profane to thesacred. The homo sacer , Agamben suggests in Profanations , is a figure who has survived the ritethrough which he was separated from other men, and—as he continues to live amongst them despitebeing removed "from normal commerce with his kind"—is exposed to violent death.

55 By virtue of the

ban on his sacrifice, however, he also subsists as a "remnant of profanity" in the realm of the sacred,meaning that "in the machine of sacrifice, sacred and profane represent the two poles of a system inwhich a floating signifier travels from one domain to the other without ceasing to refer to the sameobject."

56 While sacrifice is a bipolar machine that serves to divide use between men and Gods, it

also holds out the possibility, in Agamben's view, for a form of praxis that would consist in enablingthings to cross the threshold that divides the profane from the sacred in the opposite direction, toreturn to what he terms "free use."

What Agamben terms "profanation" is this praxis, or procedure, through which things are given a

new, non-utilitarian, use. "There seems to be a peculiar relationship," he writes, between 'using' and'profaning' that we must clarify."

57 While he frames the result of profanation as a return to use, this

does not signify a return to an actually existing prior state but rather a return to what has never been,like that evoked in Caproni's beautiful poem Ritorno , with which he concludes the "final day"of Language and Death: "I returned there/ where I have never been./Nothing has changed from how itwas not."

58 In contrast to nostalgia for a more meaningful relation to the world, Agamben rejects every

attempt to return to an earlier use, and is interested in retrieving uses that were not able to be, usesthat were prohibited by the rigid inscription of things in particular spheres and by compulsory relationsbetween means and ends. "Profanation," he writes, "does not simply restore something like a naturaluse that existed before being separated into the religious, economic or juridical sphere."

59 Rather,

profanation holds the potential for a new form of use that is neither natural nor utilitarian, and thepositive possibility he finds in the spectacle consists in its ability to denaturalize all that it touches,making possible such a new use. This is starkest in his argument that it is advertising and

pornography that "escort the commodity to the grave like hired mourners."60

 If pornography appearsas a "midwife" of the future society, this is because, in denaturalizing and desacralizing sexuality, itopens the space for "a new collective use of sexuality."

61 Lest this be viewed (simply) as a celebration

of pornography, however, we must note that in Agamben's view, pornography is also an apparatusthat attempts to capture pure means, creating something that, in its very lack of sacredness, can nolonger be profaned. Captured by the apparatus, the "solitary and desperate consumption of thepornographic image replaces the promise of a new use."

62 Pornography, perhaps the apotheosis of 

the spectacle, simultaneously frees sexuality from its naturalization or sacralization and separates itinto a realm in which it can only be consumed but not used. In a similar vein, advertising frees thebody from ineffability, while simultaneously subjecting it to "the iron laws of massification andexchange value," while the media detaches language from any relation to an end but simultaneouslyneutralizes this new relation to the word in endless vacuity.

63 In the spectacle, pure means are both

produced and captured, and thus a non-utilitarian relation to the world is both made possible and

separated in the sphere of consumption, which serves to block the new uses and new experiencesthe spectacle opens up.

If, as Agamben makes clear, "use does not appear here as something natural: rather, one arrivesat it only by means of profanation," then how would we go about profaning the unprofanable andfreeing pure means from their spectacular capture?

64 How could we create the little difference in

which Benjamin located the possibility of redemption? In religious terms, profanation may take a formas simple and banal as touching the sacred object, as in consecration rites in which parts of a victim"(the entrails, or exta : the liver, heart, gallbladder, lungs)" are reserved for the Gods, but, upon beingtouched, become edible again.

65  Agamben's favorite profanatory praxis however, is play . Tracing the

7/27/2019 'A New Use of the Self'- Giorgio Agamben on the Coming Community

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/a-new-use-of-the-self-giorgio-agamben-on-the-coming-community 7/15

origins of popular children's games to religious rituals, Agamben, following Emile Benveniste, seesplay as a repetition of a rite divorced from the myth it once staged, or, in wordplay, the repetition of the myth without the rite.

66 In an early essay, "In Playland: Reflections on History and Play," Agamben

cites a passage in which Benveniste conceptualises play as the preservation of a pure form, strippedof its previous meaning and relation to an end. Defining the sacred as the conjunction of myth andritual, Benveniste writes:

[I]n play, only the ritual survives and all that is preserved is the form of the sacred drama, in which each

element is re-enacted time and again. But what has been forgotten or abolished is the myth, themeaningfully worded fabulation that endows the acts with their sense and purpose.67 

Suggesting that there is an "inverse relation between play and the sacred," Agamben comments—drawing on Collodi's description of "Playland" in Pinocchio—that "Playland is a country whoseinhabitants are busy celebrating rituals and manipulating objects and sacred words whose sense andpurpose they have, however, forgotten."

68 

The ability of play to decompress rite and myth and thus "distract humanity from the sphere of thesacred" does not just pertain to religious rites, however; giving the examples of a cat playing with aball of string as if it were a mouse, and of "children who play with whatever old things come into their hands," Agamben suggests that play can profane things from the realms of economics, nature, law or war, returning them to a new use.

69 This can help us to understand the enigmatic suggestion in State

of Exception that:One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restorethem to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a moreproper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it.70 

Profanatory play, Agamben argues, "deactivates the apparatuses of power and returns to commonuse the spaces that power had seized" by disrupting the grounding of power on a sacred model .

71This

praxis, however, is reliant on the nullifying power of the spectacle, because what is available for playare those disused objects (or subjectivities) whose previous uses have been eroded, and can thus beput to new uses as if they were toys. Thus, it is this nullifying power of the spectacle that leaves us, in Agamben's view, only a small displacement away from the possibility of a profane world.

The significance of this account of profanatory play as the free use of inauthenticity can beconcretized if we compare Agamben's position briefly with that of Alphonso Lingis, who has also

sought to formulate a new basis for community beyond identity. Here, I will confine this comparison toa single essay, entitled Anger , in which Lingis—in stark contrast to Agamben's vision of a world"without classes"—sees the basis for community in a shared anger at the dramatic inequality of aworld in which the consumer culture of what he terms the "technocratic commercial archipelago" isbuilt on the massive exploitation of cheap labor in the "outer zone. "

72Here I want to focus on the

differing ways in which Lingis and Agamben conceptualize the possibility of community in a world inwhich both agree that at least a substantial section of us (in Lingis's case, those in the archipelago)"are present to one another alienated in technicizations and simulacra."

73 For Lingis, those in the

archipelago are alienated not merely from the products of their labor but from their world, which isconsumed in advance, while those in the "outer zone" live lives of massive exploitation andpoverty.

74 Thus, he argues, it is only in anger that we can oppose both the walls of simulacra that

keep us apart, and the literal "Berlin walls" that are increasingly appearing to keep those from the"outer zone" out . This anger, Lingis writes, arises only when we come into contact with those in the

outer zone, in the "significance of their singular and communal forms of life."75

 

While Lingis acknowledges that "much has been written about the illusions now dissipated of classconsciousness and worker solidarity among the disinherited," nonetheless, the image he provides of the "outer zone" is in stark contrast to the vacuity and atomization that he sees in the archipelago. "Inthe favelas of Rio, the crumbling buildings of Havana, the swampy shantytowns of Jakarta," he writes,"men and women rejoice at the singular beauty of their faces, the singular passions of their loins."

76 Thus, he argues that those in the archipelago who wish to discover the possibility of a more

"meaningful" life must shake themselves from their consumption-induced stupors and travel to the"outer zone." "Anyone who leaves the television set with its images of consumer euphoria and goes

7/27/2019 'A New Use of the Self'- Giorgio Agamben on the Coming Community

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/a-new-use-of-the-self-giorgio-agamben-on-the-coming-community 8/15

out to visit someone's village in the Isaan, in the favelas of Rio, the slums of Jakarta, the villages of  Africa," Lingis writes, "discovers the character, the bravery, and the pride of singular people."

77 While

this analysis recognizes that the "outer zone" is enmeshed in the circuits of consumption andproduction that sustain the spectacle, it nonetheless fails to account for the fact that millions of peopleeach year do leave their television sets to "visit someone's village," usually returning home not with agreater sense of the meaning of life and the "distress and anger" addressed to us by those theyencounter, but with an array of digital photographs and a suitcase of cheap "authentic" shawls andnecklaces, which are valued all the more highly if those who produced them are not only poor butalso "traditional."

78 

That Lingis leaves the tourism industry out of his indictment of spectacular society is curious, butseems to be symptomatic of his broader desire to emphasize the gulf that separates the archipelagofrom the outer zone. Thus, while those in the outer zone are experiencing a "meaningfulness which isgiven in singular pulses of enjoyment,"

79 meanwhile in the archipelago:

It is in the culture of spectacle and simulacra that individuals are called upon to devise the meaning andworth of their individual and collective identities. They are called upon to devise them out of forms,images, games, spectacles, that is, the excess over the necessities of life, and from which the meaningof existence is eclipsed before the instant gratification of the spectacle.80 

It is undoubtedly true, as Lingis highlights, that there are numerous people in the world, who, despite

their poverty and the difficulty of their lives indeed "devise ways to get along with each other andsupport each other."81

 It is undoubtedly true that forms of solidarity and tenderness, forms of character, bravery and pride, exist amongst those whose lives are consumed by brutal exploitation.While for Lingis, this is a specific characteristic of the "outer zone," however, for Agamben, there areno spaces "outside" the spectacle—no "outer zone" in which people live more meaningful or authenticlives. Thus, it is precisely within the spectacle, even as Lingis describes it, that Agamben identifiesthe possibility of a new form of life. For him, the fact that the spectacle, even in a form mediated byconsumption, calls on people to "devise the meaning and worth of their individual and collectiveidentities" provides an important break with the belief that these identities are dictated by biology or by tradition; that we are invited "to devise them out of forms, images, games," suggests that we nolonger believe humanity has a content (or essence) and are free to play with forms of life, openingidentity to movement it had previously lacked. And if "the meaning of existence is eclipsed," this maysuggest that existence has no meaning , in which case we may give our existence meanings that arenot imposed on it, but that arise only in existing. In my view, Agamben's account of the spectacleenables us to avoid the romanticization of poverty that pervades Lingis's account of the "outer zone."Not only is there nothing about poverty and exploitation that make life inherently meaningful, neither,in and of themselves, do poverty or exploitation necessarily lead to solidarity or to "singular pulses of enjoyment." If Agamben's account allows us to avoid romanticizing a space that supposedly existsoutside the spectacle, however, we must nonetheless ask what becomes of inequality, exploitationand labor in his vision of a global petty-bourgeoisie? And what becomes of anger?

Here, we should here turn our attention to the differential temporality of capitalism, which has seennot the creation of a single class but a proliferation of social forms that were thought to have beenconsigned to the past. What Benjamin said of fascism in the last century is true of slavery and forcedlabor in our century: "The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are 'still' possible inthe twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unlessit is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable. "

82 Not only are there still

those who sell their labour power as a commodity and those who live off the profits created byexploiting such labour power, but the teleological framework of "development" is belied by thecontinuation, and creation, of supposed archaisms, from bonded labour, to new forms of slavery,sexual and otherwise.

83 If the petty-bourgeoisie is not the only of Marx's "transitional classes" that has

proved surprisingly resilient in the society of the spectacle, if Kevin Bales is correct to suggest thatthere "are more slaves alive today than all the people stolen from Africa in the time of the trans- Atlantic slave trade," this gives a new, non-metaphorical, weight to Agamben's Pauline assertion thatthe slave should remain a slave, living his factical condition "as not. "

84 If, in fact, we are not all a

global petty-bourgeoisie, if the spectacle has not nullified all social classes and identities, then the

7/27/2019 'A New Use of the Self'- Giorgio Agamben on the Coming Community

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/a-new-use-of-the-self-giorgio-agamben-on-the-coming-community 9/15

view that we should continue to inhabit these social identities, living them "as not" turns our attentionaway from the ways in which they continue to mark differential power relations, relations of socialsubordination and of exploitation that continue to be violently enforced by national and local"sovereigns." Agamben's suggestion that these identities are no longer meaningful, that they remainin force without significance would seem to offer little consolation to those whose possibilities in lifeare thoroughly constrained within them. This means that he turns our attention too far from the extentto which identities continue to be caught up in more or less reactionary or emancipatory politicalprojects. To choose only one example, Richard Pithouse, in his insightful analysis of "resistance inthe shantytown," points out that the Hindu fascist movement Shiv Senna, which built its first base inMumbai's shantytowns, "is one of the many instances of deeply reactionary responses to the need for social innovation" and warns that "there is no guarantee that the need to invent new social forms willresult in progressive outcomes."

85  Agamben's account, in contrast, is inattentive to the extent to which

commodification, or spectacularization, not only challenges identity by eroding its naturalisticontological foundations, but also produces new identities, whether in the form of politicized identityclaims that seek to contest the differential distribution of power under capitalism, reactionaryresponses to the erosion of previous regimes of hierarchical power, or niche markets generated bythe production of new desires and identifications.

86 

The strength of Agamben's theorization of the spectacle lies in his rejection of every attempt toreturn to a supposedly more meaningful period in which identities and social classes were naturalized

and stable. To the extent that he derives his image of happiness from within this world, he draws our attention to possibilities for praxis and areas of contestation where none seemed to exist,encouraging us to seek ways to open up the world to a new use no longer inscribed in nature or tradition. Nonetheless, in focusing on forms of praxis premised on the spectacular nullification of identity and sense, he provides a one-sided image of our world, which is inattentive to the ways inwhich identities continue to be invested with meaning. By basing his account of a new form of life onlyon the nullifying aspect of the spectacle, Agamben's analysis seems to preclude the possibility thatforms of redemptive praxis could arise where capitalism has created not vacuous idleness but thedrudgery of daily labor, not useless consumption but consumption to stay (barely) alive. While Agamben's account of the spectacle provides possibilities for resisting certain aspects of spectacular capitalism—like consumer culture, the global media and entertainment business, the subsistence of the empty forms of previous political eras (such as those 'Labour' Parties that have thoroughlyoutlived their names) it is not clear that these strategies are adequate to contesting poverty or labor 

exploitation, or indeed to the concentration camp. Faced with the recognition that identity and labor exploitation are still firmly in place we could, on the one hand, dismiss them as relics that willultimately be expropriated and nullified by the spectacle, leading to a truly global "petty bourgeoisie."In this case, any inaccuracy in the descriptive element of Agamben's account of the spectacle couldbe dismissed as simply a sign that he is ahead of his times, just as Marx was in identifying thedecisive role of the proletariat at a time when this class was still relatively insignificant numerically ona global scale.

87 On the other hand, if capitalism does not have such a teleological thrust, and I

believe it does not, it may well be that it continues to produce massive poverty, forced labor, andpoliticized identities. If this is the case, it is necessary to develop a political thought capable of takinginto account the fact that capitalism does not have one telos , but is just as good at waking the deadas it is at reducing life worlds to debris.

Perhaps then, what is necessary, is to begin to formulate a political thought situated within a

society in which the spectacular consumption of useless commodities exists alongside subsistenceliving and in which a highly mobile and flexible class, unbound of the strictures of national identity andvocation, have their houses cleaned by people with few other possibilities for survival and their shoesmade in third world sweatshops, and worry about reports that their holiday destination is engulfed in aseparatist struggle. Agamben's own thought can help us here: in my view, his account of what hecalls inclusive-exclusion, of the way those included are simultaneously excluded and vice versa, ismore helpful in understanding the topology of global capitalism than the geographical stratificationimplied by Lingis's concept of the "outer zone." Just as Agamben highlights that inclusion, in thenation-state or the category of the human, for instance, presupposes (inclusive) exclusion and thecategory of the inhuman, we should remain attentive to the way spectacular consumption

7/27/2019 'A New Use of the Self'- Giorgio Agamben on the Coming Community

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/a-new-use-of-the-self-giorgio-agamben-on-the-coming-community 10/15

presupposes (unspectacular) production by people who work merely to stay alive. Just as he drawsour attention to the ways in which liberal "freedoms" presuppose the concentration camp, we shouldattend to the ways in which the freedom to consume presupposes the labor camp, and the freemarket presupposes the "free economic zones" in which labor laws are suspended and unionisationpunishable through extra-judicial killing. If we are to do justice to such a world, and develop a politicalthought adequate to our time, we need first to recognize that capitalism, in the words of thetheologian Paul Fletcher, can offer only a "deficient form of redemption."

88 To begin to formulate such

a thought it will be necessary to drop the teleological fascination with capitalism that Marx and Engelsshared and that Benjamin warned had corrupted the working class by leading it to believe "it wasmoving with the current" and begin to develop ways to contest it .

89 

Jessica Whyte Jessica Whyte recently completed a doctoral thesis on the political thought of Giorgio Agamben in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University. She has published articles on Agamben, JacquesRancière, Walter Benjamin, Immigration Control and Guantanamo Bay, in Law and Critique, Arena Journal, Conflitti Globali , and Ephemera and has published chapters in the collections Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life (2008)and Trauma, History, Philosophy (2008). She is a co-editor of the Australian Feminist Law Journal Edition "Law, Crisis,Revolution" and of the Agamben Dictionary (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming, 2010).

Notes

1. Giorgio Agamben, "Halos," The Coming Community , (Minneapolis: University of Minessota Press, 1993), 53. I

thank Eric Santner for bringing to my attention the fact that this tale can in fact be attributed to the young GershomScholem. See also Eric L. Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig , (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2001), 122, n.52. Indeed, ina letter to Benjamin, dated July 9, 1934, Scholem writes: "And one question: Who is actually the source of all thesestories? Does Ernst Bloch have them from you or you from him? The great rabbi with the profound dictum on themessianic kingdom who appears in Bloch is none other than I myself; what a way to achieve fame!! It was one of my first ideas about the Kabbalah." Gershom Scholem, "Scholem to Benjamin," July 9, 1934, in Gershom Scholem[ed.] The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem: 1932-1940 ," (New York: Schocken Books,1989), 123.

2. In Giorgio Agamben, "Halos," 53.

3. Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History," Selected Writings Vol.4 , (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,2003), 389.

4. Benjamin, "On the Concept of History," 389.

5. Agamben, "Shekinah" The Coming Community , 79.

6. Agamben "Without Classes," The Coming Community , 65.

7. Agamben, "Without Classes," The Coming Community , 65.

8. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View , (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 299.

9. Antonio Negri, "The Discrete Taste of the Dialectic," Matthew Calarco and Steven De Caroli [eds] Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life , Stanford: Stanford University Press, 117.

10. Guy Debord, "Separation Perfected," Society of the Spectacle , (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), 42. This edition

is not paginated. Rather, each fragment is numbered. Subsequently, numbers given here will refer to numberedfragments.

11. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle , 1.

12. See Agamben, The Coming Community .

13. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community , (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

14. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community , 28-9.

7/27/2019 'A New Use of the Self'- Giorgio Agamben on the Coming Community

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/a-new-use-of-the-self-giorgio-agamben-on-the-coming-community 11/15

15. Giorgio Agamben, "Without Classes," The Coming Community , 64.

16. Karl Marx, The Class Struggle in France , (Sydney: Resistance Books, 2003), 38.

17. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto , in David McLelland, The Thought of Karl Marx ,(London: MacMillan, 1980), 188.

18. Giorgio Agamben, "Without Classes," The Coming Community , 63. It is possible, though this is not stated, that Agamben means for his claim that all of humanity now comprises a global petty-bourgeoisie to be understood inparadigmatic rather than descriptive terms. Agamben has suggested that, in his work, the paradigm is used "toestablish and make intelligible a wider set of problems" [What is a Paradigm?] If this were the case, we would needto ask to what extent ascribing paradigmatic status to the petty-bourgeoisie makes a set of problems intelligible. AsI will suggest below, Agamben's utilisation of this figure tends to obscure as much as it illuminates aboutcontemporary class and about the temporality of capitalism.

19. Agamben, "Without Classes," The Coming Community , 64.

20. Thomas Carl Wall, Radical Passivity ," (New York: SUNY Press, 1999), 156.

21. Adam Thurschwell, "Specters of Nietzsche: Potential Futures of the Concept of the Political in Agamben andDerrida" Social Science Research Network, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=969055, 33.

22. Agamben, "Whatever," The Coming Community , 2.

23. Agamben, "Whatever," The Coming Community , 2.

24. Agamben, "Homonyms," The Coming Community , 73.

25. Agamben, "Shekinah," The Coming Community , 83.

26. Thurschwell, "Specters of Nietzsche," 33.

27. Agamben, "Maneries," The Coming Community , 29.

28. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans , (Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 2005), 23.

29. Agamben, The Time That Remains , 23.

30. Agamben, The Time That Remains , 27.

31. Agamben, The Time That Remains , 26.

32. Agamben, The Time That Remains , 26.

33. Agamben, The Time That Remains , 26.

34. Agamben, The Time That Remains , 28.

35. Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life , [trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-

Ferencei], (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).

36. Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life , 85.

37. Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life , 75.

38. Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life , 75.

39. Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life , 70.

7/27/2019 'A New Use of the Self'- Giorgio Agamben on the Coming Community

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/a-new-use-of-the-self-giorgio-agamben-on-the-coming-community 12/15

40. Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life , in Agamben, The Time That Remains , 34.

41. Agamben, The Time That Remains , 34.

42. Agamben, The Time That Remains , 34.

43. Agamben, The Time That Remains , 26.

44. Giorgio Agamben, "The Idea of Music" in Idea of Prose (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995),89.

45. Agamben, "Taking Place," The Coming Community , 14.

46. Agamben, "The Passion of Facticity," Potentialities , 204.

47. Agamben, "The Irreparable," The Coming Community , 102.

48. Agamben's paradigmatic example of such an unsavable life is the life of those infants who die prior to baptismand thus inhabit limbo for eternity. The punishment of these infants—unable to reach heaven due to original sin, butotherwise faultless—cannot be an afflictive punishment, Agamben writes, as "that would not be just." Rather, their punishment must be solely privative: they will be forever deprived of a vision of God. And yet this ignorance of God, Agamben suggests, turns out to be their greatest joy: as they have always already forgotten God, his judgmentcannot touch them; He is impotent in the face of their "neutrality with respect to salvation." The unsavable life is thusa purely profane life freed from the mythologeme of salvation. See Giorgio Agamben, "Limbo," The Coming Community , 6.

49. Paulo Virno, The Grammar of the Multitude , (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2004), 34.

50. Giorgio Agamben, "Heidegger e il nazismo," La potenza del pensiero , Neri Pozza, Vicenza,, 2005, 321-331.(trans. Nicholas Heron.)

51. Agamben, "Heidegger e il nazismo," 328.

52. Giorgio Agamben "Tiqqun de la Noche," Postface to The Coming Community , 2001, online at Notes for theComing Community , http://notesforthecomingcommunity.blogspot.com/2008/04/tiqqun-de-la-noche.html 

53. Giorgio Agamben, "In Praise of Profanation," Profanations , (New York: Zone Books 2007),73.

54. Agamben, "In Praise of Profanation," 73.

55. Agamben, "In Praise of Profanation," 78.

56. Agamben, "In Praise of Profanation," 79.

57. Agamben, "In Praise of Profanation," 74.

58. Giorgio Caproni, "Ritorno," cited in Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (Minneapolis: University of Minessota Press, 1991), 98.

59. Agamben, "In Praise of Profanation," 85.

60. Agamben "Dim Stockings" The Coming Community , 50.

61. Agamben, "In Praise of Profanation," 91.

62. Agamben, "In Praise of Profanation," 91.

63. Agamben, The Coming Community , 58.

64. Agamben, "In Praise of Profanation," 74.

7/27/2019 'A New Use of the Self'- Giorgio Agamben on the Coming Community

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/a-new-use-of-the-self-giorgio-agamben-on-the-coming-community 13/15

65. Agamben, "In Praise of Profanation," 74.

66. In Infancy and History , where the theme of play first appears, its model is the depiction of "Playland" in CarloCollodi's Pinocchio in which a population of boys creates a world of playful "pandemonium," which results in theacceleration of time and, in contrast to ritual, which fixes the calendar, brings about its "paralysis anddestruction."Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience , (London: Verso, London, 2007), 76.

67. Emile Benveniste, cited in Agamben, "In Playland," 78.

68. Agamben, "In Playland," 79.

69. Agamben, "In Praise of Profanation," 76.

70. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception , (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 64.

71. Agamben, "In Praise of Profanation," 77.

72. Alphonso Lingis, "Anger," Sheppard, Sparks and Thomas (eds) The Sense of Philosophy: On Jean-Luc Nancy ,(London and New York: Routledge, 1997).

73. Lingis, "Anger," 208.

74. On the problem of alienation, Lingis cites Jean-Luc Nancy, who writes: "'Alienation' has been represented as thedispossession of an original authenticity, to be preserved or restored. The critique of this determination of anoriginal property, an authentic plenitude and reserve contributed to a great extent to the extinction of the theme of alienation as the theme of a loss or theft of an original autoproduction of man…[Nonetheless] an existent can beexpropriated of its conditions for existing: its force, its labor, its body, its meanings, and perhaps always of thespace-time of its singularity. And this happens continually…'capital' or the 'world market', until further notice, areensured and proper only in such a massive expropriation." Jean-Luc Nancy, in Alphonso Lingis, "Anger," 214.

75. Lingis, "Anger," 213.

76. Lingis, "Anger," 200.

77. Lingis, "Anger," 214.

78. On the economic valuation of "authenticity," see Dave Hickey, "Dialectical Utopias: On Santa Fe and LosVegas,"Harvard Design Magazine , No.4, Winter/Spring 1998. Hickey writes, of shopping for native handicrafts:"The potential buyer is concerned with the authenticity of the object, its source and chaste appeal; in the case of native handicrafts, the buyer is even concerned with the blood, the genealogy, of the author, with his or her antiqueauthenticity." (4.) While Hickey is referring here to shopping in Santa Fe, this concern for authenticity is as much anaspect of the "shopping experience" that accompanies mass tourism in what Lingis terms the "outer zone."

79. Lingis, "Anger," 214.

80. Lingis, "Anger," 210/11.

81. Lingis, "Anger," 214.

82. Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History," Selected Writings Vol.4 , Howard Eiland and Michael W.Jennings [eds.] Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2003, 392.

83. In Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy , Kevin Bales examines the proliferation of newforms of slavery in contemporary capitalism, rejecting the view that it is an archaism, and highlighting the "newslavery" that is thriving today. "Slavery," he writes, "is not a horror safely confined to the past; it continues to existthroughout the world, even in developed countries like France and the United States." (3) Bales's account of slaveryreveals a dark side of global capitalism, characterized not by the diminution of utilitarian relations but by absolutelyinstrumental relations to people, who are treated simply as means to the end of profit. "Slavery," he writes, "is abooming business and the number of slaves is increasing. People get rich using slaves, and when they've finishedwith their slaves, they just throw these people away. This is the new slavery, which focuses on big profits and cheaplives. It's not about owning people in the traditional sense of the old slavery, but about controlling them completely.People become disposable tools for making money." (4) Bales points out that, as slavery is no longer legal, people

7/27/2019 'A New Use of the Self'- Giorgio Agamben on the Coming Community

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/a-new-use-of-the-self-giorgio-agamben-on-the-coming-community 14/15

are likely to become slaves "not through legal ownership, but through the final authority of violence." (5) He citesexamples of men lured to the gold mining towns of the Amazon with promises of lucrative employment, then lockedup and forced to work in the mines, and of girls as young as eleven, sold into the regions brothels and killed if theyattempt to escape. Lest it be thought this is a phenomenon confined to the most poverty stricken corners of theglobe, however, he also traces examples of slaves kept in houses in Paris, and beaten for minor 'infractions.' Baleestimates that there are currently approximately 3000 household slaves in Paris, and twenty seven million peopletrapped in forms of slavery (including bonded labor) across the globe. He makes clear that he is not using the termloosely, to refer to bad working conditions and subsistence wages, or even to refer to child labor, but is referring

only to "the total control of one person by another for the purposes of economic exploitation." (6) Revealing the flip-side of Agamben's belief in the power of the spectacle to create an indifference to identity, Bales suggests that inthe new slavery, in contrast to the old, the "criteria of enslavement today do not concern color, tribe or religion: theyfocus on weakness, gullibility and deprivation." (11) Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy , (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004).See also David Harvey, The Spaces of Neoliberalization (Franz Steiner Verlag: Stuttgart, 2005) and Silvia Federici, George Caffentizis and Ousseina Alidou who understand what Debord terms the "spectacle" in terms of Marx's theorisation of "real subsumption",which the latter used in contrast to "formal subsumption" to signify the moment at which the labour relation is re-organised along specifically capitalist lines. They point out that forms of unfree labour (in contrast to the "doublyfree" labour of the proletariat, which was free to sell its labour power and free of any other means of subsistence)continue to exist, in a "specifically capitalist form." Silvia Federici, George Caffentzis and Ousseina Alidou,  AThousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities , (Africa World Press: Asmara, 2000). In another sense, Ian Baucom, writing about the history of Atlantic slavery from a Benjaminianperspective, suggests that "what has been begun does not end but endures," as the time of modernity"accumulates" on the foundation of the Atlantic slave trade. Ian Baucom, Spectres of the Atlantic: Finance Capital,

Slavery, and the Philosophy of the Atlantic , (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 333.

84. Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy , 9.

85. Richard Pithouse, "Thinking Resistance in the Shantytown," Mute Magazine , August 2006, 5. In Means Without Ends , Agamben does note that our time is characterized by "increasingly powerful resistances of historicalinstances (of a national, religious or ethnic type)," but these are framed as throwbacks to a prior, historical, time,that we have not yet overcome because of our inability to think the end of history alongside the end of the state.Such 'resistances' could, in his terms, be understood as remaining "in force without significance," continuing to existyet stripped of the meaning they once held. My claim, in contrast, is that capital not only expropriates identity butconstitutes new identity formations, even if these formations conceive themselves as returns to a (mythical) past.See Giorgio Agamben, "Notes on Politics," 113.

86. My analysis here draws on Wendy Brown's important theorisation of the fate of contemporary identity in Statesof Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity , (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1995). In a seminar in

Paris, Agamben responded to critique of his suggestion, in the Coming Community , that "planetary petty-bourgeoisie has taken over the aptitude of the proletariat to refuse any recognizable social identity"(163), by stating,"if this book is republished, I am going to remove this definition of the planetary petite bourgeoisie." See AlainBadiou, Intervention dans le cadre du Collège international de philosophie sur le livre de Giorgio Agamben: laCommunauté qui vient, théorie de la singularité quelconque , (transcription de FrançoisDuvert),http://www.entretemps.asso.fr/Badiou/Agamben.htm (translation on file). My thanks go to John Cleary for drawing this seminar to my attention, and to both him and Justin Clemens for providing me with their translation.While Agamben does not elaborate, it may be that his consideration of the Marxian proletariat as a messianicsubject, inThe Time That Remains , is, in part, a response to criticisms of this understanding of the petty-bourgeoisie. WhileThe Time That Remains makes no claims about our own time, it suggests that the Marxianproletariat, like the "new creature," who must die to the old world to be granted a new life, is a self-negating subject,which must realize itself by suppressing itself. In contrast to the working class as a sociological category, Agambensees the proletariat as a non-substantive subject whose transformation into a factical-juridical subject able to claimrights for itself is the "worst understanding of Marxian thought," signalling the loss of its revolutionary vocation (31).While this mirrors much of his earlier conceptualisation of the petty-bourgeoisie, it seems to me that this does notsuggest that the proletariat, rather than the petty bourgeoisie, is a messianic subject today , but describes its

decline, and ultimate replacement by a sociological class, the 'working class', bound up in the sovereign mechanismof inclusive-exclusion and representation.

87. David Harvey describes such an understanding of uneven geographic development under capitalism as the"historicist-diffusionist" interpretation, which sees 'advanced' countries as the "engine of capitalism that entrains allother territories, cultures and places into paths of economic, political, institutional and intellectual progress." Suchan interpretation, Harvey suggests, casts continuing poverty as "residual," and places its faith in the expansion of capitalism to lift "backwards" economies to the level of "advanced" ones. See Harvey, The Spaces of Neoliberalization , 55.

88. Paul Fletcher, Disciplining the Divine: Toward an (Im)political Theology , (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 155.

7/27/2019 'A New Use of the Self'- Giorgio Agamben on the Coming Community

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/a-new-use-of-the-self-giorgio-agamben-on-the-coming-community 15/15

89. Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History," 393.

Copyright © 2010 Jessica Whyte and The Johns Hopkins University Press