A New Use of the Self T E Jessica Whyte

8/3/2019 A New Use of the Self T E Jessica Whyte

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Theory and Event Volume 13, Issue 1, 2010

‘A New Use of the Self’: Giorgio Agamben on the Com ing Community.

Heaven and Hell, however, hang together.

—ADORNO AND HORKHEIMER, Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Jessica Whyte

Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies

MONASH UNIVERSITY .

Amongst the voluminous speculations on the ‘world to come’ that have accompanied messianic prophecies, one

stands out, not for the extravagance of its predictions, but for the very banality of its account of redemption. In

the Coming Community , Giorgio Agamben recounts the following tale, as told by Walter Benjamin to Ernst Bloch:

“The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything 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 this world, 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 placed alongside Christian promises of “a new heaven and a new earth” [Rev 21:1], in which “there shall

be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying” [Rev 21:4]. Nonetheless, in offering a vision of the world to come

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, and ultimately passed from Gershom

Scholem to Benjamin to Bloch, the question of the nature of the change 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, yet decisive, alteration into the version previously told by Benjamin—if the

world to come will be just like this 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 is so

difficult to find that, with regard to the world, humans are incapable of it and it is necessary that the Messiah

come.”2



A New Use of the Self 2

What would it mean, for us, today, to imagine a redeemed world in which everything “will be as it is now, 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 the Hassidic 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 in us,” 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 by his

unrelentingly bleak diagnosis of this world. What would it mean to take our vision of happiness from a world

whose paradigmatic instance is the concentration camp? What does it mean to suggest that the new form of life

necessary to save us from catastrophe resembles nothing so much as the life we live today—a life typified by

biopolitics, the normalisation of the state of exception and unceasing commodification? 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 find our 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 now comprises a global “petty

bourgeoisie”, each of us living out the “absurdity of individual existence”, he simultaneously offers this petty

bourgeoisie—for whom authenticity, the proper, vocation, differences of 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 those characteristics that allow for its survival, removing the thin diaphragm that

separates bad mediatized advertising from the perfect exteriority that communicates only itself—this”, he

writes, “is the political task 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

own version of the world to come, indeed, resembles it more so than has any other point in history. When this

resemblance has been noted by critics, it has often been greeted with perplexity, and with the suggestion that

Agamben’s redemptive vision is simply a restatement of the predicament from which he wishes to free us. This

is clear in Slavoj !i"ek’s question: “[a]re we not encountering in our social reality 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 as dystopia.”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 to the extent that they do not examine the immanent dynamic in our own time that he sees as

enabling such a life. In what follows, I outline that dynamic, which, in Agamben’s view, nullifies substantive

identities, 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 inadequately attentive to the

differential temporality of spectacular capitalism, in which the post-modern co-exists with a resurgence of

social forms, identities and classes that, in the heady days of progress, were believed to have been consigned to

the past. Capital, I suggest, not only undermines naturalistic foundations for identity but also creates new

identities that are bound up with both reactionary and emancipatory political claims. Therefore, I suggest, any

attempt to formulate a politics, or a community, without identity must be attentive to the ways in which

politicized forms of identity continue to function as markers of differential power, and must resist the

teleological temptation to see 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 the commodity 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 living through a period in which everything has

been expropriated and offered up for consumption, in which everything “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 subjected to 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 created by 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 use plays an important, if largely

unexamined, 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 representing pre-given constituencies rather than a field of possibility and

transformation in which we could hope to be other than we are. Consequent to this fixing of identities, politics is

reliant on sovereign power to grant rights and represent social classes, and presupposes exclusionary forms of

belonging and border-control to police the borders of identity and entitlement. In order to escape such a politics,

he thus believes it is necessary to contest both the fixity of personal identity and the substantivization of




community as a community of (women, Australians, etc.), which, in his view, brings into operation the

mechanism 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 pure singularity, rather than as an

instance of a particular identity. Agamben terms such a singularity—which is neither universal, and thus

enshrined in the ‘rights of man’, nor particular, and thus able to claim sectional rights—“whatever being” and

sees it as marking the possibility of a human community free of any essential condition of belonging, common

destiny or work, or principle of inclusion and exclusion—a being-together of existences, rather than a

community of essence, as Nancy describes it.13

It is noteworthy, and I would like to focus on this, that Agamben’s account of “whatever being” rests on the

claim that the spectacle has produced a “classless society”, albeit one which parodies the Marxian version; “there

are no longer social classes,” he writes, “but just a single planetary petty bourgeoisie 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 which humanity is moving toward its own destruction. But this

also means that the petty bourgeoisie represents an opportunity unheard of in the history of humanity that it

must at all costs not let slip away.”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 hostile

camps”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 petty bourgeoisie is a

product, or better, a remnant, of the process of expropriation carried out by the spectacle. 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 the advertised 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 stable subjectivities and naturalized vocations meaningless. If it represents an opportunity,

however, this is because 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 spectacle reveals, he

suggests, is precisely the insubstantiality, the inessential nature, of human being. For the first time in history, it is

possible to discern that human being is inessential being, or, as Thomas Carl Wall 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 theseproperties.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 they marked by what Agamben terms the “incipit

generality” of concepts like “universal love” (and presumably 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. The lover 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, he suggests, is simply “seeing something in its being-thus”—in its being-in-language. Being-in-language is,

for Agamben, the “non-predicative property par excellence ”, existing in a realm prior to those linguistic 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 be modelled on love, it is in the society of

the spectacle that he believes it is germinating; “contemporary politics”, he writes, “is this devastating

experimentum linguae that all over the planet unhinges and empties 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, but thereby frees it from its abandonment as the foundation of particular languages

and peoples, that the possibility of such a community appears for the first time.

While Agamben gives his own inflection to the relation between community and love, it is nonetheless worth

asking how his coming community compares to Christian attempts to found a community 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 have forgotten 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 love against the law, that we find the inspiration for the free

use of the self that Agamben believes would 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 the

phrase “use it rather” to signify a use of freedom, Agamben argues that what is to be used is the condition of

slavery itself, which is nullified by the messianic vocation, stripped of meaning while remaining factually

unchanged.

This interpretation, in which we can find an analogue for his account of the status of identity and class in the

society of the spectacle (and here it is worth noting that Agamben has elsewhere referred to our own time as the

messianic era) rests on a reading of the following Pauline passage, in which he 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 [ hos me ] having, and those weeping as not weeping, and those rejoicing as not rejoicing, and




those buying as not 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 a nullification

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, Agamben suggests, “Paul uses a peculiar expression that gave

his interpreters much to ponder: chresai ‘make use’.”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 by the messianic one. “Use:” Agamben writes, “this is the definition Paul gives to messianic

life in the form 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 as not.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” a factical condition does not establish a new

condition, but continues to inhabit the empty form of the old one. Agamben makes this clear by returning to the

example of the slave, stressing that, in Paul’s exhortation to use , the factical-juridical condition of the slave is not

negated in such a way that a new factical-juridical condition could be established in its place. The point of use is

thus not to establish a new identity that could in turn be granted rights and legal status, but, to take up the old

identity “as not”, thus transposing it “to a zone that is neither factual nor juridical, but is subtracted from the law

and 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 a significant

component of his 1921 lecture course to Paul and the “Characteristics of Early Christian Life 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 is radically 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 radically changed.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);

the Christian, 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 which one is, in no way determine the facticity of the Christian. Nevertheless, these relations

are there, they are maintained, 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 highly significant

not only in understanding the extent of his own departure from the thinker to whom he dedicated 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 for, not an appropriation, but a new use. It is in

his lectures on Paul, Agamben suggests, that Heidegger anticipates what will become the dialectic of the proper

and improper, or authentic and inauthentic, ( 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

simply a 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 these inauthentic, or

improper, relations are “appropriated in their very impropriety.”42

After briefly summarising Heidegger’s argument, Agamben writes, nonetheless, “for Paul, what is at 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 an authentic 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’s account of inauthentic life is central to Agamben’s account of

spectacular society: in a fragment from Idea of Prose , the latter writes “if we want to look for an image of our

estrangement and social misery, 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

recovering or creating a form of authenticity or propriety. Thus, there is no great decision and no destiny; all that

is possible is to make use of the inauthentic, nullified identities revealed by the society of the spectacle. 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 human essence, 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 inauthentic to another place, where morality would once again raise its

barriers…every consolidation of the walls of 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 who fall 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 to be.

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’stheorisation of use. In the Coming Community , he offers a description of salvation that can help shed light on this:




gesturing to Kafka, he writes, the “ innermost character of salvation is that we are saved only at the point when

we no longer want to be. At this point, there is salvation, but not for 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 we abandon all dreams of destiny and substantial belonging, at the point at which the claim

of the state to save us from the dangers of the state of nature is undone by the blurring of the border between

norm 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 “a horrifiying 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 essay on Heidegger, like the “unnamed animal protagonist”

[of Kafka’s “The Burrow”] who is “obsessively occupied 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 with collapse of the nation-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 coming of 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 to return us to the

“small displacement” of which Bloch doubted humans were capable. In contrast to the view that only the

Messiah can bring about the world to come, Agamben premises the possibility of a 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 notes that “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

argues that what is essential in sacrifice is always the threshold that must be crossed from the profane to the

sacred. The homo sacer, Agamben suggests in Profanations , is a figure who has survived the rite through which he

was separated from other men, and—as he continues to live amongst them despite being 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 in which a floating signifier travels from one domain to the

other without ceasing to refer to the same object.”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 enabling things to cross the threshold that divides the profane from the sacred in the opposite

direction, to return 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 it was 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, uses that were prohibited by the rigid inscription of things in particular spheres and

by compulsory relations between means and ends. “Profanation,” he writes, “does not simply restore something like a natural use 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 the positive

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 appears as a “midwife” of the future society, this is because, in

denaturalizing and desacralizing sexuality, it opens 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 apparatus that attempts to capture pure means, creating something that, in its very lack of sacredness, canno longer be profaned. Captured by the apparatus, the “solitary and desperate consumption of the pornographic

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 it into a realm in which it can

only be consumed but not used. In a similar vein, advertising frees the body from ineffability, while

simultaneously subjecting it to “the iron laws of massification and exchange value”, while the media detaches

language from any relation to an end but simultaneously neutralizes 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 usesand new experiences the spectacle opens up.

If, as Agamben makes clear, “use does not appear here as something natural: rather, one arrives at it only by

means of profanation,” then how would we go about profaning the unprofanable and freeing 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 form as 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 being touched, become edible again.65 Agamben’s favorite profanatory praxis




however, is play . Tracing the origins of popular children’s games to religious rituals, Agamben, following Emile

Benveniste, sees play 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, stripped of

its previous meaning and relation to an end. Defining the sacred as the conjunction of myth and ritual,

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,

the meaningfully 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 whose inhabitants are busy

celebrating rituals and manipulating objects and sacred words whose sense and purpose they have, however,

forgotten.”68

The ability of play to decompress rite and myth and thus “distract humanity from the sphere of the sacred” does

not just pertain to religious rites, however; giving the examples of a cat playing with a ball 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

restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law

is not a more proper 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 common use the spaces

that power had seized” by disrupting the grounding of power on a sacred model.71 This praxis, however, is

reliant of the nullifying power of the spectacle, because what is available for play are those disused objects (or

subjectivities) whose previous uses have been eroded, and can thus be put 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 be concretized if we

compare Agamben’s position briefly with that of Alphonso Lingis, who has also sought to formulate a new basisfor community beyond identity. Here, I will confine this comparison to a 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 a world in which the consumer culture of what he terms the

“technocratic commercial archipelago” is built on the massive exploitation of cheap labor in the “outer zone”.72

Here I want to focus on the differing ways in which Lingis and Agamben conceptualize the possibility of

community in a world in which 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

achipelago are alienated not merely from the products of their labor but from their world, which is consumed in

advance, while those in the “outer zone” live lives of massive exploitation and poverty.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 class

consciousness 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. “In the 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 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 and

production that sustain the spectacle, it nonetheless fails to account for the fact that millions of people each year

do leave their television sets to “visit someone’s village”, usually returning home not with a greater sense of the

meaning of life and the “distress and anger” addressed to us by those they encounter, but with an array of digital

photographs and a suitcase of cheap “authentic” shawls and necklaces, which are valued all the more highly if

those who produced them are not only poor but also “traditional.”78

That Lingis leaves the tourism industry out of his indictment of spectacular society is curious, but seems to be

symptomatic of his broader desire to emphasize the gulf that separates the archipelago from the outer zone.

Thus, while those in the outer zone are experiencing a “meaningfulness which is given 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 and worth 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 meaning of 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 and support 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 are no spaces “outside” the spectacle—no

“outer zone” in which people live more meaningful or authentic lives. Thus, it is precisely within the spectacle,

even as Lingis describes it, that Agamben identifies the possibility of a new form of life. For him, the fact that

the spectacle, even in a form mediated by consumption, calls on people to “devise the meaning and worth of

their individual and collective identities” 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 no longer believe humanity has a content (or essence) and are free to play with forms of life, opening

identity to movement it had previously lacked. And if “the meaning of existence is eclipsed”, this may suggest

that existence has no meaning , in which case we may give our existence meanings that are not imposed on it, but

that arise only in existing. In my view, Agamben’s account of the spectacle enables 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 exists outside the spectacle, however, we must nonetheless ask what

becomes of inequality, exploitation and 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 seen not the

creation of a single class but a proliferation of social forms that were thought to have been consigned to the past.

What Benjamin said of fascism in the last century is true of slavery and forced labor in our century: “The current

amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical.

This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it 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 by exploiting such labour power, but the teleological framework of

“development” is belied by the continuation, 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 that there




“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 that the 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 view that we should continue to inhabit these social identities,

living them “as not” turns our attention away from the ways in which they continue to mark differential power

relations, relations of social subordination 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 remain in

force without significance would seem to offer little consolation to those whose possibilities in life are

thoroughly constrained within them. This means that he turns our attention too far from the extent to which

identities continue to be caught up in more or less reactionary or emancipatory political projects. To choose only

one example, Richard Pithouse, in his insightful analysis of “resistance in the shantytown”, points out that the

Hindu fascist movement Shiv Senna, which built its first base in Mumbai’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 will result 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 naturalistic ontological foundations, but also produces new identities, whether in the form of

politicized identity claims that seek to contest the differential distribution of power under capitalism, reactionary

responses to the erosion of previous regimes of hierarchical power, or niche markets generated by the

production of new desires and identifications.86

The strength of Agamben’s theorization of the spectacle lies in his rejection of every attempt to return 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 in which identities continue to be invested with meaning. By basing his account of a new

form of life only on the nullifying aspect of the spectacle, Agamben’s analysis seems to preclude the possibility

that forms of redemptive praxis could arise where capitalism has created not vacuous idleness but the drudgery

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 thoroughly outlived 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 will




ultimately 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 could be dismissed as

simply a sign that he is ahead of his times, just as Marx was in identifying the decisive role of the proletariat at a

time when this class was still relatively insignificant numerically on a 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, and politicized identities. If this is the case, it is necessary to develop a

political thought capable of taking into account the fact that capitalism does not have one telos, but is just as good

at waking the dead as 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 subsistence living and in which a highly mobile

and flexible class, unbound of the strictures of national identity and vocation, have their houses cleaned by

people with few other possibilities for survival and their shoes made in third world sweatshops, and worry about

reports that their holiday destination is engulfed in a separatist struggle. Agamben’s own thought can help us

here: in my view, his account of what he calls inclusive-exclusion, of the way those included are simultaneously

excluded and vice versa, is more helpful in understanding the topology of global capitalism than the geographical

stratification implied by Lingis’s concept of the “outer zone”. Just as Agamben highlights that inclusion, in the

nation-state or the category of the human, for instance, presupposes (inclusive) exclusion and the category of the

inhuman, we should remain attentive to the way spectacular consumption presupposes (unspectacular)

production by people who work merely to stay alive. Just as he draws our attention to the ways in which liberal

“freedoms” presuppose the concentration camp, we should attend to the ways in which the freedom to consume

presupposes the labor camp, and the free market presupposes the “free economic zones” in which labor laws are

suspended and unionisation punishable through extra-judicial killing. If we are to do justice to such a world, and

develop a political thought adequate to our time, we need first to recognize that capitalism, in the words of

the theologian Paul Fletcher, can offer only a “deficient form of redemption”. 88 Thus, to begin to

formulate such a thought it will be necessary to drop the teleological fascination with capitalism that Marx

and Engels shared and that Benjamin warned had corrupted the working class by leading it to believe “it was

moving with the current” and begin to develop ways to contest it.89

1 Giorgio Agamben, “Halos”, The Coming Community, 53. I thank Eric Santner for bringing to my attention the fact that this tale can in fact be attributed to the young Gershom Scholem. See also Eric L.Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig, University of Chicago

Press, Chicago and London, 2001, 122, n.52. Indeed, in a letter to Benjamin, dated July 9, 1934,Scholem writes: “And one question: Who is actually the source of all these stories? Does Ernst Bloch




have them from you or you from him? The great rabbi with the profound dictum on the messianic

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, inGershom Scholem [ed.] The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem: 1932-1940”, (trans.Gary Smith and Anson Rabinach) Schocken Books, New York, 1989, 123.2 In Giorgio Agamben, “Halos”, 53.3 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”, Selected Writings Vol.4, Howard Eiland and Michael W.

Jennings [eds.] (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 389.4 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”, 389.5 Giorgio Agamben, “Shekinah” The Coming Community, 79.6 Giorgio Agamben “Without Classes”, The Coming Community, 65.7 Giorgio Agamben, “Without Classes”, The Coming Community, 65.

8 Slavoj !i"ek, 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. Thisedition is not paginated. Rather, each fragment is numbered. Subsequently, numbers given here willrefer to numbered fragments.11 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1.12 See Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community.13 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1991.)14 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, 28-9.15 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, p63. It is possible, though this is notstated, that Agamben means for his claim that all of humanity now comprises a global petty-bourgeoisieto be understood in paradigmatic rather than descriptive terms. Agamben has suggested that, in his

work, the paradigm is used “to establish and make intelligible a wider set of problems” [What is aParadigm?] If this were the case, we would need to ask to what extent ascribing paradigmatic status tothe petty-bourgeoisie makes a set of problems intelligible. As I will suggest below, Agamben’s utilisationof this figure tends to obscure as much as it illuminates about contemporary class and about thetemporality of capitalism.

19 Giorgio Agamben, “Without Classes”, The Coming Community, p64.20 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 and Derrida” Social Science Research Network,http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=969055, 33.22 Giorgio Agamben, “Whatever”, Coming Community, 2.23 Giorgio Agamben, “Whatever”, Coming Community, 2.24 Giorgio Agamben, “Homonyms”, Coming Community, 73. 25 Giorgio Agamben, “Shekinah” The Coming Community, 83.26 Adam Thurschwell, “Specters of Nietzsche”33.27 Giorgio Agamben, “Maneries”, Coming Community, 29.

28 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, [trans. PatriciaDailey] (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 23.




29 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains, 23.30

Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains, 27.31 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains, 26.32 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains, 26.33 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains, 26.34 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains, 28.35 Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, [trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer AnnaGosetti-Ferencei], (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).36 Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life , 85.37 Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life , 75.38 Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life , 75.39 Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life , 70.40

In Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains, 34.41 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains, 34.42 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains, 34.43 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains, 26.44 Giorgio Agamben, “The Idea of Music” in Idea of Prose, 89.45 Giorgio Agamben, “Taking Place”, The Coming Community, 14.46 Giorgio Agamben, “The Passion of Facticity”, Potentialities, 204.47 Giorgio 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 tobaptism and thus inhabit limbo for eternity. The punishment of these infants—unable to reach heavendue to original sin, but otherwise faultless—cannot be an afflictive punishment, Agamben writes, as

“that would not be just.” Rather, their punishment must be solely privative: they will be foreverdeprived of a vision of God. And yet this ignorance of God, Agamben suggests, turns out to be theirgreatest joy: as they have always already forgotten God, his judgment cannot touch them; He isimpotent in the face of their “neutrality with respect to salvation.” The unsavable life is thus a purely profane life freed from the mythologeme of salvation. See Giorgio Agamben, “Limbo”, The Coming Community, p6.49 Paulo Virno, The Grammar of the Multitude, [trans. Bertoletti, Cascaito and Casson], Semiotext[e], Los

Angeles, 2004, 34.50 Giorgio Agamben, ‘Heidegger e il nazismo’, La potenza del pensiero, Neri Pozza, Vicenza,, 2005, 321– 331. (trans. Nicholas Heron.)51 Giorgio Agamben, ‘Heidegger e il nazismo’, p328.52

Giorgio Agamben “Tiqqun de la Noche”, Postface to The Coming Community , 2001, online at Notes for the Coming Community, http://notesforthecomingcommunity.blogspot.com/2008/04/tiqqun-de-la-noche.html 53 Giorgio Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation”, 73.54 Giorgio Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation”, 73.55 Giorgio Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation”, 78.56 Giorgio Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation”, 79.57 Giorgio Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation”, 74.58 Giorgio Caproni, “Ritorno”, cited in Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death , 98.59 Giorgio Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation”, 85.60 Giorgio Agamben “Dim Stockings” The Coming Community, 50.61

Giorgio Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation”, 91.62 Giorgio Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation”, 91.




63 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, 58.64

Giorgio Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation”, 74.65 Giorgio 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” inCarlo Collodi’s Pinocchio in which a population of boys creates a world of playful “pandemonium”,

which results in the acceleration of time and, in contrast to ritual, which fixes the calendar, brings aboutits “paralysis and destruction.” Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, (London: Verso,London, 2007), 76.67 Emile Benveniste, cited in “In Playland”, 78.68 Giorgio Agamben, “In Playland”, 79.69 Giorgio Agamben, Profanation, 76. 70 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, 64.71

Giorgio 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 Alphonso Lingis, “Anger”, 208.74 On the problem of alienation, Lingis cites Jean-Luc Nancy, who writes: “‘Alienation’ has beenrepresented as the dispossession of an original authenticity, to be preserved or restored. The critique of this determination of an original property, an authentic plenitude and reserve contributed to a greatextent to the extinction of the theme of alienation as the theme of a loss or theft of an originalautoproduction of man…[Nonetheless] an existent can be expropriated of its conditions for existing: itsforce, its labor, its body, its meanings, and perhaps always of the space-time of its singularity. And thishappens continually…‘capital’ or the ‘world market’, until further notice, are ensured and proper only in

such a massive expropriation.” Jean-Luc Nancy, in Alphonso Lingis, “Anger”, 214.75 Alphonso Lingis, “Anger”, 213.76 Alphonso Lingis, “Anger”, 200.77 Alphonso Lingis, “Anger”, 214.78 On the economic valuation of “authenticity” see Dave Hickey, “Dialectical Utopias: On Santa Fe andLos Vegas”, Harvard Design Magazine, No.4, Winter/Spring 1998. Hickey writes, of shopping for “nativehandicrafts: “The potential buyer is concerned with the authenticity of the object, its source and chasteappeal; in the case of native handicrafts, the buyer is even concerned with the blood, the genealogy, of the author, with his or her antique authenticity.” (4.) While Hickey is referring here to shopping in SantaFe, this concern for authenticity is as much an aspect of the “shopping experience” that accompaniesmass tourism in what Lingis terms the “outer zone”.79

Alphonso Lingis, “Anger”, 214.80 Alphonso Lingis, “Anger”, 210/11.81 Alphonso 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 new forms of slavery in contemporary capitalism, rejecting the view that it is an archaism, and highlighting the “new slavery” that is thriving today. “Slavery,” he writes, “is not a horror safely confined to the past;it continues to exist throughout the world, even in developed countries like France and the UnitedStates.” (3) Bales’s account of slavery reveals a dark side of global capitalism, characterized not by thediminution of utilitarian relations but by absolutely instrumental relations to people, who are treated

simply as means to the end of profit. “Slavery,” he writes, “is a booming business and the number of slaves is increasing. People get rich using slaves, and when they’ve finished with their slaves, they just




throw these people away. This is the new slavery, which focuses on big profits and cheap lives. 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 longerlegal, people are likely to become slaves “not through legal ownership, but through the final authority of

violence.” (5) He cites examples of men lured to the gold mining towns of the Amazon with promisesof lucrative employment, then locked up and forced to work in the mines, and of girls as young aseleven, sold into the regions brothels and killed if they attempt to escape. Lest it be thought this is aphenomenon confined to the most poverty stricken corners of the globe, however, he also tracesexamples of slaves kept in houses in Paris, and beaten for minor ‘infractions.’ Bale estimates that thereare currently approximately 3000 household slaves in Paris, and twenty seven million people trapped informs 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 indifferenceto identity, Bales suggests that in the new slavery, in contrast to the old, the “criteria of enslavementtoday do not concern color, tribe or religion: they focus on weakness, gullibility and deprivation.”(11)Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, University of California Press,Berkley and Los Angeles, 2004.See also David Harvey, The Spaces of Neoliberalization, and Silvia Federici and Massimo DeAngelis, whounderstand what Debord terms the “spectacle” in terms of Marx’s theorisation of “real subsumption”,

which he used in contrast to “formal subsumption” to signify the moment at which the labor relation isreorganized along specifically capitalist lines. They point out that forms of unfree labor (in contrast tothe “doubly free” labor of the proletariat, which was free to sell its labor power and free of any other

means of subsistence) continue to exist, in a “specifically capitalist form.”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 Kevin 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 historical instances (of a national, religious or ethnic type)”, but these are framed as throwbacks to aprior, 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 exist yet stripped of the meaning they once held. My claim, incontrast, is that capital not only expropriates identity but constitutes new identity formations, even if these formations conceive themselves as returns to a (mythical) past. See Giorgio Agamben, “Notes onPolitics”, 113. 86 My analysis here draws on Wendy Brown’s important theorisation of the fate of contemporary identity in States of 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 recognizablesocial identity”(163), by stating, “if this book is republished, I am going to remove this definition of theplanetary petite bourgeoisie.” See Alain Badiou, Intervention dans le cadre du Collège international de philosophie sur le livre de Giorgio Agamben : la Communauté qui vient, théorie de la singularité quelconque , (transcription de

François Duvert), 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 messianic subject, in The Time That Remains, is, in part, aresponse to criticisms of this understanding of the petty-bourgeoisie. While The Time That Remains makesno claims about our own time, it suggests that the Marxian proletariat, like the “new creature”, whomust 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, Agamben sees theproletariat as a non-substantive subject whose transformation into a factical-juridical subject able toclaim rights for itself is the “worst understanding of Marxian thought”, signalling the loss of itsrevolutionary vocation (31.) While this mirrors much of his earlier conceptualisation of the petty-bourgeoisie, it seems to me that this does not suggest that the proletariat, rather than the petty bourgeoisie, is a messianic subject today, but describes its decline, and ultimate replacement by asociological class, the ‘working class’, bound up in the sovereign mechanism of inclusive-exclusion and

representation.87 David Harvey describes such an understanding of uneven geographic development under capitalismas the “historicist-diffusionist” interpretation, which sees ‘advanced’ countries as the “engine of capitalism that entrains all other territories, cultures and places into paths of economic, political,institutional and intellectual progress.” Such an interpretation, Harvey suggests, casts continuing poverty as “residual”, and places its faith in the expansion of capitalism to lift “backwards” economies to thelevel of “advanced” ones. See David Harvey, The Spaces of Neoliberalization, 55.88 Paul Fletcher, Disciplining the Divine: Toward an (Im)political Theology, Ashgate, Surrey, 2009, 155.89 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”, 393.

A New Use of the Self T E Jessica Whyte

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