Between Art and Polis

© 2011. Epoché, Volume 16, Issue 1 (Fall 2011). ISSN 1085-1968. 17–36

Between Art and the Polis: Between Agamben and Plato

KALLIOPI NIKOLOPOULOUState University of New York, Buffalo

Abstract: In The Man Without Content, Giorgio Agamben makes a few but poignant

references to Plato’s understanding of art. Because art’s impact was powerful, Plato

deemed art dangerous and subordinated it to politics. In contrast, Agamben argues,

modern art enjoys the privilege of formal autonomy at the cost of losing political sig-

nificance. This essay develops the Platonic dimension in Agamben’s thought: whereas

Platonic censorship recognizes art’s power by way of prohibition, the modern culturalist

tolerance of art is symptomatic of art’s reduction into commodity and of the public

indifference toward it.

Ban and Bare Life in The Man without Content and Homo Sacer1

The question of art, at least from the moment art became subject to question, seems to be that of a threshold, of a boundary. Asking whether art is good

or bad for common morality, Plato set a boundary between good imitation (ex-emplarity) and bad imitation (artistic deception), and banned art from the polis. Instead of Plato’s morally laden question, the more secular modern spectator asks a seemingly different one, which concludes likewise with yet another boundary: confronted with a work of abstraction, (s)he is compelled to ask, is “this” art or gibberish—thereby putting art in the tribunal of taste, where the lines between “good” art and “bad” art, “high” art and “low” art, art and non-art, are to be drawn.

Upon second glance, however, this modern boundary between art and non-art turns out to also designate an anxiety about art’s deceptive character: our suspicion that art poses as art when in fact it is not. Consequently, even the modern ques-tion, which seems to be concerned exclusively with the nature of the artwork itself rather than its moral or political implications, can be referred to an ethico-political

18 Kalliopi Nikolopoulou

dimension—that of art “cheating” its public. Thus far we are not so removed from Plato’s anxiety. Whether in the sphere of politics or of aesthetics, art appears only as subject to judgment. Art is an impostor that threatens the city either by of-fering improper contents for public consumption or by remaining illusory even when its contents are commendable, or worst of all perhaps—and this is the predicament of the modern spectator—by its perversion of imitation, since art can also imitate itself in addition to imitating nature or the world at large. Hence, the paradox of art being what it is not (non-art) precisely by being exceedingly what it is supposed to be: a masterful imitation of everything, including of itself.

Yet, even though the fear of dupery may be a reason shared between the Platonic expulsion of art from the city and the modern preoccupation with art’s authenticity, the anxiety about art is experienced differently in these two moments. Agamben’s argument implies that the compulsion to distinguish art from non-art, a compulsion owing in part to the increasingly idiosyncratic vocabulary of modern art, is symptomatic of the forgetting of the Platonic distinction between art and politics and—to be more precise—of the forgetting of the reasons behind Plato’s condemnation of art. As we will see, Plato’s ban on poetry, although it has instituted aesthetics, does not itself stem from an aesthetic understanding of art. In other words, though it reads as a verdict, it is not rooted in a thinking of art through a judgment of taste, as with the modern critic or spectator. Agamben is well aware of this fact, and it is because of this that he finds Plato’s ban a more appropriate response to the impact of poetry than art criticism’s culturalist tol-erance, a tolerance afforded by the eclipse of art and its diminishing impact on us. Indeed, Agamben maintains that, despite the current proliferation of artists and artworks, art has withdrawn from the public arena at the very moment that the boundary separating art from politics was revoked. Now that political art is everything but a scandal, art’s effect on the political is minute compared to the time of its Platonic contestation.

More than questioning the efficacy of specific, self-proclaimed political art-ists, Agamben is concerned with the possibility of art in general to participate in our political reality. This is why he refrains from defining what kind of art may be more properly political—as, for instance, Theodor Adorno did, thereby remaining within the confines of aesthetic theorization. The a-political aspect of modern art—namely, its exceedingly subjective and formal character—which Adorno, through a negative dialectical twist, identified (and so redeemed) as the most politically radical ones, are read in Agamben for their irrecuperable reserve from politics. Thus, the formal masterpieces of high modernism are no less privative of politics than programmatic art is, the art Adorno dismissed for not being “genuine,” for being an imposture in addition to being complicit with political exploitation. Setting aside the fact that even much of explicitly political art remains opaque and irrelevant to the general public, I would emphasize that

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for Agamben this very distinction between two kinds of art—what Adorno calls “autonomous” or “difficult art” and “committed art”2—marks once again the withdrawal of art from our political horizon.

“Autonomous art” does not necessarily identify a resistance to current politics or an alternative vision of reality; rather, it names the modern, and perhaps most decisive, rift between art and politics. This rift is most decisive in modernity precisely because it conceals itself as rift, insisting instead on a continuous rela-tion between art and philosophy. (Insofar as every politics qua rational discourse is predicated upon philosophy, it follows that this continuity between art and philosophy is then translated into one between art and politics.) However, in thus concealing the difference of art from politics, the rift becomes all the more exacerbated. Ironically, the very term “autonomy,” borrowed from the juridico-political vocabulary of sovereignty, disjoins rather than conjoins art to politics.3 Consequently, if for Agamben the negativity of autonomous art says anything of politics, it says so not in offering any models of resistance vis à vis mass enter-tainment, but in disclosing, through its stark retreat into itself, the fact that the horizon of politics is itself at stake.

In what follows, I will concentrate on the philosophical threshold between art and politics that Agamben draws as a result of a more primary separation, the Platonic difference (diaforav) between philosophy and poetry that ended in the banishment of poetry from the polis. The complex motivations and repercussions of this banishment structure Agamben’s subsequent elaborations of the threshold between art and politics. In speaking of the threshold as a limit that separates what lies on either side of the divide but also invites and risks overstepping, we should note an interesting chronological fact in the development of Agamben’s reflections: the thought of the threshold in relation to art in The Man without Content, published in Italy in 1994, precedes and—I would say—grounds the juridico-political elaboration of the threshold in Homo Sacer, published a year later. Let me then cite two recurring examples of this conceptual crossing-over between the two books, two examples that also contain in a nutshell Agamben’s critique of aesthetics.

Firstly, the legal “no-man’s land” of the refugee, which is described as an in-discernible state between life and death in Homo Sacer, has its precedent in the “nothingness of the terra aesthetica” (56) of The Man without Content—namely, the scientific and objectifying spaces of art theory and the museum, where art lives on as undead, withdrawn even from the pretense of relating to its audience. Secondly, Agamben’s concern with the isolability and political appropriation of natural life—what he calls “bare life”—in Homo Sacer also finds its roots in his analysis of art. In The Man without Content Agamben maintains that the political reduction of the human being to a natural being is symptomatic of a more pro-found ontological slippage from poesis to praxis. In other words, the forgetting of


poesis (the bringing of something into being) in favor of praxis (the labor toward self-sustenance) occasioned a simultaneous reduction in the political register from the category of the human being to the category of natural life.4

Agamben describes the poetic principle with a quotation from Plato’s Sym-posium and proceeds shortly thereafter to establish the difference between poesis and praxis as two different modes of production—namely, as creating/making versus doing/operating: “In the Symposium Plato tells us about the full original resonance of the word poivhsi~: ‘any cause that brings into existence something that was not there before is Poivhsi~.’ Every time that something is pro-duced, that is, brought from concealment and nonbeing into the light of presence, there is poivhsi~, pro-duction, poetry” (59–60). Agamben’s insistence on the hyphen in the term “pro-duction” serves exactly to differentiate between these two modes of producing. On the one hand, there is poetic pro-duction, where the prefix “pro-” suggests the revealing of something previously invisible—a characteristic that is common to both nature and to works of art. This mode of pro-duction allows then both for a connection with nature (phusis) as well as for a differentiation from it. Pro-duction acknowledges the difference of a natural process (let us say the blossoming of a flower) from a work of art (let us say the painting of a flower) in that the former originates in itself, whereas the latter originates in human skill (techne), yet all the while refers human work back to nature insofar as both nature and artwork obey the same creative principle of bringing forth something hitherto nonexistent. On the other hand, there is the form of production without the hyphen, an activity that relies solely on techne as the hallmark of the work’s unbridgeable difference from nature. In other words, the difference of the work’s origin from that of a natural process (which the term techne used to designate without denying the common poetic principle behind natural and human works alike) is now absolutized as techne blocks any relation between human artifice and nature. Modern technology is, of course, the most obvious example of this form of production, which yields products and consumer goods as opposed to artworks.

The pervading aspect of this latter mode of production is largely responsible for our forgetting of the poetic mode of making: “We are so accustomed to this unified understanding of all of man’s ‘doing’ as praxis that we do not recognize that it could be, and in other eras has been, conceived differently” (68). Unlike praxis as a labor of self-sustenance, poesis has to do with the birth of something else, thus being a relational activity: “[T]he work of art is not the result of a do-ing, not the actus of an agere but something substantially other (e{teron) than the principle that has pro-duced it into presence” (73). Whereas praxis presents itself in the product—that is, the product simply mirrors its production—the act of making an artwork recedes in front of the work and lets the work be an entity on its own right. This exteriority that inheres in the making of an artwork provides the most profound link between art and politics.


Both these aforementioned issues—namely, art’s banishment in the no-man’s land of academic and museal institutions, and the philosophical slippage from the category of the human being to that of vital life—are crucial to Agamben’s argument against aesthetics. It is rather evident how he arrives at his critique of aesthetics from the former issue: the central concern of an academic or curatorial (that is, an aesthetic) encounter with art is not art, but judgment, since art serves as a mere object of study, appreciation, and connoisseurship—hence, an object of evaluation either for commercial or discursive use. How he arrives at his aesthetic critique from the issue of vitalism is less apparent, though in a certain sense, this issue reiterates his previous criticism in reverse. Insofar as the slippage from human being to vital activity is for him symptomatic of the displacement of the poetic being by the practical, self-sustaining organism, this point translates in the realm of aesthetics as follows: the forgetting of poesis as ontologically transforma-tive experience entails the triumph of the aesthetic man as “man of taste”—the sensuous appreciator and consumer of art.5 In Agamben’s own formulation, “Our appreciation of art begins necessarily with the forgetting of art” (43).

As I have suggested above, despite the continuity of these categories of the ban and bare life from The Man without Content to Homo Sacer, I believe it is the former book that presents us with a more urgent but also more ambivalent problematic, precisely because it is concerned with the poetic rather than the political side of the threshold. For instance, regardless of how we may judge the theoretical and ethico-political merits of positing the camp as the exclusive biopolitical paradigm of modernity in Homo Sacer, Agamben invests it with a descriptive certainty and even a prognostic value for our times. There is no similar gesture in The Man without Content, where we are left with the uncertainty of the future of art that both puts at stake as well as opens the horizon for a rethinking of the human.

This is, then, the principal ambivalence running through The Man without Content: though art has already been driven to irrelevance, obsoleteness, and illegibility by aesthetics, and though we have no glimpses yet of what the future holds for it or for us, art continues to be the placeholder of truth not least because its historical itinerary delineates the changes in our conception of truth as well. To be sure, art is displaced by art theory, and to be equally sure, art itself has con-sciously embraced and appropriated this displacement by turning itself into its opposite: non-art. Agamben, indeed, gives a number of modern examples where art is reduced to its opposite. In the most obvious of these examples, Duchamp’s ready-mades, art empties out its contents and reduces its relation to truth to the blank universal of formalization. As such, modern art appears often in Agamben’s text as a writing under erasure. However, even this state of utter destitution, and the threat of disorientation it carries within it, are eventually interpreted as art’s proper mode of disclosing our current reality. Endangered and endangering us through its withdrawal, art offers a tenuous, largely unnoticed disclosure of nothingness,


but a disclosure nonetheless—in Agamben’s terms, the coming into presence of privation itself (64). This is why each time Agamben discusses the Hegelian end of art, he concludes with the Heideggerian question as to whether such an end does not also mark the beginning from where we are called to think the destiny of art and, hence, human destiny: “Does it really mean that art has become for us a thing of the past? That it has faded into the darkness of the twilight? Or does it not rather mean that it has completed the circle of its metaphysical destiny and has reentered the dawn of an origin in which not only its destiny but the very destiny of man could be put in question in an initial manner?” (54).

WithoutIn his article “Five Remarks on Aesthetic Judgment,” which is concerned with the impact of Kantian aesthetics on modern art, Thierry de Duve defines the borders of modernity in terms of the limitlessness of its art: we are within mo-dernity, “when anyone and everyone can be an artist.”6 This is decidedly not the Nietzschean world of art for artists only, a world of Dionysian joy and terror, of poetic interest and passion, with which Agamben begins his book,7 but still, de Duve and Agamben do agree on the point of modern art’s limitlessness and of its trespassing of all thresholds. Less exuberant in his diagnostic, however, Agamben writes: “Limitless, lacking content, double in its principle, it [art] wanders in the nothingness of the terra aesthetica, in a desert of forms and contents that continu-ally point it beyond its own image which it evokes and immediately abolishes in the impossible attempt to found its own certainty” (56). Utter democratization, one is tempted to say, with its destruction of all limits, comes at the expense of criteria, thus signaling the impossibility of comparison and of judgment itself. Art’s dispersal is no more the fecund dissemination of truth but a veritable dismemberment. Orpheus begets the man without content, the modern artist, whose creative experience amounts to the endless production of art without truth, without internal necessity.

However, this is hardly the meaning behind Agamben’s analysis of modern art, and we should not be hasty in assuming that a return to criteria and judgment will guarantee the proper limits between “true” and “fake” art. To the contrary, it is our thinking of art through judgment, our expectation that an artwork ought to fit certain pre-established criteria, that has destroyed this other limit of art, this limit that for Agamben marked first and foremost art’s political possibilities. The question then becomes, what is this other limit or, even better, where is it located? I suggest that it is located at the moment where the work emerges outside of what sprang it forth, where the work comes into its own from without its point of origin. It is most likely the place Agamben calls in the above passage the “beyond [art’s]


own image,” a place that is both continually evoked by and inaccessible to the work of art once the work has become exactly that: a work, an entity unto itself.

This discussion of the “without” begs the question of the origin, about which Agamben writes:

What does originality mean? When we say that the work of art has the character of originality (or authenticity), we do not simply mean by this that this work is unique, that is, different from any other. Originality means proximity to the origin. The work of art is original because it maintains a particular relation-ship to its origin, to its formal ajrchv, in the sense that it not only derives from the latter and conforms to it but also remains in a relationship of permanent proximity to it. (61)

We must note carefully Agamben’s choice of words: originality in a work of art has to do with the work’s “particular relationship” to its moment of origination, a relationship, furthermore, of “permanent proximity.” In order for the work to have a relationship to its origin, it must be that the work is different from its source, but their difference from each other is cast in terms of an indelible link—a kind of fidelity, or affiliation in the sense of derivation (filiation) and affinity in the sense of a permanent bond (connatural attraction). Thus, a work of art does not simply reduplicate its originating principle the way labor is reduplicated in a product, but lets its tie to its origin appear by keeping the origin near but always at a certain distance, a certain reserve. Since I have already mentioned the relation of artwork to phusis as it is elaborated by Agamben, the following simile from nature may give us a sense of the kind of relationship the artwork bears to its origin: such relationship is much like the one between the blossom and its root. The blossom is permanently connected to its root, yet the root remains invisible below the ground, and when seen, it disarms the lay eye with its striking dissimilarity to its offspring, the flower.

The articulation of this precarious proximity between origin and artwork, which accounts for the subsequent difference between art as poesis and art as techne, had already preoccupied Plato and marked a certain rift between his thinking of art in the Ion and in the Republic. In the former work, the proximity between the artist, the work, and its divinely inspired origin is so strong—indeed, it is described in terms of magnetic attraction—that the distance between them is collapsed.8 The artist and his work are divine just as the original inspiration that brought forth the work was divine. This cancellation of the distance results in part to art’s favor, but with the proviso that art sacrifice its name. That art is a misnomer for what Socrates seeks to define in this dialogue is emphasized by the choice of “art” under discussion: poetry. The privileging of versification owes to the fact that Socrates is interested in the event of poesis, which in Greek is synonymous with versification, and not in the notion of art as skill. Socrates repeatedly attributes the rhapsode’s virtuosity not to art (tevcnh), or knowledge


(ejpisthvmh), but to what he calls “divine power” (qeiva duvnami~) (Ion 533d) or “divine dispensation” (qeiva/ moivra/) (Ion 534c). He thus explains to Ion:

[T]his is not an art in you, whereby you speak well on Homer, but a divine power, which moves you like that in the stone which Euripides named a magnet, but most people call “Heraclea stone.” For this stone not only attracts iron rings, but imparts to them a power whereby they in turn are able to do the very same thing as the stone, and attract other rings; so that sometimes there is formed quite a long chain of bits of iron and rings, suspended one from another. (533d–e)

Later on, Socrates again rebuts Ion’s claim that his talent is an art based on knowledge: “Now if you are an artist and . . . you only promised me a display about Homer to deceive me, you are playing false; whilst if you are no artist, but speak fully and finely about Homer, as I said you did, without any knowledge but by divine dispensation which causes you to be possessed by the poet, you play quite fair” (542a).

That poetry is not art in the sense of skill or craft as is horsemanship, fish-ing, and so on, but “divine lot,” forms the crux of this dialogue.9 It turns out that Socrates’ main reason for distrusting the term “art” as an adequate description of such creative activity has to do with the singularity of this poetic activity, a singularity that contrasts with the term “art” as a genus—namely, as a general gathering of the skills involved in a particular craft. Socrates emphasizes this singularity of poetry’s divine lot when he says that “[o]ne poet is suspended from one Muse, another from another. . . . And from these first rings—the poets—are suspended various others, which are thus inspired, some by Orpheus and others by Musaeus; but the majority are possessed and held by Homer” (536b). Thus, from each specific combination of poets held together, various chains of poetic legacy emerge. One would suspect that all these chains would add up to the same genus of art, the art of poetry, but Socrates resists exactly this gesture. Poetic utterances cannot be subsumed under a common know-how the way that all fishing techniques—whether used on rivers, lakes, or the sea—form together the art of fishing, since poetry is not the result of know-how, but of a singular divine gift. This is why Ion is instantly moved by recitations of Homer, but remains indifferent to discourses on any other poet. Homer attracts him for no reason in the strict sense of reason as rational cause; instead, Homer is simply befitting to Ion’s emotional sensibility.

Furthermore, it is only as such, as not-art, and as divine gift alone, that poetry escapes the deception of which it could otherwise be accused, since it purports to “know” actions and events beyond its scope of expert competency. Though Socrates does not explicitly accuse poetry of deception in this dialogue, he does suggest repeatedly that Homer’s description of other arts, such as medicine, charioteering, or fishing, may not be correct (538b–d). The reason, however,


that deception is a lesser concern here—if a concern at all—has to do with the fact that poetry is not viewed as a techne, as a product of intelligent delibera-tion, and therefore is not responsible for errors of intellection. In other words, in this Platonic scenario, Socrates rescues poetry from its delusional character by removing it from the realm of art qua production—hence also reproduction and imitation—and keeping it through this magnetic attraction as close, if not coincident, to its divine origin. The elimination of techne from the event of poesis entails the simultaneous elimination of the distance between origin and work. As techne does not mediate the divine frenzy that inspires the poet, he and his work are immediately coincident with their source. The divinely inspired poet is then celebrated for his gift, but the stage is now cleared for the next scenario, where poetic madness becomes a political liability.

Thus we come to this latter, more fatal of Plato’s readings from his Republic,10 which is also the one Agamben quotes in the opening chapter of The Man without Content. Here again, poetry is synonymous with divinity, but this time the poet is not simply the “light and winged and sacred thing” Socrates sees in the Ion (534b), but a terrifying creature, whose madness threatens the rational order of the city:

If a man who was capable by his cunning of assuming every kind of shape and imitating all things should arrive in our city, bringing with himself the poems which he wished to exhibit, we should fall down and worship him as a holy and wondrous and delightful creature, but should say to him that there is no man of that kind among us in our city, nor is it lawful for such a man to arise among us, and we should send him away to another city, after pouring myrrh down over his head and crowning him with fillets of woo[l]. (Plato’s Republic 398a as quoted in Agamben, The Man without Content, 3)11

His divine calling may earn him a precious moment of adoration, but it does not spare the poet from the exile to which the polis must ultimately condemn him for his flight of fancy. Though the fate of the poet is markedly different from the Ion to the Republic, in both cases Plato’s agon unfolds around the articulation of the relation between origin and artwork.

I would suggest that it is this very proximity to which Plato fell prey, and so felt compelled to equate the work with the divine terror (qeiò~ fovbo~) that is its source. And yet, in thus falling prey to a quick immediacy, Plato was not so far removed from the truth when he spoke of art in terms of terror: even if art is not coincident with its terrible source but only proximate to it, art still induces another kind of terror. In fact, the work’s terrifying strangeness is due to (and not in spite of) this simultaneous nearness and distance with which the work holds on to its origin. What is uncanny about an artwork is precisely its departure from its place of origin, its capacity for dissemblance. To recall the example of the flower and its root, we could say that art’s power of dissimulation disturbs even more so than


the unsettling feeling we may have at the sight of the muddy and entangled root of our most beloved blossom.

Hence, even though Plato seems to dwell on the proximity rather than the dif-ference between the artwork and its beginnings, the intimation of this difference marks the strangeness of his own definition of art as imitation in the Republic, and his partial expulsion of art, for not all art is banished from his ideal city. Let us then turn our attention to Plato’s notion of imitation, with which I began this essay on art and politics, since this notion—connected as it is in Plato with deception—drives his political judgment against art.

Art in Plato’s Republic is defined and condemned as imitation, thus as an in-complete, false, and illusory disclosure of reality, which corrupts the city. However, as I also mentioned at the start of the essay, despite Plato’s association of imitation with deception, he is not against all imitation. In the Republic, he distinguishes between good and bad imitation in story-telling, all the while encouraging good imitation for its pedagogical importance12 in the polis: “the stories on the accepted list we will induce nurses and mothers to tell to the children and so shape their souls” (Rep. II.377c). Even poetry would be allowed in the polis if it produced good imitations, that is, if it produced characters and values that would foster civic consciousness. Indeed, Agamben’s citation of the poet’s expulsion from the city stops short of the interesting exception Plato makes immediately afterward: “but we ourselves, for our souls’ good, should continue to employ the more austere and less delightful poet and taleteller, who would imitate the diction of the good man and would tell his tale in the patterns which we prescribed in the beginning, when we set out to educate our soldiers” (Rep. III.398b, my italics). We want a poet, Plato seems to say, who is less of a divine creature and more of an ordinary artisan, a skilled worker of words, an imitator, who knows how to obey certain rules and pre-established criteria in order to produce texts of pedagogical value. Strangely, the logic of the Ion is inverted in the Republic: whereas calling the poet an artist was a misnomer in the former dialogue, now Plato wishes for a poet who is precisely an artist, a technician, and in being that, he is also a responsible pedagogue and citizen. Imitation, after all, can serve rational purposes and be subject to check—this is its “goodness”—whereas divine inspiration is thor-oughly arbitrary and therefore threatening.

Consequently, the problem of the Republic is that the poets usually present us with bad imitations, namely, bad examples to follow. This apparently simple state-ment, however, discloses something extremely complex in Plato’s theory of art. It says first and foremost that art’s definition as imitation hinges less on its previous relation to an original it was supposed to copy, and more on its own status as the origin of future imitative acts by the city’s youth, who will take poetic characters as role models. But the question still remains: if art is the origin of other acts, what is its origin? Whence these terrible plots and unseemly characters? Plato’s logic


pushes us to take a leap: I suggest that if his critique of poetry as bad imitation does not always stem from its being a “poor” imitation, from its not reproducing nature successfully, then it stems from the exact opposite principle—namely, from art’s wish to escape imitative stature altogether. Not only would art disclaim any possibility of its imitation by life, but it would show this impossibility in the very fact that it, itself, does not bear a simply imitative relation to an exterior source. Put differently, it is art’s flight from the imitation of an external original, its wish to have its own origin, which is termed bad imitation. Paradoxically then, it is the counter-imitative, rather than the imitative impulse of art—as it has been so often supposed—that lies at the bottom of its illusory character for Plato. It is in this light that we can understand why Plato condemns insistently Homer’s depiction of the pettiness of the gods as offering a bad example: Homer evokes and invokes the gods, and in that sense he is their origination; after all, it would be impossible to “copy down” the gods the way one is said to copy in painting a natural creature. But this appropriation of its own origin is what ultimately puts art at risk in Plato.

Here is summarily the abyss that art faces in these two dialogues: whereas in the Ion poetry is spared the verdict of deception through an insanity plea based on its identification with its mad, divine source, in the Republic art can only survive as good imitation of an origin(al) so distant from it that it belongs to an entirely different plane than the work—the so-called natural, empirical plane. The pre-cariousness of this fine border between origin and work leads Plato’s thought to these two extremes: utter coincidence in divine madness, which renders art holy but politically unreliable, or the impregnable hierarchy of a “higher” original in nature and its “lower” imitation in the work of art, which makes art appropriate for the average citizen at the expense of denying it its higher destiny of inspired revelation. In thus considering this “without,” which is also the wherefrom of the work, Plato faced the great fear that, locked in this paradox, art risks always being without content: without political content as a holy endeavor, and without genuine truth-content as a political prop. Today, it is also between these withouts that Agamben rehearses the whither of modern art.

Whither?Indeed, content-less art is the essence of art today. What could be more artistic than art for its own sake, art that does not look for a referent outside its own workings—modernity’s dream of a self-reflexive poetics? Duchamp’s Fountain exemplifies the issues surrounding art’s absolute self-enclosure. Intentioned in large part as a scandal, Duchamp’s piece raises a host of questions: by what criteria is it art, or is it not, and what does it mean to reduce art to this very question of non-being? The lowest object of utility, a urinal, claims the status of an aesthetic


work, thus also claiming the space of an impossible universal—for what kind of truth or shared affect can such an ironic solipsism disclose? The question of affect is inextricable from the question of content, and this is why de Duve is right to point out that, faced with the hollowness of the ready-made, one cannot speak about the content of one’s affect, but simply about the presence of an indeterminate “feeling of having something to do with art” (de Duve 1999: 20).

This is also for Agamben the enigma of modern art: how could it be that when utensils and art occupied two distinctly different worlds, art succeeded in perme-ating many more aspects of the ordinary human life, when at present so much of politically engaged art seems incapable of voicing legibly a single concern? Let us be warned against the tendency of thinking that Agamben is nostalgic either for a return to the Greek polis, or for a genuine kind of prolet-art. He is rather asking the following simple, yet poignant question: why is it that for all the politicization of art nowadays, our political institutions are hardly affected, let alone threatened in the way Plato was afraid they would be by a group of poets? Why, when there was a boundary between art and the public, the exchange between these two worlds was constant, but now that the boundary is lifted, art remains hermetically sealed from the world it once opened up?

De Duve’s solution to the problem constitutes Agamben’s question. For de Duve, modern art has the deictic function of the proper name. I baptize something as art—I say, “this is art”—where “the word ‘art’ is a proper name whose bearers one can only designate by pointing” (de Duve 1999: 19). Consequently, and in ac-cordance with Kant’s insistence on the non-conceptuality of aesthetic judgment, “‘art’ is . . . not a concept, but a collection of examples—different for everyone” (de Duve 1999: 20). In my own list of favorites, Duchamp’s urinal is established as art by virtue of metonymy and then analogy: in my list, it is contiguous to Michelangelo’s Sibyls, Mozart’s Requiem, and so on, and this contiguity guarantees some sort of resemblance—Duchamp’s Fountain is art just like its neighbor, the Delphic Sibyl, is art; otherwise it would not be in the same list. This argument does not fare as well with Agamben, since for him the figure of the collector is not so unproblematic. As a disinterested spectator, who judges “this” to be art and “that” not to be art, the collector for Agamben figures art’s decline. The collector’s appearance marks the moment when art loses its original relation to truth and becomes a collectible—a site for the exercise of taste, an endangered species to be rescued and appreciated on the dusty display shelf.

Furthermore, exemplarity is also at stake, since in de Duve’s scheme, the exemplary is operative only within the subjective frame and logic of a single individual collection. An example is supposed to be normative, and thus utterly legible by itself, not by association. An example legitimizes the link among the other listed items; it does not draw its force by being associated with them. In other words, the example stands as the representative of the collection by having


a metaphorical rather than a metonymic relation to the whole. For Agamben, the withdrawal of art into the museum or the collection is precisely its withdrawal from exemplarity and representativeness. It is in not representing anything but the limitless freedom and subjectivity of the artist, who proceeds unaccount-able to anyone else, including to his or her own material, that contemporary art presents us with the problem of our destiny. Eventually, de Duve also accepts to some extent this double-edged sword of modernity. He writes that, “the fact that one can be an artist without being a painter, or sculptor, or poet, or musician, [is] a fact that I still think one must not stop marveling at or worrying over” (24).

The Man without Content performs this simultaneous movement of marveling and worrying over the fate of art. The fact that art offers us a world and at the same time endangers this world brings us back to the logic of the threshold, of the fine line, in Agamben’s text. As I mentioned earlier on, Agamben’s argument relies first and foremost on the Platonic threshold between poetry and the polis that results in the banishment of the former from the latter. This banishment Agamben correctly interprets not as a simply negative expulsive move, but as Plato’s profound under-standing of the divine terror to which art exposes us, and which may endanger the city’s rational rule. In other words, Plato the censor emerges as a figure who is truly affected by the work. He cannot pretend to respect, appreciate, or judge art from a safe distance because he feels the shuddering truth of the artwork all too near. Over and against the tasteful but disinterested collector, the menacing censor emerges implicitly as an example of a spectator who is all too interested in the work and who, tormented by it, yields art its dues by way of prohibition.

Indeed, the figure of the censor is the one that bridges the split between spectator and artist, a split Agamben attributes to Kant and to modern aesthet-ics in general. Whereas Kant’s ideal spectator has a detached eye, Plato’s censor is interested in the work to the point of being afraid that he will be swept away by it—and in a sense he already is. He thus confronts the work as his enemy. But the only other person who also sees in the work his mortal enemy is, as Agamben remarks, the artist:

For the one who creates it, art becomes an increasingly uncanny experience, with respect to which speaking of interest is at the very least a euphemism, because what is at stake seems to be not in any way the production of a beau-tiful work but instead the life and death of the author, or at least his or her spiritual health. To the increasing innocence of the spectator’s experience in front of the beautiful object corresponds the increasing danger inherent in the artist’s experience, for whom art’s promesse de bonheur becomes the poison that contaminates and destroys his existence. (5)

The censor is a powerful version of the dream of the spectator as artist. For, after all, which great artist would not be relieved to be rid of art? Plato and Rimbaud share the same dream, which is the same nightmare. To understand this pro-ductive13


logic of censorship means to also understand why Agamben begins The Man without Content with a reading of Nietzsche that re-emphasizes the importance of the artist—namely, of the creative principle—over and against the post-Kantian world of spectatorial reception. Such an initiatory gesture should not be dismissed as a conservative exhuming of the artist after the death sentence conferred upon him/her by postmodern aesthetics. Agamben is actually doing the opposite of reclaiming the cult of genius, which is itself a Kantian category. The genius, the misunderstood and monadic artist, is a symptom of modernity, which, in granting infinite freedom and subjectivity to the artist, conveniently isolates him from the polis in a fashion more efficacious and insidious than Plato’s outright but pained verdict. Agamben’s is a different understanding of the artist as someone who is endangered and ultimately annihilated by art, but who, accordingly, can never be as disinterested to this art as the Kantian spectator is expected to be.

It should be noted at this point that Agamben’s reading of Kant is itself very interested and, in fact, strategic. Agamben espouses Nietzsche’s refutation of the Kantian distinction between the empirical and the transcendental, which aligns the empirical with interest, contingency, and thus the need for concepts, and the transcendental with disinterest, universality, and thus freedom from conceptual determination. Though Nietzsche finds Kant’s valorization of disinterest to be responsible for the culture of indifference toward art, it should be said that for Kant this distinction between the empirical and the transcendental was to serve the opposite purpose: it was meant to guarantee a deeper engagement with art than the facile pronouncement of the bourgeois subject’s taste. In other words, contrary to the notion that the disinterested posture amounts to an indiffer-ent, disengaged aesthetic experience, disinterest ensured that the work not be encountered as an object whose mere purpose was to satisfy the spectator’s subjective inclinations. Nietzsche attacks Kant because he is not convinced of such a scheme. In turn, Agamben follows Nietzsche’s polemic because he seems to be less interested in Kant’s philosophical intentions and more in the historical and discursive legacy of Kant’s rhetoric, namely, the rise of a public indifference to art that was concomitant with and symptomatic of Enlightenment aesthetics.

Thus, for Agamben, the split effected by Kant between artist and spectator in modern aesthetics, a split between risk and judgment, between terror and detach-ment, gives way to a number of other splits that I can only mention in passing here—splits that usually collapse onto themselves leaving us with nothing. The artist/spectator division splits the artists themselves into “Terrorists” and “Rheto-ricians,”14 the latter insisting on form much like the spectator, the former on pure and unmediated content (8). The spectator is also internally split. In a rhetoric that resonates with Marx’s critique of alienation, Agamben describes the alienation of the spectator from himself and from the object of his judgment: “The spectator’s is the most radical split: his principle is what is most alien to him; his essence is


in that which, by definition, does not belong to him” (24). What does not belong to him is the creative experience, which he utterly lacks, but which does not stop him from pronouncing judgments. This is judgment without justification, an inessential and illegitimate judgment, since the judge cannot grasp the artwork he/she judges. Moreover, he/she cannot grasp it not because of poor taste and lack of connoisseurship, but because art is not to be “known” or grasped in that manner at all. At any rate, the spectatorial judgment has been rendered virtually redundant by modern art, which internalizes and performs its own judgment by making it its sole content. As if all this were not enough, despite his/her judging agency, the spectator ends up a rather passive figure, ultimately relinquishing complete freedom to the artist, who is after all his/her own best judge. Indeed, even if I, the common spectator, do not deem “this” as art, I do at the minimum concede that poetic license has no borders whatsoever. An artist is an artist who is a critic who is an artist, and this infinite tautology constitutes, or rather evacu-ates, his/her content.

This tautology is the modern symptom of the forgetting of the difference (diaforav) between poetry (and, in a sense, art in general) and philosophy (judg-ment, reflection, political thought). This difference, as Plato suggests, was operative not only in his thought, but possibly much earlier, since already for him it is an “old quarrel” (palaia; mevn ti~ diafora; filosofiva/ te kai; poihtikh`/) (Rep. X.607b). As I mentioned in the beginning of my essay, Agamben’s exploration of the relation between art and politics hinges precisely on this modern philosophical collapse of the artistic and critical faculties that, in turn, is responsible for the political paradox of modern art—namely, the fact that art becomes politically impotent the more it is invested with political urgency. Agamben implies that once the Platonic quarrel between philosophy and poetry was settled, the artist is ironically robbed both of art (art becomes non-art) and of politics (illegible art cannot have any shared truth-content). This is the case, of course, because the quarrel is all but settled. Plato attempted to resolve it at first, and his solution was to side entirely with philosophy and expel art from the city. However, expulsion is no settlement, and in this sense his failure is also to his credit, for a gesture as radical as his preserves the difference between these two realms. Modern aesthetics too—with Hegel as its cornerstone—took wholeheartedly the side of philosophy, but this time not by expelling art, but by subsuming it under philosophy, by making the artist a critic. When such differences were tacitly observed, Agamben seems to be suggesting, when the artist was revered but was also bound by the choice of his material and held accountable by it and by his public, art mattered. In the pres-ent age of infinite aesthetic subjectivity, where everyone could potentially be an artist, we are ironically left not with abundance, but with the poverty of art both at its producing and receiving ends. In Agamben’s own example, compared to Renaissance church paintings that involved the pope, the faithful, and reflected a


general spiritual life (15–6), political art today resembles a voice in the desert. Yet before we rush in to judge Agamben’s attitude as conservative and sentimental, let me point out one last turn in his analysis, a doubly edged turn from where this threshold between art and politics demands to be thought in his text.

On the one hand, Agamben accepts the Hegelian proposition that art is no more the necessary medium for the disclosure of truth, while on the other he maintains that even in its withdrawal art remains disclosive not only of its own destiny, but of human destiny as well. This happens in part because of Agamben’s own emphatically Hegelian reading of Hegel’s end of art—namely, a reading posited from a retrospective vantage point: “Hegel thinks about art in the most elevated manner possible, that is, from the perspective of its self-transcendence” (53).

Consequently, Agamben configures the Hegelian end of art as a (re)begin-ning: “His [Hegel’s] is in no way a simple eulogy, but is rather a meditation on the problem of art at the outer limit of its destiny, when art loosens itself from itself and moves in pure nothingness, suspended in a kind of diaphanous limbo between no-longer-being and not-yet-being” (53). To read Hegel this way is to ask with him the question of art inceptually from its end: has art ever been? Has art ever existed in any other way than in relation to two sorry metaphysical alterna-tives—either as a servant to the concept, or as a merely sensuous thing designed to appeal to our taste? In this light, Hegel’s end of art, usually understood to be synonymous with the reign of aesthetics, is reconsidered: it reads retroactively as an end of our idea of art, that is, as an end of art qua aesthetics; it means, as Agamben writes, that art has ended only in the sense that it “has completed the circle of its metaphysical destiny” (54). After all, Hegel is not the origin, but the culmination of Western aesthetics, and his thought itself needs to be thought from that point of culmination, as the completion and thus also the consummation of the aesthetic understanding of art. Therefore, reading with rather than against Hegel, Agamben calls for “a destruction of aesthetics” (6) as a first step toward a more originary understanding of art as poesis.

The problem with aesthetics in general is that it cannot conceive of art in any other way than the merely sensuous. Hegel is also complicit in this, even as his thought can be read to surpass aesthetics. Whether Hegelian or post-Hegelian, aesthetics respectively condemns or celebrates art for its sensuous aspects: for Hegel, the contingency of the sensuous renders it an inadequate mode for disclos-ing the idea; for post-Hegelian aestheticians, most notably Adorno, the excess of the sensuous promises to relieve us from the oppressiveness of conceptual abstrac-tion. In separating the sensuous from the conceptual, both branches of aesthetics seem to uphold a certain aspect of the Platonic difference, albeit without Plato’s recognition of the troubling super-sensuous, yet non-conceptual, nature of art. For all of Plato’s idealism, which opposed the sensuous to the Idea, he saw that art represents a third possibility, one in which the super-sensuous does not have the


Idea as its only and necessary synonym.15 This third possibility—namely, that art is something thought-provoking but non-conceptual—is its poetic possibility. Let us remember that the divine lot of poetry Socrates was speaking about in the Ion refers precisely to this notion of art: the divine is beyond the sensuous, yet it equally does not belong to the realm of concepts that govern techne.

The destruction of aesthetics as art’s most recent limit opens up an indeter-minate future for art, one through which art could possibly reclaim its originary status. It follows that such a reclaiming would demand an equally originary understanding of limits and of the difference between art and philosophical discourse as genuine difference—thus also proximity—and not as dialectical opposition. The Man without Content is an approach toward this “between” of art and philosophy, or art and politics. Naturally, its chapters also unfold as encounters between Nietzsche and Kant, Aristotle and Marx, Hegel and Diderot, and less obviously—which is why I have undertaken the project to elaborate here—between Plato and Agamben himself.

Notes

1. While I refer to several concepts from Homo Sacer in this comparison, all quoted passages from Agamben and their parenthetical citations refer to The Man without Content. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: On Sovereignty and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998); and Giorgio Agamben, The Man without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999).

2. See Theodor Adorno’s reading of Brecht in “Commitment,” in Notes to Literature II, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, European Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 76–94.

3. Similarly, regarding the autonomy of art in antiquity, Edgar Wind notes that Plato’s suspicion of the arts was inextricably tied to a particular historical development of his times—namely, the gradual distancing of the arts from one another. As they grew isolated within their autonomous domains, the arts targeted different registers of the soul, fragmenting the human being and fostering discord. See Edgar Wind, “Qeiò~ Fovbo~ (Laws, II, 671D): On Plato’s Philosophy of Art,” in The Eloquence of Symbols: Studies in Humanist Art, ed. Jaynie Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 1–20; here, 6–7.

4. The political dichotomy between bios (the political life) and zoe (the animal, bare life), which Agamben reads as concomitant of the ontological split between poesis (associated with truth and political existence) and praxis (associated only with sensuous existence) proves problematic in that Agamben attributes it to Aristotle. While in Homo Sacer Agamben charges Aristotle with the construction of a binary that isolates sensuous life from political existence, thus making the body vulnerable to state violence, in The Man without Content he invokes Aristotle favorably to sup-port his alignment of praxis with vitalism and poesis with truth:


The essential character of poiesis was not its aspect as a practical and volun-tary process but its being a mode of truth understood as unveiling, aj-lhvqeia. And it was precisely because of this essential proximity to truth that Aristotle, who repeatedly theorizes this distinction within man’s “doing,” tended to assign a higher position to poiesis than to praxis. According to Aristotle, the roots of praxis lay in the very condition of man as an animal, a living being: these roots were constituted by the very principle of motion (will, understood as the basic unit of craving, desire, and volition) that characterizes life. (68–9)

Aristotle’s concepts, however, are not simple binaries. As he held poetry in high esteem, Aristotle also insisted on the tragic characters as figures of praxis (Poetics, trans. Ste-phen Halliwell, Loeb Classical Library [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995], 1448a). For a critical view of Agamben’s misreadings of Aristotle on the bios/zoe distinction, see James Gordon Finlayson, who argues that Agamben transforms Aristotle’s gradational concepts into clear-cut binaries (“‘Bare Life’ and Politics in Agamben’s Reading of Aristotle,” The Review of Politics 72 [2010]: 97–126). For the limited purposes of my argument here, which does not draw on the concepts of praxis and bare life beyond this introductory comparison of Agamben’s two books, I will not pursue further this otherwise meritorious critique of Agamben’s assumptions.

5. The difficulty of this argument involves primarily Agamben’s counter-intuitive disjoining of vitality from creativity. When it comes to art, Agamben’s Heideggerian dislike for the vital undermines the Nietzschean overtones of his opening chapter, since Nietzsche’s model of the creator exalts natural robustness. Hardly would Nie-tzsche associate vitality with the weakened, decadent, over-refined “man of taste” as Agamben does here.

6. Thierry De Duve, “Five Remarks on Aesthetic Judgment,” Umbr(a) 1 (1999): 13–32; here, 24.

7. The first chapter of The Man without Content, entitled “The Most Uncanny Thing,” discusses the uncanninness inherent in Kantian disinterest—namely, that the artist who is most interested in the artwork turns out to be, because of this interest, art’s most inappropriate beholder.

8. Plato, Ion, trans. W. R. M. Lamb, in The Statesman, Philebus, Ion, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1925), 406–47.

9. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns observe that up until the time of Socrates, “in all the arts in Athens the emotions and intellect had worked together. There was a balance of power. That is the uniqueness of Greek art; it is an intellectual art. In the Ion Socrates disputes the possibility of such a balance” (Edith Hamilton and Hunting-ton Cairns, eds., Prefatory Note to Ion, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, Bollingen Series [New York: Pantheon, 1963], 215, original italics). To say that Greek art is an intellectual art may be an overstatement. Instead, the sense of this fragile balance between intellect and emotion, exteriority and interiority, has been often celebrated in later theorizations of Greek art in the West. Either way, however, the interesting point Socrates introduces in this dialogue is the very difference between cognition and affect. Whether art was more or less intellectual or emotional before did not matter much, because the difference between intellection and emotion as such was not yet in place.


10. Plato, The Republic, trans. Paul Shorey, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930 and 1935).

11. The English translation of Agamben’s book includes a typographical error. Plato writes about “fillets of wool” (ejrivw/ stevyante~) (Rep. III.398a), and not “fillets of wood,” crowning the poet.

12. Although this issue falls beyond the scope of this essay, it is important to note that the problematic of imitation in Plato becomes even more complex once we take into ac-count his description of education as the imitation of good or bad behavioral models. In other words, if art is deceptive because of its imitative quality, and education—the very process of instilling ethical and political principles in the future citizen—is itself based on imitation, then any simple equation of imitation and deception is immediately foreclosed, or Plato would run the risk of undermining entirely his own ethico-political stakes in education.

13. I use the hyphen in Agamben’s vein and in order to stress the poetic—that is, genera-tive and affirmative—aspects of Platonic censorship.

14. Agamben borrows this distinction from Jean Paulhan.

15. Although The Man without Content renders Kant responsible for the turn away from art and toward judgment, it is of course Kant who preserves in modern aesthetics this Platonic sense of a non-conceptual supersensuousness; the most obvious instance comes from the Third Critique, where Kant defines the judgment of the beautiful as intelligible but non-conceptual. See Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), 44.

BiBliography

Adorno, Theodor. 1992. “Commitment,” in Notes to Literature II, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, European Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press), 76–94.

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: On Sovereignty and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press).

. 1999. The Man without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press).

Aristotle. 1995. Poetics, trans. Stephen Halliwell, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).

De Duve, Thierry. 1999. “Five Remarks on Aesthetic Judgment,” Umbr(a) 1: 13–32.

Finlayson, James Gordon. 2010. “‘Bare Life’ and Politics in Agamben’s Reading of Aristotle,” The Review of Politics 72: 97–126.

Hamilton, Edith, and Huntington Cairns, eds. 1963. Prefatory Note to Ion, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, Bollingen Series (New York: Pantheon), 215.

Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987).

Plato. 1925. Ion, trans. W. R. M. Lamb, in The Statesman, Philebus, Ion, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).


. 1930, 1935. The Republic, trans. Paul Shorey, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).

Wind, Edgar. 1983. “Qeiò~ Fovbo~ (Laws, II, 671D): On Plato’s Philosophy of Art,” in The Eloquence of Symbols: Studies in Humanist Art, ed. Jaynie Anderson (Oxford: Clar-endon), 1–20.

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Between Art and Polis