Feminine 'I Can'- On Possibility and Praxis in Agamben's Work

7/27/2019 Feminine 'I Can'- On Possibility and Praxis in Agamben's Work

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Feminine 'I can':On Possibility and Praxis in Agamben's WorkEwa Plonowska Ziarek (bio)

At the end of Homo Sacer , Agamben suggests that the question of potentiality is intertwined with a

(non-dialectical) mediation of bare life and political forms of living outside the parameters of thesovereign decision. In this essay I attempt to develop a new type of interaction between bare life andforms of life by examining Agamben's philosophy of potentiality in the context of his earlier writings oncommunity and Irigaray's theories of sexual difference. Such a feminist interpretation of Agamben'swork raises the question about the sexed and gendered character of community and potentiality itself. Although Agamben does not investigate this question directly, it is nonetheless implied in his workthrough the contrast between the two different figures of potentiality: Anna Akhmatova's "I can" andBartelby's "I prefer not to." By focusing on the paradigm of potentiality routinely ignored in discussionsof Agamben's work, namely, on the Russian poet's "I can," which opens his famous essay "OnPotentiality,"

1 I reflect on the intersubjective mode of potentiality, its relation to language, politics, and

sexual difference.

1. Severance

Agamben's reframing of biopolitics in the context of bare life has provoked a significant debate aboutthe status of bare life - is it a natural life, is it a life in the state of immediacy, or is it a politicallymediated life?

2 What is at stake in this debate is a shift in the understanding of power in biopolitics. In

the wake of Foucault's work, biopolitics, both in its methodology and in the object of its meticuloushistorical analysis, has become synonymous with the specific micro operations of power, discipline,and normalization of bodies. By associating biopower with sovereignty, Agamben foregrounds insteadthe limit of normalization and confronts us with the exception of the damaged body stripped from itscultural signification, that is, with the abject body expelled from symbolic and political universe.Reworking Aristotle's distinction between biological existence (zoē ) and the political life of speechand action (bios ), Agamben's "bare life" refers to damaged life stripped of its political significance andexposed to violence, which does not count as crime. What is the status of this exception of damagedflesh stripped from its cultural and political signification, of the abject body expelled from the symbolic

and political universe? As I have argued elsewhere, the political determination in the case of bare lifedoes not mean the constitution or disciplinary regulation of the body, but rather what precedes andenables such regulation - the possibility of the severance of bare life from its forms-of-life.

3Consequently, the biopolitics of sovereignty, like the abstraction of the exchange value from any

particularity of the object, time and labor, is based in the last instance on the possibility of separationof the naked disposable life from diverse socio-political forms/contexts/and modalities of living (bios) .Bare life is included only as the excluded outside of politics and signification. Political determination inthis case does not mean the constitution or disciplinary regulation of the body, but on the contrary, itsextreme destitution - for instance, the comatose patient on life support - which marks the boundary of the inclusion/exclusion from the political.

At stake in the operation of sovereignty is the separation and destruction of a form of life, adestruction which reduces beings to bare life. This possibility of the expulsion of bare life is, therefore,

the correlative of the sovereign decision on what constitutes embodied, viable forms of life and onwhat can no longer, or not yet, be considered as such forms. Implicated in other divisions structuringWestern politics, anthropology, and even aesthetics - such divisions as the human and the inhuman,the human and the animal, the individual and the common, the particular and the universal, meansand ends, will and taste - the severance between bare life and political forms also enables aretrospective recodification of the diverse forms of living as abstract juridical categories, as a voter,the population and so on.

4

To provide an alternative to biopolitics, Agamben calls for a rethinking of embodiment and forms of living outside the parameters of the social regulation of the body and the sovereign decision on the

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state of exception. At stake here is a new type of link between bare life and political forms that wouldbe generated from below, as it were, rather than imposed by a sovereign decision. According toThomas Wall, it is the absence of the relation between bare life and its politically qualified ways of lifethat calls for sovereign decision: "Between bare life and its ways of living, there can be only decision .Every sovereign and every state has always confronted this... Bare life is nonrelational and thusinvites decision. It is the space of decision... and, as such, is perpetually au hasard ."

5 Rather than

imposed by a sovereign decision, this inseparable inter-connection between bare life and politicalforms would have to be generated from below, from the mutual interaction between "form" and "life." As Agamben suggests at the end of Homo Sacer :

This biopolitical body that is bare life must itself instead be transformed into the site for the constitutionand installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoē ...Yet how can a bios be only its own zoē , how can a form of life seize hold of the veryhaplos (bare being)that constitutes both the task and the enigma of Western metaphysics? If we give the name form-of-life tothis being that is only its own bare existence and to that life, that, being its own form, remains inseparablefrom it, we will witness the emergence of a field of research beyond the terrain defined by the intersectionof politics and philosophy, medico-biological sciences and jurisprudence.6

In this difficult passage Agamben only hints at what this new form of relation supplanting sovereigndecision might look like. It is easier to provide a negative description of this interaction between lifeand form: such interaction is meant to contest and disarticulate the founding oppositions of Westernpolitics, namely, the oppositions between the human and the inhuman, bios and zoē , nature and

culture, human and animal, norm and exception, possibility and actuality, essence and existence, andfinally, pre-political life and political identity. By displacing the sovereign decision on bare life, thisdifferent interaction between bodies and forms of living cannot be confused with either a dialecticalreconciliation

7 or social construction and especially not with a prepolitical life or a new form of

immediacy.8 It seems to me that the key point here is the interconnection and yet also the nonidentity

between form and life,9 materiality and signification, which make their separation and unification

equally impossible.

By preserving a fundamental relation to the excess of impotentiality over actuality, the conflictingcreation of form for/from bare life might take its orientation from poiesis rather than from action or production, both of which are all too frequently associated with agency controlling materiality, or witha self-realization of the subject. In this essay I will attempt to develop a new mode of interactionbetween bare life and a form of life by examining from a feminist perspective Agamben's philosophy

of potentiality and his earlier writings on community. Such a rethinking of Agamben's work, I argue,takes us beyond the four dominant paradigms that govern the discussion of the body in feministpolitics: the paradigm of biopolitics, social construction, worries of essentialism, or the naivecelebration of a new technological "posthuman" body.

Inseparability of form and life entails a double task: first, it calls for rethinking both "form," that is,being in language, and "life/existence/body" in terms of potentiality. As Agamben points out, theemphasis on the ontology of potentiality in his work transforms "facts" into possibilities:

A life that cannot be separated from its form is a life... in which the single ways, acts, and processes of living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities ... Each behavior and each form of human living is never prescribed by a specific biological vocation, nor is it assigned by whatever necessity; instead, no matter how... socially compulsory, it always retains the character of a possibility .10

Second, this task also entails a rethinking of belonging, understood in a double sense of the

relation between community/singularity and the encounter with the other. In other words, what is atstake in Agamben's reformulation of "forms-of- life" is not the contrast between the ontology of potentiality and the ontology of community, as Jenny Edkins suggests, but the inseparable relationbetween the two.

11

2. Potentiality, Gender, Impossibility

For Agamben, the interaction between "life/body" and "forms of living" entails a rethinking of both lifeand politics in terms of potentiality. As he compellingly argues, the possibility of resistance and of






























the praxis of freedom demands a new ontology of potentiality in excess of historically determinedactuality.

12 Such an ontology emphasizes the persistence of potentiality even after its full actualization

in reality:Contrary to the traditional idea of potentiality that is annulled in actuality, here we are confronted with apotentiality that conserves itself and saves itself in actuality. Here potentiality, so to speak, survivesactuality.13

In contrast to the majority of Western political and moral philosophy, Agamben is concerned withthe "liberation" of potentiality from its subjection to will or moral law: philosophers have attempted torestrict the ambiguities of potentiality,

by reducing it to the terms of will and necessity. Not what you can do, but what you want to do or must dois its dominant theme... To believe that will has power over potentiality, that the passage to actuality isthe result of a decision that puts an end to the ambiguity of potentiality... this is the perpetual illusion of morality.14

We can add that the same destructive illusion of the primacy of decision and will is at the heart of the political theories of sovereignty, defined precisely as the power to decide on the state of exceptionto the law.

Agamben is right to argue that the possibility of resistance and of the praxis of freedom from belowdemands a new ontology of potentiality in excess of historically determined actuality. The important

implication of Agamben's thought is that potentiality conserving itself in the political order deprivesthat order of its historical necessity. To liberate potentiality from agency, will and decision, Agambenturns to Aristotle's distinction between possibility and actuality and argues that the original meaning of potentiality cannot be separated from impotentiality, just as for instance the architect's capacity tobuild cannot be separated from his capacity not to build: "[i]t is a potentiality that is not simply thepotential to do this or that thing but potential to not-do, potential not to pass into actuality."

15 It is the

capacity of "not to" that questions the irreversibility of historical determination of power, marks thecontingency of historical reality, and opens the possibility of freedom. At the moment of its realization,potentiality can never be completely absorbed in actuality since it persists as impotentiality, as thecapacity of "not to." This is a powerful intervention, yet it does not consider the relational aspect of potentiality. Since Agamben implicitly associates potentiality with the capacity of the isolated subject -the architect or the pianist in his examples - the only way he can liberate it from the will of that subjectis by relating possibility "to its own privation" rather than to the potentialities of others. Thus, he

argues that "[b]eings that exist in the mode of potentiality are capable of their own impotentiality andonly in this way do they become potential."

16Because Agamben does not consider how human

capacities might be enlarged, altered or destroyed by capacities/incapacities of others, he argues thatonly an aporetic capacity for impotentiality can liberate potentiality from telos , agency or will.

No doubt Agamben provides a very compelling critique of sovereignty and the reductiveunderstanding of potentiality as the will to power. Yet, the liberation of potentiality from telos , agencyor will does not take into account two issues: the relational modality of the potential, on the one hand,and the racialized, gendered character of "agency, autonomy, and will" in the history of philosophy.

17 As Irigaray, for example, famously argues, in the Western philosophical imaginary,

women, associated with sensibility, unfreedom, and matter - with the ambivalent "mother-matter-nature" envelope - invisibly support philosophical capacities of thinking, and yet are "rejected as thewaste product of reflection."

18 Although Irigaray's analysis of the erasure of the feminine and sexual

difference from/by the philosophical discourse is by now a rather familiar story, we have yet to askabout the implications of her diagnosis for Agamben's critique of the equation of potentiality with will.In the context of Irigaray's work, the first task of a feminist philosophy of potentiality is to "recover" theinvisible "place of her exploitation by discourse," which renders the feminine operation in languageboth invisible and impossible.

19 What is at stake here is the interrogation of potentiality from the

perspective of impossibility associated in Agamben's thought with bare life and in Irigaray's work withthe exclusion of the feminine as "the waste product of reflection," rather than from the perspective of the sovereign decision and will.


































This shift of perspectives raises several questions. The most urgent question is how to transformthe destruction of human capacities of subjugated groups into enabling possibilities. In most of thefeminist, postcolonial and race theories of liberation this political project has been articulated as the"reclaiming of agency" for and by the oppressed. Can collective agency include the privation of potentiality at stake in Agamben's thought? This question calls for a more rigorous and richer analysisof the difference between the destruction of human capacities, associated with subjugation and barelife, on the one hand, and the enabling impotentiality (what Agamben calls the capacity of not to), onthe other hand. Second, we need to analyze the relational aspect of potentiality, implied in Agamben'searlier work on the community but never fully developed. And finally, we need to address the relationbetween potentiality and materiality - materiality understood in the double sense of the body of racialized, gendered and objectified subjectivities and the materiality of objects, for instance, themateriality of the house in Agamben's analysis of the architect's capacity to build. Ultimately, thesequestions point to unpredictable interactions among multiple capacities, privations, andimpossibilities, for instance, to return to Agamben's example of the architect, the interaction betweenthe architect's capacity/incapacity/powerlessness to design, the workers' capacity/incapacity to build,and the unforeseeable capacities/deficiencies of the materials (and human labor/damageaccumulated in them), locations and so on.

If we approach the politics of potentiality from the perspective of bare life, the most urgent issue isnot only the distinction of possibility from will but the difference between impotentiality (the enabling

capacity of "not to," which for Agamben is the source of freedom) and powerlessness or impossibility. Although barely legible in Agamben's paradigmatic figure of potentiality, namely, Bartelby's famousformula "I prefer not to," this task is at stake in another example of potentiality, which makes only afleeting appearance in Agamben's work, and which thus far has been almost completely ignored by Agamben's commentators.

20 Let us recall that Agamben begins his essay "On Potentiality" with a

brief reference to the Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova, who, standing outside the Stalinist prison inLeningrad to hear the news of her imprisoned son, utters "I can" instead of "I prefer not to." Agambendoes not pursue in greater detail this feminine inflection of possibility proclaimed in the face of thesuffering of others and political terror. Not only does he eclipse the subtle difference between the(feminine?) "I can" and the (masculine?) "I prefer not to," but he generalizes the singularity of Akhmatova's utterance into "everyone's" experience of potentiality:

For everyone a moment comes in which she or he must utter this 'I can," which does not refer to any...specific capacity that is, nevertheless, absolutely demanding. Beyond all faculties, this "I can"... markswhat is, for each of us, perhaps the hardest and bitterest experience possible: the experience of potentiality21

By glossing over the specificity of her case, by equating her experience of Stalinist terror with theexperience of possibility encountered by "each of us," Agamben misses the opportunity to interrogatethe relation between potentiality, powerlessness, and gender.

What is then the difference between Bartelby's "I prefer not to," uttered in response to the juridicalmachinery of the liberal state, and Akhmatova's "I can," proclaimed in response to another woman,also subjected to the political machinery of intimidation and terror? Although Bartelby's formulachallenges the power of the law and the will, it does not necessarily express the systematicdestruction of the potential of subjugated people - the destruction, to which Akhmatova's poetry bearswitness. Nor does it show how powerlessness can be transformed into possibility.

Akhmatova's "I can," cited by Agamben, comes from her 1957 preface, which she added to her most famous collection of short poems, entitled Requiem . Written between 1935-40, after a longperiod of silence, Requiem is a poetic testimony to the horror of Stalin's Terror and an act of mourningfor its victims. In the "Dedication" section she describes a daily congregation of beings "less live thandead."

22 Akhmatova herself spent 17 months waiting in line outside the prison for news of her son, Lev

Gumilev, whom she addresses as "my dead."23

The cycle of poems mourns not only the death of relatives and friends, like her former husband or the poet Osip Mandelstam, but all the victims of theGreat Terror, including other women with whom she shared her painful vigil and the experience of being abandoned by the disaster. How can a possibility of writing arise from the utter destruction of


















possibilities, from the powerlessness and destitution of these living dead congregating outside theStalinist prison? In her 1957 prose foreword, entitled "Instead of a Preface," which is a kind of retrospective "Afterward," Akhmatova offers the following response to this question:

During the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prisonin Leningrad... Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in awhisper (everyone whispered there): 'Could one ever describe this?'/And I said: 'I can'.24

What is at stake in Akhmatova's "I can" is neither a critique nor a proclamation of the will of thepoet. Rather it is a recovery of feminine possibility from the double sense of powerlessness: onestemming from the paralyzing effects of political subjugation, which destroys writing itself, and theother from the erasure of "the feminine operation" from language. How can transformative capacityand potentiality survive their destruction by political terror? How can its victims and survivors be"jolted out of their torpor"? How can this persisting capacity be reclaimed and inscribed in languagewithout reverting into a counter-will to power? As Akhmatova's answer suggests, the experience of impotentiality - "I can not do this or be that" -can be enabling even in a state of "torpor" only if itmaintains its relation, as Agamben's own formulation implicitly suggests, to the positive,intersubjective potentiality of "I can." Indeed, as Agamben himself reminds us, Aristotle draws hisexamples of potentiality and impotentiality from "the arts and human knowledge," which means thathuman beings "exist in the mode of potentiality" only insofar as they can act or produce .

25 Only if I

can write, paint, or act politically, and only if this capacity is manifested and enhanced in my relationswith others, can I preserve my abilities when I do not act, and especially, when I'm told that I cannotdo so.

Although the emphasis on "I can" is crucial to all subjugated groups, because this is whatultimately separates potentiality from the torpor of powerlessness, this emphasis is even moreimportant in the case of female potentiality. As Irigaray's work suggests, the feminine experience of impotentiality -"I can not to"- is hardly legible in philosophical discourse where it appears as "thewaste product of reflection" or as deficiency expressed as "you cannot ."

26 This collapse of the

distinctions between impotentiality and impossibility, and the implicit gendering of powerlessness as"feminine," are some of the effects of the erasure of sexual difference from the philosophicalconception of the subject and language. Consequently, the impotentiality of women has to inscribe inlanguage, again and again, its relation to the feminine "I/you/we can." Only then the powerlessnessprojected onto the feminine can be deprived of its necessity and transformed into thecapacity for notacting, which is inseparable from the capacity for acting.

Such a transformation also requires a shift in the relation between feminine potential and thenegative. Instead of being subjected to the impossible - expressed as "you cannot " - the femininehas to assume the capacity for the negative - for "I can not to." What we see here is a transformationof the destroyed potentiality, experienced as powerlessness, into a capacity for negating thatdestruction. In a reversal of Agamben, we can say that the unrealized feminine potential survives itsdestruction as impotentiality, which contests the inevitability of destruction. Furthermore, since thispersisting impotentiality is an inherent part of the human potential to change, it can be reclaimed andmobilized first as the negative capacity to contest destructive conditions, and second, as the positivecapacity to create new unpredictable possibilities of being otherwise, possibilities exceedingany telos , end, or political goal.

Finally, what is crucial in Akhmatova's "I can" is that it is uttered in response to another woman,who barely whispers "Could one ever describe this?" One can imagine multiple significations of thisquestion, ranging from desperation and impossibility (how can one speak of this?) to the urgency of the impossible request imploring another woman to witness and speak about the destruction to whichall of the women are subjected. Consequently, Akhmatova's "I can" is a response to this imploringquestion from another woman rather than the pronouncement of her own initiative. In his analysis Agamben, however, glosses over this relational aspect of Akhmatova's potentiality. Yet, as thisexchange between women suggests, potentiality cannot be understood, as Agamben seems tosuggest, in terms of the isolated subject and what he "can or can not do," because it is fundamentally















a relational concept, emerging from the encounter with another "you." Such encounters can bedestructive or enabling. It is this "Can you/I can" that is rescued against all odds by a femalecommunity outside the prison walls in Akhmatova's Requiem .

3. Potentiality and Community

Akhmatova's response-"ability" - "I can"- emerging from the encounter with another woman brings usto the relational aspect of potentiality, that is, potentiality understood not only in respect to its ownprivation (because that privation might imply a capacity/incapacity of the isolated subject) but also inrelation to other potentialities or to the potentialities of others. Needless to say, the mode of relationality to the other has to be qualified since in Homo Sacer , Agamben argues for a politicsbeyond all relation, including a "non-relational relation" implied in the sovereign ban.

27 Instead of

relationality, Agamben proposes terms like being together, coming together, or co-belonging. As allthese terms suggest, "relational" potentiality is inseparable from rethinking community and singularity.This is especially the case in The Coming Community where potentiality is intertwined with being incommon and with the manner in which entities are coming into being. Consequently, to address themain problem of Western bio-politics diagnosed in Homo Sacer , namely, the severance of bare lifefrom the common political forms of life, we need to return to The Coming Community , because in thistext Agamben proposes a richer understanding of potentiality as a modality of being-in-common.

Furthermore, the perspective of the community makes it clear that Agamben's critique of biopoliticsdoes not stress immediacy, as some commentators argue,28

but on the contrary calls for a radicalredefinition of belonging itself (or what I call intersubjective potentiality) apart from the operations of the inclusion/exclusion that secure collective borders and political identities. Let us begin with Agamben's redefinition of belonging and political community apart from the severance between barelife and the politically relevant forms of life. According to Agamben, being in common is not based onrepresentation, shared identity, the realization of common goals, or belonging to a common class or asect. In fact, it is a mode of belonging "without representable conditions."

29 Agamben argues that co-

belonging has to be defined beyond the politics of representation, identity, and recognition, becauseall these conceptions of community depend, in the last instance, on the legal recognition of identities,rights, and demands of subjugated groups by the sovereign power. Consequently, the politics of recognition and the sovereign ban on bare life are two opposite sides of biopolitics. As an alternativeto identity politics or the politics of recognition, Agamben proposes being in common based on theinterplay of the appropriation of belonging by each singular being and on the disappropriation of all

identities. Following Agamben's formulation, intersubjective potentiality will also be characterized bythis interplay of belonging and disappropriation.

The redefinition of communal belonging apart from the notion of a common identity or a commonfoundation also requires a rethinking of singularity apart from the oppositions of individuality anduniversality, isolation and community, particularity and generality. Agamben defines such singularityas "whatever" being.

30 Rather than an indifference to particularity, the formulation of "whatever"

means that beings matter in all their idiosyncrasies and modes of being, no matter what they are. Thisis the case because "whatever" is not a secondary attribute that modifies a pre-existing identity butthe modality of being preceding any formation of identity. The counterpart of "whatever" is not,therefore, "no matter what " but "how " or "thus": what matters is not what singularities arebut how they are. Rather than signifying indifference with respect to identity, "whatever" reveals thelinguistic mode of each singular being - its mode "of being called." Agamben calls it "mannerism of

being."31

What is crucial here is that the displacement of essence, describing what one is, intomultiple and indeterminate manners of existence, entails a shift from what one is into how one canbe. Understood in terms of the ontology of potentiality, the manner of being "is the simple fact of one'sown existence as possibility or potentiality " rather than an essence or destiny that we shouldrealize.

32

Since such belonging does not depend on sharing a common identity, common goals, or prior conditions, it can be defined only in terms of sharing belonging itself .

33 Yet, what is belonging itself?

For Agamben belonging is synonymous with being in language, which he formulates as "being































called." What matters in belonging is not what one is called but that one is called . As Agamben putsit, being-called is "the property that establishes all possible belongings (being-called Italian, -dog, -Communist)";

34 it implies a multiple singularity and scattered commonality. What is important in this

conceptualization of belonging in terms of "being called" is the fact that the emphasis on linguisticmodality removes all the discussion of community, and the unification of forms of life with bare life,from immediacy. On the contrary, it suggests that the coming community is mediated, to useCatherine Mills' apt formulation, through the communication of the "pure communicability" of language.35 As we shall see, it is precisely this linguistic mediation that makes life and forminseparable from each other and redefines both of them in terms of potentiality.

If the communication and appropriation of "being called" enables belonging to a community, suchbelonging is at the same time intertwined with the expropriation of meaning and identity: "Being-called" is what brings all identities "radically into question... these pure singularities communicate...without being tied by any common property... They are expropriated of all identity, so as toappropriate belonging itself."

36 Thus, the appropriation of belonging to a community does not secure

common identity but expropriates all identities. As a possibility of belonging, "being called" puts intoquestion "what" one is called. Such an expropriation puts one beside oneself, so what iscommunicated in the "sharing" of belonging is the irreducible plurality of being called.

Agamben clarifies this relation between belonging and the expropriation of identity through the

paradox of exemplarity. The minimal formulation of belonging in terms of communication of "beingcalled" makes each singular being into the exemplar "of the coming community. "

37 Yet, the linguistic

and ontological status of such an exemplar is neither a particular nor the universal; the exemplar, as Agamben argues, is always "a singular object that presents itself as such, that shows itssingularity."

38 At the same time, as the Greek etymology of the paradigm suggests, the exemplar is

always beside itself, "in the empty space in which its undefinable and unforgettable life unfolds. "39

It isthis being beside oneself that enables an exemplary or a paradigmatic being to be singular,irreplaceable and, at the same time, to serve as an exemplar for all the other singularities with whomit shares not just particular qualities but precisely the fact that it is called at all. Hence the doublemodality of belonging - the communication in all particular statements of the common modality of "being called" and of the singular being beside oneself, expropriating oneself into an empty space of exemplarity and substitution. As the exemplar of the coming community, a singular being is at once inrelation to the common and beside itself.

Being beside oneself, the mode of expropriation as the modality of being in common has crucialconsequences for the understanding of "form" at stake in the common "forms of life." In so far as theyare shared and emerge from expropriation, forms of life are improper and indeterminate. As Agambenargues, what every form of being in common exposes is its own "amorphousness" and the lack of final determination.

40 As the characteristic of both singularity and being-in-common, such an

indeterminacy of form opens a mode of belonging and individuation through indetermination rather than through the exhaustion of all possibilities: "the singularity here is not a final determination of being, but an unraveling or an indetermination of its limits: a paradoxical individuation by indetermination. "

41 The expropriation understood as the absence of the final determination of the

common forms of life implies that the "form" at stake in the "common forms of life" is not theactualization of the concept, purpose, or design but the preservation of "inactuality."

42 Possibility and

reality become indistinguishable from each other .43

Since form, or perhaps it would be more

appropriate to say, modes of forming, implies a finality or the actualization of the final determination of being, it paradoxically consists in the undoing of limits. Like Foucault, Agamben argues that hisconcept of form entails a transformation of the Kantian notion of the limit into a threshold or passageto the outside.

44 The transformation of the limit into a threshold makes common forms of life not only

indeterminate but irreducibly exposed to the outside.45

There are two crucial consequences of this indetermination and expropriation characteristic of common forms of life. First of all, the emphasis on expropriation as the modality of belonging allows Agamben to move away from the operation of inclusion and exclusion marking the borders of politicalcommunities and political identities. Instead of the exclusion of the improper to set the borders of the



















































polis, Agamben argues that commonality is based on the appropriation of one's own impropriety, of one's own being beside oneself. Impropriety, or expropriation, is precisely what cannot be cast awayin the formation of the community because it is the very condition of being with others. In this context,the political theology of evil, such as George W. Bush's "axis of evil," consists in casting outimpropriety and impotence, in turning it into a substance, enemy, or fault.

46 We could develop this

thought further and say that evil signifies the projection of one's own impropriety, which is a conditionof possibility of both being with others and being in language, onto marginalized others in order toexclude them from "proper" commonality.

Agamben's emphasis on expropriation, hospitality and love as related modalities of being incommon brings us again to the relation between sexual difference and community. Since Agambendoes not follow this path of reflection, let us turn again to Irigaray. Like Agamben's notion of expropriation, Irigaray's conception of sexual difference does not stress gender identity but on thecontrary foregrounds disappropriation, incompleteness, and the relational character of singular subjects and communities. As she famously puts it,

The mine of the subject is always already marked by disappropriation… Being a man or a woman meansnot being the whole of the subject or of the community or of spirit, as well as not being entirely one'sself .47

As a mode of relation, sexual difference reveals the exposure and incompleteness of any identity -

it marks the ontological disappropriation of sexuate being. By stressing the disappropriation andincompleteness of historically constituted identities, this approach to sexual difference prevents thereification of existing gender and racial stereotypes into political or "natural" norms. Furthermore, itemphasizes the transformative effects of sexual dislocation, by interpreting the "disappropriating"character of sexual difference in temporal terms as a possibility of becoming, desire, indeed, as theopening of freedom. By dramatizing, in Irigaray's words, "not being the whole of the subject or of thecommunity," the disappropriating character of sexual difference undercuts any fantasmatic, imaginaryconstructions of wholeness and projections of incompleteness onto another. Another importantaspect of Irigaray's work is that the call for the ethics of sexual difference is often intertwined with theemphasis on its "impossible" character .

48 The "impossible" has to be understood in the double -

historical/diagnostic and ontological - sense. As we have seen in the context of the analysis of Akhmatova's poetry, one meaning of the impossible points to the erasure (or its sublation) of sexualdifference by the monological, homosocial discourse of philosophy and politics. Such erasure

precludes the possibility of the feminine speaking subject, that is, of the feminine "I can." Bycontesting monologism, the inscription of sexual difference in the conception of community does not,however, remove the register of the impossible but changes its character - it precisely foregroundsthe shift from the ontology of actuality to possibility. Or, as Irigaray puts it, the inscription of sexualdifference in social relations makes "the impossible possible." For historical reasons, on themasculine side (Bartelby's "I prefer not to), to make the impossible possible is to contest the ideologyof will and the fear of impotentiality. On the feminine side (Akhmatova's "I can"), however, theimpossible possibility of sexual difference transforms the exclusion from discourse into a possibility of speaking, becoming, indeed, into a possibility "of being called."

Understood in Irigaray's sense, the ethics of sexual difference is what might make non-violent,non-narcissistic love in erotic and social relations possible.

49 Agamben is perhaps a bit uncritical in

his embrace of love as a modality of being with others. As psychoanalysis teaches us, love can benarcissistic, compensatory, violent, bespeaking more of the fantasies of the subject than of the

singularity of the other. By revealing the fact that it is not only the hostile or the missing others thatblock the full actualization of identities but the ontological condition of sexuate being of eachsingularity, the ethics of sexual difference at least opens the possibility of a love that is irreducible tothe domination of the other or to narcissistic relations of complementarity. Since the ethics of sexualdifference negates both the projections of incompleteness onto the other and the reduction of theother to the complement of the subject, it respects the alterity of the Other, or, in Agamben's terms,the singularity of the Other's face, in erotic and social relations.

50 It gives the love of "whatever being"

a chance.























IV. Praxis : From Impotentiality to the Creation of New Forms of Life

As we have seen, the reverse side of Agamben's redefinition of being in common in terms of potentiality is the relational aspect of potentiality itself. Yet, what are the implications of potentialityand being in common for political praxis ? Although Agamben gives us some provocative examples of political praxis , for instance, the Chinese students' protest against the state in Tiananmen Square, he

does not directly engage the analysis of praxis as such. Nonetheless, in the context of his ontology of potentiality and his theory of community, we would have to emphasize the contingent, relational, andopen-ended character of any transformative praxis . Such an approach to praxis contests the veryidea that the political act is merely an actualization of potentiality that already pre-exists it. As wehave seen, Agamben challenges the notion of praxis as the process of actualization of pre-existingcapacities by stressing primarily the survival of potentiality as the capacity of not to. Yet the excess of potentiality as privation does not necessarily address the interaction between diverse capacities of political agents nor does it account for the possibility of the creation of new forms of life. To indicatethe possibility of such a praxis in a preliminary way, I propose to supplement Agamben's ontology of potentiality with Hannah Arendt's "grammar" of political action.

Before turning to Arendt, however, I want to stress some conceptual resources for thinkingabout praxis in The Coming Community . The most important point in this respect is reversibility,

oscillation and alteration in the passage from potentiality to act. Like a movement from language tospeech act or to the act of writing, the passage to acting is not a single event but, as Agambenargues, it is the "infinite series of oscillations" and variations between potentialities and actuality.

51 If

we extend this analysis to collective praxis , then action would also have to be characterized by areversible (though not necessarily reciprocal) oscillation between possibility and actuality. As Agamben puts it,

[t]he passage from potentiality to act, from language to word, from the common to the proper, comesabout every time as a shuttling in both directions along a line of sparkling alternation on which commonnature and singularity, potentiality and act change roles and interpenetrate.52

The emphasis on the interpenetration, reversibility, and alteration of possibilities implies that the"process of realization" not only conserves the excess of capacity as privation but creates new,unpredictable possibilities, which were inconceivable prior to the action. Consequently, the excess of potentiality also implies the creation of new possibilities of being otherwise, possibilities which were

unheard-of prior to the action. Seen in this way, political praxis departs from therealization/conservation of potentiality to the creation of what does not yet exist. We might call sucha praxis an "experiment without truth" - to use Agamben's very suggestive term.

53 Such

experimental praxisnot only conserves a pre-existing potential but transforms the impossible into anunheard-of possibility.

To account for the emergence of new possibilities through action, let us turn to Hannah Arendt,whose work is an important influence in Agamben's political thought. Despite its limitations, (for instance, the separation between the private and the political, bios and zoē ), Arendt's theoryof praxis shows that the creation of the new forms of political life stems not only from contingency of political community but primarily from the interaction among the diverse capacities of participants.Like Agamben, Arendt underscores the multiplicity, plurality, and contingency of political communities.Because such a political community is relational, linguistic, and created through and for action, it does

not require a common identity (on the contrary, it implies coming together of strangers), a commonorigin, or even common goals. Instead of a shared identity, it requires only a worldly space of the "in-between." Unlike Agamben, however, Arendt analyzes the participatory and interactive character of praxis - what she calls the complex "grammar" and "syntax" of political power.

Arendt's "grammar of action" and the "syntax" of political power stress the fact that formingalliances with others not only preserves but increases the capacities of each participant and thuscreates new possibilities. Such an increase of capacities occurs when singular beings "jointhemselves together for the purpose of action, and it will disappear when, for whatever reason, theydisperse."

54 Thus capacities and human powers are augmented through the creation of alliances



















based on mutual promises. In contrast to political theories of contract or sovereignty, such an alliance"gathers together the isolated strength of the allied partners and binds them into a new power structure."

55 By gathering together "whatever" singularities, praxis augments their capacities, creates

a new power, and opens new possibilities.

In the context of Arendt's theory of action the excess of possibility over historically determinedactuality cannot be limited to the preservation of negative possibilities because it entails the creationof new capacities in the process of action.

56 Arendt calls these new possibilities "the world building

capacity of men."57

The convergence of community, novelty and transformative praxis links theontology of potentiality to the possibility of freedom. Needless to say, freedom in this context isneither the property nor the capacity of the isolated subject but is fundamentally relational, contingent,and created by acting with others. Furthermore, political freedom in the contingent historical world isdifferent from liberation, even though liberation is its necessary precondition. As Arendt argues,liberation is primarily negative - it is the struggle to end oppression or to regain lost liberties - whilefreedom is positive, implying the creation of a new way of life. In a very suggestive formulation, Arendt argues that freedom in the positive and transformative sense reveals a political capacity toenact with others the "birth" of a new world.

58 In contrast to the rhetoric of human rights,59 the

political birth of a new world not only implicitly inscribes the feminine inflection of possibility into thepolitical, but also suggests the emergence of the new forms of life, in which life and form would be incontinuous, inseparable interaction. Ultimately what I propose in this essay is that potentiality

understood as the intersubjective capacity to create a new world is the indispensable counterpart of Agamben's rhetoric of privation. Both of these modalities - the unpredictable creation of the new aswell as the excess of privation - are crucial to political action based on the ontology of potentiality.

Ewa Plonowska Ziarek Ewa Plonowska Ziarek is Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature and the Founding Director of HumanitiesInstitute at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is the author of The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism (SUNY, 1995); and An Ethics of Dissensus: Feminism, Postmodernity, and thePolitics of Radical Democracy (Stanford 2001). She is the editor of Gombrowicz's Grimaces: Modernism, Gender,Nationality (SUNY, 1998); and the co-editor of Revolt, Affect, and Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva'sPolis (SUNY 2005) and Time for the Humanities: Praxis and the Limits of Autonomy (Fordham UP 2008). She haspublished numerous articles on Kristeva, Irigaray, Derrida, Agamben, Foucault, Levinas, Fanon, feminist theory, andliterary modernism.

Notes

1. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy , ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1999), 177.

2. For some examples of the critiques of bare life see for instance Andrew Benjamin, "Spacing as the Shared:Heraclitus, Pindar, Agamben," in Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Agamben's 'Homo Sacer' , ed. Andrew Norris (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 145-172. See also Andrew Benjamin, "Particularity andException: On Jews and Animals," South Atlantic Quarterly 107, 1 (2008): 71-88 and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, "BareLife on Strike: Notes of the Biopolitics of Race and Gender," South Atlantic Quarterly 107,1 (2008): 89-105.

3. Ziarek, "Bare life on strike: notes on the biopolitics of race and gender".

4. Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End , trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 6-7.

5. Thomas Carl Wall, "Au Hasard," in Politics, Metaphysics, and Death , 38-39.

6. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life , trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1998), 188.

7. For a discussion of Agamben's relation to dialectical mediation, see Antonio Negri, "The Discreet Taste of theDialectic" in Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life , eds. Matthew Calarco and Steven De Caroli (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 2007), 109-126. For a critique of Agamben's insufficient attention to the hegemony, seeErnesto Laclau, "Bare Life or Social Indeterminacy," in On Agamben , 11-22.













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http://muse.jhu.edu.vortex3.uco.edu:2050/journals/theory_and_event/v013/13.1.ziarek.html#f1-text

























8. For a discussion of whatever singularities as a form of immediacy, see for instance, Edkins, "Whatever Politics,"in Giorgio Agamben , 70-91.

9. In the context of his discussion of the survivors' testimonies, Agamben defines such a link between the damagedlife and the human as the aporetic task of witnessing to the inhuman. The ethics of such witnessing neither abandons nor assimilates it to the human. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999). For my further discussion of the ethical structure of the survivors' testimonyin Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz , see Ewa Ziarek Plonowska, "Evil and Testimony: Ethics 'after'Postmodernism" Hypatia , 18, 2 (2003): 197-204.

10. Agamben, Means Without End , 3.

11. Edkins, "Whatever Politics," 70-91.

12. Agamben, Potentialities , 259.



15. Agamben, Potentialities , 179-180


17. For a discussion of the relation between bare life and the politics of race and gender, see for example, Alexander G. Weheliye, "Pornotropes" Journal of Visual Culture 7, 1 (2008): 65-81; Diane Enns, "Political Lifebefore Identity" Theory & Event 10, 1 (2007); and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, "Bare Life on Strike". The implicit relationbetween bare life and gender is also stake in Catherine Mills, "Linguistic Survival and Ethicality," in Politics,Metaphysics, and Death , 198-221. For an excellent discussion of the destruction of forms of life by the Westernimperialism, see Sidi Mohammed Barkat, Le Corps D'Exception: Les artifices du pouvoir colonial et la destructionde la vie (Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2005).

18. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One , trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985),76-77. For a comprehensive discussion of Irigaray's engagement with the history of philosophy, see TinaChanter, Ethics of Eros: Irigaray's Rewriting of the Philosophers (New York: Routledge, 1995).

19. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One , 76.

20. The critics, who are exceptions, merely mention Akhmatova in passing or endontes. See for instance, AntonSchütz, "Thinking the law with and against Luhmann, Legendre, Agamben" Law and Critique 11, 2 (2000): 107-136and Rad Borislavov, "Agamben, Ontology, and Constituent Power" Debatte , 13, 2 (2005).


22. Anna Akhmatova, Poems of Akhmatova , eds and trans. Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward (Boston: HoughtonMifflin Company, 1973) 101.

23. Akhmatova, Poems of Akhmatova , 103.

24. Akhmatova, Poems of Akhmatova , 99.


26. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One , 76-77.

27. Agamben, Homo Sacer , 47.

28. Edkins, "Whatever Politics," in Giorgio Agamben ; Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben (Montréal:McGill University Press, 2008).


















































29. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community , trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1993) 86.

30. Agamben, The Coming Community , 1-2.

31. Agamben, The Coming Community , 28.

32. Agamben, The Coming Community , 43 (emphasis in original).

33. Agamben, The Coming Community , 10, 85.


35. Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben , 130-131. My only point of contention with Mills' otherwise very helpfuldiscussion is her claim that the singular beings share "ontological immediacy", 130.




39. Agamben, The Coming Community , 10





44. Agamben, The Coming Community , 64, 67.



47. Luce Irigaray, I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity Within History , trans. Alison Martin, New (York and London:Routledge, 1996), 106.

48. For an illuminating discussion of the impossible character of sexual difference as the pair of empty brackets,see Penelope Deutscher, A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray (Ithaca: CornellUniversity Press, 2002), 107-20.

49. For a discussion of love in Irigaray's work, see Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernism,Feminism, and the Politics of Radical Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 163-172.

50. Although Agamben does not consider the distinction, so crucial to Derrida's, Irigaray, and Levinas'sphilosophies, between being in common and the encounter with the other, his analysis in The Coming

Community nonetheless fluctuates between these two levels signaled, for instance, in the shifts from the face of thesingular other to the multitudes coming together in the opposition to the state. In a few moments when Agambenconsiders what being with others means he stresses the fact expropriation is intertwined with "unconditionalhospitality" welcome, and substitution for others. Needless to say, hospitality, welcome, and substitution bear anuncanny (or deliberate) resemblance to the Levinasian discourse of responsibility and Derrida's hospitality. Despitethe common ethical discourse of hospitality, Agamben, in contrast to Levinas, does not define substitution in termsof responsibility or being a hostage, but associates it rather with openness, with being at ease with others, andfinally, with love. See Agamben, The Coming Community , 24-25.





















































54. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 1990), 175. For Arendt's discussion of political action, seealso Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998) 175-245.

55. Arendt, On Revolution , 170.

56. The migration of the "new" from new discoveries in science, new ideas in philosophy, or originality of art to thepublic realm of political action radicalizes this notion, and links it with the praxis of the multitude rather than with theproperty or the achievements of a chosen few.

57. Arendt, On Revolution , 175. Recently, Arendt's political philosophy has attracted a renewed attention of feminist scholars. For excellent, but different in their approach, examples of reinterpretation of Arendt in the contextof the political discourses of modernity, see, for instance, Seyla Benhabib's analysis of Arendt's conflicting relationto Benjamin and Heidegger in her The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Lanham: Roman and Littlefield,2003) as well as an excellent analysis of Arendt's notions of human rights, natality and responsibility by PegBirmingham in her Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 2007).

58. Arendt, On Revolution , 42. At the same time, Arendt stresses the fragility of the convergence of positive

freedom, collective praxis , and the inauguration of the new forms of political life.

59. For Agamben's critique of the notion of birth in the conception of human rights see Agamben, Homo Sacer ,126-135.

Copyright © 2010 Ewa Plonowska Ziarek and The Johns Hopkins University Press

















Documents

Feminine 'I Can'- On Possibility and Praxis in Agamben's Work