Book review: Agamben and Radical Politics

In his recent text Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene, McKenzie Wark calls for the affirmation of pluralistic thought, an embrace of intellectual practices that begin both from the necessity of alternative ways of thinking and from an acknowledgment of the creative potential of moving across different intellectual traditions. However, despite such an overt affirmation of pluralism, Wark admits early on to being troubled by the place of a figure like Saint Paul within contemporary critical thought. He states that:

in the age of the Carbon Liberation Front, even sunny California can seem like a vision haunted in advance by its own ruins. No wonder critical theorists are now turning to past-times, reading Saint Paul for instance, as if there was nothing for it as Rome burns but to day-trip in the City of God. (p. xix)

Agamben and Radical Politics, a new collection of essays published by the University of Edinburgh Press, takes up the challenge that Wark’s comments implicitly present. As Wark’s quote implicates, given the great number of ecological, economic, and political calamities that persist across the globe, how are we to square the desire for radical political alternatives with an intellectual project like that developed by Giorgio Agamben? One only has to skim through Agamben’s work, replete, as it is, with close readings of obscure Ancient and Medieval texts, to question the pertinence of its focal points. Like Martin Heidegger, one of Agamben’s teachers and great philosophical resources, he is not a thinker known for his overt support for contemporary political projects or parties. Unlike his contemporaries Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou, we don’t find Agamben referring to the necessity of a universal political project, such as the ‘communist idea’ or a ‘communist hypothesis’. Agamben’s relation to radical politics is, accordingly, far from self-evident, since, while Agamben’s work has often been framed as an alternative to the dominant figures in ‘post-structuralism’ – i.e. Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard – he shares its interest in the power of transformative readings of often obscure and marginalized sources. As a result, one could very well wonder, along the lines offered by Wark’s quote, whether or not a close attention to the margins of Western thought – no matter how rigorous and intricate – can really be of use to those engaged in present political struggles.

For these reasons, it is timely that the last few years have seen a more engaged reading of Agamben with regards to the place of the latter’s thought in the struggle for radical political alternatives. In this volume, Jessica Whyte’s chapter on Agamben’s relationship to Marxist thought; Sergei Prozorov’s comparative and conciliatory reading of Agamben and Badiou; and Jason E. Smith’s analysis of the legacy of Operaismo in relation to Agamben, each evince the significance of Agamben’s thought for complicating and reconceptualizing the terrain of struggle as relates to radical politics in theoria and praxis. However, the collection as a whole presents a series of attentive engagements with Agamben’s more recent texts – such as The Kingdom and the Glory and The Highest Poverty – in which the historical meaning of ‘use’ and ‘utility’, and the metaphysical development of such notions, is put into question. In so doing, this text is able to outline the points of convergence between Agamben’s thinking and a plurality of radical intellectual traditions, while also opening up the space for an upheaval of the very notion of ‘usefulness’ that might be deployed to criticize the obscurity of the latter’s sources and themes. Indeed, while Agamben’s thought has no simple or self-evident usefulness for present political struggles, the question of what use does and could mean is one of the most fascinating and compelling lines of inquiry he develops. This it to say, it is precisely the way in which he is able to open up a space for thinking through an alternate sense of ‘use’, one that is not overdetermined by notions of rights, sovereignty, and law that makes his thought so radical. As Miguel Vatter argues in his contribution to the volume, ‘Law and Life beyond Incorporation: Agamben, Highest Poverty and the Papal Legal Revolution’, what Agamben uncovers in his later work is a certain ‘readability’ of the Franciscan affirmation of the “highest poverty” that is evinced in Messianic life’ (p. 254). Through Agamben’s reading of the legacy of Saint Francis and the communities he inspired, Vatter argues that we find a means of thinking through the contemporary problem of the disappearance of the ‘commons’ and the need for reconceptualizing notions of use and utility in light of the need to share phenomena like ‘clean drinking water, biodiversity, certain natural landscapes as well as cultural sites, [and] the Internet’ (p. 254). Indeed, rather than turning to the Christian tradition for some kind of succour, as a form of spiritual assistance while ‘Rome burns’ – to quote Wark again – Agamben turns to the writing of Saint Paul and his logic of the hōs mē or ‘as not’ in order to point to a certain inoperativity at the heart of phenomena that makes them irreducible to any entitlement or sovereign use. Such a rejection of the synonymity of phenomena with their operational character, of the way things are and the way things are used, speaks to a variety of contemporary political issues: from the politics of security, to the crisis of the Anthropocene, to the struggle for a revolution in our relation to waged-labour. As Matthew Abbot argues, what is most overtly radical about Agamben’s thought is his attention to the possibilities that can only emerge from inoperativity, the suspension, of prevailing relations of use and usefulness, that can reveal the possibility of what Abbot calls – in one of the books most evocative formulations – ‘the common fact of being-there: Dasein as a weapon’ (p. 42).

While Agamben is certainly not a maligned figure in contemporary critical thought, the latter’s propensity for novelty fetishism can function to affirm a suspicion of turning to history and the pre-modern, regardless of how creative such a turn happens to be. The attempt to hear something new in old words must compete against more ‘contemporary’ developments in theory, such as new truth-claims produced by neurologically centred life-science, or new forms of speculative realism or ‘object oriented ontologies’. Against such a preoccupation with the ‘new’, Agamben and Radical Politics reinforces the status of Agamben as a truly original thinker. This is to say, a thinker who attends to the historical origins of things so as to seek out an alternative, or an ‘otherwise’, that is marginalized in our dogmatic understanding of the origins of thought and practice. Furthermore, it is a testament to the intellectual acumen of this collection’s contributors that they too are able to think through Agamben’s corpus so rigorously and creatively as to cause any preconceptions about Agamben’s identity as a thinker to tremble – i.e. to make his thought resonate powerfully and unexpectedly.