Following up on my remarks on Agamben, spurred by Ken‘s questions (thanks!). Sequentially, this comes before my other unfinished remarks on Agamben here. There’s more to write on this, of course.
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Agamben writes that “the production of bare life is the originary form of sovereignty” (HS 83.) Bare life results from a production – it is a product produced. It is artificial or artifactual, not natural in the sense of a given or self-producing starting point. Furthermore, bare life is not, in the sense of being actually bare in the sense of being only life-qua-life, life sans all qualities except the quality of being life. Bare life is a counting-as-bare-life.
Those who are counted as bare life are counted only insofar as they (merely) alive. Those who are counted as bare life still have other qualities than merely being alive, but the count-as-bare is indifferent to these other qualities. This counting-as acts upon a set of bodies which have a potential to be counted in this way. This is not trivially true. That the bodies counted as bare life have a potential to be so counted is connected to why bare life is a product, rather than a given and a necessity.
Potentiality, Agamben writes, “is not simply the potential to do this or that thing but potential to not-do, potential to not pass into actuality.” (Potentialities, 180.) Potential is always potential-to. Potential is also always potential-not-to, which is to say, in Agamben’s terms, potentiality is always also impotentiality. Agamben quotes Aristotle, “all potentiality is impotentiality of the same and with respect to the same,” then adds that “[w]hat is potential is capable (…) both of being and of not being.” (Potentialities, 182.)
Various cuts of wood and an assortment of screws has the potential to become a bookshelf. It also has the potential to not become a bookshelf. Building a bookshelf is a process of the materials passing from the potential of being a bookshelf into the actuality of being a bookshelf. If the wood and screws did not have an impotential to be a table, they would be always-already a table, and there would be no process of production, no passage from potentiality to actuality.
Those who are counted as bare life have the potential to be counted in this way. They also have the impotential to be – or the potential not to be – counted in this way. The above has the following consequences which I will first list then expand.
1. Bare life or count as bare life is historically produced by practice.
2. Whether or not a count as bare life occurs, in any particular and historical situation, is a matter of conflict. The results of any such conflict are aleatory, in the sense of not being a foregone conclusion.
3. Any operation of a count as bare life, insofar as it is still productive of bare life rather than death, is aleatory in the sense of not guaranteed to continue to exist, that is, of being reversible or dissoluble.
To expand on these points:
1. Bare life or count as bare life is historically produced by practice. Life is (or rather, lives are) not always-already bare life. This is significant in relation to Carl Schmitt, a frequent source for Agamben. Schmitt makes politics an existential matter and makes politics a matter of sovereignty, thus making life and sovereignty coterminous. This is not the case. Life is prior to bare life. Sovereignty, for Agamben, produces bare life. Thus life is prior to sovereignty. This priority is both historical and logical. This means sovereignty could pass away within history without life passing away. A post-sovereign life is possible.
2. Whether or not a count as bare life occurs, in any particular and historical situation, is a matter of conflict. The results of any such conflict are aleatory, in the sense of not being a foregone conclusion.
Counting-as-bare-life occurs in history, when it occurs. Agamben writes [someplace, look it up] that in some cases where bare life is produced [camps? exception?] anything can happen. This is important, but reading Agamben can be unclear on this. Agamben’s “anything can happen” can easily be read to mean “the production of bare life will happen” such that the “anything” is fully contained within the production of bare life. That would be a mistake, as it would neglect Agamben’s discussion of (im)potentiality. “Can happen” contains both “potential to happen” and “potential to not happen.” That is, “can happen” is a phrase expressing (im)potentiality. Agamben is easy to read, though, as if “anything can happen” is not a statement of (im)potentiality but a statement of a necessary passage from potentiality to actuality. Such an understanding results from an overemphasis on law and sovereignty in such a way that other registers are eclipsed.
Consider Homo Sacer, Agamben’s figure of choice for bare life. Homo Sacer is the figure which can be killed but not sacrificed. This means that the sacrifice of homo sacer is impossible. It also means that homo sacer has the potential to be killed. But all life has the potential to be killed. Potential to be killed – or, potential to die – is part of what it is to be alive. Homo sacer is a legal figure in Roman law. What Agamben means, then, is that there is no legal obstacle to the killing of homo sacer. There is also no legal support to the continued life of homo sacer – law does not ‘prop up’ the life of homo sacer. In the case(s) of homo sacer, law does not intervene to act against life’s potential to die and to be killed.
Legal support for homo sacer’s life and absence of legal opposition to taking homo sacer’s life is not the only factor involved in homo sacer’s continuing to live or to die. When Agamben writes that sometimes anything can happen, this is so at the level of legality in that, with homo sacer, there is no legal support for life nor legal opposition toward taking life. But legality is not the only register involved in what can happen and what does happen with regard to life. Legality is not the only register in or at which (im)potentiality can pass into actuality and at which actuality can dissolve, nor is legal status a guarantee of outcomes.
One can still attempt to kill another who is legally protected, if one is willing to suffer the consequences (or believes one will not be caught) and if one is able to manage to overcome the life of the other, to kill them. The inverse is also true. One could attempt to kill another who was rendered homo sacer, but find oneself unable to overcome the life of the other, unable to kill them. The result in any of these situations, like the (non)occurrence of a count-as-bare life, is not predetermined but aleatory.
3. Any operation of a count as bare life, insofar as it is still productive of bare life rather than death, is aleatory in the sense of not guaranteed to continue to exist, that is, of being reversible or dissoluble. Not only is the genesis of the production of bare life not historically predetermined, but instances where bare life is produced, once they do exist, may dissolve. In many instances the most egregious forms and mechanisms of for producing bare life do pass away – states of exception, camps, etc. This passing away was the goal of antifascist partisans and those who aided refugees seeking to escape the count-as-bare-life in fascist countries. In addition, those who endure counting-as-bare-life and live can struggle to remake themselves in such a way that their experiences do not fully determine them. One can, so to speak, pass from being a victim to being a survivor. The count-as-bare-life is thus reversible or dissoluble in two senses. First, any particular apparatus and/or operation of counting-as-bare-life can be opposed and there is a chance of successfully abolishing this apparatus. Second, to be counted-as-bare-life, provided on does not die, does not mean that once is permanently consigned to a status as exhausted by the experience. One may be marked by the experience, surely, but one’s life – in the sense of being multiple and in the sense of being refashionable – is not reduced to nothing.
It also must be noted that the conditions for the production of bare life might cease. I said above that sovereignty could pass away within history. That is, sovereignty’s potential to be (actual) is also an impotential, a potential to not-be (actual). Against Schmitt, using Agamben sovereignty, as an actuality, is not necessary but contingent both in its historical origin and its historical persistence.
crashcourse666 
Again, a really good, really precise, really clear intervention into the obscurantist muck of Agamben-interpretation.
Some thoughts about the potential to be and the potential not to be… Or, modal meanderings…
It’s more or less clear that a potentiality can either be or not be. In a sense, a potential is something which both is and isn’t, inasmuch as it’s defined as potentiality (not-being, in the sense of not-being-actual) rather than actuality (being, in the sense of being-more-than-potential).
But couldn’t it be said that an actuality can either be or not be as well (so long as it’s not necessary)?
We could say that actuality is just possibility plus contingency. If actuality is possibility plus contingency, then there’s no reason why what’s actual could be otherwise (or cease to be, or simply not-be-anymore).
You might run into a time condition on this definition, so that nothing that is actual can not-be at the same time as it is. But that would still leave the future open (even if we can’t change the past), and affirm the possibility-potentiality of removing the contingency that lets what’s actual be rather than not-be.
Does this make any sense?
paragraph 5, 2nd line… “couldn’t.”
I worry that you’re rigging the analytical game here by framing everything as a counting or not-counting. A sort of Badiou residue, I suppose; but I’m not sure I understand why one would want counting to be the means by which we make sense of the production of bare life. Counting has a form that seems to me irreducible to that of bare life, and yet here that irreducibility is expository, even enabling. That means that the epistemological precepts that make possible something like counting will be inherited in the production of bare life, which I can imagine being defended as a claim, but it also means, by necessity and by way of the limit-conditions of bare life, that those same epistemological presumptions will be at work without the production of bare life.
Unless you’re argument is in reality that counting is coterminous with bare life, a claim that is way outside of Agamben, but that might seem interesting as a path of exploration.
It might also be helpful to think of the role of one’s own identificatory practices within the context of this notion of counting. Must I identify as the proletariat to count as one? Who does the counting otherwise? How does counting get done?
Just some thoughts.
On “counting” and bare life. A response to Nate and Kenneth.
I actually like Nate’s language of counting, because it mutes the ontological implications of “the production of bare life.”
As I understand him, Nate’s suggesting that certain people are “counted as” or “considered” bare life within certain political frameworks. I think this is exactly what Agamben means when he talks about politics being a process of “giving form to life” in Homo Sacer. The political “form” of bare life is something which is ultimately “fictional,” in the sense in which law is a “fiction” for Agamben. It’s something “made” and “imposed.” But it’s still what “counts” or “matters” in certain contexts. So, within the sphere of the law, illegal immigrants are reduced to the status of bare life. They have no legal or civil rights because of their extra-legal status. But it’s actually the law that’s denied them these rights, because it denies that they’re political “subjects” in the legal sense of the term. In that sense, being a political “subject” means that the law applies to them and defines their political “form,” their status within the political community.
What I think Nate’s brought out is that just because someone is “counted as” bare life, or does not have the political “form” of a member of the political community, that doesn’t mean they’re nothing but bare life. (Statist) politics doesn’t have the last word on who’s a political “subject.” If it did, then those given the “form” bare life by a certain political process really would be nothing but bare life. They’d have the ontological status of a vegetable, which is something Agamben points out in The Remnants of Auschwitz. Clearly those included-excluded by politics under the “form” of bare life are not just vegetables. Even if the law and the state and every other political institution or community treated them as if they were just a vegetable, they’d still be capable of a certain kind of political “subjectivity.”
I think this is what Agamben is talking about when he talks about form-of-life… a kind of integral way of life that resists the imposition of “form,” which just is and does what it is and does. That’s “bare” life, in the sense that it’s a way of living that just lives its life, irrespective of its political status or “form.” That’s not the same as being reduced to “bare life” by the law or the state. But even if one were reduced to “bare life” by the law or the state, one could still just go about one’s life…
hi Colin, Ken,
I’ve been out of town and I’m very tired, so I’m gonna be brief. thanks for these. I’ll say more later. For now, Ken –
I’m not wedded to “count”. Colin’s paraphrase as “consider” is fine. As would be “think of as”, “act as if it is” etc. I don’t have the Kant chops to make a firm connection to Kant and the as-if, but I’d like to do that eventually. The point is praxiological, for lack of a better term – a sort of pragmatics. “Bare life” is no type of essence but a mode of interaction of some people with others. And no, Ken, I don’t find the subjective orientation relevant here – one doesn’t have to identify as something to be (treated as) that something. That’s not to say the subjective orientation isn’t important at all – it’s key to all kinds of things, but isn’t what I’m after for now.
cheers,
Nate
Now I definitely don’t understand; how can you want to engage praxis and then relegate the different phrases your listing to mere semantic slippages? You seem to think that the subject-position here is not at all essential, and yet it is: counting implies an epistemological capacity for noting and measuring inclusion, consider as implies an outside observer (who is, how is?), think of as implies a cognitive, and thereby elides the mechanics of the operation, and act as if it is implies agency on the part of the bare life that in other formulations is simply understood as such from the outside. If bare life really is a mode of interaction (which I’m not necessarily agreeing with, as that would need unpacked some), there’s no interaction without the predicates that inform the possibility of those interactions, and the phrases that you choose to deploy in understanding bare life are what will determine the interpretation of those interactions (a la Burke’s terministic screen). So whether you’re after the subjective orientation or not, there it is.
At stake, and this comment is more for Colin, is the means by which one resolves the axis through which bare life comes to fruition. Colin’s claim, it seems to me, has little todo with a positive reevaluation of the agency inherent in the form of life, even in the form of bare life, and everything to do with the positive incapacity of the sovereign to reach universal control or symbolic perfection. If the argument ends up being merely an Agamben-based argument against views of absolute statism, then fine (though surely we can understand the “disciplinary” problems with such a read), but if you’re looking to make a more substantial investigation of the essence or form of bare life itself, and its relation to capital, then you’ll need to do more. Otherwise, you’ll risk ending up like Hardt and Negri, with all the pomp and none of the substance in the advocacy of some gelatinous alternative.
Hi Nate and Kenneth…
I think Nate’s “praxiological” move is a pragmatic move. He thinks there are some differences which “make a difference” and some differences which “don’t make a difference.” The difference between “counting” and “considering” is not a “difference which makes a difference” in this discussion. I tend to agree… The semantic fields of the terms are similar enough to be indifferent to their differences, and the relevant sense is included under both (and many other) terms.
With respect to Kenneth’s response to me, I’d agree that my claim has a lot to do with the inabililty of sovereign power ever to achieve absolute authority. So, I deny that sovereign power is ever really sovereign.
There is, however, a positive content to that assertion, with respect to “bare life” and “form-of-life.”
I could state that positive content negatively, and just say that there’s something about (human) life and/or political subjectivity which resists domination. People can’t be deprived of their right to resist, becaus their right to resist comes from their power to resist, and that power can’t be taken away from them absolutely (a point emphasized by Spinoza). Even the most abject political subject retains a certain capacity, a certain potential for resistance.
Putting things more positively, I’d ask what life would look life if it were free from domination by sovereign power, political authority, and was totally indifferent or oblivious of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of its political form. The answer to that question is the positive content of Agamben’s “form-of-life.” He gives the example of Heidegger’s Dasein in Homo Sacer, and in the Open. He talks about children and play, and scholars and study in State of Exception. And in one of his essays in Means WIthout End, he talks about “denizens.”
I’d agree that Agamben’s account of political subjectivity may be as ambiguous as Hardt and Negri’s multitude, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. An ambiguity is a potential which can be realized in a variety of ways. We certainly don’t want a narrow definition of political subjectivity which says only X,Y, and Z are political subjects, and no one else, and they can only assert themselves in ways A, B, and C.
hi Ken, Colin,
Ken, I think we just disagree on some issues related to language and I’m not sure we’re going to come to a productive conclusion on that. For what it’s worth, I’m fine with using “think of X as”, “count X as”, “consider X as”, as “treat X as” and “hold X as” as all being synonyms such that they’re interchangeable without any important loss. In some speech contexts, any one of the above utterances could be considered equivalent. For instance, some contexts with regard to the status “being a friend, not a lover”. — “Hey Y, I found out that X is interested in you in a romantic way.” “Oh really? Well, I think of X as a friend not a lover.” “Think of X as” could be swapped for any of the above phrases – “count X as” etc – without communicative misfire or any significant difference.
The same holds for the purposes of my discussion of bare life. To be clear – I’m not arguing that this is the case for all contexts of use of those utterances. Just for some, namely mine in this discussion of Agamben. There certainly are some contexts where there are important differences between those phrases. I do not believe, though, that there is a difference between them in every single context (which would be a contextless difference). In contexts where these utterances can be used as equivalents, any differences between them are ignored in these contexts (these contexts are indifferent to the differences). These contexts do not have to be affected by the fact that other contests do not ignore (are not indifferent to) these differences. Enough on that.
I may have mis-typed when I talked about subjective stuff. What I should have said was this –
You said “It might also be helpful to think of the role of one’s own identificatory practices within the context of this notion of counting. Must I identify as the proletariat to count as one? Who does the counting otherwise? How does counting get done?”
I do think the identificatory practices of those who are counted or considered as bare life/proletariat are tremendously important issues. But counting/considering as bare life is indifferent to these practices. Think of bare life as analogous to race. If I’m born deaf and blind I may spend a very long time before I’m aware of race – mine and others. During that time, I may have no identification with “my” race or against others. That doesn’t mean that I can’t still be counted/considered as being in some position, such that I get relative advantages or disadvantages due to how I am racially counted/considered. Those countings/considerings are not subjective in the sense of occurring (grammatically speaking) only in the first person, whether singular or plural. The same is the case with bare life. Self-identification is neither a condition for nor a blockage on one’s capacity to be counted/considered as bare life.
All of that aside, you’re point about identification is relevant (in a way I didn’t get at first) to my argument that bare life isn’t bare life, but rather is only counted/considered as bare life. That counting/considering is made/occurs from some perspective. To say “they really are bare life” is to universalize the perspective from which the counting/considering occurs. From many other perspectives, those counted/considered as bare life have all sorts of qualities in addition to being alive, such that they can not be said to be merely (only) alive, bare life. That’s what I meant by ‘mode of interaction’ – bare life is a way of considering/counting people in connection with other practices of acting upon them (interacting with them). Bare life (like race, gender, and class position) is not an essence but is social. In that sense, it’s not biological or natural in the sense of being an essence.
One could say that nothing is natural in this sense, including nature and biology. I’m amenable to that. Agamben sounds like he means this in some of his remarks on life in Means Without End or maybe it’s Man Without Content, on Marx and Gattungswesen and life as not being a biological category at all.
Colin, you got what I meant exactly and put much of it more clearly than I did. Thanks for that. I’m not clear on the form stuff and will have to come back to that after more reading. I’ve never really gotten that stuff in Agamben. Also, the modal meanderings, time and all that, very interesting. I think we’re of a piece here. If you get a chance to read the Althusser collection Philosophy of the Encounter I’d be keen to hear your thoughts. That’s the direction I want to go with this stuff. Historical genesis (encounter) was not necessary but contingent, the same goes for historical persistence up to the present (Althusser calls this “take”, as in “it didn’t take” or “we’ll see if it takes), and historical presence in(to) the future. All that is solid may well melt into air, as it were. So yes to this:
“nothing that is actual can not-be at the same time as it is. But that would still leave the future open (even if we can’t change the past), and affirm the possibility-potentiality of removing the contingency that lets what’s actual be rather than not-be.” Gotta run.
cheers,
Nate
Nate, I would suggest then that you’re talking about something other than bare life; I think what you’re talking about is the phenomenon of “social death,” for what it’s worth.
hi Ken,
I’m not sure I understand the difference, or it may be that we have a disagreement here that’s not been explicitly posed yet. What do you mean by social death? How do you understand the term ‘bare life’ as distinct from what you call social death?
take care,
Nate
Social death is a term you see in sociology studies, mostly about the constitutive/interactional force played by certain structurally marginalized groups. The idea of social death is the idea that the group suffers severe impositions on its ability to act, though of course those impositions are never complete, and the capacity abounds to make even social ostracization a form of inventional resource. For a look at it in the context of the euthanasia debate (a good example), check out Michael Hyde’s _The Call of Conscience_, which is also full of fun Heidegger/Levinas stuff.
For me, whatever our symbolic/rhetorical differences (which you’re right, we probably won’t agree on), I cannot find myself agreeing that “bare life is a way of considering/counting people in connection with other practices of acting upon them (interacting with them). Bare life (like race, gender, and class position) is not an essence but is social”. I consider bare life to be essential, which isn’t to say it does not follow as a consequence of certain procedures that are social in form and content, but rather is to say that bare life exceeds any social determination, that it expresses certain phenomenological (or depending, psychological) operations that are integral to human being as such. I’m thinking here of shame, mostly, though guilt and anxiety play a lesser part. And I’m not sure it’s possible to approach the issue of the form of life if its counterpoint – bare life – is reduced to a social determination.
hi Ken,
Thanks for clarifying. I don’t think we’re going to agree on this issue of bare life then. For what it’s worth, I think you and Agamben may also disagree, though I’m not sure. He seems to equivocate sometimes. I’ll chase up the reference where he seems to be opposed to any kind of notion of biological life, which would I think imply a rejection of the idea of the human being as such – any such concept is political (or at least potentially so). I might be wrong on the Agambenology here – he certainly does sound on occasion like he’s saying what you’re saying. I don’t like those moments in his work, but there are those other moments which are in tension where he doesn’t sound like he’s saying this at all. All of which is part of what motivates my present writing on him.
That aside, I’m not saying alles ist construction, in case that wasn’t clear. I do want to say there’s a world there, materiality etc. My claim that “bare life isn’t bare life but counted-as-bare-life” wouldn’t make sense without that. I’m just not clear what claims one can support about that world, I think it’s something like a noumena such that any claim about it is subject to epistemological questions and such that ontological claims do very little work. So my argument at this point is not omni-constructivist so much as a claim that bare life is constructed. I expect this does little to change our disagreement, though.
cheers,
Nate
I’m not even sure it’s a substantive disagreement. Though the fact that I believe bare life to be essential does not imply that I think it biological, and the conflation of the two in the previous comment may hint at another component of our own divergence in interpretive perspectives, but whatever. I do think that with Agamben, he’s never far from Heidegger on the question of essence, or on the question of interpretation, and I think that, given his arguments in Remnants, he’s never too far from an early Levinas either. As a result, I have a tendency to resist interpretations of Agamben that run counter to this, for instance (not that you’re necessarily doing this) those that see Agamben as an updated and refined Foucault, and that stress his focus on something like a conditions of emergence. He’s much more attentive to the law than Heidegger, to be sure, and in that institutional attention has much to do with Foucault, but I’ve always considered this a channeling of content and not of form, and a choosing of a particular terrain more than an effort to understand anything like social construction.
Of course, there’s no reason he must be read as I have read him, even if I think I’m comfortable with my take on it, so go to 🙂
hi Ken,
Fair enough. For what it’s worth, the little bits of Heidegger and Levinas I’ve read and the stuff I’ve read using them has left me cold and I have a sort of knee-jerk response against that stuff. As a result I also don’t know that material at all well, so I’ll leave that to Colin to discuss with you if he wants, as he’s read a decent amount of both of them and takes them more seriously than I do as thinkers to wrestle with.
All that aside, I don’t get what you mean about bare life as an essence. Do you mean it as something like an existential fact, people will die etc? If so, I’m sympathetic but don’t see what work gets done by the concept. If not, then I just don’t get it (a result of my not having any Heidegger, itself a result of both my thickheadedness [he’s really hard to read!] and pigheadedness [who needs him!]).
take care,
Nate
Hi Nate and Kenneth…
I agree with both of you. I very much like Nate’s attempt to mute the ontological implications of Agamben’s argument about bare life. I like it because it’s Levinasian rather than Heideggerean… Ethics (or politics, if we leave aside Levinas’ hostility to politics) is first philosophy, not ontology. It’s more important to talk about the condition of life, and the way it’s treated, than it is to talk about what life is. That’s not really Levinas’ ethics, and it doesn’t committ us to the Levinasian polemic against ontology (ontology as the philosophy of imperialism and war), but it means we resist defining or even talking about the “essence” of life wherever we can. Agamben’s tendency to see life in terms of a “potential” is consistent with this resistance. A “potentiality” is not an “essence,” because an “essence” is an “actuality,” at least in Aristotle. But Kenneth isn’t wrong, because for Heidegger “possibility stands higher than actuality,” so “essence” pertains to possibility-potentiality, not actuality. On that count, I think Agamben has found a middle way between Levinas and Heidegger (partly through a better reading of Heidegger than Levinas was willing to present). But that’s why he gives us the “essence” of life without any content. The kind of life that Agamben describes as “form-of-life,” and which he thinks Dasein exemplifies, is utterly devoid of specific determinations. It’s a “form” of life, in the sense that it doesn’t have any content, apart from its own “potentiality.” Agamben tries to work in things like facticity through his discussion of singularity in the Coming Community, but I’m not sure that makes his discussion any more “substantive” or “material.” I think he wants to and has to maintain the ambiguity of life and its capacity to take different forms, which he associates with human freedom at the end of Language and Death.
I hope all of this makes some kind of sense. I just kind of dashed it off…
hi Colin,
I’m out of my league here, having read one, maybe two essays by Heidegger and Levinas. Still – if life and form-of-life for Agamben is contentless, does that give these a negative function in his work? (The same goes for the not-actual part of potentiality, potentiality-not-to as being as much a part of life as potentiality-to.) Or, instead of negative function, relativizing function?
cheers,
Nate
My reference to Levinas was probably ill-advised… I probably should have just said “ontology isn’t first philosophy. Ethics and politics are more important, and even prior in the order of investigation and analysis.”
I think there is a negative and a positive utility to the form-of-life discussion. The negative utility is the dis-identification of life with its political form. That lets of say that a life can still be “worth living,” even if it is not recognized as such. The positive utility comes from the negative utility, and defines the nature of freedom. Freedom is the capacity to define one’s way of life. This can be expressed in the collective project whereby political “forms” are imposed on life. Or it can be expressed in the absence of such a project, or against such a project. In that case, you could say that one is free to live the way one wants. Affirming that freedom is a positive utility of the form-of-life talk.
The talk of contentlessness and ambiguity that I indulged myself in is just my attempt to explain why freedom doesn’t consist in the content of one form of life rather than another, but the capacity to decide one’s form of life, or just to live it, which implies a possibility to decide and/or to live, and which is a potentiality which is not or not always determined. Again, I’m just dashing this off, so please excuse me if it makes no sense.
hi Colin,
Makes tons of sense to me. This stuff makes sense also in regard to Agamben’s discussion of the problem of (or just the possibility of) evil in Potentialities, in the context of his discussion of (im)potentiality and, I think, freedom. (That’s all I’ve read of the book so I don’t know if he talks about that elsewhere too.) This suggests Agamben as on a “side” with Adorno, Benjamin, and Badiou (negative dialectics, now-time that blasts apart, truth as that which bores a hole). I like that, as I’ve come back to negativity. Again if you can get a copy of the Althusser collection, Philosophy of the Encounter, I’d love to hear what you think of it. It reads fast and there’s a lot here that resonates I think.
take care,
Nate
I’ve edited the post slightly. I took out the prole references as they’re not needed for the argument at this point. I also expanded on my three points.