The Power of Life: Agamben and the Coming Politics
David Kishik
Language: English
Pages: 144
ISBN: 0804772304
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
to elaborate in the final years of his life. But the first theme is as much, if not more, fundamentally Deleuzian: “What interested me most in Spinoza,” he writes, “wasn’t his Substance, but the composition of finite modes.”27 He expands this idea in the third and last part of his major book on Spinoza, though it is present across his entire philosophical work, to the extent that, in the letter, it is almost taken for granted. The idea of a single, infinite, and immanent substance, which can be
account, escapes ‘responsibilities,’ escapes the world, takes refuge in the desert, or else in art.”37 Rather, a line of flight is an immobile movement in situ, which must be internal to the very life that one lives at this place and time, as long as one manages to be and not to be in the here and the now, to be absent while present, to be perceptible and imperceptible at the same time. At its best, philosophy functions as a perfect manifestation of this impalpable form of life (maybe this is the
survive even a generation with only naked techniques of holding power,” politics is basically the practice of “giving form to the life of the people.”4 To complicate our basic dichotomy, we must admit that what the power over life is concerned with above all else is how, and not just that, we live. It is only when the powers that be realize that they have not managed to achieve their desired result—that life has not cared to conform to a certain form—that the opposite practice is unleashed: the
automatism and thoughtlessness it functions, and how much of its potentiality or vitality has been exhausted so far. We can even think of all successful institutions (theological, political, juridical, governmental, social, educational, financial, commercial, cultural, artistic, stylistic, linguistic) as fossilized forms of life, as the more or less empty shells of lifeless potentialities. If we wished to study lives from their inception to their petrification, to trace the bygone dynamic power
1975), 40. 36. Smith, “‘I am sure that you are more pessimistic than I am . . . ,’” 121. 37. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 204. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–1940, ed. G. Scholem and T. W. Adorno (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 162. 41. Ibid., 164. 42. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Selected Writings, 1:236. 43. Giorgio Agamben, “Sui limiti della violenza,” Nuovi argumenti 17 (January–March