Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Kishik is the author of Wittgenstein's Form of Life (2008) and co-translator, with Stefan Pedatella, of Agamben's What Is an Apparatus? (Stanford 2009) and Nudities (Stanford 2010). He is a fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin, though he usually lives in New York.

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The Power of Life

Stanford University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................viAbbreviations of Agamben's Major Works.....................................viiIntroduction: Life in Venice...............................................1The Philosophical Subject..................................................1There Is Something Inside the Text.........................................4Nonparticipation...........................................................7The Mirror of Narcissus....................................................10The Specter of Venice......................................................131 Dialectic of Endarkenment................................................17Darkness Visible...........................................................17Biopolitics in Miniature...................................................19The Biopolitical Ladder....................................................25The Work of Dance in the Age of Sacred Lives...............................27Ethics After Auschwitz 32, The Potentiality of Thought.....................37The Color of Potentiality..................................................422 Feather-Light Rubble.....................................................45Zarathustra's Whisper......................................................45Sharpening Knives..........................................................49Emergency Brake............................................................51Above the Weight of the World..............................................54The Stillest Word..........................................................56Brachylogy.................................................................61Bricolage..................................................................63Ingenium...................................................................65Breathless Lingering.......................................................67The Philosopher and the Dog................................................703 Present While Absent.....................................................73The Politics of Presence...................................................73The Spiral of the Possible.................................................77I Am Whatever I Am.........................................................82Becoming Imperceptible.....................................................86Life and Violence..........................................................924 How to Imagine a Form of Life............................................99Notes......................................................................121Index......................................................................131

Chapter One

Darkness Visible

"Let there be darkness": it is hard to resist placing these words in the opening chapter of a book dedicated to Agamben's philosophy of life. "Light," he writes, "is only the coming to itself of the dark" (IP, 119). There seems to be little hope in his mind that light really has the capacity to enlighten. A light can only flicker, like a distant star, and the darkness that surrounds it is not meant to understand it. In fact, even the "total darkness" of the nightly sky is for him "the testimony of a time in which the stars did not yet shine" (RA, 162). Even Arendt's Gnostic faith in the power of singular bright "men in dark times" to ever more slightly make a difference in this world does not seem to play the same role in Agamben's thought. Be that as it may, he also appears to be possessed by an exigent demand to which he cannot not answer: it is difficult to miss (though many still do) that there is a constant attempt throughout his writings to bear witness to a certain light or, at least, to a glimmer. If you have ever tried to catch fireflies with your hand on a hot summer night, you may have experienced this curious philosophical comportment. Call it, if you wish, a dialectic of endarkenment, by which I mean a perpetual attempt "to perceive, in the darkness of the present, this light that strives to reach us but cannot" (WA, 46).

Consider, for example, the Homo Sacer series of books, Agamben's major contribution to the field of political philosophy, and compare it with The Republic, the founding text in this tradition. The most famous image in Plato's book is of a prisoner who is released from his chains to face the sunlight of truth, of this gloomy cave from which the reader is supposed to emerge with a little help from the philosopher. In Agamben's work, the experience seems to be the reverse: in the middle of life, while sitting on a comfortable chair with a lamp and maybe even a hot drink in a reasonably secure corner of the earth, the reader suddenly finds herself in a dark forest. This experience echoes not only the first lines of Dante's Inferno but also the opening scene of Kafka's The Trial, where Joseph K., the protagonist of the story, wakes up one morning to discover that he is charged in a shadowy court of committing an unspecified crime. Our life, with its basic rights and liberties, is usually protected by the laws of a state; but it can also easily be transformed into what Agamben calls a bare or naked life, which is stripped of its way or form of life. With a blink of an eye, a flick of a pen, or a press of a button, any "good citizen" from any "respected country" (it does not matter whether it is democratic or not) can be excluded from the state-run "protection plan" and thus be exposed to random acts of violence. Even as we live our seemingly meaningful and civil everyday lives, we should not forget that, from the perspective of the powers that be, we may very well be perceived as no more than a mere fact, a docile body, or a simple number, which can and should be governed, monitored, disciplined, and controlled. Agamben thus observes that "in the eyes of authority—and maybe rightly so—nothing looks more like a terrorist than the ordinary man" (WA, 23).

But what at first appears to the human eye as pitch dark—similar to what, in the initial ascension from the cave, appears to Plato's prisoner as the blinding light of the sun—simply takes time to adjust to. You will certainly begin to discern your surroundings after spending a few seconds in an unlit room, even though objects may still look monochromatic (as Agamben's work might seem at times). What you then see, however, is "no light; but rather darkness visible," to echo Milton's Paradise Lost. We therefore need to find a way to cope with the shadows inside the cave that Plato deems to be mere appearances in a time when the burning sun—understood here not only as a metaphor for absolute truth or God but also for the absolute king or sovereign—is possibly undergoing an eclipse. This, however, does not mean that we now have no choice but to live in a relativistic or anarchic chaos, as some nihilistic readings of the allegory of the cave may lead one to assume. "Because human beings neither are nor have to be any essence, any nature, or any specific destiny," Agamben writes, "their condition is the most empty and the most insubstantial of all: it is the truth. What remains hidden from them is not something behind appearance, but rather...