Thread by @ZoharAtkins

Giorgio Agamben (1942-present), Italian philosopher and philologist, is one of the most original, wide-ranging, and virtuosic thinkers and writers alive. This @threadapalooza is my tribute to a mind who is so much more than his headline-making politics.

But for the uninitiated, let's get in a brief word about Agamben's politics. After 9/11 turned down a position at NYU because entering the US would require him to submit himself to biometric finger-printing. Distrustful of the surveillance state this was too much. 2

More recently, and to the chagrin of left-liberals, Agamben has been a voice from the anti-capitalist left critical of Covid lockdowns, seeing the pandemic largely as a pretext for the consolidation of governmental power. Agamben is more of an anarchist than a Marxist. 3

Agamben's translator now sees his Covid "negationism" as integral to his thought. Whether or not this is true, I don't think Agamben is most fruitfully read as a political theorist. 4

Agamben is a thinker whose themes repeat like leitmotifs in a great opera: Homo Sacer, the Muselmann, bare life, the State of exception, aporia, potentiality, the king's two bodies; his pattern finding is beautiful, elegant, deep, haunted, learned. Learn from this master. 5

Before we get to substance, let's just appreciate Agamben's singularity as a syncretist. Zizek's schtick is Lacan and Hegel + pop culture. Agamben's signature is more arcane. It's Heidegger and Benjamin + Grotius, Roman Digests, Kabbalah, Hermes Trismegistus, and Melville. 6

Lots of people are widely read, few find continuity throughout. Whether he's reading Paul, Scholem, Artaud, Kafka, Strauss, Schmitt, Arendt, Augustine or Origen, you don't care, because Agamebn is making the text feel like it's alive and speaking to everything else. 7

Agamben is an intellectual omnivore, a rare feat in the age of disciplinarity and specialization & his knowledge of many languages allows him to do Midrash, excavating dozens of possible readings for each text & showing how these different readings affect history. 8

Most scholars are conservative, they stick to what they can confirm, which is pretty narrow. Agamben is wildly speculative, which annoys a lot of people. But his speculative mode allows him to put out the kind of works that merit being called primary sources. 9

One reason I was put off academia is that I want to write and think like a Heidegger or Arendt or Strauss, but you can't get an academic job (or even pass a dissertation) writing this way. Agamben is one of the few still alive whose work is riveting and not simply "precise". 10

There's another thing that makes Agamben super rare as a creature. 11

20th century thinkers they don't really engage each other deeply; they are broken up into schools and groups. Benjamin and Strauss are worlds apart. Arendt & Scholem were antagonists. None of these folks read Derrida or Foucault. Agamben moderates their conversation. 12

He bridges thinkers that all humanities grad students read, arranging them, almost like a Talmudic editor, as voices on one page. (Agamben also reads Talmud!) 13

Not only does he do this with so called continental thinkers, but Agamben reads everyone, including analytic thinkers. He reads literary theory, literature, legal philosophy, analytic philosophers, technologists. No topic is off topic. 14

Ok, you might say, he's eclectic, but it's more than that. He's generous of spirit, like someone who throws a good party, bringing together people who might otherwise not mix. His intellectual allegiance cuts across aesthetic and partisan lines. 15

At the writerly intellectual level, he's the biggest liberal I know, in the sense of wanting to learn from everyone. We should give him massive honor for this posture alone. 16

Agamben writes in a tradition of ontology and metaphysics, but his focus is on politics. That is, he's interested in what's true, but he's primarily focused on what human society is like depending on how it's organized. Still, he's kind of mystical...17

So that means that political life is a reflection of theological or metaphysical reality in some way. 18

Agamben points out that the word "Economics" which means law of the home is the same word that early Church theologians used when talking about the trinity. Even heaven has an economy. 19

Conversely, all theories of value have a kind of theological residue. We find this point in David Graeber's book on debt. Agamben thus looks to Biblical stories like the golden calf to try to understand the history of money. Right or wrong, you gotta love it. 20

If you are a happy go lucky neo-liberal utilitarian, you might dismiss Agamben as just reactionary romanticism of the leftist variety. Agamben's erudition may seem at best useless and at worst irresponsible. 21

I may not persuade you otherwise, but you'd still be wrong to discard him. Agamben is a diagnostician of paradox. What you do with the discovery of paradox is up to you. 22

Still, we need to address the theme of uselessness because this is a big theme in his work. Agamben finds a messianic power and redemptive meaning in figures who are drop outs, figures who are abject, who are useless. 23

One such figure is Bartleby in Herman Melville's story, who stops serving as a scribe, but also doesn't quit. He's a liminal figure because he just sits there saying "I would prefer not to" but he doesn't say what he would prefer not to do. 24

In his reading of Kafka's famous parable Before the Law, a man from the country comes and spends his whole life waiting to being admitted to the Law...25

For Agamben, the hopeful moment comes when the door to the law is shut, because only a door that is shut can be opened. An open door cannot be opened and is thus more forbidding, paradoxically. 26

Bartleby and the man from the country aren't happy folks, they are despondent. But Agamben also finds something liberatory in their pov, because they are not cogs in some utility function, they open up something through their being off. 27

One of my favorite ideas from Agamben is in his book of essays Potentialities. He develops the concept of potentiality from Aristotle in a strange counter-intuitive direction. 28

To have the potential to do something requires that you also have the potential NOT to do it. The violinist isn't simply one who plays violin, but one who can NOT play violin. A non violinist doesn't have the potential not to play. They don't even have the option. 29

It's fun to think this way. A doctor has the ability to practice medicine, and also not to. A non doctor lacks the ability to not practice medicine. It's a beautiful shift in frame. 30

Agamben is constantly taking familiar phenomena and making them new again. Take the categories of holy and profane on which he writes, esp. in his delightful book "Profanations." 31

The holy and the profane aren't nouns, says Agamben. They aren't regions or places. They are vectors. To sanctify and to profane. Things are always moving in one or the other direction. 32

To make holy is to remove from use. To profane is to use or use up. Bartleby is a figure of the holy. Uselessness is a holy state; it's not good, it just is a part of life. 33

But there's an ominousness to the holy, because it's associated with the exceptional, and the exceptional can be exceptionally good or bad, abject or sovereign. It's lonely at both the top and the bottom, as it were. 34

In his most famous and influential book, Homo Sacer, which is a trilogy, in fact, Agamben develops the figure of the person who has no legal reality, but still has a physical reality. 35

The origins of Homo Sacer (sacred man) are this: he is a botched sacrifice. Sent into battle to be killed by the enemy, he escapes, wounded. Now what? He shouldn't exist, but he does. Agamben says he says Zoe, but not Bios. He is a bare life, but has no quality of life. 36

The Greeks have two words for life. Zoe gets us to zoology; bios to biology. Zoe describes physiological functioning; bios describes social and legal and other dimensions that make human life what it is. 37

The Greeks talk about the bios agathos, the good life, but never the zoe agathos. Rather, it's the zoon logon or zoon politikon, the animal with language or the political animal. But being a zoe isn't a compliment it's just a brute fact. 38

Agamben makes the point that it's possible to dehumanize people by rendering them just zoological. Refugees are one example of this, but Agamben develops the category further. If you're sitting in a detention center at a checkpoint or sitting in Guantanamo, you're a bare life 39

You're rights have been suspended. You're a person on the books, but not in experience. 40

Another figure on whom Agamben draws is the mythic figure of the Holocaust Muselmann (related to the word Muslim) a person who is so hunched over and submitted that they are scarcely noticed. 41

While a normal prisoner might be punished for breaking a norm, the Muselmann is so ghastly nobody even notices or cares if he, say, bumps into a guard. 42

Drawing for his account on Primo Levi, Agamben says that one cannot say "I am a Muselmann" but only "I was a Muselmann," since the Muselmann is such an extreme figure as to lack any presence to himself, any language. 43

These extreme portrayals make Agamben loathsome to those who think the world is basically good and getting better, because he's saying look at the heart of Western thought is a terrible problem. The figure of bare life is paradigmatic and not going away. 44

But Agamben isn't just interested in the exceptionally miserable. He thinks that the sovereign and the sacred man are mirrors of one another. If you are a king or a lawmaker you are also both inside and outside the law, and this means your experience is also kind of strange. 45

Agamben draws on Carl Schmitt a lot, but I don't think he believes in dictatorship or states of exception as good. He simply thinks that they are a structural feature of life that we need to figure out how to address. 46

Just as the sovereign decides on the state of exception, there is another person who is excluded as a result, a figure for whom law doesn't apply. You can't solve this problem of the exception with better laws or better lawmakers. Technocracy is too limited in scope. 47

Again, though, whether you like it or not, the sovereign and the refugee or the suspended terrorist, or l'havdil the camp inmate are all holy in the sense of extra-judicial; their reality is more than their "use." Utilitarians miss this phenomenon. Eudaimonists miss it, too. 48

The idea that the top and bottom mirror each other and both involve paradox is super interesting and under-developed in mass culture. Often, the focus is either on defending hierarchy or rejecting it. 49

Agamben is like it's terrible to be Bartleby but it's also freeing. It's good to be the king, but it's also massively stifling. You're basically disassociated. You have two bodies. You want to know who has ontological dysphoria: the person making the law. 50

If you're looking for a moral theorist who will tell you what to do and what's right and wrong, don't read Agamben. If you're looking for someone who bucks the boring left-right right distinction and returns to ancient roots without being nostalgic, he's a must. 51

He's an archaeologist. He's saying that our lives are still ruled by ambiguities in texts written thousands of years ago. Very idealistic for a Marxist! I love it. But also this is a similar vibe to Benjamin. The best Marxists are not reductionist. 52

If you read Agamben for long enough you'll return to his favorite word, aporia, meaning loss of way. 53

Aporia is the moment in a discourse where the argument reaches an impasse, due to a contradiction. For Agamben, aporia isn't just a rare event, or something to be overcome, it's sort of a mainstay of philosophy, of politics, of aesthetics, of life. 54

What is the relationship between the word used in a grammar text book as an example and the rule it is trying to set by example? Agamben gives this example as an example of the paradox of giving an example! How does one thing stand for other things without also being unique? 55

Representation is so hot right now, but who gets to represent whom?

Kafka famously said what do I have to do with the Jews, I hardly have anything to do with myself. 56

Agamben gets this. He doesn't accept a theory of self that sees it as a coherent whole; he doesn't accept a theory of groups that sees them as coherent wholes; he doesn't accept anything as a coherent whole. 57

Rather, you might say, things are brought together, unified, by contradiction, by exception, by example, by exclusion, by disassociation, by doubling. 58

The theme of the double or dopplegänger is big in mysticism. In Kabbalah, even the divine has a kind of evil twin, as it were, the "sitra d'achra" or other side. 59

The Kabbalistic concept means that good things are always at risk of becoming their opposite and vice versa. So that is why the abject Bartleby is also a figure of hope. 60

In a famous Talmudic passage, the messiah sits by the gates of Rome, disguised as a leper. Why? 61

Well one possibility is that the leper is an outcast and so is the messiah, so the saving power will come from the dregs, from those who aren't bought in. 62

In @mgurri 's terms, drawing on the work of Mary Douglas, the messianic dimension arrives not from the center, but from the border. 63

This sentiment should be familiar to Jews and Christians. Esther is a saving power, so is Joseph. Both are insider outsiders. Jesus loves prostitutes and the disabled. 64

It's also become a myth in Silicon Valley, which sees contrarianism as the source of creative disruption. I think there's a common enough view (ironically) that great founders are on the spectrum or off in some way, because this means they are likely to be disagreeable. 65

So Agamben is super trad in a way but not because he's orthodox. He's rather interested in recuperating the discarded. Tradition is interesting precisely because it's not in vogue today amongst the liberal "nones." 66

[Will be back with 34 more tweets on Agamben after a break.]

Ok, and we're back (for the time that remains). The Time that Remains is Agamben's commentary on Walter Benjamin and Paul explicating the concept of "now-time," the idea that any moment has a radical potential to bring about a sudden change (revelation, apocalypse, natality?) 67

Agamben wants to show a theological kernel at the heart of modern. Here, he agrees with Schmitt that all political concepts have a theological analogue. But not only Schmitt; it's really in Scholem and mysticism, generally. It's the concept of "as above, so below." 68

Metaphysics and politics mirror one another. 69

You can't not have a politics and you can't not have a theology. That will provoke everyone, I think, but especially those who are either secular or anti-religious. Agamben really needs to be read as a post-secular thinker. Someone who sees religion as inescapable. 70

Angels are real, not because they exist, but because they are shorthand for phenomena that are uncanny and familiar: bots, algorithms, snapchat screen shots that go into digital flame upon arrival...71

The world is weirder than we know and at the same time more traditional than we admit. Maybe we don't read sestinas as much (the perfect messianic form for Agamben owing to the repetition in difference), but 72

Soccer games are really re-enactments of battles between gods. Plays are adult gestures of a desire for childhood play. Toys are idols. The world actually is enchanted though we live in an age of mass production, mass culture, and mass reproduction. 73

For better and for worse the holy is everywhere, in potential. And so is the profane. The world may be flat vis a vis global trade, but it's quite uneven vis a vis vibe. 74

Political thinkers of clash of civilizations miss that the fundamental clash is a clash of vibes (and vibe shifts), between the pull to rules and the pull to exception within us all...75

the conflict between normie, comfortable life and the enduring reality of sacrifice, waste, excess, and, yes, violence is not one that can be dialectically overcome, as it were. It's just a tension, for now, of this life. 76

Not to equate everyone at all, but within each person is a kind of mini sovereign and a mini homo sacer, and both are abject and both are glorious in their own way. Our lives are sublime, filled with all kinds of paradoxical agency-in-non-agency; useful-uselessness. 77

Purely, philosophically, metaphysically, you can't say this theory or this rule is bad because if you follow it to its root you arrive at an aporia, a contradiction in which good and bad come together...78

As God tells it in Isaiah, I make good and bad, I the Lord do all these things. 79

So yeah if you're a long termist trying to optimize your funding strategy for non profit grantmaking, what can Agamben prescribe? Not much. He's as useless as Bartleby. 80

But there may be a meta use to recognizing the importance or just the reality of those who only stand and wait, those who serve as witness to something other than the instrumental. 81

In this sense, Agamben is a kind of modern monastic, and I think this is good. We should have some monastic life even if it's not for everyone. 82

Monastics come in all forms, not just those who take vows of abstinence. The dilly-dallyer is also a kind of monastic, as is the artist, as is the thinker. The young Agamben was a student of Heidegger's, sitting in on his seminars in the 60s (I believe). 83

At this time, Heidegger had taken a quietist turn, arguing for the importance of practicing contemplation rather than activism. But, the young Agamben was a fiery Marxist-anarchist involved in post-68 radical student politics. Dislike the fusion, love the fusionism! 84

I think the meta lesson of Agamben is not his own solution, but the sheer complexity of the cocktail he brewed out of disparate sources. He also makes a cameo in Passolini's film Gospel According to sT. Matthew. 85

He's a person who is engaged with world events, but also has a bias to scholarship and contemplation as the ultimate form of "resistance." self aggrandizing? foolish? naive? whatever. I resonate with the old school move in a way. 86

Reminds me of

Of the idea from Heidegger that “the most useful is what is useless. Or from Jewish tradition, the concept of Shabbat, a day of rest. Of leisure. Of highest service. Or the Buddhist line “don’t just do something, sit there.” 87

I think Agamben is wildly brilliant even when incorrect or over reaching but that’s not the point. The point is thinking as a kind of mystical contemplative artistic exercise regardless of where it leads. The pious person prays. 88

For GA, the intellectual who is pious connects the dots, and awaits what arises. 89

The standard etymology of religion is that it’s re-binding. Ligion from ligament. 90

But Agamben defines it from re-legere, to reread. Religion is about returning to scripture in broad sense again and again. Religion is repetition. 91

Heidegger describes this as the retrieve of one’s thrownness. It’s not about going back but about acknowledging one is already indebted. 92

For Heidegger the philosophical tradition is one of forgetting. So too for Benjamin, for whom truth is found at the margins, in figures like martyrs and idlers and collectors and hashish tokers. 93

For GA, what is forgotten is not Being but paradox. Human life is dual, godly and beastly, legal and lawless, language bearing and infant. 94

What is forgotten is the mystery of potentiality, the discontinuity contained in continuity and the continuity contained in discontinuity. But it is forgotten so that we might remember. Forgetfulness is the potential for memory. 95

We are constituted by amnesia and no Freudian shrink can fully help us out of this grounding condition. The closest we come to the clearing is in extreme situations of non being. 96

Situations of meditation verging on death but also scenes of abjection and despondency touching the asymptote where life loses definition. 97

It’s a kind of Franciscan model—the poor shall inherit the earth, but stripped of romance and morality. Just bare description of how it is that the worst off and least among us many also have access to some basic truths the rest of us cannot know. 98

The truths are universal and perspectival, common and subjective, generic and situational, high and low, available in the form of philosophy and in actual history. 99

Following Heidegger, Benjamin, and Paul, Agamben finds truth to be an event not a proposition or doctrinal conclusion. But the meaning of this event has yet to reach us. It is greeting us, searching for us from the future, our potential, our most intimate non-being. 100

If you liked this you can subscribe to my Substacks and podcast linked in bio. My other mega threads are all here in this growing library!

https://mobile.twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1372675033336778755