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ABSTRACT
This article deals with Giorgio Agamben's late work, arguing that Agamben’s trans secular critique of capitalist political theology is incepted from the historical conditions of late neoliberalism – with its focus on the personal “self” as its anchor. It suggests that to understand Agamben’s trans secular reaction to late neoliberalism we need historicized his thought. As historicized, it can reveal the dialectical limits of neoliberalism. To do so, the article reads late Agamben texts next to contemporary Marxist thinkers Alenka Zupančič and her theory of comedy, Todd McGowan and his analysis of Capitalism and desire and Sianne Ngai and her conceptualization of zaniness as the aesthetic representation of neoliberal precariousness. Moving on, the article focuses on Agamben’s late book Pulcinella. It argues that the book not only expresses the limits of neoliberalism but also uncovers hope and promises for comic theological renewal beyond neoliberalism and its cult of the self.
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Notes
1 Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism.
2 Razinsky, “Better then they know themselves? Algorithms and Subjectivity.”
3 Andrejevic. Automated Media, 65 (for example). Rouvroy, “The End(s) of Critique: Data Behaviorism Versus due Process.”
4 Kotsko, Neoliberalism’s Demons, 18.
5 Han, Psychopolitics, 20.
6 Zupančič, The Odd One in, 6.
7 Han, Psychopolitics, 33.
8 Smith, Affect and American Literature in the age of Neoliberalism, 3.
9 Ibid., 4.
10 Ibid.
11 Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 11.
12 For example, Agamben, The Sacrament of Language, 11, see also 61–6.
13 Kotsko, Agamben’s Philosophical Trajectory, 154.
14 Agamben, Profanations, 87–8.
15 Agamben, Creation and Anarchy, 66. See also Prozorov, Agamben and Politics, 129
16 Christiaens, “Neliberalism and the Right to be Lazy” deals with Agamben with relation to neoliberalism and focuses on the concept of potentiality. Kotsko argues that “when the hegemony of global Capitalism seemed most unassailable” Agamben became concerned with neoliberalism (Kotsko, Agamben’s Philosophical Trajectory, 211).
17 Much in the vein of other Italian Marxists from the “workerism” strain, like Mario Tronti, “Bifo” Berardi and Antonio Negri. However, Agamben is not usually considered next to such thinkers.
18 Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 95.
19 Kotsko, Neoliberalism’s Demons, 23.
20 Ibid., 187–8.
21 Kotsko, The Prince of this World, 200. Kotsko investigates the genealogy of this concept in The Prince of this World, while Agamben himself dedicated his brief Karman, as well as The Kingdom and the Garden for the geneology of this trap, as well as for examination of ways out it. Han offers a similar account of freedom as what allows for exploitation in Psychopolitics (for example page X).
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., 199.
24 Ibid., 13.
25 Ibid., 15.
26 Illouz, The End of Love.
27 Cohen-Lustig, Makers of Worlds, 32.
28 Ibid.
29 Illouz, Why Love Hurts.
30 Rak, Boom! Manufacturing Memoire for the Free Market.
31 Greenwald-Smith, Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism, 3.
32 McGowan, Capitalism and Desire, 220.
33 Ibid., 223.
34 Ibid., 225.
35 Agamben, “Desiring”, Profanations, 53.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., 54.
38 Agamben, Profanations, 20.
39 Brian O’Conner, Idleness, 30.
40 Agamben, Profanations, 21.
41 Ibid.
42 Greenwald-Smith, Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism, 7.
43 Agamben, Profanations, 21.
44 Zupančič, The Odd One in, 27.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid., 90.
47 Ibid., 78.
48 Ibid., 91.
49 Ibid., 32.
50 Ibid., 95.
51 Agamben, Profanations, 22.
52 Ibid., 51–73.
53 Agamben, The Adventure, 91.
54 “Magic and Happiness”.
55 Kotsko, Agamben’s Philosophical Trajectory.
56 Agamben, Profanations, 23–9, 53–5, for example.
57 Agamben, Pulcinella, 4.
58 Ibid., 10.
59 Ibid., 43.
60 Zupančič, The Odd One in, 93.
61 Agamben, Pulcinella, 122.
62 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 204.
63 Agamben, The Kingdom and the Garden, 87.
64 Ibid.
65 Agamben, The Coming Community, 62.
66 Ibid., 84–5.
67 And others, for example “Bifo” Berardi in Chaos and Poetry.
68 Ngai, Zany, Interesting, Cute, 7.
69 Ibid., 14–15.
70 Ibid., 7–8.
71 Agamben, Pulcinella, 49.
72 Ibid., 107. Even diverting from Agamben’s own infatuation with the melancholic (against Capitalist productivity), that was mostly contained within the pages of the early Stanzas.
73 Ibid.
74 Ngai, Zany, Interesting, Cute, 30.
75 Ibid.
76 Agamben, Pulcinella, 93.
77 Ngai, Zany, Interesting, Cute, 11.
78 See Ronel, “Idle Laborl.”
79 Agamben, The End of the Poem, 112.
80 Agamben, Pulcinella, 57.
81 The same thing happens with the creature’s voice. In Agamben’s early work, he traces the process of anthropogenesis (becoming human) using the voice category. Human voice – what he refers to as “the Voice” – is always the presupposition via negation of our animal voice that remains trapped, excluded, and banned (Agamben, Infancy and History, 1–13). However, the voice reappears in Pulcinella, as the creature at stake speaks in an artificial tongue, as the puppeteer uses a “small brass instrument, the Piveat.” As Kotsko explains, “Pulcinella’s voice is not the voice of the puppeteer, who has to go through difficult training to learn to speak intelligibly using [a] device, and it is also undeniably artificial.”
82 Zupančič, The Odd One in, 27.
83 Razinsky, “Better then they know themselves,” 395.
84 Ibid., 396.
85 Ibid., 399.
86 According to Ngai, Zaniness is a form of “incessant movement”.
87 Agamben, Pulcinella, 103.
88 Ibid., 104.
89 Razinsky, “Better then they know themselves,” 410.
90 McGowan, Capitalism and Desire, 178.
91 Agamben, The Time that Remains, 40.
92 Kotsko, Agamben’s Philosophical Trajectory.
93 Agamben, “The Assistants”, Profanations.
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Notes on contributors
Yoav Ronel
Dr. Yoav Ronel is a postdoc fellow at the Ben Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, and a lecturer at the Department of Visual and Material Culture, Bezalel Academy for Arts and Design. He completed his PhD in the Department of Hebrew Literature, Ben Gurion University. His current research deals with cultural, literary, and theoretical representations of idleness and labor, focusing on the relations between idleness, late neoliberalism, and culture.