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ABSTRACT
The article explores the implications of Giorgio Agamben’s The Man Without Content for beliefs necessary to visual art practice. It examines in particular Agamben’s critique of Kantian aesthetics and the use he makes of ideas of historicity. While Agamben has controversial but sometimes insightful and persuasive things to say about the modern art world, specifically aspects of making, spectating and exhibiting, his reading of Kant is distorted by his adoption of a technique of neutralising dialectical oppositions, and then his determination to find in key texts the grounds for this operation. At times Agamben’s critical judgements, uncorrected by the perspective of practice, are indiscriminate and insensitive, and it is difficult to see how his politics escapes quietism or apathy on the one hand or an unwitting convergence with Kantian notions of moral providence on the other.
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Notes
1 See the summary by Christine Korsgaard (Citation1992, 21–26).
2 In Being and Time the emphasis is on the temporal self-understanding of Dasein laid bare by fundamental ontology. Later in Heidegger’s thought historicity or historicality points away from human powers of transcendental self-constitution to receptivity and dependence in relation to the clearing or gift of being. See Pöggeler and Mohanty Citation1973, 53–73. For a comparison of Nietzsche and Heidegger on nihilism, see Rosen Citation1969, 94–139.
3 A forthcoming essay will look at Agamben’s interpretation of Hegel and Heidegger in the second half of The Man Without Content.
4 For an example with respect to recent practice see his incorporation of Vanessa Beecroft’s VB55 into a reflection on the theology of nudity in Agamben (Citation2010).
5 Terms like ‘beauty’, ‘taste’ and ‘genius’ that populate eighteenth and nineteenth century aesthetics have been subject to widespread suspicion and criticism, often understandably so. Here I follow Agamben’s procedure of accepting them as placeholders for notions and practices in which the identity, quality and basis of works of art and instances of nature are proposed, discussed and negotiated today. For a careful analysis of suspicion of the idea of beauty, as well as an impressive defence of its current importance, see Nehamas Citation2010.
6 Artists sometimes present practice as involving ‘not knowing’, not just as an inevitable preliminary but as sought-after throughout the making process; see Fisher and Fortnum Citation2013. Even the close looking characteristic of the activity of drawing, a sort of ‘primal scene’ for many artists, can be thought of as requiring an innocent, unprejudiced gaze. Yet in both cases it is possible to think of ‘not knowing’ as an artifice or strategy, a more or less deliberate epoché or ‘putting to one side’ of familiar looks and purposes.
7 For a concise summary of Heidegger’s critique of an aesthetics rooted in ‘lived experience’ (Erlebnis), see Pippin Citation2014, 100–101.
8 Judith Norman (Citation2000) argues that Hegel is wrong about Friedrich Schlegel’s idea of romantic irony. This matters because Agamben appears to use Hegel’s critique of romanticism as the basis for his notion of the creative-formal principle. She argues that Schlegel adopts Fichte’s supplement to Kant which is designed to answer questions about the origins of noumena. Fichte’s ‘absolute I’ is the transcendental not empirical ego. The externalising process through which the transcendental ego projects aspects of itself as ‘not I’ (or the thing itself) is not a feature of consciousness but its condition. There is nothing individual or singular going on, so nothing characteristic of the ‘romantic genius’. The romantic ironist Hegel attacks, a theoretical figure he attributes to Friedrich Schlegel, is the individual artist who knows that everything she projects can be wilfully, capriciously negated, and that this sequence of projection and dissolution is a full exposition of her powers, in the last analysis more real and substantial than her determinate ‘positing’ or works.
9 Irony has a lengthy and complicated history in the modern arts, at its stylistic and critical zenith in the period of postmodernism. Although this fashion is now a distant memory Agamben’s reading of Hegel’s critique of the Schlegel’s romanticism remains relevant. Outwith a limited range of sacrosanct ‘issues’, it can require courage and imagination to risk ‘post-ironic belief’, particularly in the continuing artistic potential of a specific medium like painting, ironically perhaps given that painting is currently quite fashionable. There may be room here for Agamben’s therapy, dissolving the tension between the involuntary ironist and the ethical dogmatist.
10 The long tradition of thinking about community includes Aristotle and Hegel, and more recently Amitai Etzioni, Robert Bellah, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, Richard Sennett, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello and Seyla Benhabib. See also the overview of communitarianism by Daniel Bell (Citation2020).
11 A point Rutter (Citation2010, 22–23) makes in relation to Friedrich Schlegel.
12 See the interesting discussion of Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece in Chapter 2.
13 Kant does not equate this pleasurable feeling with an ‘objective sensation’ like a perception of ‘blue’. Colour perception may be pleasurable but still not qualify as beautiful. We might also assume that disinterest applies to both what is represented in a work of art and the work itself.
14 For aspects of the complexity see for example Pluhar’s ‘Translator’s Introduction’, lxi -lxvi, in Kant Citation1987; also Henrich Citation1992.
15 Agamben makes a similar point later in The Man Without Content (Citation1999a), 68–93.
16 Inoperativity (désœuvrement) is an important feature of Agamben’s philosophical lexicon. See discussion by Murray Citation2010, 33–55.
17 For a critical account of Agamben’s political philosophy and related aesthetic matters see ‘The Ethical Turn in Aesthetics and Politics’ in Rancière Citation2010.
18 For Agamben on the relationship between Benjamin, Scholem and Jewish mysticism see Agamben Citation1999b.
19 Yovel (Citation1980, 122) summarises the teleological principle applying to human action as ‘the assertion that the given world is highest good in potentia, and that human praxis can make it so actually’. He also notes that none of these convictions prove or rest on the existence of God but solely on ‘the primacy of moral consciousness’.
20 The idea of a life of exile or of the foreigner as an active embrace of messianic time, in contrast with katoikia, the time of institutions and governments, is lucidly set out by Agamben in The Church and the Kingdom (Citation2012). For insights into Agamben’s views about the relationship with the culture of institutions see Michael Phillipson Texts 7 and 14 in his Art’s Plight Archive (https://artsplight.michaelphillipson-arts.co.uk/texts).
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Ian Heywood
Ian Heywood studied painting at Maidstone College of Art and sociology and social theory at Goldsmiths’ College. His doctoral thesis was published as Social Theories of Art: A Critique. He taught in the studio and in the history and theory of art at Leeds Polytechnic and Lancaster University. He has published widely in the areas of art theory, visual culture, art education and leisure studies.