Shifting Presence: Giorgio Agamben’s and Karen Barad’s Reflections on Quantum Mechanics

ABSTRACT

This essay centres on two contributions—Giorgio Agamben’s What is Real? (2018) and Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007)—that deal with what they see as the import the quantum turn has had for their respective notions of metaphysics and its history. Notwithstanding the difference in their views, the discussion focuses on two principal claims: Barad’s claim as to the overcoming and dismissal of a certain metaphysical trajectory, and Agamben’s claim as to the full accomplishment and completion of the history of metaphysics. The aim of the essay is to question whether the horizon of constant presence (beständige Anwesenheit) that determines the domain of metaphysics in the classical Heideggerian account is overcome, fulfilled or shifted by the perspective introduced by quantum mechanics.

KEYWORDS:

• Agamben
• Barad
• metaphysics
• quantum mechanics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See Kant, Kant’s Handschriftlicher Nachlaß IX, 487.

2. One can refer to Bohr himself in this respect: “The significance of physical science for philosophy does not merely lie in the steady increase of our experience of inanimate matter, but above all in the opportunity of testing the foundation and scope of some of our most elementary concepts.” Bohr, Philosophical Writings III, 1.

3. Throughout this essay, the word “classical” individuates the neglect of quantum contributions.

4. See e.g. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 32.

5. Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity,” 810.

6. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 26. Hereafter page references are cited in the text.

7. Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity,” 810–11.

8. Žižek, Less than Nothing, 929–30.

9. One should recall Heidegger’s injunction: “Metaphysics cannot be abolished like an opinion, one can by no means leave it behind as a doctrine no longer believed and represented.” Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, 85.

10. For a summary see e.g. the chapters dedicated to the notion of potentiality in de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben; Watkin, Agamben and Indifference; or consult de la Durantaye’s “Agamben’s Potential.”

11. Agamben, What is Real? 27–28. Hereafter page references are cited in the text.

12. See Heidegger, Aristotle’s Metaphysics Theta.

13. It is beyond the scope of this essay to connect a talk of nature’s free will with the fundamental role that the notion of will has played throughout the history of metaphysics.

14. Žižek, Less than Nothing, 938, 936.

15. Bohr, The Philosophical Writings IV, 81.

16. Meillassoux, After Finitude begins with the words: “The theory of primary and secondary qualities seems to belong to an irremediably obsolete philosophical past. It is time it was rehabilitated” (1).

17. Bohr, The Philosophical Writings IV, 53.

18. Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 128.

19. Ibid., 97.

20. Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 119. See also Agamben, Homo Sacer, 21, as well as Agamben, Potentialities, 33.

21. This is the point that Meillassoux misses in his analysis of primary and secondary qualities vis-à-vis “correlationism.”

22. Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 118.

23. Ibid., 271.

24. Ibid., 125.

25. Žižek, Less than Nothing, 925.

26. See Heidegger, Identity and Difference.

27. Žižek, Less than Nothing, 925.

28. Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 264.

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Damiano Sacco

Damiano Sacco is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI) Berlin, Germany. His work focuses on Continental and Italian philosophy, particularly on Martin Heidegger, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, and Emanuele Severino. He is currently translating two of Emanuele Severino’s most important works—Legge e caso (1979), and Oltre il linguaggio (1992)—into English. His articles have appeared in, among others, Continental Philosophy Review, diacritics, and the Journal of Italian Philosophy.