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Abstract
This article explores the implications of Giorgio Agamben's genealogy of government for our understanding of critique. Agamben argues that the providential government of the world of Christian theology has bequeathed to the West an ontology of will and command. Replacing the pantheistic world of Stoic late Antiquity, the Christian world must be other than it is. The lack that this introduces is central to Agamben's account of nihilism, as it was also for Nietzsche. But what does this mean for critique? Does critique belong to the nihilistic tradition of the West; occupying the still-warm seat of God inasmuch as it finds the world wanting as if from the outside? Does this mean we are left only with affirmation—passively acceding to the world as we find it? Or is this alternative of world-rejection/world-affirmation a false one? Agamben's concept of use seeks a way out of it.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to all the participants at the wonderful workshop on “IR in an Age of Critique”, 7–8 December 2017, Käte Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research, Universität Duisburg-Essen. Thanks, in particular, to Pol and Peter for their in-depth feedback on earlier versions of this article, which has proved invaluable.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (trans. J. Nauckhoff, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 204
.2 Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks (trans. K. Sturge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 146
.3 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, op. cit., pp. 194–195.
4 Cf. P. Bargués-Pedreny, “From Critique to Affirmation in International Relations” Global Society Vol. 33, No. 1 (2019), pp. 1–11
.5 Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings (trans. J. Norman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 150
.6 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (trans. D. Heller-Roazen, New York: Zone Books, 1999), p. 100
.7 As a helpful reviewer pointed out, it is important to note the overlap between Agamben's concept of use and other of his central concepts such as “profanation”, “destituent power” and “impotentiality”. As in use, profanation involves putting the sacred (and therefore separated) object into profane circulation. Destituent power, meanwhile, is that power of unmaking which all constituted power must constantly refer back to even as it seeks to capture it. Similarly, impotentiality is that kernel of potentiality which is never consumed in the passage to act. For more on profanation, see Agamben, Profanations (trans. J. Fort, New York: Zone Books, 2007); for more on destituent power see Agamben, “What is a Destituent Power?”, Environment and Planning, Vol. 32, No. 1 (2014), pp. 65–74
; for more on impotentiality, see Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (trans. D. Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).8 Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, op. cit., p. 244.
9 Ibid., p. 180.
10 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (trans. H. Tomlinson, London and New York: Continuum, 1983), p. 147
.11 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (trans. A. Del Caro, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 94.
12 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, op. cit., p. 182.
13 Ibid., p. 174.
14 Ibid., p. 184.
15 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (trans. P. Patton, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 53.
16 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, op. cit., p. 163.
17 Ibid., pp. 20–22.
18 Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, op. cit., p. 182.
19 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (trans. J. Stambaugh, Albany: SUNY, 1996)
.20 Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (trans. W. McNeill and N. Walker, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) p. 340
.21 Agamben, The Kingdom and The Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (trans. L. Chiesa, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011)
; Agamben, The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath (Cambridge: Polity, 2011) ; Agamben, Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty (trans. A. Kotsko, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013) ; Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life (trans. A. Kotsko, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013) .22 See Michel Foucault, On the Government of the Living (trans. G. Burchell, Houndmills: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014)
.23 Lorenzo Chiesa, “Giorgio Agamben's Franciscan Ontology”, Cosmos and History, Vol. 5. No. 1
.24 Agamben, Opus Dei, op. cit., p. 16.
25 Agamben, The Kingdom and The Glory, op. cit., p. 140.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., p. xi.
28 Ibid., p. 26.
29 Aristotle, Metaphysics (trans W.D. Ross, South Bend, IN: Infomotions, Inc. ProQuest ebrary. Web, 2001).
30 Agamben, The Kingdom and The Glory, op. cit., p. 53.
31 Ibid., p. 142.
32 Ibid., p. 276.
33 Ibid., p. 76.
34 Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, op. cit., p. 182.
35 Agamben, Opus Dei, op. cit., p. 119.
36 Ibid.
37 Agamben, The Kingdom and The Glory, op. cit., p. 56.
38 Agamben, Pilate and Jesus (trans. A. Kotsko, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).
39 Agamben, The Coming Community (trans. M. Hardt, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 90–92
.40 Ibid., p. 105.
41 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge, 2013), p. 91
.42 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, op. cit., p. 204.
43 Agamben, The Coming Community, op. cit., p. 102.
44 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, op. cit., p. 157.
45 Ibid., p. 187.
46 Ibid., p. 188.
47 For Deleuze (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, op. cit., pp. 6, 41 and 299), Nietzsche's eternal return is not some external order imposed upon the world's chaos, it is only the internal identity of world and chaos—Chaosmos. This is why Nietzsche's eternal return cannot be understood as a cycle, as if it is an idea content only to oppose linear time.
48 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, op. cit., p. 190.
49 Agamben, The Use of Bodies (trans. A. Kotsko, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), pp. 164, 172 and 223
.50 Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics (trans. E. Curley, London: Penguin, 1996), pp. 10 and 19
.51 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, op. cit., p. 304.
52 Agamben, The Use of Bodies, op. cit., p. 170.
53 Agamben, What is Philosophy? (trans. L. Chiesa, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), p. 86
.54 Descartes’ doubt concerning the tradition's definition of what man is leads him to the realisation: “Am I not that being who now doubts nearly everything … Is there nothing in all this which is as true as it is certain that I exist” (René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy [trans. E.S. Haldane, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911], p. 10, emphasis added).
55 Agamben, The Use of Bodies, op. cit., p. 175.
56 Spinoza, Ethics, op. cit., p. 169.
57 Agamben, The Coming Community, op. cit., p. 92.
58 Jacques Derrida, Adieu: to Emmanuel Levinas (trans. P-A. Brault and M. Nass, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1999)
; Derrida, Adieu: to Emmanuel Levinas (trans. P-A. Brault and M. Nass, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2000) ; Derrida, “The Principle of Hospitality”, Parallax, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2005) .59 Agamben, The Coming Community, op. cit., p. 44.
60 Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy (trans. T. Sadler, London and New York: Continuum, 2002), p. 82
.61 Agamben, Homo Sacer (trans. D. Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 59
.62 Whyte (Jessica Whyte, Catastrophe and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben [New York: SUNY Press, 2013], p. 32) argues that it is in Agamben's re-utilization of Heidegger's notion of abandonment that we see his debt to Heidegger most clearly.
63 Agamben, The Coming Community, op. cit., p. 60. For a discussion of the politics of abandonment, see Sergei Prozorov, “Living à la mode: Form-of-life and democratic biopolitics in Giorgio Agamben's The Use of Bodies”, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Vol. 43, No. 2 (2009)
.64 Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (trans. P. Dailey, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005)
.65 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, in Walter Benjamin ed., Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1986)
.66 This “Eucharistic” presence in absence is a core theme of Quentin Meillassoux's strange but compelling book on Mallarmé's revolutionary poem, Un Coup de Dés: Quentin Meillassoux, The Number and the Siren: A Decipherment of Mallarme's Coup De Des (trans. R. Mackay, Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2012)
.67 See, for example: Agamben, The Time that Remains, op. cit.; Agamben, The Use of Bodies, op. cit., p. 277.