MEDIEVAL CULTURES AND MODERN CRISES

Abstract

Giorgio Agamben is accused of political passivity, but this article argues that he sees the potential for resistance in modes of being inactive and unproductive, in study, play and profanity, which alone can escape the binary oppositions through which modern power operates, most notably the attempt to separate useful from useless life. He finds the resources for this model in very diverse locations, including the poetry of the troubadours, medieval thought about angels and medieval monastic movements. Agamben argues that such texts retain philosophical potential which is revealed precisely by modern crises of subjectivity, economy and community. Agamben’s The End of the Poem is read here as containing early elements of a mode of resistance that informs the new paradigms for human life and practice developed in his The Kingdom and the Glory and The Highest Poverty, where the revolutionary potential of past cultures emerges fully.

Keywords:

• medieval
• resistance
• inoperativity
• poetry
• bureaucracy
• form-of-life

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

I would like to thank the University of Exeter’s Centres for Medieval Studies, and for Translating Cultures, for the opportunity to develop these ideas via a lecture in 2016. I am further indebted to Pamela Díaz, Gerald Moore and Claudia Nitschke, as well as the anonymous reader for Angelaki, for their insightful comments on drafts of this piece.

1 See the summary in Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009) 12–13, 347–48.

2 Antonio Negri, “Giorgio Agamben: The Discreet Taste of the Dialectic” in Sovereignty and Life, eds. Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007) 109–25 (121).

3 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001).

4 Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005) 139, 145 (henceforth cited parenthetically as TR).

5 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2002).

6 Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (New York: Verso, 1993) 100.

7 I owe this tripartite division to Claire Colebrook and Jason Maxwell, Agamben (Cambridge: Polity, 2016) 8.

8 Giorgio Agamben, “Un libro senza patria: Giorgio Agamben intervista di Federico Ferrari,” Eutropia 1 (2001): 44–46.

9 Jacques Derrida offers something similar when he argues that poetry be seen in terms of dictation, as repetition that is accomplished without knowledge. See “Che cos’è la poesia?” in Between the Blinds: A Derrida Reader, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia UP, 1991) 221–40.

10 Giorgio Agamben, “Philosophy and Linguistics” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999) 62–76 (73).

11 Idem, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991) 68.

12 Ibid. 72.

13 Idem, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Roland L. Martinez (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993).

14 Idem, End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999) 113–14 (henceforth cited parenthetically as EP).

15 Arnaut Daniel poems are quoted from Il sirventese e le canzoni, ed. Mario Eusebi (Milan: Vanni Scheiwiller, 1984). All translations of the troubadours are my own. Full English translations can be found at <http://www.trobar.org/troubadours> (accessed 15 Aug. 2017).

16 See Charles Jernigan, “The Song of Nail and Uncle: Arnaut Daniel’s Sestina ‘Lo ferm voler q’el cor m’intra,’” Studies in Philology 71.2 (1974): 127–51.

17 Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone, 2007) 40 (henceforth cited parenthetically as PR).

18 Quoted from Walter T. Pattison, ed., The Life and Works of the Troubadour Raimbaut d’Orange (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1952).

19 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990).

20 Aquinas, Summa theologiae (http://www.newadvent.org/summa/), 1, q. 103 (henceforth cited parenthetically as ST).

21 Giorgio Agamben, Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2013) 23 (henceforth cited parenthetically as OD).

22 Idem, The Use of Bodies, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2016).

23 Idem, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993).

24 Idem, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000) 3–12; Profanations 61–72.

25 Idem, Means without End 4.

26 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone, 1995).

27 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume III: The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1988).

28 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor et al. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991).

29 Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown: Station Hill, 1988).

30 Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2013) xi (henceforth cited parenthetically as HP).

31 Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben 350.

32 Giorgio Agamben, “Bartleby, or On Contingency” in Potentialities 243–71.

33 Idem, “The Work of Man,” trans. Kevin Attell, in Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, ed. Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004) 1–10 (9).

34 Idem, Idea of Prose, trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt (Albany: State U of New York P, 1995) 63–66.

35 Idem, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998) 22.

36 Joseph Canning, Ideas of Power in the Late Middle Ages, 1296–1417 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011) 115.

37 Alessia Ricciardi, “Specters of Saint Francis: Agamben’s The Highest Poverty and the State of Digital Culture,” California Italian Studies 5.1 (2014): 204–23.

38 Agamben, “The Work of Man” 10.

39 Paolo Virno, Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2014).

40 This idea is developed in Agamben’s The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010).