Reditus into self-inflicted immaturity: Agamben’s perversions

ABSTRACT

In my essay, I offer an interpretation of Giorgio Agamben’s political thought as a case of philosophical perversion. According to Lacan, perverse practice is based on a structural non-personal enjoyment, in which a pervert assumes the role of an executioner, meticulously executing his task. My analysis will focus on Agamben’s perverse use of the messianic discourse, the aim of which is to explode it from within: while applying all elements of the messianic idiom, Agamben assumes a mission the goal of which is to deactivate all mission and revoke all vocations. As he states in reference to Bartleby the Scrivener as the possible figure of the Messiah, to fulfill the Torah, i.e. the religious law, is to “destroy it from top to bottom.” I will thus claim that Agamben’s strategy of deactivation – a vocation to end all vocation – can be interpreted as a deliberate methodical use of perversion, that is, a position which simultaneously obeys and destroys the law. Although critical of Agamben’s method, I will not use the Lacanian frame of perversion in a value-charged manner. I want to present it as one of the late-modern philosophical modes of thinking, which became so widely seductive precisely of its powerful perverse component.

KEYWORDS:

• Agamben
• perversion
• messianism
• Jean Laplan che
• Otto Rank
• biomorphism

Suffering creature, born for a day, child of accident and toil, why are you forcing me to say what would give you the greatest pleasure not to hear? The very best thing for you is totally unreachable: not to have been born, not to exist, to be nothing. The second best thing for you, however, is this – to die soon.

Faun Silenus to King Midas, in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

In my essay, I offer an interpretation of Giorgio Agamben’s political thought as a case of philosophical perversion. According to Lacan, perverse practice is based on a structural non-personal enjoyment, in which a pervert assumes the role of an executioner, meticulously executing his task. My analysis will focus on Agamben’s perverse use of the messianic discourse, the aim of which is to explode it from within: while punctiliously applying all elements of the messianic idiom, Agamben assumes a mission the goal of which is to deactivate all mission and revoke all vocations. As he states in Potentialities, in reference to Bartleby the Scrivener as the possible figure of the Messiah, to fulfil the Torah, i.e. the religious law, is to ‘destroy it from top to bottom.’¹ I will thus claim that Agamben’s strategy of deactivation – a vocation/mission/task/work to end all vocation/mission/task/work – can be interpreted as a deliberate methodical use of perversion, that is, a position which simultaneously obeys and destroys the law. Although critical of Agamben’s method, I will not use the Lacanian frame of perersion in a value-charged manner. On the contrary, I want to present it as one of the late-modern philosophical modes of thinking, which became so widely seductive precisely of its powerful perverse component.²

In my reading, informed by psychoanalysis, the ultimate locus of this seduction will be Agamben’s denial of birth: a particularly mighty fantasy of never being born, which I, following Jean Laplanche, diagnose as a biomorphic perversion. Laplanche’s bio-morphe will emerge here as a key concept to understand the Agambenian forma-di-vita, the final form-of-life which ‘liberates living human beings from every biological and social destiny.’³ According to Agamben, the great apologist of infancy, this liberation can succeed only through the deliberately perverse deactivation of the traditional pedagogical mission – the programme of Bildung – which shapes every human infant from the moment of birth and leads it to the stage of maturity. It is precisely the normative pressure of maturation starting with the moment of birth, which constitutes the matrix of all missions and destinies, including the messianic vision of universal redemptive fulfilment. To deactivate the scheme of ‘black pegagogy,’⁴ which pushes the infant out of the womb-like bliss and throws it into a hostile world of survival, means thus to disable any formative pressure that imposes on human life a rigid form of mission, vocation or task. Yet, if this ‘revocation of all vocation’ is to succeed, it must first target the particularly charged moment of human life, from which the black pedagogy of survival takes all its force: the instant of birth. In what follows, I will present Agamben as a thinker who – on a sympathetic reading – deconstructs the excess of power which the hyper-determined pole of birth holds on the pedagogical process of Bildung, but who – on a more critical one – emerges as a birth denialist, reducing this formative influence to zero. While in the former case, the perverse strategy of denouncing black pedagogy may be said to work towards a better, more liberating, type of Bildung – in the latter, perversion leads towards a regressive fantasy of prenatal existence. For Agamben, however, this is not a serious objection, because in his system fantasy is never just-a-fantasy, inferior to the proper perception of reality principle. It is rather a powerful – in fact, messianic – tool of per/subverting the laws of Realitätsprinzip, which aims at destroying it ‘from top to bottom.’

“Leave them kids alone”: against black pedagogy

If Kant’s definition of Enlightenment as an exit out of the self-inflicted immaturity marks the pinnacle of the human effort of reflexive self-fashioning – Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy locates itself on the precisely opposite pole. Pace the Kantian idea of human life as complex and aporetic – a ‘crooked timber’ in the constant need of self-correction under the guidance of the law⁵ – Agamben advocates the concept of a ‘simply human life’: undivided and unproblematic, which could have been lived happily and ‘without pain’ if mankind had not chosen the disciplining process of civilisation. The famous report from limbo – the middle realm between salvation and damnation, populated by the souls of unbaptised children – with which Agamben opens his messianic anticipations of the coming community, gives us a taste of what such simple life could look like:

The greatest punishment, the lack of the vision of God, thus turns into a natural joy; irremediably lost, they persist without pain in divine abandon. […] Their nullity […] is principally a neutrality with respect to salvation – the most radical objection that has ever been levied against the very idea of redemption. The truly unsavable life is the one in which there is nothing to save […] these beings have left the world of guilt and justice behind them: The light that rains down on them is that irreparable light of the dawn following the novissima dies of judgment. But the life that begins on earth after the last day is simply human life.⁶

For Agamben, the emergence of the simply human life – ‘beyond every idea of law’⁷ – marks the messianic moment of the fulfilled ‘now,’ yet this closure is not to be conceived as an achievement: it does not comply to the traditional idea of redemption as ‘mission accomplished.’ What makes it messianic is precisely the deactivation of all mission or, as Agamben calls it in The Time That Remains, the ‘revocation of all vocation,’ which suspends thinking in terms of task and its completion: similarly to the abandoned child in the limbo, the Pauline remnant too ‘contemplates salvation only to the extent that he loses himself in what cannot be saved.’⁸ The simply human life emerges in the realm beyond ‘the world of guilt and justice’ (CC, 6) as well as beyond God, spirit, and history, that is, any overarching transcendental structure which the human subject used to assume in order to give its life a form and charge it with a task of bringing this form to perfection. It does not have either form or task, either vocation or mission: it just is what it is, like an infant left to itself from the moment of inception, counting for nothing in great eschatological schemes, and precisely because of that ‘naturally joyful.’ Perhaps, not even an infant – rather a foetus which is not only unbaptised, but not even properly nated.

Agamben never endorsed Johann Gottfried Herder’s concept of the anthropological difference, according to which humans, conceived as deficient beings (Mängelwesen), must face the problem of survival from the moment of their birth. Herder, the founder of philosophical anthropology, was the first thinker to formulate so clearly the idea that the human being is a ‘sick animal’ – a creature maladapted to the order of nature – and that his life is from the start problematic, that is, far from simple. Unlike all other beings which have their place in the natural organisation of the world, humans are hopeless misfits, ‘the most orphaned children of nature.’⁹ The human, says Herder – very much against Rousseau – must live in culture, because for him nature is a deadly and hostile environment in which she cannot survive: symbolic forms of culture are her only means of survival. Human child, therefore, is the most problematic case of life: simultaneously continuous with natural world as its extremely ‘experimental’ form – and discontinuous, because in order to survive she must resort to the innovative products of her own ‘imagination,’ which create the symbolic sphere of cultural institutions. Her staying in life is not just a matter of biological instinct of self-preservation: it involves the complex machinery of language, stories, missions and goals – all necessary to foster the process of maturation, oriented towards the fundamental task of survival.

For Agamben, Herder, presented as such, is one of the most repressive representatives of the black pedagogy of mankind, next to Thomas Hobbes. Based on threat and fear, black pedagogy posits the natural state of mankind as full of dangers that must be immediately averted by the cultural effort of forming a more viable and no longer ‘orphaned’ form of life – a socially structured bios, shaped and maintained by ‘anthropological machines’: Agamben’s term for the Herderian ‘prosthetic limbs.’ On Agamben’s reading, Herder’s idea of the original negativity/deficiency of human being would be nothing but yet another scary story designed to keep humans on the leash of the external forms of bios, imposed by the institutions of culture. Together, therefore, with the parallel Hobbesian myth of the evil state of nature, from which humans must get out in order to survive, the Herderian myth must be firmly rejected and replaced by an alternative model of anthropogenesis – this time based on the originally positive inoperativity which will not be characterised as ‘orphaned,’ as it implies an imminent danger, but rather as abandoned or left to itself as it is. Or, at least, thoroughly modified: for, while Herder presents the original lack in terms of an immediate threat to conservatio vitae, Agamben approaches the lack of natural vocation of the human species in a much more playful manner: ‘Man […] appears as the living being that has no work, that is, the living being that has no specific nature and vocation […] he would be, that is, a being of pure potentiality, which no identity and no work could exhaust.’¹⁰ Whereas for Herder, the lack translates immediately into deficiency, which makes human animal the most precarious and least taken care of being in nature, ‘the most cruel stepmother’ – for Agamben, the lack, far from spelling a threat, is rather a chance to maintain the original inoperativity in which there is nothing ‘specific’ to do. No ergon, no energeia, no actualisation – just pure potentiality, inoperative whatever, ‘as-you-were’ and ‘as-you-like-it’ of each and every quodlibet. And, at the same time, a clear mirror for contemplation.¹¹

According to Agamben, therefore, it is not a paradox that the ancient ideal of a free vita contemplativa was attributed by Aristotle to the Unmoved Mover whose form of life he described not as bios, but as zoè. For, contemplation can be realised only if humans dared to abandon themselves to their own form of zoè as ‘just-living’ (the Heideggerian Nur-Leben), in which they would withdraw from projecting themselves as humans, the special beings bestowed with vocation, missions, and ideals, necessary for their survival. If redemption lies not in the accomplishment of the mission inscribed into the cultured bios, but in the radical revocation of all mission, then the chance of coming closer to the divine contemplative zoè resides precisely in ‘falling’ to the level of beasts. For Heidegger, this ‘falling’ constituted the basest and most inauthentic form of Verfallenheit, but Agamben deliberately perverts the concept and affirms it as the right thing to do. So, if humans – instead of eagerly jumping to the task of surviving – would rather ‘prefer not to’ and retreat into the ‘idle’ potential of the Pauline hos me (UB, 278), they, in this last post-historical variation on the Kojèvian topos of the ‘faul and beastly’ Hegelian Master, could indeed finally become ‘like gods.’ The last post-historical task, therefore, is to depose the modern apparatus of coercion to survival and, according to Paul’s wish, live sicut dei – ‘without care’ (UB, 56).¹² This ‘simply human life’ will thus be finally set free from the last external forms imposed by the Hobbesian-Herderian sovereignty of bio-political caretakers replacing nature as ‘the most cruel stepmother.’ No longer dependent on its ‘teachers’ – no longer ‘orphaned,’ but liberated – it will live without Angst und Sorge in the state of ‘natural joy’ (CC, 6).

Admittedly, this is an enticing vision which takes the popular anarchic slogan of Pink Floyd – ‘Teachers, leave them kids alone!’ – to the most sophisticated heights. But it all hinges on the assumption that there is no grain of truth in the Hobbesian-Herderian picture of natural state as endangering human survival. So, the question remains: can simply human life survive as it is, abandoned by all anthropological machines and apparatuses, and eventually transform into a theomorphic zoè? The answer, again, depends on semantic subtleties: on what we mean by the capability to live and survive. For Agamben, this capability is literally taken for granted: in his version of the Spinozist-Deleuzyan metaphysics, elaborated in The Use of Bodies, natural immanence is neither the Hobbesian war of all against all, nor the Herderian cruel stepmother, who did not supply humans sufficiently for their task of survival, but a Grand Nourisher bestowing every living with its own mode and portion of life (which, in case of the humans, turns out to be pure potentiality and inoperativity). The proper form-of-life – forma-di-vita most inherent to the simple process of life as such – consists thus in keeping close to this nutritive abode and its zoè aonios – eternal life of infinite flux which knows neither birth nor death – by deposing and deactivating all tasks and projects which man takes upon itself in an erroneous attempt to compensate for his apparent deficiency. Nothing is lacking – so there is also no need to appropriate one’s life and take possession of it within the modern proprietary paradigm of self-care. Life – the Grand Nourisher (UB, 206), here also identified with the Averroist Common Intellect (UB, 211), to be shared equally by all beings – is not to be owned, but only lived as simultaneously transitive and transient: used but never appropriated, and because of that perfectly attuned to the ‘rhythm of transience’ which – according to Benjamin’s definition, discussed by Agamben in The Open – is the true and only mode of happiness.¹³ Although this happy transience, naturally underlying all simply human life, gets obfuscated by the error of ‘messianic intensity,’ which tries to resist entropy, by creating eternal forms as the ‘prosthetic’ stabilisers of human life, it can nonetheless be recovered in the Heideggerian gesture of Gelassenheit and expropriation. This goal of recovery constitutes the core of what Benjamin calls ‘nihilism as world politics’ (ibid., 306) and what Agamben, faithful to the Benjaminian project, envisages as a politics to come in which ‘life [will be] experienced as enjoyment of the passage of time’ (UB, xix).¹⁴

Me Phynai or the Denial of Birth: Agamben with Rank

There is one logic in which such ‘natural joy’ becomes immediately possible: the logic of the denial of birth. While the earlier parts of Homo sacer sought to deactive the overestimated figure of death and turn it profane, simple, and usable – the last parts target the other culturally overspecified pole of human life, which is birth. When Agamben, in his modal ontology highly sympathetic to Spinoza and Deleuze, describes the coming-into-being of vortices/modifications as ‘naturation’ and ‘birth’ (UB, 164), it should not mislead us: it is a deliberate manouevre which aims at concealing the fact that no birth here takes place whatsoever. Nothing gets born within this all-encompassing and formless ‘indefinite life’: all stays in its limboic womb – and hence the intrauteral sensation of ‘even bliss’ and ‘complete beautitude,’ which indeed can be compared to a ‘living contemplation’ (P, 234), but only because it is a mode of an unborn foetus suspended in the limbo of the uterus in a purely potential and inoperative state. Such form-of-life, staying as close as possible to ‘an indefinite life,’ can thus only be attributed to either unborn child or dying man, in whom, as in the hero of Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend (or, for that matter, der Muselmann), ‘life is playing with death.’¹⁵ In those moments in which living and dying commingle and flow into one another in the infinite flux, the hypostatic error of a separate finite existence gets undone. Things do not get born – just as they do not come out of being at one specific point. They remain in the infinite finitude where nothing lasts for ever apart from the transience and irreparability itself: the Benjaminian ‘eternity of the downfall.’¹⁶ To ‘be like not-be’ would thus not only mean to ‘be like already-dead,’ which was a previous position of Agamben, strongly influenced by Maurice Blanchot, but also – and this is a novelty – to ‘be like not-yet-born.’ Just as Blanchot deactivated ‘the instant of my death’ (l’instant de ma mort) – so does Agamben deactivate the other pole of illusory separation, ‘the instant of my birth.’

If we translated this position into terms of Otto Rank, the author of The Trauma of Birth, Agamben would emerge as the denier of birth, for whom the real act of birth – traumatising because of the violent and abrupt separation – must be negated and undone in order for the subject to remain in the monistic sphere of one indefinite zoè aionos or ‘life eternal.’¹⁷ According to Rank, such messianic fulfilment can come only with a steep price of regression to the cosmic womb and its limboic mode of ‘being-carried’: the perverse denial, contesting the law of birth and in this manner trying to undo the ‘constant effort to be born.’¹⁸ Perceived through the lenses of Rankian psychoanalysis, the ‘eddy’ – the basic unit of Agamben’s modal ontology – would be an entity not properly nated, for ever lingering in the limbo of primary narcissism: ‘heedless and not menaced by guilt an death’ (UB, 191), having its ‘own’ rhythm of existence, yet, at the same time, ontologically dependent on the nourishing [trephein] matrix of the cosmic womb. The Pauline hos me – the suspension of being, advocated by Agamben in The Time That Remains – would thus mean to be like the fact of natality never took place; like it could be erased by the ‘destituent potential’ (UB, 277) the role of which is to deactivate social and biological conditions, fixed on the instant of birth (where like is strongly analogical, as opposed to as if, merely conditional and weak). In the latest and most probably ultimate reformulation of forma-di-vita, Agamben states:

The constitution of a form-of-life coincides, that is to say, with the destitution of the social and biological conditions into which it finds itself thrown. In this sense, form-of-life is the revocation of all factical vocations, which deposes them and brings them into an internal tension in the same gesture in which it maintains itself and dwells in them. (UB, 277; emphasis added)

From Agamben’s perspective, the Rankian warning that such revocation could only mean the regression to the bliss of primary narcissism does not constitute an objection. For him, the human difference and its characteristic form of anthropogenesis consists precisely in the unique capability to withdraw from life while still living – the life hos me – which he associates with vita contemplativa. Only humans can live like they were never born: undo the trauma of birth thanks to the destituent potential, which destitutes what has been seemingly constituted as a separate unit, and contemplate the undisturbed oneness of being in constant flux. If the original sin – and error – of all life constitutes in becoming ‘hypostatically’ separated from the All in the traumatic moment of natality, then this destitutive regression to the nourishing matrix coincides with the promise of redemption: undoing of the error and its fatal consequences. Thus, if modern Enlightenment in Kant’s definition merely perpetuates this mistake, by insisting on the Exodus of mankind from its paradise of infancy, Agamben proposes the opposite strategy: the one of the Reditus in which humans will deliberately inflict absolute immaturity on themselves and remain forever in the blessed foetal state.

The destituent power of regression serves here the process of what Freud called Ungeschehenmachen: un-doing as de-nating, which corrects the error of a ‘nated life’ while still in life. Only human, this unique Ungeschehenmacher or undoer, can become a de-natus before he meets his actual death. Indeed, the concept of undoing/Ungeschehenmachen matches perfectly Agamben’s predilection for the ‘negative magic,’ or, generally magic per se. What Freud designated as the silent work of Thanatos, which pushes backwards in order to restore life to its inorganic origin as the perfect nirvana of zero excitations, Agamben sees as the de-activating counter-current of de-nating which puts out of operation all tasks and efforts of a born life, so it can revert to the taskless state of abiding in the nourishing limbo.¹⁹

Yet, these affinities between Freud and Agamben end soon. For the latter, undoing is not just a defence which would allow for such return merely virtually, as if, and in effigie: it is rather a corrective mechanism which takes things back to how they really are, by dismantling the illusory reality principle of the black-pedagogical apparatus. As Agamben insists in his book on Paul, hos me is emphatically not as if: if he, following Jacob Taubes, rejects the interpretation of hos me as the ‘as if’ (als ob) type of messianism, it is because the so called reality is already hos me, that is, as-if-existing and dreamlike. As if, therefore, is not a feature of the messianic attitude against the hard world of brute facts (as in Adorno), but the essential feature of the immediate/indeterminate matrix of being: to live hos me is not to take distance from the world as if it did not exist; it is rather to be in the world as properly recognised, the world as it is in reality. Also, unlike in Freud, for whom the death drive is a violent destroyer of life, Agamben’s de-nating cannot be simply identified with the Blanchotian dying. While the earlier parts of Homo sacer saga stood under the Heideggerian auspices and tried to guess the new forma-di-vita from ‘the intimate symbiosis with death’ (HS, 100) – the later chapters play with a different, no longer openly thanatic, shade of the destitutive potential. Although denatus means in Latin a ‘dead one,’ Agamben’s de-nating strategy is not oriented zum Tode: it is rather a means to achieve a state of contemplative bliss, ‘natural joy,’ and happiness. The children in the limbo, therefore – the role-models of the future inhabitants of the coming community – are not only unbaptised and abandoned: they are also quite simply unborn.

Forma-di-vita as bio-morphe? Agamben with Laplanche

The seductive power of the denial of birth, appealing to one of the strongest archetypes of human existence: me phynai, the wish to never be born, goes hand in hand with Agamben’s mighty phantasm of what we may call a perfectly happy biomorphic life. Already Otto Rank observed that humans tend to imagine the Ovidian Golden Age in which bodies lived next to one another in an unforced intimacy sponte sua et sine lege – ‘spontaneously and without laws’ – as the utopia of sweet simplicity and absolute ease of living on the lap of nature, only to be ruined by the trauma of birth, which, when fully realised, leads to the rise of civilisation and the rejection of nature as the Herderian ‘most cruel stepmother.’ This is the kind of utopia which Jean Laplanche, the French psychoanalyst of the Lacanian school, calls biomorphic, that is, representing a phantasmatic desire to conceive human life as simple and natural, kata physein.

According to Laplanche, the biomorphic tendency arises in the psyche for one reason only: precisely because it has no biology. The weaker the biological functions in the human infant, the stronger the mimetic drive which chooses smooth and efficient natural functionality as its perfect object. Biomorphism, therefore, compensates – very much in accordance with the Herderian logic – for the ‘lost instinct,’ by creating an illusion of the ‘instinct regained’: the biomorphic psyche is engaged in the constant recherche du instinct perdu, by trying to recover the balance which it lost with the moment of birth and the traumatic danger of ‘immediate death.’ This search presents itself to the psyche as absolutely simple necessity, because, in fact, it is not a necessity at all: it is already a libidinal choice and investment, merely masquerading as a ‘false interiorized biology.’ While biomorphism compensates for the lost biologism of the neotenic human child, it can never fully replace it: the seemingly natural instinct of the vital order (Lebensordnung), the role of which is to maintain life, is always only an ‘instict mimed (instinct mimé), a substitute instinct, which only imitates the instinct proper.’²⁰

It is not at all an accident that Agamben’s concept of forma-di-vita matches so closely Laplanche’s bio-morphe: it is driven by the same phantasmatic desire to undo the dangers of birth, that can lead to the infant’s ‘immediate death,’ and restore the safety of the natural intrauteral existence in which the foetus was not aware of the essential lack or ‘weakness’ of its biological endowment, because, remaining merely potential and inoperative, it was not yet actualised or tested. In the lights of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, which form the basis for Laplanche’s analysis, Agamben’s ‘form-of-life’ conforms exactly to the defensive strategy of the vital order (Lebensordnung): weakened by the neotenic condition of the human infant, it is driven by a nostalgic desire to regain what had been irretrievably lost with the act of birth and idealises natural life as a smooth tautological process where ‘bios and zoè coincide at every point’ (UB, 225). This coincidence marks the stage of perfect fulfilment, because all the self-preservatory life wants is what it already has: unlike desire, thrown into the otherness of the world, and because of that wanting what it never had: the other, the simple life drive, contained in the biomorphic womb, wishes only more of itself, more of the same. Hence, in Agamben’s definition of Spinoza’s conatus, the self-preservatory drive is strictly autotelic: ‘To perservere in being means this and nothing else’ (UB, 171). It would, however, be a mistake to conceive this ideal biomorphic conservatio vitae in terms of survival – the way it is usually done by the interpreters of the Spinozist’s ‘appetite for life.’ In Agamben’s reading, this appetite is self-fulfilling; freed from Angst und Sorge, it does not face the challenge of the external reality, it is immersed in solitude of absolute immanence. The foetal de-natus is alone: it is in the state of phyge monou pros monon, ‘exile of one alone with one alone’ (UB, 234), described by Plotinus as the one of perfect self-contemplation.

Can we have ethics and politics on such grounds? Only if – and this yet another clever move conducted in The Use of Bodies, treading in the footsteps of Foucault – we understand ethics in the strictly Greek sense of the word, i.e. as an autarchic ‘use of oneself,’ with no immediate reference to others (UB, 33). In that sense, the coming community of the de-nated ‘whatevers,’ exercising their conatus as the ‘destitutent potential,’ would indeed resemble Blanchot’s ‘unavowable community’ in which aloneness – as emphatically not separation – does not announce a lack of contact with others. In the natalistic perspective, where separation and fragmentation are accepted as facta bruta of the reality principle, the only way to counteract them would be to create a relational tie of an operative community, which then becomes a concern of ethical and political laws. The modal ontology, however, denies the natalist separation and in that manner makes any relation – and with it any law regulating it – spurious:

‘Alone with one alone’ (‘alone by oneself’) can only mean: to be together beyond every relation […] It will therefore be necessary to think politics as an intimacy unmediated by any articulation of representation: human beings, forms-of-life are in contact, but this is unrepresentable because it consists precisely in a representative void, that is, in the deactivation and inoperativity of every representation. To the ontology of non-relation and use there must correspond a non-representative politics. (UB, 236–7; emphasis added)

After all, there is no need of a representative politics in the womb: foetal entities are ‘in contact’ and intimate with one another in the same natural way in which they feed and grow – sponte sua et sine lege.

Agamben’s investment in the bio-morphe as the basis for a new non-representative politics has significant precursors: Bachofen and Benjamin. The former’s ‘anthropological fantasy’ famously postulated the origins of mankind in a natural state of Mutterrecht: a maternal law which, in contrast to the paternal legal system (the Lacanian ‘Law of the Father’) runs smoothly and invisibly, taking the form of a natural necessity that, as Agamben reminds us, ‘needs no laws.’²¹ Such matriarchal arrangement is modelled on a simple nourishing dyad of mother and child as analysed by Laplanche: a condition of non-separation, which perpetuates the monistic union between the womb and the foetus and thus keeps the infant in the pre-symbolic stage of ‘false biology,’ before the other-oriented sexuality sets in. The Bachofenian model of the dyad, in which birth becomes neutralised and separation blurred, was praised by Walter Benjamin, fascinated with the primal world of hetaeric fluidity where life and death do not yet form an opposition, but ‘commingle’ in the monistic flux of ‘general promiscuity.’²² It is precisely Benjamin’s appreciative reelaboration of Bachofen’s ‘fantasy’ which constitutes the utopian horizon of Agamben’s biomorphic project. His coming community of quodlibeta, the ‘whatever beings,’ is the horizontal republic of the unborn, where the denial of birth serves as a means to fulfil the biomorphic ideal of the ‘simply human life.’ A true life that could be lived if we had not succumbed to the Siren song of black pedagogy which throws us into the world of fear and care.

According to Agamben’s intimations of the community-to-come, this true blessed life is close, almost at hand. What separates us from the messianic fulfilment is just one ‘last effort’: ‘In the impossibility of defining a new “work of man,” it is now a question of taking on biological life as the last and decisive historical task.’²³ ‘To bring to light – beyond every vitalism – the intimate interweaving of being and living: this is today certainly the task of thought (and politics)’ (UB, xix). ‘Beyond vitalism’ means here ‘towards Heidegger,’ but only as the thinker of Gelassenheit which released life from excessive willing and taugth it to what only more of what it already has.²⁴ But, what does it mean to take on biological life? And how does this task situate Agamben in the context of modern biopolitics which he criticises?

In opposition to the sovereign thanatopolitics in the style of early Kojève, who wished to counteract the biopolitical boredom by reinstalling traditions capable of reaching beyond the biological life and recommending self-sacrificial death in service to a higher Cause, Agamben locates himself on this side of biopolitics, yet not in favour of what Kojève dismissed as a purely physiological process that goes without saying. In Agamben’s utopian reimagination of the biopolitical paradigm, ‘simply human life’ is neither bios, i.e. life disciplined by culture, nor zoè, i.e. natural or animal life. It is a biomorphic life which cannot rely solely on physiology: it also requires a symbolic culture, but not the one that would form the ideal bios as transcending the needs of the vital order (as in Kojève), but the one that would teach human life not to want anything more than itself – a new language that will facilitate the desired coincidence of bios and zoè (UB, 225) as the immanent, no longer black-pedagogically imposed, forma-di-vita. To take on biological life, therefore, would be to radically transform the symbolic traditions, already nullified by modern biopolitics: make them express not the interests of sexuality and its sublimated variants – the Platonic Eros desiring to transcend the finite realm of becoming – but the interests of the self-preservatory drives of the immanent vital order which is satisfied with what it already has. It is precisely this act of symbolic ‘taking on’ that, seemingly imperceptibly, changes biological life into a biomorphic one: not the life as it is, but the life that it desired as it is. Desired passionately – and because of that capable to bring the highest form of jouissance. Hence, in Means Without Ends, Agamben defines the goal of his positive biopolitics as creating ‘a political community oriented exclusively toward the full enjoyment of worldly life.’²⁵

The simply human life should thus be taken for granted, because it already is what it is – at the same time, however, it must also be taken on, desired, chosen, and confirmed as the new political orientation. These two positions can be reconciled only on the condition that human zoè will be conceived here as insinuating itself into the dualism between animal zoè and human bios by the Apelles cut – that is, as a tertium, a biomorphic life. Just as the Heideggerian Gelassenheit, therefore, is a new thinking that teaches the will not to will, but still remain a will – so does the Agambenian ‘relaxation’ teach the desire not to desire in terms of reaching for transcendent goals, but simply want what it already has within the pleromatic immanence of life. What he recommends is a biomorphic revolution of the desire: not to be abolished altogether, but merely reversed from the path of seeking external and elusive objects of fulfilment, now returning to its own blessed immanence.

Biomorphic perversion

In psychoanalysis, the black-pedagogical guardian of the reality principle, the biomorphic life is strictly impossible: the dreamy reality of the vital order, best satisfied in the embryonic stage, becomes interrupted the moment the castrating Real marches in, making the child realise that it got birthed and forever cut off from the pleromatic oneness, despite all its lingering fantasy of still living in the womb. Yet, for those seduced by Agamben’s day-dreaming, his antinatalist phantasm has a cogency of a realistic project. Thus, Colby Dickinson, while affirming Agamben’s ‘gesture toward our “infantile” stage of development as somehow being the goal for all humanity,’²⁶ quite openly declares:

Perhaps some deeper truth lies in our regression to an infancy we can hardly fathom, and to which we would like to respond, as once did Nicodemus: how can we regress to our infancy? Are we to enter again into our mothers’ wombs? Yet, indeed, if this were nothing but sheer nonsense, Christianity would most likely have evaporated a long time ago. (ibid., 108; emphasis added)

Otto Rank would have fully agreed with this diagnosis: Christian doctrine is one of those powerful symbolic systems which implicitly aim at the denial of birth, and Agamben is its obvious heir in making fully apparent what Slavoj Žižek rightly named ‘the perverse core of Christianity.’²⁷ If perversion consists in the disavowal of castration, the denial of birth is its obvious consequence. In the pre-natal state of the foetus, the very idea of the law makes no sense, because the law can only begin with the first act of separation, which, in Lacanian terms, announces the breaking of the quasi-monistic dyad of mother and child by the external intervention of the voice of the Father: it is only on the basis of this original separation that all the subsequent Ur-teile (the Hegelian judgements ‘cutting’ the Real into separate segments) can be made, isolating fantasies from the perceptions of reality. This, however, is not a sexual perversion, which occupied Freud in The Three Essays, where only human sexuality could become polymorphously perverse, i.e. non-confroming to the normative path of genital fulfilment. What Freud did not envisage, but Agamben delivers in full, is a perversion of the vital order (Lebensordnung), in which sexuality does not even come into the picture (as indeed in Agamben’s later works, uncannily silent on the topic): a biomorphic perversion which ‘takes on’ biological life as its object and replaces the sexual enjoyment, always involving a relation to the other, with an autotelic (though not exactly auto-erotic) self-same bliss of ‘just-living’ that does not recognise the difference between the inside and the outside.²⁸

This is the reason why, in The Use of Bodies, Agamben adopts only one of Freud’s many definitions of perversion: not the one which characterises perversion as the polymorphous ‘deviance’ in search of partial objects, but the one which describes perversion as the objectless ‘narcissistic withdrawal of libido into the Ego,’ thus losing the reference to the other:

The narcissistic withdrawal of libido into the Ego, by which Freud defines perversion, is only the psychological transcription of the fact that for the subject what is in question in that determined and uncontrollable passion is his life, that this life has been entirely put at stake in this certain gesture or in that certain perverse behavior. (UB, 227; emphasis added)

According to Agamben, this withdrawal into the immanent passion for life is not a pathology, but a fully positive ideal, the traces of which can be found in the oldest soteriological archives – for instance, in the teachings of the Cappadocian Fathers, which, in Agamben’s reading, define the turning point between Athens and Jerusalem, the Greek classical apology of bios and the messianic vision staking on the passion for zoè:

According to the messianic paradigm of ‘eternal life’ (zoè aionos), the very relationship between bios and zoè is transformed in such a way that zoè can appear in Clement of Alexandria as the supreme end of bios […] The reversal of the relation between bios and zoè here allows for a formulation that simply would not have made sense in classical Greek thought and that seems to anticipate modern biopolitics: zoè as telos of bios. (UB, 227)

In this manner, the biomorphic perversion becomes a synonym of the messianic inversion: the passion for zoè, secretly subversive towards the cultured structures of bios, is eventually to destroy its order ‘from top to bottom’ and, at the eschatological kairos of fulfilment, appear as the true and only goal. As Agamben states in Profanations, ‘the idea that the Kingdom is present in profane time in sinister and distorted forms […] is a profound messianic theme’ (PR, 34) and then reiterates in The Use of Bodies: ‘It is a matter of an application of the Benjaminian principle according to which the elements of the final state are hidden in the present, not in the tendencies that appear progressive but in the most insignificant and contemptible’ (UB, 227). Perversion, therefore, is not to be condemned, even if it may now appear as pathological: a ‘sinister bend’ distorting the pedagogical narrative of Bildung, where maturity – the goal of the psyche thrown into the otherness of the world – can only be achieved through the Goethean lesson of Entsagung, a ‘renunciation’ of the original totipotency of the infantile psyche. On the contrary, it must be understood as a messianic strategy of reversal in which the tables gradually turn and the ‘rejected stones’ eventually become a new foundation for the ‘final state’ (UB, 227). The biomorphic perversion of the ‘lives of the infamous men,’ who refused to submit to the renunciation of Bildung, are thus the messianic harbingers of the olam ha-ba, ‘the world to come,’ in which life lived without remainder as the sole immanent object of the inverted desexualised desire will become a new norm:

These biographies, which are by all appearances miserable and have been transcribed solely to bear witness to their pathological and infamous character, testify to an experience in which the life that has been lived is identified without remainder with the life by which it has been lived. In the life that the anonymous protagonists live what is at stake in every instant is the life by which they live: the latter has been wagered and forgotten without remainder from the beginning in the former, even at the cost of losing all dignity and respectability. The short-sighted summaries of medical taxonomy conceal a sort of archive of the blessed life, whose pathographic seals had each time been broken by desire. (UB, 227; emphasis added)

The question which Agamben poses in front of us is tempting in its simplicity: why not? Why not allow the desire to break all those black-pedagogical patographic seals and enter the heaven of eternal bliss? If the tragic wisdom of Silenus tells us that ‘it would be better for us never to be born,’ but we are also those strange beings capable of a reversio of the fact of birth – then why not pursue this path? Why not try to live like we were never born and refuse the castrating impact of the reality principle?

There were few thinkers, coming mostly from the rogue kind of psychoanalysis – that is, not fully endorsed by the patriarch Freud – who advocated therapeutic virtual regression in order to ease the pressure of Realitätsprinzip: Rank himself, Fromm, and particularly Marcuse.²⁹ None of them, however, dared to articulate this regressive desire with such extreme intensity, openly demanding the impossible: the regressive de-realisation taken on as the final task by the eternal de-natus, making real what the therapy would recommend only in effigie, virtually, as if. Agamben’s variant of the Marcusian Grand Refusal is thus truly uncompromising: when it comes to the agon between fantasy and reality, it is the former which always gets the upper hand – because it is the fantasy which opens the gates of perception to the true Real.³⁰

And there, at the end of the royal road of the biomorphic perversion, waits the happiest life imaginable – a life of our dreams and desires, free of care and fear, which our sense of the Real negates as strictly unliveable, yet, so Agamben tempts us, is nonetheless possible, but we simply do not dare to reach for it. This makes his temptation both irresistible and non-falsifible: we will never know until we try. We will never know if such blessed life cannot be lived because of the Real as it is or because of what we, weighed down by the black pedagogy, anxiously project as the Real. In the meantime – and, as in the case of all Gnostic promises-temptations based on the model of reversio, it is an eternal meantime – Agamben skilfully seduces us, by putting forward a seemingly possible messianic agent, a perverse de-natus, simultaneously un-born and already gently dying. As such it perfectly embodies the two ideals that the tragic wisdom which Silenus defined as ‘totally unreachable,’ but which the messianic per/in/version reclaims as the only telos worth striving for:

Suffering creature […], the very best thing for you is totally unreachable: not to have been born, not to exist, to be nothing. The second best thing for you, however, is this – to die soon.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. In ‘Bartleby, or On Contingency,’ Agamben describes Melville’s hero, Bartleby the scrivener, as a messianic figure who has arrived ‘not to bring a new table of the Law but […] to fulfill the Torah by destroying it from top to bottom’: Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 270; henceforth as P.

2. For Lacan, perversion may at first appear as a sub-version of the symbolic order, which occurs as an inversion of the law, made possible by the weakness of the law itself, but as a père-version, i.e. ‘turning towards the Father,’ ultimately ends as ‘the sole guarantee of this function of father’: Jacques Lacan, ‘Seminar of 21 January 1975,’ in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, trans. Jacqueline Rose, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (London and New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1985), 167. The pervert, therefore, may be even said to improve the law, by simultaneously exploiting and correcting its deficient overt articulation, which makes him not so much anti-nomian as hyper-nomian: as Slavoj Žižek puts it nicely, for a pervert ‘serving the Law is the highest adventure’: Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf. The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 56. In Stephanie Swales' definition which explains the hypernomian nature of the Pervert’s transgressions, ‘perversion is a strategy for increasing the power of the paternal function and thereby setting limits to jouissance. By way of disavowal, the pervert creates a substitute for the insufficient Other of the Law […] The lawgiving Other exists, but only precariously; the pervert fervently tries to make the Other whole and to give it a stable existence’: Stephanie Swales, Perversion. A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Approach to the Subject (London & New York: Routledge, 2012), 55–6. According to Boštjan Nedoh, however, the psychoanalytic understanding of perversion as the hypernomian père-version differs from what he calls ‘philosophical perversion,’ operative mostly in Deleuze and Agamben, which entails a far more radical subversive attitude of turning away from the law-giving father function towards ‘masochism [where] the symbolic power is invested upon the Mother by means of the fetishistic disavowal of her castration’: Boštjan Nedoh, Ontology and Perversion. Deleuze, Agamben, Lacan (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2019), 28. This difference may in fact be more significant in case of Deleuze, strongly invested in the alternative sado-masochistic structures of schizo-analysis, but in case of Agamben for whom ‘the messianic event consists above all in the abolishment of the form of law by way of its complete fulfilment’ (ibid., 22), the Lacanian definition holds fast and does not seem to diminish the subversive power of his anti/hyper/nomianism as, in Nedoh’s apt formulation, a ‘philosophical conception which sees perversion […] as a means of social criticism which points also to the renewal of classical metaphysics’ (ibid., 23).

3. Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies. Homo Sacer IV, 2, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 278. Henceforth as UB.

4. The term ‘black pedagogy’ was coined by Katherine Rutschky in her book called Schwarze Pädagogik. Quellen zur Naturgeschichte der bürgerlichen Erziehung (Berlin: Ullstein Verlag, 1977) in order to denounce violent practices of upbringing which exploits the child’s fear of her own fragility and dependency. It was then popularised by Alice Miller who elaborated the tenets of ‘black pedagogy’ in psychoanalytic terms: Alice Miller, Am Anfang war die Erziehung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 17–111. Here I use the term in a broader figurative sense which wants to capture Agamben’s defence of infancy against the pedagogical apparatuses of enforced maturation.

5. Immanuel Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim,’ trans. Allen Wood, in Kant’s ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim.’ A Critical Guide, ed. Amelie Oxenberg Rorty and James Schmidt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 13.

6. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press, 1993a), 5–6; emphasis added. Henceforth as CC.

7. Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 59. Henceforth as HS.

8. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005b), 42.

9. Johann Gottfried Herder, Essay on the Origin of Language, trans. Alexander Gode (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966), 108.

10. Giorgio Agamben ‘The Works of Man,’ in Giorgio Agamben. Sovereignty & Life, eds. Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007b), 2.

11. Agamben offers his own Franciscan-optimistic version of Herderism in The Idea of Prose where he praises the potentialities of the ‘neotenic infant’ who, unlike all human children destined to grow, ‘would hold onto its immaturity and helplessness’: ‘in his infantile totipotency [which, non-accidentally, closely echoes the Kleinian concept of the omnipotence sensed by the foetus – ABR], he would be ecstatically overwhelmed, cast out of himself, not like other living beings into a specific adventure or environment, but for the first time into a world. He would truly be listening to being. His voice still free from any genetic prescription, and having absolutely nothing to say or express, sole animal of his kind, he could, like Adam, name things in his language’: Giorgio Agamben, The Idea of Prose, trans. Michael Sillivan & Sam Whitsitt (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995), 96–7 (henceforth as IP).

12. ‘I want you to be without care’ (1 Corinthians 7:32).

13. Compare Benjamin: ‘ … the rhythm of this eternally transient worldly existence, transient in its totality […] the rhythm of Messianic nature, is happiness. For nature is Messianic by reason of its eternal and total passing away’: Walter Benjamin, ‘Theological Political Fragment,’ in Selected Writings, vol. 3, eds. Howard Eiland, Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 305–6.

14. This intuition stems not only from Benjamin, but also Guy Debord, the eulogy for whom constitutes the prologue to the last part of Homo Sacer IV, 2, i.e. The Use of Bodies. In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord, while referring to the ‘exuberant life’ of the great cities of Italian renaissance, which for the first time assumed a ‘joyous rupture with eternity,’ defines happiness as the ‘enjoyment of the passage of time’ (UB, xix).

15. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Immanence: A Life … ,’ in Pure Immanence. Essays on A Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 28. In his early commentary on Deleuze’s last essay, called ‘Absolute Immanence,’ Agamben does acknowledge the problem of plural singularities emerging out of one matrix, but he does away with it by a linguistic trick which renames this process of emergence an immanation: ‘in this sense, the colon represent the dislocation of immanence in itself, the opening to an alterity that nevertheless remains absolutely immanent’ (P, 223)

16. Benjamin, ‘Theological Political Fragment,’ 305.

17. In Rank’s somewhat exaggerated account, all symbolic and culture-forming achievements of human race ‘finally turn out to be a belated accomplishment of the incompleted mastery of the birth trauma’: Otto Rank, The Trauma of Birth (Eastford: Martino Fine Books, 2010), 5. Myths are nothing but ‘the most sublime attempts to undo the birth trauma, to deny the separation from the mother’ (ibid., 105); ‘just as the anxiety at birth forms the basis of every anxiety or fear, so every pleasure has at its final aim the re-establishment of the intrauterine pleasure’ (ibid., 17), imagined as ‘the best of all worlds’ (ibid., 63).

18. In reference to Oskar Becker’s more cheerful revision of Heidegger, Agamben writes: ‘In this sense being-thrown and being-carried (Getragensein) define the two poles between which the various grades and modalities of existence are deployed and articulated. And as the form par excellence of being-carried, the inspiration of artistic existence – “heedless and not menaced by guilt an death” – is the opposite of the anguished and decisive being consigned to a task’ (UB, 191).

19. Agamben does not hide that he takes his concept of ‘regression’ from Freud. In ‘Philosophical Archaeology,’ he praises Freud for inventing the technique of withdrawing the patient’s mind to its earlier stages, where it can see things from a new perspective, but simultaneously scolds him for giving it a negative spin. In his own perverse transvaluation, ‘the pessimistic vision of regression, which is incapable of overcoming the original infantile scene, cedes its place to an almost soteriological vision of an archaeology capable of going back, regressively, to the source of the split between conscious and unconscious’: Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things. On Method, trans. Luca d’Isanto & Kevin Attel (New York: Zone Books, 2009), 98.

20. See Jean Laplanche, Nouveaux fondements pour la psychanalyse (Paris: PUF, 1987), 51: ‘This false interiorized biology has its deep reasons: in the infantile psyche, the vital order, which represents the self-preservatory interests, cannot be just represented, it must also be helped and assisted [vicarié et supplée], because the excess of the libido could make the psyche accept immediate death.’ And, while commenting on Freud’s Three Essays in the Theory of Sexuality: ‘Their main purpose is to demonstrate the fundamental orientation which governs the evolution of human psyche and which runs from the instinct lost to the instinct regained […] Yet, this instinct regained is merely an instict mimed (instinct mimé), a substitute instinct, which only imitates the instinct proper’ (ibid., 33–4). For a more detailed discussion of Laplanche’s concept of biomorphism and its implications for the philosophical attempts to conceive human life kata physein or ‘according to nature,’ see my Another Finitude. Messianic Vitalism and Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), esp. the chapter, ‘Another Infinity: Towards Messianic Psychoanalysis,’ 145–98.

21. Necessitas legem non habet, this Latin formula, translated by Agamben as ‘necessity does not recognize any law,’ perfectly expresses the simple governance of the natural rhythm of transience, always proceeding horizontally by the ‘literal application of the norm,’ which needs no acts of ‘paternal’ interpretation or arbitration: Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005a), 36.

22. The Bachofenian fantasy comes to Agamben mediated by Walter Benjamin who clearly prefered Bachofen’s vision of libidinal communism to the Marxist version. Fifteen years after he composed the ‘Theological Political Fragment,’ which defined the new world politics in terms of a nihilistic pursuit of happiness according to the natural ‘rhythm of transience,’ in 1935 piece called ‘Johann Jakob Bachofen,’ Benjamin extolls the ‘prophetic side of Bachofen,’ which manifests itself in his growing influence on both rightwing (Klages) and leftwing (Engels) radical theories of social utopia: Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 3, 13.

23. Agamben, ‘The Work of Man,’ 6; emphasis added.

24. ‘So far as we can wean ourselves from willing, we contribute to the awakening of releasement’: Martin Heidegger, ‘Conversation on the Country Path,’ in Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 60.

25. Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends. Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press, 1993b), 114.

26. Dickinson, Agamben and Theology (New York: T. & T. Clark International, 2011), 38.

27. See Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf. The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

28. Nedoh too notices in Agamben (as well as in Deleuze) the construction of ‘a new type of subjectivity which founds itself upon a strict separation between pleasure and sexuality or, in psychoanalytic terms, between jouissance and the Other. The figure which best epitomises this disposition of perversion as “beyond the Other” is obviously Deleuze’s masochist as a “new man, devoid of sexual love”,’ but also, as I argue, the Agambenian de-natus, equally desexualised and engaged in a new – biomorphic – mode of perversion: Nedoh, Ontology and Perversion, 28.

29. Indeed, Marcuse’s programmatic preface to Eros and Civilization comprises Agamben’s project of regressive soteriology in the nutshell: ‘The reality principle restrains the cognitive function of memory – its commitment to the past experience of happiness which spurns the desire for its conscious re-creation. The psychoanalytic liberation of memory explodes the rationality of the repressed individual. As cognition gives way to re-cognition, the forbidden images and impulses of childhood begin to tell the truth that reason denies. Regression assumes a progressive function. The rediscovered past yields critical standards which are tabooed by the present. Moreover, the restoration of memory is accompanied by the restoration of the cognitive content of fantasy’: Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization. Philosophical Inquiry Into Freud (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1955), 19; emphasis added.

30. Agamben’s critique of black pedagogy can also be approached from the Gnostic perspective which rejects the ‘disgrace of adaptation’ and chooses instead the Grand Refusal that denounces reality principle as nothing but the deception of the Archon, merely creating an illusion of a solid reality. Agamben shares this rebellion against the reality principle with the French students of Alexandre Kojève, who introduced them not only into the reading of Hegel, but also into Gnostic arcana: most of all Georges Bataille and Raymond Queneau. Especially Queneau’s surrealist investment in the power of fantasy, backed by his deep Gnostic conviction about the dreamy nature of the whole material reality is pertinent here. If all is ultimately a fantasy, including the existence of the world, then the only way out of the black pedagogy is the liberation of the fantastical element: the revealment of the cruel rules of the dream called life – the sheer necessities of survival – as nothing but a hardened fantasy, fallen into an illusion of dura lex. Seen from the Gnostic perspective, therefore, the ultimate perversion is not a plague of fantasies, but its all too sober reverse: a perverse hardening of the primordial fantasy which imprisons us in a totally regulated dream which appears as real precisely because of the seemingly intransigent order. Moreover, Queneau’s ‘sages,’ who possessed this kind of gnosis, are also quite biomorphic: they cherish fantasies of never being born, so they can enjoy infinite freedom and omnipotence of the prenatal existence governed by the Kleinian primacy of the fantastical. One of them, Jacques L’Aumone aka James Charity, is an actor who lives his life like it were a movie and, instead of being punished by his indulgence in autofictional fantasies – as the black pedagogy would have it in the case of other ‘infamous men’ – he is rewarded for his persistence: at the end of the novel, he steps into the film and merges with its fictional hero. Exactly the same kind of undecidability defines the ‘knowledge’ in Agamben: a fluid oscillation between being born and unborn, alive and dead, real and fantastical.