In a few months Crosscurrents will be publishing Mathew Abbott’s The Figure of This World, an important new book on Agamben and political ontology. I took the opportunity to put some questions to Mathew about his intentions for the book and how it develops current debates.
CW: Let’s start with where this book sits in the landscape of critical work on Agamben. You write “My intention is not to produce a systematic overview or detached scholarly appraisal of Agamben’s thought; nor is it to give an exhaustive account of his influences […]. It is to provide a defence and development of his philosophy.” From whom or from what does his philosophy need defending, and in what way should it be developed?
MA: I think some serious misunderstandings have marked the reception of Agamben’s philosophy. This is partly due to the provocative nature of Homo Sacer, which is certainly his most influential book: its claims about the camp, the exception, bare life, and the paradoxes of sovereignty are so striking – and, it would appear, hyperbolic – that many scholars have failed to analyse them with the care they deserve. It is also due to the fact that, at least until recently, Agamben has been taciturn regarding his method. More recent scholarship on his philosophy has worked to rectify these problems by situating the Homo Sacer project in the wider trajectory of his thought, linking it to his earlier work on aesthetics, language, and potentiality. In this way, the claims of this project are grounded in a philosophical system. This has been very helpful, but fundamental questions remain about the precise status of those claims. Agamben is still regularly attacked for his extreme pessimism, and for paying insufficient attention to historical specificity. These are criticisms from which I work to defend him in my book.
That said, many pages do not mention Agamben. This is because I take defence and development to be coextensive: as I work to defend Agamben, I am of necessity also developing his thought. Departing from the letter of his texts is a way of staying true to them. This is in keeping with a point about philosophy that Agamben himself makes, which is that the genuinely philosophical element in any work is its capacity for being developed. Clarifying the philosophical element in Agamben means more than simply giving an account of what he has said in his books. It means taking this thinking further. That is the methodological commitment at work in The Figure of This World.
At the heart of your argument is the claim that we should understand Agamben as giving us not a political philosophy or political theology, but a political ontology. What is the difference, and why does it matter?
On the traditional account, the difference between political theology and political philosophy is the difference between reason and revelation, Athens and Jerusalem, atheism and faith. I take political ontology to upset the traditional account. This is not because political ontology is theistic; it sides with the political philosopher here. At the same time, however, it sides with the political theologian in committing to the claim that the political cannot be thought without a certain exigency. Yet this exigency consists not in divine revelation but rather in the fact that human beings are beings for which being is at issue.
Agamben’s thought is not a political theology; nor is it a critical theory; it does not work in a sociological register; it is not even a political philosophy in anything like the usual sense. If we understand Agamben as engaging in political ontology, on the other hand, we will be able to get a much clearer sense of what it is he is doing, and how.
Why are we mistaken in attributing political pessimism to Agamben?
Part of what makes Agamben’s work compelling to me is that it is geared from the outset toward thinking the possibility of transformation. Crucial to the way Agamben thinks is a sense of contingency: even (and perhaps especially) when the phenomena in question appear to be fated or destined, the necessary result of some overarching yet hidden logic, they are being invoked because of how they can help us think the potentials hidden within the darkness of the present. If understood ontically, his claim that, for instance, the camp is the nomos of the modern will appear to be indicative of a truly extreme political nihilism; if understood ontologically, however, it becomes much more interesting. It may seem paradoxical, but it is precisely the ontological nature of Agamben’s discourse that opens it to the possibility of radical change. Because it is not a critical theory, the primary value of this thinking does not lie in its capacity to help us understand and critique the present; Agamben’s archaeologies and genealogies of modernity are always first and foremost strategic engagements with – and challenges to – the present.
Badiou is of course critical of any position that identifies politics with ontology: with what is rather than with the possibility of radical change. By identifying the political so strongly with an ontology is there not a danger that the possibility for radical political change and invention is blunted, as Badiou fears?
I disagree with Badiou on this. Generally I dispute the idea that ontology is necessarily about grounding or justifying, or that thinking the political as an ontological problem means reifying the present state of things; as I have indicated already, political ontology as I want to define it departs from a claim about the radical contingency of ontic political structures. This project – as with Heidegger’s – is not about the nature of being as such but the question of it.
My disagreement with Badiou is also more specific, and relates to this attempt at introducing a fundamental distinction between ordinary existence in the state of the situation and the exceptional existence of a subject acting in fidelity to the event. In making this distinction, Badiou ends up an unwitting proponent of the sovereign logic Agamben has identified: his is an explicitly decisionistic ethic of the event that, as he states almost as explicitly, turns on a separation between the biological substrate of human life and the immortal existence of the subject. His haughty disregard for everyday existence and everyday experience – which can appear for him as nothing more than the sphere of base interest – is more than mere prejudice: it stems from a commitment that is constitutive of his philosophy. This makes it effectively impossible for Badiou to properly think what I believe is one of the key political problems of our time: how to respond politically to the banalisation of life, the expropriation of the common, and the destruction of experience characteristic of the society of the spectacle.
Against all of this, I am interested in those moments in which distinguishing the ordinary from the exceptional becomes difficult or even impossible. I want to think the ordinary as a potential political achievement. Agamben’s thought can help us here. In its positive moment, political ontology turns on the possibility of a revolution of everyday life.
We are familiar with Heidegger’s contention that metaphysics misses the fact of being and concerns itself only with beings, but you argue that politics, as well as metaphysics, commits this error. What does it mean for politics to forget being?
It means forgetting the common. More exactly, it forces us into an assumption about community – that it must be constituted on the basis of a certain shared condition or set of conditions of belonging – that makes it impossible for us to properly think being in common as such. Part of the task of political ontology is to work to make such thinking possible.
In a chapter entitled ‘The myth of the earth’ you argue for the political importance, for Heidegger, of poetry and art. To some this might sound like a watering down of immediate political imperatives and, to speak in caricatures, might be taken as a typical Heideggerean or even “continental” move, dissolving crisp political imperatives in a solution of endless complexity, detour and obfuscation. How does the treatment of poetry and art in this chapter contribute to the book’s overall political concerns?
First of all, I do not think it is particularly controversial to assert that art has political importance. The question is what one makes of the political aspects of art, and how centrally to political problems one locates them. Now Heidegger situates art very closely to political problems. My argument with Heidegger in the book is not necessarily with the claim that art is essential for thinking the political, but with the particular, reactionary way in which he tried to politically mobilise poetic experience.
Specifically I reject Heidegger’s attempts at turning to poetry in order to find a means of grounding the destiny of a historical people. Instead, I am interested in how the poetic experience with language should force us to confront our living without destiny, the fact that there is nothing we must do or be. The only possible vocation for us now, as Agamben argues, is in the revocation of vocation; any idea of a national vocation has to be resolutely foreclosed. I turn to poetry for something else: for a sense of what a life lived in the zone of indistinction between the ordinary and the exceptional might be like. That is the link I want to make between art and politics.
Partly in dialogue with Walter Benjamin you identify and elaborate an ‘atheist redemption’ at work in political ontology, but you insist that it does not remain residually dependent on theism because it does not participate in the a/theism binary. Could you talk a little more about what redemption means in this context, and how it resists falling back into a structural a/theism. Redemption from what, and unto what?
I would prefer to say that it does not participate in the secular/religious binary. Above all, political ontology is concerned with the possibility of a proper owning up to the ungrounding force of the ontological question. I believe this makes it basically atheist (though of course there are certain concepts of the divine that could sit quite comfortably with that). At the same time, I certainly do want to refuse the idiotic Dawkins-esque atheism that sees religious belief as another, less rational version of scientific explanation. As I argue in the book, science is just as incapable of resolving the question of being: knowing exactly how the universe came to be does not mean knowing the reason for the fact that it did. I say political ontology is atheist because it turns on the possibility of properly acknowledging that there is no reason for being, that nothing could ever provide a satisfactory explanation for it.
The Benjaminian concept of redemption I use is related to this. It is a profane concept of redemption concerned with the possibility of collective happiness. This happiness is linked in an originary way with precisely this sense of contingency: with the fact that what occurs – what haps – does so for no reason. The redemption in question is redemption from what Benjamin calls mythical violence, but which we could also call destiny. It redeems us to ordinary existence itself: the world in its gratuity.
In the same way that capitalism can be seen to play an ambiguous role in Marx’s thought, being a necessary staging post in his historical dialectic, capital emerges in the final chapter of your book as something of the hero of the piece, providing the possibility of resolving the problems in the picture-concept of the world critiqued in Heidegger’s ‘The Age of the World-Picture’. Could you sketch this positive contribution of capital?
I’m a bit uncomfortable with the word ‘hero’ here, but in a way you are right: my claim is that capital has created certain of the conditions for its own undoing, and a resolution of the aporias of representation that characterise modernity and the society of the spectacle. As you indicate, a properly ambivalent attitude toward capital is clear in Marx too – and the issues surrounding this arguably led to a number of grave misunderstandings in 20th Century orthodox Marxism. I think it’s a mistake to read Marx – or myself, for that matter – as ‘necessitarian’ regarding capital: I certainly don’t think there are necessary stages of human development, nor that we are destined to eventually replace capitalism with communism, or whatever. My claim – and, I believe, Marx’s claim – is rather that capitalism creates certain of the conditions for its own undoing. The difference between my argument and that of Marx, of course, is that I see the potential for undoing here as involving not only capital but western metaphysics too. In the book I try to remain agnostic about the precise differences between those two things, and whether they have different origins. There is much more to say about this, and more than I get around to saying in the book. It’s a question I will return to as part of a new project.
As a means of clarifying this, however, I would turn to a point made by Badiou in his Manifesto for Philosophy, where he argues that the one virtue of capital is ontological: it dissolves our sense of an essential place for humanity in the universe, any concept of a natural order or hierarchy. We should acknowledge this with gritted teeth, of course, for this process of dissolution and destitution was (and is) extremely brutal. My argument, however, is that this process has created certain of the conditions needed for a new thought of the common, and a proper owning up to the question of being. Of course, my claim about contingency means there can be no guarantees here. I only said that capital has created certain of the conditions of its own undoing.
The first sentence of the introduction reads: “Things are. Philosophy is constitutively ill equipped to own up to this fact, which is both banal and singularly inexplicable.” It sounds like an introduction to a book on Object Orientated Ontology. Later on you do deal at length with Heidegger’s understanding of the object and refer briefly to Graham Harman’s reading of Heidegger. How would you situate your own reading in relation to the OOO of Harman and others?
I agree with Harman that it is worth trying to extract a form of realism from Heidegger, and that realism in philosophy is a worthy goal more generally. Mine is not an object-oriented ontology in his sense of the term, however. This isn’t the place for me to list my problems with Harman’s project, but the most relevant one is his disconnection of ontology from politics and ethics. Instead, Harman aestheticises ontology. By its nature, this can be highly entertaining and even beautiful, but it lacks the kind of engagement with the good that I take to be a crucial part of any true philosophy. Of course, Harman has his reasons for doing this. They pertain to his apparent belief that we must abandon anthropocentrism at all costs. But I am not convinced by this response to the problem of humanism: as Heidegger once argued in relation to Sartre’s existentialism (incidentally in a debate on this very issue), the reversal of a metaphysical position remains a metaphysical position. There are better and more interesting ways of dealing with the problem than simply abandoning the human altogether. Indeed in trying this Harman ends up propounding a kind of empty exoticism; as a result OOO is not a true philosophy but a kind of philosophical tourism. So while I share certain positions with Harman, and while his reading of Heidegger has influenced my own, I end up in a very different place.
We can see Jean-Luc Nancy’s imprint running through your argument, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly. You say the fact that ‘things are’ makes a claim on us that ‘bears on our being in common, as we share exposure to it’. In the final chapter you insist on the importance of our common singularity in the face of the fact of the world, and you refer early on to Nancy as ‘the other major contemporary philosopher working in the political ontological field I am working to clarify’. Given the way that Nancy seems to return at key moments in the book’s argument, to what extent would you say you are offering a Nancean reading of Agamben?
That is a perceptive question. Jean-Luc Nancy has been an important influence on my thinking ever since I studied him as an undergraduate. It is also clear enough to me that he has been an important influence on Agamben, even if the Italian philosopher only acknowledges this on certain occasions. As I indicate in the book, much of what I say about political ontology could also apply to Nancy. As for whether my reading of Agamben is Nancean – I would say that it is, but only to the extent that Agamben himself is Nancean!
Of course, working out to what extent he is would require some serious work. I outline some of the similarities in the book. Here I will say that the differences between them seem to me to be ones of method, and also politics. On the one hand, I believe Agamben has a somewhat more polemical reading of Heidegger, which leads him to emphasise nihilism, negativity, and the violence of modernity more strongly than Nancy. On the other, there is the role of Benjamin in Agamben’s thinking, and his quasi-Marxist inheritance more generally – something that makes his philosophy more explicitly revolutionary. These two factors can explain why Agamben’s thinking possesses an urgency that Nancy’s sometimes appears to lack. But, I would add, this really is just an appearance: these are questions of emphasis. I think both philosophers should be crucial for anyone trying to think nihilism, community, and the relation between politics and ontology.
