Giorgio Agamben, <\/b>The Use of Bodies<\/i><\/b>. Trans. Adam Kotsko Stanford CA. Stanford University Press. 2016; 313 pages. ISBN 978-0-8047-9840-2. <\/b><\/p>\n
Review by Eric D. Meyer, Independent Scholar<\/i><\/p>\n
What\u2019s the big difference between metaphysics and politics? As Toni Negri says in his review of the Italian edition, in Materialismo Storico<\/i> (November 19th, 2014), Giorgio Agamben\u2019s The Use of Bodies<\/i> is a big metaphysical book. And, whether he\u2019s being ironic or not, it\u2019s true: The Use of Bodies <\/i>is a big metaphysical-political book, with the hyphen between the two terms designating both the conjunction and the disjunction between them. But by Agamben\u2019s standards, The Use of Bodies<\/i>, billed as the final volume of the Homo Sacer <\/i>project, is really three books in one. Two sections\u2014\u201cThe Use of Bodies\u201d and \u201cForm-of-Life\u201d\u2014are political books, which follow up on the critique of biopolitics begun by Michel Foucault in The Use of Pleasure:<\/i> The History of Sexuality, Volume 2<\/i>, while the remaining section, \u201cAn Archeology of Ontology,\u201d is a metaphysical book, which attempts to excavate the whole archive of Western metaphysics, from Aristotle\u2019s Metaphysics<\/i>, through the Neo-Platonists and the Scholastics, to Hegel and Heidegger, in somewhat less than seventy pages. And sandwiched in between these big metaphysical-political books are brief biographical interludes (Intermezzi<\/i>), focusing on the private lives of Guy Debord, Michel Foucault, and Martin Heidegger, perhaps to disclose the gaps between \u201cthe form(s)-of-life\u201d of philosophy, poetry and art, and \u201cthe use of bodies\u201d in Western politics, which it is one of the grandiose ambitions of this big, important book, to expose, and, finally, to fill.<\/p>\n
Agamben\u2019s basic thesis is that Western metaphysics is inhabited by a whole series of fractures or scissions between, for example, ontology and logic (Aristotle\u2019s Metaphysics<\/i> and Categories<\/i>), essence and existence (Aristotle\u2019s \u03c4\u03bf \u03c4\u03b9 \u03b5\u03bd \u03b5\u03bd\u03b1\u03b9 and \u03c4\u03bf\u03b4\u03b5 \u03c4\u03b9, the Scholastic essentia<\/i> and existentia<\/i>), or substance and subject (Aristotle\u2019s \u03c5\u03c0\u03bf\u03ba\u03b5\u03b9\u03bc\u03b5\u03bd\u03bf\u03bd and Aquinas\u2019 subiectum<\/i>), which are roughly equivalent to the schismatic split between public and private life in Western politics. Similarly, Western politics is likewise fraught with a corresponding series of fractures or scissions, between, for example, the Greek city (\u03c0\u03bf\u03bb\u03b9\u03c2) and the Greek household (\u03bf\u03b9\u03ba\u03bf\u03c2), which are equivalent to the division between \u201cpolitical life\u201d (\u03b2\u03b9\u03bf\u03c2) and \u201cbare life\u201d (\u03be\u03bf\u03b7) in Aristotle\u2019s Politics: <\/i>a metaphysical-political division, Agamben argues, arising from \u201cthe zone of indistinction\u201d upon which sovereign power is founded by its simultaneous exclusion <\/i>and inclusion <\/i>of the \u201cbare life\u201d in the political sphere. The Use of Bodies<\/i>, then, attempts to expose the secret complicity between Western metaphysics and Western politics, to show that meta-physics really is <\/i>meta-politics, and by politicizing metaphysics, also to transcend both politics and meta-politics, <\/i>toward the future community described in Agamben\u2019s earlier work, The Coming Community<\/i> (1991). And Agamben\u2019s closing argument in his \u201cEpilogue: Toward a Theory of Destituent Potential\u201d (263\u2013279), closely resembles that of The Coming Community<\/i>, in which the basic problem of \u201cthe originary fracture of being in essence and existence\u201d (94) in Western meta-politics was first exposed, and the explicitly political content of Agamben\u2019s anarchist project was more clearly revealed. The Coming Community<\/i> culminates with Agamben\u2019s predictions of a future utopian anarchist community, in which human beings might exist in the perfect \u201csingularity\u201d of their \u201cform(s)-of-life,\u201d un-riven by the scission between their an-archistic \u201cbare lives\u201d and their un-free political existences, and un-trammeled by the substantialist imperatives of class, race, sex, religion, etc., which previously dictated the \u201cuse of bodies\u201d by the sovereign power of the Greek \u03c0\u03bf\u03bb\u03b9\u03c2 and the Western State.<\/p>\n
But if Western metaphysics is really, as Alfred North Whitehead said, a series of footnotes to Plato, Agamben\u2019s The Use of Bodies<\/i>, by contrast, is a series of footnotes to Aristotle, especially to the Metaphysics <\/i>and Categories<\/i>, which provide the theoretical framework for Agamben\u2019s study of the \u201contological apparatus\u201d of Western metaphysics (115\u2013135), but also to the Politics<\/i>, in which Aristotle discusses the forms of sovereignty (\u03b4\u03b5\u03c3\u03c0\u03bf\u03c3\u03c5\u03bd\u03b7) in the Greek \u03c0\u03bf\u03bb\u03b9\u03c2, by comparison to the despotic relationship between the master (\u03b4\u03b5\u03c3\u03c0\u03bf\u03c4\u03b7\u03c2) and the slave (\u03b4\u03bf\u03c5\u03bb\u03bf\u03c2) in the Greek household. (7\u201322) \u201cThe expression, \u2018the use of bodies\u2019 (he tou somatos chresis<\/i>),\u201d Agamben begins, first appears \u201cat the beginning of Aristotle\u2019s Politics<\/i> (1254b18), at the point where it is a question of defining the nature of the slave\u201d (3); and Aristotle\u2019s description of the despotic relationship between sovereign and subject, master and slave, soul and body, in the Greek \u03c0\u03bf\u03bb\u03b9\u03c2, provides the paradigm for Agamben\u2019s analysis of the sovereign\u2019s \u201cuse of bodies\u201d in the Western State. For Agamben, as for Reiner Schuermann (Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy)<\/i>, Aristotle\u2019s Politics <\/i>describes the foundational principle (\u03b1\u03c1\u03c7\u03b7) or principles of Western political culture; and, hence, the deconstruction of those founding principles is the crucial task of a theoretical \u201can-archy\u201d (Greek: \u03b1\u03bd-\u03b1\u03c1\u03c7\u03b7): that is, the critical theory of political life without the sovereign rule exercised by the Western State over its citizens and subjects. The despotic master\/slave relationship (\u03b1\u03c1\u03c7\u03b7 \u03b4\u03b5\u03c3\u03c0\u03bf\u03c4\u03b9\u03ba\u03b7) between the sovereign master and the household slave in Aristotle\u2018s Politics<\/i>, in which the slave is defined as simply the \u201canimate equipment\u201d (ktema ti empsychon<\/i>; literally: \u201cen-souled tool\u201d ) or \u201chousehold instrument\u201d (oikeia organa<\/i>) of the master (10\u201311), is also equivalent, Agamben notes, to the relationship between soul and body in Aristotle\u2019s De Anima <\/i>(3\u20135), thereby providing the connecting link between metaphysics and politics in \u201cthe use of bodies\u201d in Western meta-politics.<\/p>\n
But the scrupulous critic might also observe that Agamben\u2019s work itself, like Aristotle\u2019s Metaphysics<\/i>, is structured by a whole power-series of supplementary oppositions or binary dichotomies\u2014sovereign\/subject, master\/slave, soul\/body, essence\/existence, \u03c0\u03bf\u03bb\u03b9\u03c2\/\u03bf\u03b9\u03ba\u03bf\u03c2, \u03b2\u03b9\u03bf\u03c2\/\u03be\u03bf\u03b7, political life\/bare life, and so on\u2014which might then invite an attempt to somehow sublimate, supercede, subvert, or deconstruct those stubborn contradictions, as suggested by Agamben\u2019s references to the Hegelian Aufhebung<\/i>. (e.g., 273) Agamben\u2019s method, however, is not, finally, like Hegel\u2019s dialectic, an attempt to supercede or sublimate dialectical contradictions, or, like Derridean deconstruction, to subtly deconstruct them, by showing how the privileged major term is subverted by the deprivileged, minor term. (239) Instead, Agamben prefers to leave them un-resolved, in stark contradiction with each other, as symptoms of the cleft or scission within the meta-political existence of Western \u201cman,\u201d which is similarly, perhaps, frustratingly unfulfilled. Or rather, Agamben\u2019s method, like Foucault\u2019s, is to regard them as bipolar oppositions in a field or play of forces whose final term is always sovereign power: the sovereign biopower of the Western State over the \u201cbare life\u201d of its citizens and subjects. For Agamben, \u201cit is not a question of\u2026playing the two halves of the [metaphysical-political] machine off against one another,\u201d or \u201cof archeologically going back to a more originary beginning,\u201d before this fracture or scission first occurred in the West; but, instead, it is a question of deactivating the ontological apparatus itself, of rendering it inoperative, by de-constituting the basic principles of its meta-political foundations. (266) And whether the sovereign power of the Western State, which Agamben calls \u201cconstituent power\u201d (potere constituente<\/i>) (266\u2013267), can be challenged or subverted by another un<\/i>-sovereign power, which Agamben calls, alternatively, \u201cdestituent potential\u201d (potenza destituente<\/i>) (268), \u201cdestituent power\u201d (potere destituente<\/i>) (269), or \u201cdestituent violence\u201d (violenza destituente<\/i>) (ibid), is the crucial question of Agamben\u2019s metaphysical-political project. But in contrast to The Use of Bodies<\/i>, which celebrates the ability of \u201cdestituent power\u201d to deactivate the meta-political apparatus of the Western State, to liberate the \u201cbare life\u201d of its political subjects into a \u201cform-of-life\u201d beyond sovereignty and subjection, master and slave, public and private, and so on, The Coming Community<\/i> concluded, disturbingly, with the starkly dialectical opposition of the Tiananmen Square Massacre of June 4th, 1991, between the student protesters as \u201cenemies of the State,\u201d and the approaching tanks of the Chinese Communist regime: a catastrophic event that does not bode well for Agamben\u2019s utopian anarchist project, when faced with the \u201cconstituent power\u201d of the sovereign State.<\/p>\n
Agamben\u2019s theoretical method is predicated upon the critical analysis of certain stubborn aporias or perplexing paradoxes within Western political thought\u2014for example, the strange ambivalence by which the sovereign power of the Greek city-state both ex-cludes <\/i>and in-cludes <\/i>the private life of the household within its political life (cf. Stasis<\/i>), or the curious stigma attached to the \u201csacred man\u201d (the homo sacer<\/i>), who, under Roman law, cannot be sacrificed, but can be killed by anyone without risk of prosecution for homicide (cf. Homo Sacer<\/i>). This paradoxical exclusive-inclusion <\/i>(Latin: ex-ceptio<\/i> or ex-clusio<\/i>) of the de-privileged term (\u201cbare life\u201d) within the privileged, major term (\u201csovereign power\u201d) in a crypto-dialectical, syllogistic process, is Agamben\u2019s paradigm for the secret workings of an omnipresent sovereign power, which he calls \u201coperativity,\u201d and which, by making its subjects or slaves the objects of sovereign power, also makes them \u201cwork\u201d for the sovereign master, thereby providing for \u201cthe use of bodies\u201d within the Western metaphysical-political system. Against this \u201cab-use of bodies\u201d by the Western State, Agamben opposes his concept of \u201cinoperativity\u201d (80\u201394) which, by suspending the work of the laborer or slave in pure potentiality, also deactivates the workings of the machineries of sovereign power, and allows the former slaves to work out the \u201cforms-of-life\u201d which are consistent with their distinctive individualities, their inappropriable \u201csingularities,\u201d as members of this \u201cun-workable community.\u201d By deactivating the metaphysical-political apparatus of the Western State and liberating the \u201cdestituent potential\u201d within the much-abused bodies of its workers and slaves, Agamben argues, it might be possible to arrive at a future utopian state in which destituent \u201cpotential becomes a form-of-life[,] and a form-of-life is constitutively destituent\u201d (277): an an-archistic state of \u201cpurely destituent potential\u201d resembling an Italian autonomist version of a Trotskyite \u201cpermanent revolution,\u201d albeit without the constant threat of state-sponsored terror, but, instead, with the desperate hope for a \u201cconstitutively destituent power\u201d which never actually coalesces into the \u201cconstituted power\u201d of a sovereignty. (279)<\/p>\n
Whether or not Agamben\u2019s theory of \u201cdestituent power\u201d provides an un-workable alternative to a Western political system predicated upon \u201cthe use of bodies\u201d by sovereign power, and exactly how a non-violent transition from the current system to Agamben\u2019s utopian anarchist alternative might be brought about, are certainly practical problems not addressed by this big metaphysical-political book. The most troubling passages of Agamben\u2019s The Use of Bodies<\/i> are provided by his discussion of Walter Benjamin\u2019s \u201cToward a Critique of Violence,\u201d in which Benjamin advocates the use of a \u201cdestituent violence\u201d (violenza destituente<\/i> is Agamben\u2019s translation of Benjamin\u2019s Gewalt<\/i>) to bring about the collapse of the existent (\u201cconstituted\u201d) system, and the beginning of \u201ca whole new historical epoch\u201d in Western metaphysical politics. (268\u2013269) But, finally, when confronted with the un-workable alternative between these two equally violent extremes\u2014State violence and destituent violence\u2014Agamben\u2019s thought wavers between the extremes. On the one hand, Agamben\u2019s prognostications of a future utopian state based upon the radical theory of \u00a0\u201cdestituent power\u201d (or \u201cdestituent violence\u201d?) come dangerously close to endorsing revolutionary violence as a necessary means to bringing about his utopian anarchist community. On the other hand, his account of radically anarchistic individuals who creatively transform their everyday lives into works of art, and whose \u201cbare lives\u201d are therefore compatible with their \u201cform(s)-of-life,\u201d seems to result in a politically ambiguous aestheticism, which would hardly counteract the constituent violence of the sovereign State. And whether either of these two extremes can be seen as plausible solutions to the stubborn dilemmas of Western metaphysical politics is a question worth asking by the critical reader of Agamben\u2019s The Use of Bodies<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies. Trans. Adam Kotsko Stanford CA. Stanford University Press. 2016; 313 pages. ISBN 978-0-8047-9840-2. Review by Eric D. Meyer, Independent Scholar What\u2019s the big difference between metaphysics and politics? As Toni Negri says in his review of the Italian edition, in Materialismo Storico (November 19th, 2014), Giorgio Agamben\u2019s The Use […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[69,9,123],"class_list":["post-4998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-agamben","tag-metaphysics","tag-political-philosophy","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-07 12:58:38","action":"Draft","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4998"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4998\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6973,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4998\/revisions\/6973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}