Feminine 'I can':

On Possibility and Praxis in Agamben's Work

Ewa Plonowska Ziarek

At the end of Homo Sacer, Agamben suggests that the question of potentiality is intertwined with

a (non-dialectical) mediation of bare life and political forms of living outside the parameters of

the sovereign decision. In this essay I attempt to develop a new type of interaction between bare

life and forms of life by examining Agamben's philosophy of potentiality in the context of his

earlier writings on community and Irigaray's theories of sexual difference. Such a feminist

interpretation of Agamben's work raises the question about the sexed and gendered character of

community and potentiality itself. Although Agamben does not investigate this question directly,

it is nonetheless implied in his work through the contrast between the two different figures of

potentiality: Anna Akhmatova's "I can" and Bartelby's "I prefer not to." By focusing on the

paradigm of potentiality routinely ignored in discussions of Agamben's work, namely, on the

Russian poet's "I can," which opens his famous essay "On Potentiality,"1 I reflect on the

intersubjective mode of potentiality, its relation to language, politics, and sexual difference.

1. Severance

Agamben's reframing of biopolitics in the context of bare life has provoked a significant debate

about the status of bare life - is it a natural life, is it a life in the state of immediacy, or is it a

politically mediated life?2 What is at stake in this debate is a shift in the understanding of power

in biopolitics. In the wake of Foucault's work, biopolitics, both in its methodology and in the

object of its meticulous historical analysis, has become synonymous with the specific micro

operations of power, discipline, and normalization of bodies. By associating biopower with

sovereignty, Agamben foregrounds instead the limit of normalization and confronts us with the

exception of the damaged body stripped from its cultural signification, that is, with the abject

body expelled from symbolic and political universe. Reworking Aristotle's distinction between

biological existence (zoē) and the political life of speech and action (bios), Agamben's "bare life"

refers to damaged life stripped of its political significance and exposed to violence, which does

not count as crime. What is the status of this exception of damaged flesh stripped from its

cultural and political signification, of the abject body expelled from the symbolic and political

universe? As I have argued elsewhere, the political determination in the case of bare life does not

mean the constitution or disciplinary regulation of the body, but rather what precedes and

enables such regulation - the possibility of the severance of bare life from its forms-of-life.3

Consequently, the biopolitics of sovereignty, like the abstraction of the exchange value from any

particularity of the object, time and labor, is based in the last instance on the possibility of

separation of the naked disposable life from diverse socio-political forms/contexts/and modalities

of living (bios). Bare life is included only as the excluded outside of politics and signification.

Political determination in this case does not mean the constitution or disciplinary regulation of

the body, but on the contrary, its extreme destitution - for instance, the comatose patient on life

support - which marks the boundary of the inclusion/exclusion from the political.

At stake in the operation of sovereignty is the separation and destruction of a form of life, a

destruction which reduces beings to bare life. This possibility of the expulsion of bare life is,

therefore, the correlative of the sovereign decision on what constitutes embodied, viable forms of

life and on what can no longer, or not yet, be considered as such forms. Implicated in other

divisions structuring Western politics, anthropology, and even aesthetics - such divisions as the

human and the inhuman, the human and the animal, the individual and the common, the

particular and the universal, means and ends, will and taste - the severance between bare life and

political forms also enables a retrospective recodification of the diverse forms of living as

abstract juridical categories, as a voter, the population and so on.4

To provide an alternative to biopolitics, Agamben calls for a rethinking of embodiment and

forms of living outside the parameters of the social regulation of the body and the sovereign

decision on the state of exception. At stake here is a new type of link between bare life and

political forms that would be generated from below, as it were, rather than imposed by a

sovereign decision. According to Thomas Wall, it is the absence of the relation between bare life

and its politically qualified ways of life that calls for sovereign decision: "Between bare life and

its ways of living, there can be only decision. Every sovereign and every state has always

confronted this... Bare life is nonrelational and thus invites decision. It is the space of decision...

and, as such, is perpetually au hasard."5 Rather than imposed by a sovereign decision, this

inseparable inter-connection between bare life and political forms would have to be generated

from below, from the mutual interaction between "form" and "life." As Agamben suggests at the

end of Homo Sacer:

This biopolitical body that is bare life must itself instead be transformed into the site for the

constitution and installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that

is only its own zoē... Yet how can a bios be only its own zoē, how can a form of life seize hold of

the very haplos (bare being) that constitutes both the task and the enigma of Western

metaphysics? If we give the name form-of-life to this being that is only its own bare existence

and to that life, that, being its own form, remains inseparable from it, we will witness the

emergence of a field of research beyond the terrain defined by the intersection of politics and

philosophy, medico-biological sciences and jurisprudence.6

In this difficult passage Agamben only hints at what this new form of relation supplanting

sovereign decision might look like. It is easier to provide a negative description of this

interaction between life and form: such interaction is meant to contest and disarticulate the

founding oppositions of Western politics, namely, the oppositions between the human and the

inhuman, bios and zoē, nature and culture, human and animal, norm and exception, possibility

and actuality, essence and existence, and finally, pre-political life and political identity. By

displacing the sovereign decision on bare life, this different interaction between bodies and forms

of living cannot be confused with either a dialectical reconciliation7 or social construction and

especially not with a prepolitical life or a new form of immediacy.8 It seems to me that the key

point here is the interconnection and yet also the nonidentity between form and life,9 materiality

and signification, which make their separation and unification equally impossible.

By preserving a fundamental relation to the excess of impotentiality over actuality, the

conflicting creation of form for/from bare life might take its orientation from poiesis rather than

from action or production, both of which are all too frequently associated with agency

controlling materiality, or with a self-realization of the subject. In this essay I will attempt to

develop a new mode of interaction between bare life and a form of life by examining from a

feminist perspective Agamben's philosophy of potentiality and his earlier writings on

community. Such a rethinking of Agamben's work, I argue, takes us beyond the four dominant

paradigms that govern the discussion of the body in feminist politics: the paradigm of biopolitics,

social construction, worries of essentialism, or the naive celebration of a new technological

"posthuman" body.

Inseparability of form and life entails a double task: first, it calls for rethinking both "form," that

is, being in language, and "life/existence/body" in terms of potentiality. As Agamben points out,

the emphasis on the ontology of potentiality in his work transforms "facts" into possibilities:

A life that cannot be separated from its form is a life... in which the single ways, acts, and

processes of living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities... Each behavior

and each form of human living is never prescribed by a specific biological vocation, nor is it

assigned by whatever necessity; instead, no matter how... socially compulsory, it always retains

the character of a possibility.10

Second, this task also entails a rethinking of belonging, understood in a double sense of the

relation between community/singularity and the encounter with the other. In other words, what is

at stake in Agamben's reformulation of "forms-of- life" is not the contrast between the ontology

of potentiality and the ontology of community, as Jenny Edkins suggests, but the inseparable

relation between the two.11

2. Potentiality, Gender, Impossibility

For Agamben, the interaction between "life/body" and "forms of living" entails a rethinking of

both life and politics in terms of potentiality. As he compellingly argues, the possibility of

resistance and of the praxis of freedom demands a new ontology of potentiality in excess of

historically determined actuality.12 Such an ontology emphasizes the persistence of potentiality

even after its full actualization in reality:

Contrary to the traditional idea of potentiality that is annulled in actuality, here we are confronted

with a potentiality that conserves itself and saves itself in actuality. Here potentiality, so to speak,

survives actuality.13

In contrast to the majority of Western political and moral philosophy, Agamben is concerned

with the "liberation" of potentiality from its subjection to will or moral law: philosophers have

attempted to restrict the ambiguities of potentiality,

by reducing it to the terms of will and necessity. Not what you can do, but what you want to do

or must do is its dominant theme... To believe that will has power over potentiality, that the

passage to actuality is the result of a decision that puts an end to the ambiguity of potentiality...

this is the perpetual illusion of morality.14

We can add that the same destructive illusion of the primacy of decision and will is at the heart

of the political theories of sovereignty, defined precisely as the power to decide on the state of

exception to the law.

Agamben is right to argue that the possibility of resistance and of the praxis of freedom from

below demands a new ontology of potentiality in excess of historically determined actuality. The

important implication of Agamben's thought is that potentiality conserving itself in the political

order deprives that order of its historical necessity. To liberate potentiality from agency, will and

decision, Agamben turns to Aristotle's distinction between possibility and actuality and argues

that the original meaning of potentiality cannot be separated from impotentiality, just as for

instance the architect's capacity to build cannot be separated from his capacity not to build: "[i]t

is a potentiality that is not simply the potential to do this or that thing but potential to not-do,

potential not to pass into actuality."15 It is the capacity of "not to" that questions the

irreversibility of historical determination of power, marks the contingency of historical reality,

and opens the possibility of freedom. At the moment of its realization, potentiality can never be

completely absorbed in actuality since it persists as impotentiality, as the capacity of "not to."

This is a powerful intervention, yet it does not consider the relational aspect of potentiality. Since

Agamben implicitly associates potentiality with the capacity of the isolated subject - the architect

or the pianist in his examples - the only way he can liberate it from the will of that subject is by

relating possibility "to its own privation" rather than to the potentialities of others. Thus, he

argues that "[b]eings that exist in the mode of potentiality are capable of their own impotentiality

and only in this way do they become potential."16 Because Agamben does not consider how

human capacities might be enlarged, altered or destroyed by capacities/incapacities of others, he

argues that only an aporetic capacity for impotentiality can liberate potentiality from telos,

agency or will.

No doubt Agamben provides a very compelling critique of sovereignty and the reductive

understanding of potentiality as the will to power. Yet, the liberation of potentiality from telos,

agency or will does not take into account two issues: the relational modality of the potential, on

the one hand, and the racialized, gendered character of "agency, autonomy, and will" in the

history of philosophy.17 As Irigaray, for example, famously argues, in the Western philosophical

imaginary, women, associated with sensibility, unfreedom, and matter - with the ambivalent

"mother-matter-nature" envelope - invisibly support philosophical capacities of thinking, and yet

are "rejected as the waste product of reflection."18 Although Irigaray's analysis of the erasure of

the feminine and sexual difference from/by the philosophical discourse is by now a rather

familiar story, we have yet to ask about the implications of her diagnosis for Agamben's critique

of the equation of potentiality with will. In the context of Irigaray's work, the first task of a

feminist philosophy of potentiality is to "recover" the invisible "place of her exploitation by

discourse," which renders the feminine operation in language both invisible and impossible.19

What is at stake here is the interrogation of potentiality from the perspective of impossibility

associated in Agamben's thought with bare life and in Irigaray's work with the exclusion of the

feminine as "the waste product of reflection," rather than from the perspective of the sovereign

decision and will.

This shift of perspectives raises several questions. The most urgent question is how to transform

the destruction of human capacities of subjugated groups into enabling possibilities. In most of

the feminist, postcolonial and race theories of liberation this political project has been articulated

as the "reclaiming of agency" for and by the oppressed. Can collective agency include the

privation of potentiality at stake in Agamben's thought? This question calls for a more rigorous

and richer analysis of the difference between the destruction of human capacities, associated with

subjugation and bare life, on the one hand, and the enabling impotentiality (what Agamben calls

the capacity of not to), on the other hand. Second, we need to analyze the relational aspect of

potentiality, implied in Agamben's earlier work on the community but never fully developed.

And finally, we need to address the relation between potentiality and materiality - materiality

understood in the double sense of the body of racialized, gendered and objectified subjectivities

and the materiality of objects, for instance, the materiality of the house in Agamben's analysis of

the architect's capacity to build. Ultimately, these questions point to unpredictable interactions

among multiple capacities, privations, and impossibilities, for instance, to return to Agamben's

example of the architect, the interaction between the architect's

capacity/incapacity/powerlessness to design, the workers' capacity/incapacity to build, and the

unforeseeable capacities/deficiencies of the materials (and human labor/damage accumulated in

them), locations and so on.

If we approach the politics of potentiality from the perspective of bare life, the most urgent issue

is not only the distinction of possibility from will but the difference between impotentiality (the

enabling capacity of "not to," which for Agamben is the source of freedom) and powerlessness or

impossibility. Although barely legible in Agamben's paradigmatic figure of potentiality, namely,

Bartelby's famous formula "I prefer not to," this task is at stake in another example of

potentiality, which makes only a fleeting appearance in Agamben's work, and which thus far has

been almost completely ignored by Agamben's commentators.20 Let us recall that Agamben

begins his essay "On Potentiality" with a brief reference to the Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova,

who, standing outside the Stalinist prison in Leningrad to hear the news of her imprisoned son,

utters "I can" instead of "I prefer not to." Agamben does not pursue in greater detail this feminine

inflection of possibility proclaimed in the face of the suffering of others and political terror. Not

only does he eclipse the subtle difference between the (feminine?) "I can" and the (masculine?)

"I prefer not to," but he generalizes the singularity of Akhmatova's utterance into "everyone's"

experience of potentiality:

For everyone a moment comes in which she or he must utter this 'I can," which does not refer to

any... specific capacity that is, nevertheless, absolutely demanding. Beyond all faculties, this "I

can"... marks what is, for each of us, perhaps the hardest and bitterest experience possible: the

experience of potentiality21

By glossing over the specificity of her case, by equating her experience of Stalinist terror with

the experience of possibility encountered by "each of us," Agamben misses the opportunity to

interrogate the relation between potentiality, powerlessness, and gender.

What is then the difference between Bartelby's "I prefer not to," uttered in response to the

juridical machinery of the liberal state, and Akhmatova's "I can," proclaimed in response to

another woman, also subjected to the political machinery of intimidation and terror? Although

Bartelby's formula challenges the power of the law and the will, it does not necessarily express

the systematic destruction of the potential of subjugated people - the destruction, to which

Akhmatova's poetry bears witness. Nor does it show how powerlessness can be transformed into

possibility.

Akhmatova's "I can," cited by Agamben, comes from her 1957 preface, which she added to her

most famous collection of short poems, entitled Requiem. Written between 1935-40, after a long

period of silence, Requiem is a poetic testimony to the horror of Stalin's Terror and an act of

mourning for its victims. In the "Dedication" section she describes a daily congregation of beings

"less live than dead."22 Akhmatova herself spent 17 months waiting in line outside the prison for

news of her son, Lev Gumilev, whom she addresses as "my dead."23 The cycle of poems mourns

not only the death of relatives and friends, like her former husband or the poet Osip Mandelstam,

but all the victims of the Great Terror, including other women with whom she shared her painful

vigil and the experience of being abandoned by the disaster. How can a possibility of writing

arise from the utter destruction of possibilities, from the powerlessness and destitution of these

living dead congregating outside the Stalinist prison? In her 1957 prose foreword, entitled

"Instead of a Preface," which is a kind of retrospective "Afterward," Akhmatova offers the

following response to this question:

During the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside

the prison in Leningrad... Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who

had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common

to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there): 'Could one ever describe

this?'/And I said: 'I can'.24

What is at stake in Akhmatova's "I can" is neither a critique nor a proclamation of the will of the

poet. Rather it is a recovery of feminine possibility from the double sense of powerlessness: one

stemming from the paralyzing effects of political subjugation, which destroys writing itself, and

the other from the erasure of "the feminine operation" from language. How can transformative

capacity and potentiality survive their destruction by political terror? How can its victims and

survivors be "jolted out of their torpor"? How can this persisting capacity be reclaimed and

inscribed in language without reverting into a counter-will to power? As Akhmatova's answer

suggests, the experience of impotentiality - "I can not do this or be that" -can be enabling even in

a state of "torpor" only if it maintains its relation, as Agamben's own formulation implicitly

suggests, to the positive, intersubjective potentiality of "I can." Indeed, as Agamben himself

reminds us, Aristotle draws his examples of potentiality and impotentiality from "the arts and

human knowledge," which means that human beings "exist in the mode of potentiality" only

insofar as they can act or produce.25 Only if I can write, paint, or act politically, and only if this

capacity is manifested and enhanced in my relations with others, can I preserve my abilities

when I do not act, and especially, when I'm told that I cannot do so.

Although the emphasis on "I can" is crucial to all subjugated groups, because this is what

ultimately separates potentiality from the torpor of powerlessness, this emphasis is even more

important in the case of female potentiality. As Irigaray's work suggests, the feminine experience

of impotentiality -"I can not to"- is hardly legible in philosophical discourse where it appears as

"the waste product of reflection" or as deficiency expressed as "you cannot."26 This collapse of

the distinctions between impotentiality and impossibility, and the implicit gendering of

powerlessness as "feminine," are some of the effects of the erasure of sexual difference from the

philosophical conception of the subject and language. Consequently, the impotentiality of

women has to inscribe in language, again and again, its relation to the feminine "I/you/we can."

Only then the powerlessness projected onto the feminine can be deprived of its necessity and

transformed into the capacity for not acting, which is inseparable from the capacity for acting.

Such a transformation also requires a shift in the relation between feminine potential and the

negative. Instead of being subjected to the impossible - expressed as "you cannot" - the feminine

has to assume the capacity for the negative - for "I can not to." What we see here is a

transformation of the destroyed potentiality, experienced as powerlessness, into a capacity for

negating that destruction. In a reversal of Agamben, we can say that the unrealized feminine

potential survives its destruction as impotentiality, which contests the inevitability of destruction.

Furthermore, since this persisting impotentiality is an inherent part of the human potential to

change, it can be reclaimed and mobilized first as the negative capacity to contest destructive

conditions, and second, as the positive capacity to create new unpredictable possibilities of being

otherwise, possibilities exceeding any telos, end, or political goal.

Finally, what is crucial in Akhmatova's "I can" is that it is uttered in response to another woman,

who barely whispers "Could one ever describe this?" One can imagine multiple significations of

this question, ranging from desperation and impossibility (how can one speak of this?) to the

urgency of the impossible request imploring another woman to witness and speak about the

destruction to which all of the women are subjected. Consequently, Akhmatova's "I can" is a

response to this imploring question from another woman rather than the pronouncement of her

own initiative. In his analysis Agamben, however, glosses over this relational aspect of

Akhmatova's potentiality. Yet, as this exchange between women suggests, potentiality cannot be

understood, as Agamben seems to suggest, in terms of the isolated subject and what he "can or

can not do," because it is fundamentally a relational concept, emerging from the encounter with

another "you." Such encounters can be destructive or enabling. It is this "Can you/I can" that is

rescued against all odds by a female community outside the prison walls in Akhmatova's

Requiem.

3. Potentiality and Community

Akhmatova's response-"ability" - "I can"- emerging from the encounter with another woman

brings us to the relational aspect of potentiality, that is, potentiality understood not only in

respect to its own privation (because that privation might imply a capacity/incapacity of the

isolated subject) but also in relation to other potentialities or to the potentialities of others.

Needless to say, the mode of relationality to the other has to be qualified since in Homo Sacer,

Agamben argues for a politics beyond all relation, including a "non-relational relation" implied

in the sovereign ban.27 Instead of relationality, Agamben proposes terms like being together,

coming together, or co-belonging. As all these terms suggest, "relational" potentiality is

inseparable from rethinking community and singularity. This is especially the case in The

Coming Community where potentiality is intertwined with being in common and with the manner

in which entities are coming into being. Consequently, to address the main problem of Western

bio-politics diagnosed in Homo Sacer, namely, the severance of bare life from the common

political forms of life, we need to return to The Coming Community, because in this text

Agamben proposes a richer understanding of potentiality as a modality of being-in-common.

Furthermore, the perspective of the community makes it clear that Agamben's critique of

biopolitics does not stress immediacy, as some commentators argue,28 but on the contrary calls

for a radical redefinition of belonging itself (or what I call intersubjective potentiality) apart from

the operations of the inclusion/exclusion that secure collective borders and political identities.

Let us begin with Agamben's redefinition of belonging and political community apart from the

severance between bare life and the politically relevant forms of life. According to Agamben,

being in common is not based on representation, shared identity, the realization of common

goals, or belonging to a common class or a sect. In fact, it is a mode of belonging "without

representable conditions."29 Agamben argues that co-belonging has to be defined beyond the

politics of representation, identity, and recognition, because all these conceptions of community

depend, in the last instance, on the legal recognition of identities, rights, and demands of

subjugated groups by the sovereign power. Consequently, the politics of recognition and the

sovereign ban on bare life are two opposite sides of biopolitics. As an alternative to identity

politics or the politics of recognition, Agamben proposes being in common based on the

interplay of the appropriation of belonging by each singular being and on the disappropriation of

all identities. Following Agamben's formulation, intersubjective potentiality will also be

characterized by this interplay of belonging and disappropriation.

The redefinition of communal belonging apart from the notion of a common identity or a

common foundation also requires a rethinking of singularity apart from the oppositions of

individuality and universality, isolation and community, particularity and generality. Agamben

defines such singularity as "whatever" being.30 Rather than an indifference to particularity, the

formulation of "whatever" means that beings matter in all their idiosyncrasies and modes of

being, no matter what they are. This is the case because "whatever" is not a secondary attribute

that modifies a pre-existing identity but the modality of being preceding any formation of

identity. The counterpart of "whatever" is not, therefore, "no matter what" but "how" or "thus":

what matters is not what singularities are but how they are. Rather than signifying indifference

with respect to identity, "whatever" reveals the linguistic mode of each singular being - its mode

"of being called." Agamben calls it "mannerism of being."31 What is crucial here is that the

displacement of essence, describing what one is, into multiple and indeterminate manners of

existence, entails a shift from what one is into how one can be. Understood in terms of the

ontology of potentiality, the manner of being "is the simple fact of one's own existence as

possibility or potentiality" rather than an essence or destiny that we should realize.32

Since such belonging does not depend on sharing a common identity, common goals, or prior

conditions, it can be defined only in terms of sharing belonging itself.33 Yet, what is belonging

itself? For Agamben belonging is synonymous with being in language, which he formulates as

"being called." What matters in belonging is not what one is called but that one is called. As

Agamben puts it, being-called is "the property that establishes all possible belongings (being-

called Italian, -dog, -Communist)";34 it implies a multiple singularity and scattered commonality.

What is important in this conceptualization of belonging in terms of "being called" is the fact that

the emphasis on linguistic modality removes all the discussion of community, and the unification

of forms of life with bare life, from immediacy. On the contrary, it suggests that the coming

community is mediated, to use Catherine Mills' apt formulation, through the communication of

the "pure communicability" of language.35 As we shall see, it is precisely this linguistic

mediation that makes life and form inseparable from each other and redefines both of them in

terms of potentiality.

If the communication and appropriation of "being called" enables belonging to a community,

such belonging is at the same time intertwined with the expropriation of meaning and identity:

"Being-called" is what brings all identities "radically into question... these pure singularities

communicate... without being tied by any common property... They are expropriated of all

identity, so as to appropriate belonging itself."36 Thus, the appropriation of belonging to a

community does not secure common identity but expropriates all identities. As a possibility of

belonging, "being called" puts into question "what" one is called. Such an expropriation puts one

beside oneself, so what is communicated in the "sharing" of belonging is the irreducible plurality

of being called.

Agamben clarifies this relation between belonging and the expropriation of identity through the

paradox of exemplarity. The minimal formulation of belonging in terms of communication of

"being called" makes each singular being into the exemplar "of the coming community."37 Yet,

the linguistic and ontological status of such an exemplar is neither a particular nor the universal;

the exemplar, as Agamben argues, is always "a singular object that presents itself as such, that

shows its singularity."38 At the same time, as the Greek etymology of the paradigm suggests, the

exemplar is always beside itself, "in the empty space in which its undefinable and unforgettable

life unfolds."39 It is this being beside oneself that enables an exemplary or a paradigmatic being

to be singular, irreplaceable and, at the same time, to serve as an exemplar for all the other

singularities with whom it shares not just particular qualities but precisely the fact that it is called

at all. Hence the double modality of belonging - the communication in all particular statements

of the common modality of "being called" and of the singular being beside oneself, expropriating

oneself into an empty space of exemplarity and substitution. As the exemplar of the coming

community, a singular being is at once in relation to the common and beside itself.

Being beside oneself, the mode of expropriation as the modality of being in common has crucial

consequences for the understanding of "form" at stake in the common "forms of life." In so far as

they are shared and emerge from expropriation, forms of life are improper and indeterminate. As

Agamben argues, what every form of being in common exposes is its own "amorphousness" and

the lack of final determination.40 As the characteristic of both singularity and being-in-common,

such an indeterminacy of form opens a mode of belonging and individuation through

indetermination rather than through the exhaustion of all possibilities: "the singularity here is not

a final determination of being, but an unraveling or an indetermination of its limits: a paradoxical

individuation by indetermination."41 The expropriation understood as the absence of the final

determination of the common forms of life implies that the "form" at stake in the "common

forms of life" is not the actualization of the concept, purpose, or design but the preservation of

"inactuality."42 Possibility and reality become indistinguishable from each other.43 Since form, or

perhaps it would be more appropriate to say, modes of forming, implies a finality or the

actualization of the final determination of being, it paradoxically consists in the undoing of

limits. Like Foucault, Agamben argues that his concept of form entails a transformation of the

Kantian notion of the limit into a threshold or passage to the outside.44 The transformation of the

limit into a threshold makes common forms of life not only indeterminate but irreducibly

exposed to the outside.45

There are two crucial consequences of this indetermination and expropriation characteristic of

common forms of life. First of all, the emphasis on expropriation as the modality of belonging

allows Agamben to move away from the operation of inclusion and exclusion marking the

borders of political communities and political identities. Instead of the exclusion of the improper

to set the borders of the polis, Agamben argues that commonality is based on the appropriation

of one's own impropriety, of one's own being beside oneself. Impropriety, or expropriation, is

precisely what cannot be cast away in the formation of the community because it is the very

condition of being with others. In this context, the political theology of evil, such as George W.

Bush's "axis of evil," consists in casting out impropriety and impotence, in turning it into a

substance, enemy, or fault.46 We could develop this thought further and say that evil signifies the

projection of one's own impropriety, which is a condition of possibility of both being with others

and being in language, onto marginalized others in order to exclude them from "proper"

commonality.

Agamben's emphasis on expropriation, hospitality and love as related modalities of being in

common brings us again to the relation between sexual difference and community. Since

Agamben does not follow this path of reflection, let us turn again to Irigaray. Like Agamben's

notion of expropriation, Irigaray's conception of sexual difference does not stress gender identity

but on the contrary foregrounds disappropriation, incompleteness, and the relational character of

singular subjects and communities. As she famously puts it,

The mine of the subject is always already marked by disappropriation… Being a man or a

woman means not being the whole of the subject or of the community or of spirit, as well as not

being entirely one's self.47

As a mode of relation, sexual difference reveals the exposure and incompleteness of any identity

- it marks the ontological disappropriation of sexuate being. By stressing the disappropriation

and incompleteness of historically constituted identities, this approach to sexual difference

prevents the reification of existing gender and racial stereotypes into political or "natural" norms.

Furthermore, it emphasizes the transformative effects of sexual dislocation, by interpreting the

"disappropriating" character of sexual difference in temporal terms as a possibility of becoming,

desire, indeed, as the opening of freedom. By dramatizing, in Irigaray's words, "not being the

whole of the subject or of the community," the disappropriating character of sexual difference

undercuts any fantasmatic, imaginary constructions of wholeness and projections of

incompleteness onto another. Another important aspect of Irigaray's work is that the call for the

ethics of sexual difference is often intertwined with the emphasis on its "impossible" character.48

The "impossible" has to be understood in the double - historical/diagnostic and ontological -

sense. As we have seen in the context of the analysis of Akhmatova's poetry, one meaning of the

impossible points to the erasure (or its sublation) of sexual difference by the monological,

homosocial discourse of philosophy and politics. Such erasure precludes the possibility of the

feminine speaking subject, that is, of the feminine "I can." By contesting monologism, the

inscription of sexual difference in the conception of community does not, however, remove the

register of the impossible but changes its character - it precisely foregrounds the shift from the

ontology of actuality to possibility. Or, as Irigaray puts it, the inscription of sexual difference in

social relations makes "the impossible possible." For historical reasons, on the masculine side

(Bartelby's "I prefer not to), to make the impossible possible is to contest the ideology of will and

the fear of impotentiality. On the feminine side (Akhmatova's "I can"), however, the impossible

possibility of sexual difference transforms the exclusion from discourse into a possibility of

speaking, becoming, indeed, into a possibility "of being called."

Understood in Irigaray's sense, the ethics of sexual difference is what might make non-violent,

non-narcissistic love in erotic and social relations possible.49 Agamben is perhaps a bit uncritical

in his embrace of love as a modality of being with others. As psychoanalysis teaches us, love can

be narcissistic, compensatory, violent, bespeaking more of the fantasies of the subject than of the

singularity of the other. By revealing the fact that it is not only the hostile or the missing others

that block the full actualization of identities but the ontological condition of sexuate being of

each singularity, the ethics of sexual difference at least opens the possibility of a love that is

irreducible to the domination of the other or to narcissistic relations of complementarity. Since

the ethics of sexual difference negates both the projections of incompleteness onto the other and

the reduction of the other to the complement of the subject, it respects the alterity of the Other,

or, in Agamben's terms, the singularity of the Other's face, in erotic and social relations.50 It

gives the love of "whatever being" a chance.

IV. Praxis: From Impotentiality to the

Creation of New Forms of Life

As we have seen, the reverse side of Agamben's redefinition of being in common in terms of

potentiality is the relational aspect of potentiality itself. Yet, what are the implications of

potentiality and being in common for political praxis? Although Agamben gives us some

provocative examples of political praxis, for instance, the Chinese students' protest against the

state in Tiananmen Square, he does not directly engage the analysis of praxis as such.

Nonetheless, in the context of his ontology of potentiality and his theory of community, we

would have to emphasize the contingent, relational, and open-ended character of any

transformative praxis. Such an approach to praxis contests the very idea that the political act is

merely an actualization of potentiality that already pre-exists it. As we have seen, Agamben

challenges the notion of praxis as the process of actualization of pre-existing capacities by

stressing primarily the survival of potentiality as the capacity of not to. Yet the excess of

potentiality as privation does not necessarily address the interaction between diverse capacities

of political agents nor does it account for the possibility of the creation of new forms of life. To

indicate the possibility of such a praxis in a preliminary way, I propose to supplement

Agamben's ontology of potentiality with Hannah Arendt's "grammar" of political action.

Before turning to Arendt, however, I want to stress some conceptual resources for thinking about

praxis in The Coming Community. The most important point in this respect is reversibility,

oscillation and alteration in the passage from potentiality to act. Like a movement from language

to speech act or to the act of writing, the passage to acting is not a single event but, as Agamben

argues, it is the "infinite series of oscillations" and variations between potentialities and

actuality.51 If we extend this analysis to collective praxis, then action would also have to be

characterized by a reversible (though not necessarily reciprocal) oscillation between possibility

and actuality. As Agamben puts it,

[t]he passage from potentiality to act, from language to word, from the common to the proper,

comes about every time as a shuttling in both directions along a line of sparkling alternation on

which common nature and singularity, potentiality and act change roles and interpenetrate.52

The emphasis on the interpenetration, reversibility, and alteration of possibilities implies that the

"process of realization" not only conserves the excess of capacity as privation but creates new,

unpredictable possibilities, which were inconceivable prior to the action. Consequently, the

excess of potentiality also implies the creation of new possibilities of being otherwise,

possibilities which were unheard-of prior to the action. Seen in this way, political praxis departs

from the realization/conservation of potentiality to the creation of what does not yet exist. We

might call such a praxis an "experiment without truth" - to use Agamben's very suggestive

term.53 Such experimental praxis not only conserves a pre-existing potential but transforms the

impossible into an unheard-of possibility.

To account for the emergence of new possibilities through action, let us turn to Hannah Arendt,

whose work is an important influence in Agamben's political thought. Despite its limitations, (for

instance, the separation between the private and the political, bios and zoē), Arendt's theory of

praxis shows that the creation of the new forms of political life stems not only from contingency

of political community but primarily from the interaction among the diverse capacities of

participants. Like Agamben, Arendt underscores the multiplicity, plurality, and contingency of

political communities. Because such a political community is relational, linguistic, and created

through and for action, it does not require a common identity (on the contrary, it implies coming

together of strangers), a common origin, or even common goals. Instead of a shared identity, it

requires only a worldly space of the "in-between." Unlike Agamben, however, Arendt analyzes

the participatory and interactive character of praxis - what she calls the complex "grammar" and

"syntax" of political power.

Arendt's "grammar of action" and the "syntax" of political power stress the fact that forming

alliances with others not only preserves but increases the capacities of each participant and thus

creates new possibilities. Such an increase of capacities occurs when singular beings "join

themselves together for the purpose of action, and it will disappear when, for whatever reason,

they disperse."54 Thus capacities and human powers are augmented through the creation of

alliances based on mutual promises. In contrast to political theories of contract or sovereignty,

such an alliance "gathers together the isolated strength of the allied partners and binds them into

a new power structure."55 By gathering together "whatever" singularities, praxis augments their

capacities, creates a new power, and opens new possibilities.

In the context of Arendt's theory of action the excess of possibility over historically determined

actuality cannot be limited to the preservation of negative possibilities because it entails the

creation of new capacities in the process of action.56 Arendt calls these new possibilities "the

world building capacity of men."57 The convergence of community, novelty and transformative

praxis links the ontology of potentiality to the possibility of freedom. Needless to say, freedom

in this context is neither the property nor the capacity of the isolated subject but is fundamentally

relational, contingent, and created by acting with others. Furthermore, political freedom in the

contingent historical world is different from liberation, even though liberation is its necessary

precondition. As Arendt argues, liberation is primarily negative - it is the struggle to end

oppression or to regain lost liberties - while freedom is positive, implying the creation of a new

way of life. In a very suggestive formulation, Arendt argues that freedom in the positive and

transformative sense reveals a political capacity to enact with others the "birth" of a new world.58

In contrast to the rhetoric of human rights,59 the political birth of a new world not only

implicitly inscribes the feminine inflection of possibility into the political, but also suggests the

emergence of the new forms of life, in which life and form would be in continuous, inseparable

interaction. Ultimately what I propose in this essay is that potentiality understood as the

intersubjective capacity to create a new world is the indispensable counterpart of Agamben's

rhetoric of privation. Both of these modalities - the unpredictable creation of the new as well as

the excess of privation - are crucial to political action based on the ontology of potentiality.

Ewa Plonowska Ziarek

Ewa Plonowska Ziarek is Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature and the Founding

Director of Humanities Institute at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is the author

of The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism (SUNY,

1995); and An Ethics of Dissensus: Feminism, Postmodernity, and the Politics of Radical

Democracy (Stanford 2001). She is the editor of Gombrowicz's Grimaces: Modernism, Gender,

Nationality (SUNY, 1998); and the co-editor of Revolt, Affect, and Collectivity: The Unstable

Boundaries of Kristeva's Polis (SUNY 2005) and Time for the Humanities: Praxis and the Limits

of Autonomy (Fordham UP 2008). She has published numerous articles on Kristeva, Irigaray,

Derrida, Agamben, Foucault, Levinas, Fanon, feminist theory, and literary modernism.

Notes

1. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel

Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 177.

2. For some examples of the critiques of bare life see for instance Andrew Benjamin, "Spacing as

the Shared: Heraclitus, Pindar, Agamben," in Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on

Agamben's 'Homo Sacer', ed. Andrew Norris (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 145-172.

See also Andrew Benjamin, "Particularity and Exception: On Jews and Animals," South Atlantic

Quarterly 107, 1 (2008): 71-88 and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, "Bare Life on Strike: Notes of the

Biopolitics of Race and Gender," South Atlantic Quarterly 107,1 (2008): 89-105.

3. Ziarek, "Bare life on strike: notes on the biopolitics of race and gender".

4. Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 6-7.

5. Thomas Carl Wall, "Au Hasard," in Politics, Metaphysics, and Death, 38-39.

6. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 188.

7. For a discussion of Agamben's relation to dialectical mediation, see Antonio Negri, "The

Discreet Taste of the Dialectic" in Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, eds. Matthew

Calarco and Steven De Caroli (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 109-126. For a

critique of Agamben's insufficient attention to the hegemony, see Ernesto Laclau, "Bare Life or

Social Indeterminacy," in On Agamben, 11-22.

8. For a discussion of whatever singularities as a form of immediacy, see for instance, Edkins,

"Whatever Politics," in Giorgio Agamben, 70-91.

9. In the context of his discussion of the survivors' testimonies, Agamben defines such a link

between the damaged life and the human as the aporetic task of witnessing to the inhuman. The

ethics of such witnessing neither abandons nor assimilates it to the human. Giorgio Agamben,

Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999). For my

further discussion of the ethical structure of the survivors' testimony in Agamben's Remnants of

Auschwitz, see Ewa Ziarek Plonowska, "Evil and Testimony: Ethics 'after' Postmodernism"

Hypatia, 18, 2 (2003): 197-204.

10. Agamben, Means Without End, 3.

11. Edkins, "Whatever Politics," 70-91.

12. Agamben, Potentialities, 259.

13. Agamben, Potentialities, 184.

14. Agamben, Potentialities, 254.

15. Agamben, Potentialities, 179-180

16. Agamben, Potentialities, 182.

17. For a discussion of the relation between bare life and the politics of race and gender, see for

example, Alexander G. Weheliye, "Pornotropes" Journal of Visual Culture 7, 1 (2008): 65-81;

Diane Enns, "Political Life before Identity" Theory & Event 10, 1 (2007); and Ewa Plonowska

Ziarek, "Bare Life on Strike". The implicit relation between bare life and gender is also stake in

Catherine Mills, "Linguistic Survival and Ethicality," in Politics, Metaphysics, and Death, 198-

221. For an excellent discussion of the destruction of forms of life by the Western imperialism,

see Sidi Mohammed Barkat, Le Corps D'Exception: Les artifices du pouvoir colonial et la

destruction de la vie (Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2005).

18. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press, 1985), 76-77. For a comprehensive discussion of Irigaray's engagement with

the history of philosophy, see Tina Chanter, Ethics of Eros: Irigaray's Rewriting of the

Philosophers (New York: Routledge, 1995).

19. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 76.

20. The critics, who are exceptions, merely mention Akhmatova in passing or endontes. See for

instance, Anton Schütz, "Thinking the law with and against Luhmann, Legendre, Agamben" Law

and Critique 11, 2 (2000): 107-136 and Rad Borislavov, "Agamben, Ontology, and Constituent

Power" Debatte, 13, 2 (2005).

21. Agamben, Potentialities, 178.

22. Anna Akhmatova, Poems of Akhmatova, eds and trans. Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward

(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1973) 101.

23. Akhmatova, Poems of Akhmatova, 103.

24. Akhmatova, Poems of Akhmatova, 99.

25. Agamben, Potentialities, 182.

26. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 76-77.

27. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 47.

28. Edkins, "Whatever Politics," in Giorgio Agamben; Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of

Agamben (Montréal: McGill University Press, 2008).

29. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University

of Minnesota Press, 1993) 86.

30. Agamben, The Coming Community, 1-2.

31. Agamben, The Coming Community, 28.

32. Agamben, The Coming Community, 43 (emphasis in original).

33. Agamben, The Coming Community, 10, 85.

34. Agamben, The Coming Community, 10-11.

35. Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben, 130-131. My only point of contention with Mills'

otherwise very helpful discussion is her claim that the singular beings share "ontological

immediacy", 130.

36. Agamben, The Coming Community, 10-11.

37. Agamben, The Coming Community, 11.

38. Agamben, The Coming Community, 10.

39. Agamben, The Coming Community, 10

40. Agamben, The Coming Community, 44.

41. Agamben, The Coming Community, 56.

42. Agamben, The Coming Community, 44.

43. Agamben, The Coming Community, 56.

44. Agamben, The Coming Community, 64, 67.

45. Agamben, The Coming Community, 64.

46. Agamben, The Coming Community, 44.

47. Luce Irigaray, I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity Within History, trans. Alison Martin, New

(York and London: Routledge, 1996), 106.

48. For an illuminating discussion of the impossible character of sexual difference as the pair of

empty brackets, see Penelope Deutscher, A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of

Luce Irigaray (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 107-20.

49. For a discussion of love in Irigaray's work, see Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, An Ethics of

Dissensus: Postmodernism, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical Democracy (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 2001), 163-172.

50. Although Agamben does not consider the distinction, so crucial to Derrida's, Irigaray, and

Levinas's philosophies, between being in common and the encounter with the other, his analysis

in The Coming Community nonetheless fluctuates between these two levels signaled, for

instance, in the shifts from the face of the singular other to the multitudes coming together in the

opposition to the state. In a few moments when Agamben considers what being with others

means he stresses the fact expropriation is intertwined with "unconditional hospitality" welcome,

and substitution for others. Needless to say, hospitality, welcome, and substitution bear an

uncanny (or deliberate) resemblance to the Levinasian discourse of responsibility and Derrida's

hospitality. Despite the common ethical discourse of hospitality, Agamben, in contrast to

Levinas, does not define substitution in terms of responsibility or being a hostage, but associates

it rather with openness, with being at ease with others, and finally, with love. See Agamben, The

Coming Community, 24-25.

51. Agamben, The Coming Community, 19.

52. Agamben, The Coming Community, 20.

53. Agamben, Potentialities, 260.

54. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 1990), 175. For Arendt's discussion of

political action, see also Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of

Chicago Press, 1998) 175-245.

55. Arendt, On Revolution, 170.

56. The migration of the "new" from new discoveries in science, new ideas in philosophy, or

originality of art to the public realm of political action radicalizes this notion, and links it with

the praxis of the multitude rather than with the property or the achievements of a chosen few.

57. Arendt, On Revolution, 175. Recently, Arendt's political philosophy has attracted a renewed

attention of feminist scholars. For excellent, but different in their approach, examples of

reinterpretation of Arendt in the context of the political discourses of modernity, see, for

instance, Seyla Benhabib's analysis of Arendt's conflicting relation to Benjamin and Heidegger in

her The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Lanham: Roman and Littlefield, 2003) as well

as an excellent analysis of Arendt's notions of human rights, natality and responsibility by Peg

Birmingham in her Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common

Responsibility (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).

58. Arendt, On Revolution, 42. At the same time, Arendt stresses the fragility of the convergence

of positive freedom, collective praxis, and the inauguration of the new forms of political life.

59. For Agamben's critique of the notion of birth in the conception of human rights see

Agamben, Homo Sacer, 126-135.