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.
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