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A parody of action: Politics and pantomime in Agamben's critique of Arendt

2021; Wiley; Volume: 29; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/1467-8675.12592

1467-8675

Sergei Prozorov,

Franz Kafka Literary Studies

Hannah Arendt's thought has been a major influence on Giorgio Agamben's political theory. Agamben's appreciation of Arendt dates back at least to 1970 when he sent her a note expressing his admiration and gratitude (De la Durantaye, 2009, p. 41). It clearly persists in the first volume of Homo Sacer, where Arendt is presented as the first author to address the entry of biological life to the forefront of Western politics. And yet, this appreciation has also been accompanied by a certain distancing, since Arendt's line of reasoning in The Human Condition and other works appears not merely incomplete from Agamben's perspective, for example, in the lack of biopolitical perspective to her study of totalitarianism (Arendt, 1968; see Agamben, 1998, p. 4), but also complicit in the very process of the inclusive exclusion of bare life into the political domain. After all, Arendt's retracing of the victory of animal laborans and the eclipse of action in The Human Condition presupposes both the possibility and the desirability of the foundation of the political space through the exclusion of bare life from the polis (see Lechte & Newman, 2012). Arendt did not merely trace the way bare life enters politics in modernity but also argues that its exit alone could revive politics in the modern period. While Agamben certainly shares Arendt's diagnosis, he entirely disagrees with her solutions, claiming that the "restoration of classical political categories proposed by Leo Strauss and, in a different sense, by Hannah Arendt, can have only a critical sense" (Agamben, 1998, p. 187). There is, for Agamben, no return from the contemporary indistinction between life and politics to a politics rigorously distinguished from the needs of life. While Agamben never returned to Arendt's work in the subsequent volumes of the series, the affirmative biopolitics outlined therein, culminating in The Use of Bodies (Agamben, 2016), may be read as an attempt to develop an alternative to sovereign biopolitics that would not be merely "restorative," like Arendt's. In the tradition of Western ethical and political thought there are two paradigms, which intersect and incessantly keep separating from one another in the course of its history. The first situates the essence of the human and the proper place of politics and ethics in action and praxis; the second situates it instead in knowledge and contemplation (in theoria). (Agamben, 2019, p. 35) In Karman, Agamben focuses his critique primarily on the first paradigm, yet he does not subscribe to the second one, but rather ventures to "open the space for the tertium" or the third paradigm, whose exemplary activity would be a mysterion or theatrical performance. In Agamben's view, the main problem with the paradigm of action consists in its constitutively juridical character that he traces to the etymological sense of actio as a trial or religious ritual (Agamben, 2019, p. 70). What defines action for Agamben is its imputability to a subject, who thereby becomes responsible for it. Action is thus linked to the Latin term crimen (Agamben, 2019, p. 24), which refers both to the accusation and the crime. "[Crimen] is the form that human action assumes when it is imputed and called into question in the order of responsibility and law" (Agamben, 2019, p. 25). Agamben traces this Latin term to the Sanskrit term karman, which refers to work in general, good or bad. Karman implies a connection between an action and its consequences, which makes it possible to assess the consequences of one's actions and impute responsibility for them to the actor, who could thus be accused of a crime. This logic of imputation permits Agamben to claim that the "concept of crimen, of action that is sanctioned, which is to say, imputable and productive of consequences, stands at the foundation not only of law but also of the ethics and religious morality of the West' (Agamben, 2019, p. 29). The question of imputation and responsibility first leads Agamben to a critique of the notion of will that he developed at length in earlier writings. Yet, the theme of the will is ultimately secondary to Agamben's argument in Karman, especially with regard to his engagement with Arendt's thought. Of course, Agamben recognizes that the concept of the will was not developed in Greek thought, which is the main site for Arendt's interpretation of action. Moreover, Arendt herself did not focus on the will in The Human Condition but only turned to it in the second volume of her final work The Life of the Mind (Arendt, 1978), which deals with contemplative rather than active life. Thus, Agamben identifies as the main problem with action not its willed character but rather its imputability to the subject as such: "if by imputing the act to the agent and assigning a fault to him for this reason, one makes of action the ultimate criterion of ethics and of humanity, then one introduces into the latter a split that can no longer be resolved" (Agamben, 2019, pp. 33–34). It is this split that Agamben first ventures to identify in Arendt's concept and, second, ventures to overcome in his own paradigm of mysterion, performance, and gesture. Agamben ventures to demonstrate that for all her attempts to define action as having no end outside itself and therefore constitutive of a space of freedom (Arendt, 1977, pp. 21–23; 1998, pp. 30–31), Arendt's concept remains tied to the quasi-juridical logic that imputes action to the subject, rendering it responsible and at least potentially guilty. The participatory-democratic politics advocated and inspired by Arendt is thus rendered suspect, and its faults correctable only by Agamben's alternative vision of an inoperative politics of pure means. In this article, we shall retrace the three steps in Agamben's critique in order to question its validity. First, we shall address Agamben's criticism of the idea of the "end in itself," which Arendt, following Aristotle, understands as the constitutive feature of action. We shall argue that in his insistence on eudaimonia as the "ultimate end" of action in Aristotle, Agamben ignores Arendt's own understanding of the end in itself as eupraxia, which could not possibly be a final or ultimate end but does indeed remain "in itself" in the action and not outside it. Second, we shall analyze Agamben's alternative notion of pure means and argue that, Agamben's critique notwithstanding, pure means and the pure end (in itself) that characterizes Arendt's action end up indistinguishable as long the relationship between means and ends is severed. Third, we shall analyze Agamben's interpretation of pure means as exposing potentiality and compare it with Arendt's argument about action as irreducibly potential. Whereas in Arendt's account potentiality and actuality coincide entirely in action, Agamben's affirmation of potentiality seeks to separate it from actualization and expose it as such in an "inoperative" state. This leads us to a concluding argument that interprets Agamben's "third paradigm" as less an alternative to than a parody of Arendt's notion of action that seeks to profane it and deactivate its every relation to an end and to a subject. The price of this deactivation, however, is a strangely impoverished activity of pantomime, whose "new possible use" is difficult to ascertain. Thus, Agamben's critique of Arendt illuminates the limits of his political theory, which cannot advance beyond what it criticizes but is resigned to producing parodies of it. Agamben addresses Arendt's work in the final chapter of Karman called "Beyond Action." Having acknowledged the highly influential character of Agamben's rethinking of action in contemporary political thought, Agamben nonetheless remarks: "And yet, an attentive reading of the chapter of the book dedicated to this concept shows precisely that the author does not succeed in furnishing a coherent definition for it, as if it were not properly a philosophical term" (Agamben, 2019, p. 60). Reminding the reader that the Latin term actio is indeed not philosophical but rather belongs to the juridical and religious spheres, Agamben isolates a single example of the philosophical use of the notion of praxis in Greek philosophy, found in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: "praxis and poiesis are different in kind. For the end of poiesis is different from itself, but the end of praxis could not be, since acting well is its own end" (Aristotle, 2014, 1140b). In The Human Condition, Arendt does indeed cite this sentence when defining action in opposition to work (poiesis), also evoking Aristotle's concept of energeia (actuality): "It is from the experience of this full actuality that the paradoxical 'end in itself' derives its original meaning; for in these instances of action and speech the end (telos) is not pursued but lies in the activity itself which therefore becomes entelecheia, and the work is not what follows and extinguishes the process, but is imbedded in it; the performance is the work, is energeia" (Arendt, 1998, pp. 206–207). She then goes on to argue that Aristotle was "still well aware" of what is at stake in politics when he identified it with the "work of man" (ergon tou anthropou) and defined this work as "living well" (eu zen): "he clearly meant that 'work' here is no work product but exists only in sheer actuality" (Arendt, 1998, p. 207). For Agamben, the attempt to define action with the help of Aristotle's notion of praxis is doomed from the outset. This is because, since Aristotle's own example of praxis, that is, vision, could not possibly constitute action in Arendt's sense (Agamben, 2019, p. 61). Senses and bodily functions exemplify praxis insofar as they have their end in themselves yet have nothing to do with the self-disclosing deeds and discourse that comprise action for Arendt. Moreover, since activities such as seeing, hearing, or apprehending need no presence of others and are easily performed by individuals in private, Aristotle's concept of praxis entirely lacks the dimension of publicity that is so important for Arendt's understanding of action (see Backman, 2010, p. 37). If Agamben wished to demonstrate that Arendt's concept of action cannot be rigorously modeled on Aristotle's notion of praxis, he could have stopped right there. Evidently, what Arendt intends by action can at best be approached as a particular variant of Aristotle's praxis, which, like other variants, has its end in itself, but, unlike other variants, consists in self-disclosure by words and deeds in the presence of and in competition with others. Yet, in the remainder of the chapter Agamben continues to criticize Arendt's concept of action by addressing the problems with Aristotle's notion of praxis, whose tenuous connection to Arendt's concept has just been demonstrated. We are dealing with an apparatus that founds and simultaneously constitutes as absolute the opposition between ends and means. If there is good as final end, then all human actions appear as means and never as ends with respect to it; if the good is not, then all actions lose their end and therefore their sense. […] Praxis, human action, appears as the dimension that opened up for the sake of the good, as what must actualize the final end toward which human beings cannot but aim. This means that between human beings and their good there is not a coincidence but a fracture and a gap, which action—which has its privileged place in politics—seeks incessantly to fill. (Agamben, 2019, p. 63) Thus, Agamben interprets Aristotle's idea of the "work of man" differently from Arendt (see Agamben, 2007b; 2011, p. 246). This "work" does not consist simply in living well as sheer actuality but in the pursuit of happiness, which remains an end separable from the action itself. The gap between action and this ultimate end of happiness resigns human beings to ceaseless activity that seeks, in vain, to fill this gap but only resigns human beings to guilt and being "in debt with respect to their own end" (Agamben, 2019, p. 63). Rather than having its end in itself, action not only remains subjected to an end, but this end, being ultimate, is bound to remain out of reach. [it] has the connotation of blessedness, but without religious overtones, and it means literally something like the well-being of the daimon who accompanies each man throughout life. Unlike happiness, which is a passing mood and, unlike good fortune, which one may have at certain periods of life and lack in others, eudaimonia, like life itself, is a lasting state of being which is neither subject to change nor capable of effecting change. (Arendt, 1998, pp. 192–193). This state of blessedness is only available at the end of one's life, insofar as one withdraws from the unpredictable consequences of one's action. This is why we may only find out about someone's eudaimonia from the stories recounting their past actions. Understood in this sense, eudaimonia does indeed produce a sort of a split in the human condition, insofar as it might well be sought throughout but cannot really be attained during one's life. Yet, crucially, eudaimonia is not even the end that Arendt (and, in her reading, Aristotle) has in mind when speaking about action as having its end in itself. For her, it is not a matter of relating every activity to the ultimate end of "good," which would render all activities (including labor and work) all but equivalent with respect to it as mere means. It is instead a matter of positing an immanent, and not ultimate, end of action, which consists entirely in "acting well": eupraxia. One acts not in order to attain either happiness or blessedness in the future, but in order to act well in the present (see Tchir, 2017, p. 26). Acting well is the end of action but is not in any way separable from the action itself but is rather its aspect: at any point in the action, one may be acting badly or well. In the first case, the action remains deficient with respect to its end, but in the latter case it attains it fully in the very moment of acting in this manner. While both the artisan and the artist are condemned to have their energeia, their being-in-act, outside themselves, the man of action is ontologically master of his acts, but for this reason, while the artisan remains such, if he does not exercise his activity, the man of action cannot be argos, he constitutively has to act. (Agamben, 2019, p. 65) The idea of happiness as ultimate end makes every activity a means of attaining this end, while the understanding of praxis as having its ergon within the agent makes it the constitutive characteristic of the human being: man is a being, which is consigned for never-ending action for the ultimate end of happiness that remains out of reach. And yet, if we return to Arendt's idea of eupraxia, this tragic vision begins to dispel. First, if the end of praxis consists in its own being done well, then there is no longer a split in the human being that is effected by action: the end of eupraxia is attained in the action itself and not in the forever deferred future. Second, "having to act" is no longer the imperative of the pursuit of the elusive end but rather the injunction to excel at acting itself, to get better at acting in the action itself. Rather than produce any split in the human being, let alone an imperative of mending it, Aristotle's notion of eupraxia rather suggests that the attainment of the immanent end of praxis is considerably easier than the production of an external end in poiesis: while in the latter case, numerous things could go wrong, spoiling the final product, in the former case one attains an end as soon as one begins to act (i.e., we see as soon as we open our eyes) and the only question is whether one does so well or poorly (Backman, 2010, pp. 37–38). To sum up, while Agamben is correct about the difference between Aristotle's notion of praxis and Arendt's concept of action, his focus on the "ultimate" end of eudaimonia to the exclusion of the immanent end of eupraxia obscures the specific nature of this difference. Since Arendt does not define the end of praxis in terms of the ultimate and elusive end of happiness but defines this end in the immanent terms of eupraxia, she only differs from Aristotle in dissociating the action, characterized by this end, from the individual acts of vision or apprehension and relocating it into the public space of appearance. And yet, given Arendt's own argument about the complicity of the philosophers, including Aristotle, in the eclipse of public action, this difference is neither controversial nor damaging to Arendt's wider argument, which never postulated a strict identity between the two concepts to begin with. What is more interesting is the difference between Arendt and Agamben that arises from the two different interpretations of the relation of action to an end, which carries important implications for their approaches to politics. Agamben's well-known politics of inoperativity that seeks to deactivate the operation (ergon) of various apparatuses, in which the human condition is confined (Agamben, 1998, pp. 60–62; 2007b, pp. 6–9; 2016, pp. 245–248; see also De la Durantaye, 2009, pp. 18–20), is only intelligible in the context of his approach to praxis as resigning the human being to ceaseless action for the purpose of attaining the happiness that eludes it (Agamben, 2011, pp. 245–253). It only makes sense to even try to suspend the operation of apparatuses, if they are, first, operative at all and, second, operating perpetually, their end being constitutively elusive. Neither assumption holds true in Arendt's analysis, for whom action is historically contingent and increasingly rare (Arendt, 1998, pp. 289–94). Since its end is contained in itself, it leaves behind no product except the stories that recount its glories and failures. Rather than serve as a perpetually operative apparatus that one should try to stop, we are instead dealing with a tentative and transient arrangement, whose task it is for the contemporary political theorist to reactivate. The divergence between Arendt and Agamben thus becomes clear: what one considers a solution cannot but appear to the other as a problem. In the remainder of the final chapter of Karman Agamben proceeds from this divergence to outline his alternative to Arendt's concept of action, which is actually well familiar to Agamben's readers since it consists in the affirmation of pure means and potentiality—two central concepts of Agamben's oeuvre that have already been discussed extensively (Chiesa & Ruda, 2011; Wall, 1999, pp. 115–161; Whyte, 2009). Adam Kotsko has argued that Agamben's works often present solutions before working out the problems they are intended to solve (Kotsko, 2020, pp. 52, 148). Pure means and pure potentiality are arguably good exemplars of this "solutions first" approach, having become familiar to the reader long before the problems that these concepts venture to solve were even identified. Nonetheless, in the case of action, the sheer familiarity of these notions as markers of Agamben's approach risks obscuring the operation of very similar notions in the approach Agamben criticizes, that is, Arendt's theory of action. In the following two sections, we shall demonstrate that the indistinction of ends and means and potentiality and actuality is already at work in Arendt's theory of action in a more nuanced manner than Agamben's somewhat one-sided affirmation of means over ends and potentiality over actuality. In the final section, we shall address the question of whether this one-sided affirmation actually leads Agamben anywhere "beyond action." We have seen that Agamben interprets the notion of "end in itself" as an end separate from action, to which it remains subordinated. While action does not produce its own particular product, it remains guided by the search for happiness. Thus, the idea of end in itself does not in any way dispense with the means-to-an-end logic, but only succeeds in positing an end that could never itself be a means to some other end and for which, therefore, everything else must serve as a means: "precisely the irreducible tension toward what can never be a means condemns the one who acts to the split between means and ends" (Agamben, 2019, p. 66). The means shows itself as such in the very act, in which it interrupts and suspends its relation to the end. Just as, in the gesticulations of the mime, the movements usually directed at a certain goal are repeated and exhibited as such—that is, as means—without there being any more connection to their presumed end, and, in this way, they acquire a new and unexpected efficacy, so too does the violence that was only a means for the creation or conservation of the law become capable of deposing it to the extent that it exposes and renders inoperative its relation to that purposiveness. (Agamben, 2019, p. 82) Agamben insists that a pure means remains a means even as it is emancipated from any relation to an end: "a praxis that, while firmly maintaining its nature as a means, is emancipated from its relationship to an end: it has joyously forgotten its goal and can now show itself as such, as a means without an end" (Agamben, 2007a, p. 86). Yet, what does it mean for the means to remain a means in the absence of any end? We have seen that the separation of an end from the means, as in the elevation of happiness to the status of the ultimate end, only led to the split between means and ends, and the subjection of human beings to action as an imperative. What happens when we now separate the means from the end and expose its mediality freed from any relation to it? Does not this freedom from any external end suggest that this means now has its end in itself? Agamben insists that gesture cannot be "conceived as end in itself" (Agamben, 2007a, p. 82), which is the only reason why "in gesture, each member, once liberated from its functional relation to an end—organic or social—can for the first time explore, sound out and show forth all the possibilities of which it is capable, without ever exhausting them" (Agamben, 2007a, p. 82). While we shall deal with the question of possibilities in the following section, let us first consider the question of whether a pure means differs from an end in itself. To begin with, both notions are produced by separation: in the first case, a means is separated from an end and becomes pure, while in the second case an end is separated from the means and becomes something like a pure end, an end that can never become a means and in relation to which everything is presumably a means but in a strangely disconnected way. Happiness in Agamben's example above was only an end in the sense that it orients and guides all action, which nonetheless does not attain it, having no product of its own that it could deploy as a means towards it. If in both cases the means and the end are separated, how do we even know which is which? An end, which no action produces but which hovers above any possible action as its unattainable goal, does not appear that different from a means that no longer leads to any end but exposes itself as such. In both cases, we are dealing with something like a self-exposing or self-revealing activity that may be seen either as a means that no longer seeks to attain any end or as an end that no longer has any means to attain itself. To recall Arendt's analysis in The Human Condition, action is indeed constitutively characterized by this self-exposure: "In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world, while their physical identities appear without any activity of their own in the unique shape of the body and the sound of the voice" (Arendt, 1998, p. 179). This activity of showing and revealing is evidently a pure means, insofar as it is not undertaken for some purpose of, for example, currying favor, deception, or seduction. The latter remains an ever-present possibility, which explains the fragility and transience that Arendt associates with action. Yet, while Arendt recognizes the possibility of this resumption of the means-end relationship (Arendt, 1998, p. 180), she clearly views it as the loss of the quality specific to action, "through which it transcends mere productive activity, [which] has no more meaning than is revealed in the finished product and does not intend to show more than is plainly visible at the end of the production process" (Arendt, 1998, p. 180). This quality consists precisely in the exposure of the speaker and doer in their speech and action. Yet, precisely as long as this exposure is not undertaken in order to achieve some goal, it becomes indistinguishable from a pure end that is no longer a means to anything else: one shows oneself to show oneself and not for any other end that would be separable from the showing. The eudaimonia that Agamben posits as the end of all action in Aristotle is for Arendt only attained at the end of the actor's life and is in any case produced not by the actor himself but in the stories recounting his actions (Arendt, 1998, pp. 193–194). In contrast, the notion of eupraxia, which Arendt understands as the immanent end of action, is rather more appropriate in grasping this specificity of action: while action has no end beyond the self-exposure that it consists in, it nonetheless ventures to expose itself well, to excel at self-exposure in the "agonal spirit, the passionate drive to show one's self in measuring up against others that underlies the concept of politics prevalent in the city states" (Arendt, 1998 , p. 194; see also Arendt, 1977, pp. 124–25, 221–240). One reveals oneself for no other purpose than to do it well. Action is therefore a pure means that, precisely by virtue of being separated from any end, is indistinguishable from an end produced by such a separation. As long as the means-end relation is interrupted, pure ends and pure means are indiscernible from each other, precisely to the extent that they both consist solely in self-manifestation and exposure. Whenever they are not related to each other, means and ends are one and the same. Interestingly, Agamben admits as much when discussing the critique of purposiveness in ancient thought: "an end that can never be a means is completely in agreement with a means that can never be an end" (Agamben, 2019, p. 69). Yet, he goes on to interpret this "agreement" as a gap that leads to the quest of human beings for the end that is out of reach by using means that do not attain it. Nonetheless, Arendt's account of self-exposure in action permits us to approach this agreement otherwise: an end to which no means leads is strictly identical to a means that leads to no end. The rupture of the relation between means and end leaves the two activities suspended in self-exposure. [Because] the actor always moves among and in relation to other beings, he is never merely a "doer," but always and at the same time a sufferer. To do and to suffer are like opposite sides of the same coin, and the story that an act starts is composed of its consequent deeds and sufferings. Since action acts upon beings who are capable of their own action, reaction, apart from being a response, is always a new action that strikes out on its own and affects others. Thus, action and reaction among men never move in a closed circle and can never be reliably confined to two partners. (Arendt, 1998, p. 190) This indistinction between doer and sufferer in the concept of action resonates with Agamben's understanding of gerere: "those who gerunt are not limited to acting, but in the very act in which they carry out their action, they at the same time stop it, expose it, and hold it at a distance from themselves" (Agamben, 2019, p. 84). However, the resonance is only partial: whereas Arendt finds in the verb gerere the implication of suffering in every doing, Agamben interprets it in terms of inoperativity: "it is an activity or a potential that consists in deactivating human works and rendering them inoperative, and in this way, it opens them to a new, possible use" (Agamben, 2019, p. 84). Yet, it is difficult to see what warrants this interpretation of gerere, aside from the claim that in modern languages this verb was only conserved in the term "gesture" (Agamben, 2019, p. 83). While this might be the case, it does not warrant the retroactive application of Agamben's rather idiosyncratic interpretation of gesture to the verb gerere, whose scope of reference was much wider. Assuming or bearing a public office or function does suggest a certain indiscernibility between the doer and the sufferer since one acts only insofar as one also suffers the function or office that one bears, but it need not imply rendering this function or office inoperative. In contrast, the gestures of the mime do indeed render inoperative the functions these actions were originally meant to serve, insofar as they are exposed in the absence of any purpose they were intended to serve. Of course, this inoperativity is, in a strict sense, only observable in those gestures that originally pertained to poiesis and not to praxis, that is, the activities that were meant to have an end or product outside themselves but clearly lack it in the context of the mime's performance. A mime can expose and render inoperative the gestures defining the activity of the house-builder, a sculptor, or a shoemaker. Yet, what would be rendered inoperative in the miming of a dancer or, for that matter, of the "words and deeds" of Arendt's political actors? If the activities in question never produced any works, then their gestural exposure in the absence of these works would render nothing inoperative, as the activities in question were not operative (or productive) to begin with