tabula rasa

quotes from the coming community by giorgio agamben

"only a power that is capable of both power and impotence, then, is the supreme power. . .in de anima aristotle articulates this theory in absolute terms with respect to the supreme theme of metaphysics. if thought were in fact only the potentiality to think this or that intelligibly, he argues, it would always already have passed through to the act and it would remain necessarily inferior to its own object. but thought, in its essence, is pure potentiality; in other words, it is also the potentiality to not think, and as such, as possible or material intellect, aristotle compares it to a writing tablet on which nothing is written. (this is the celebrated image that the latin translators render with the expression tabula rasa, even if, as the ancient commentators noted, one should speak rather of a rasum tabulae, that is, of the layer of wax covering the tablet that the stylus engraves.)

thanks to this potentiality to not-think, thought can turn back to itself (to its pure potentiality) and be, at its apex, the thought of thought. what it thinks here, however, is not an object, a being-in-act, but that layer of wax, that rasum tabulae that is nothing but its own passivity, its own pure potentiality (to not-think): in the potentiality that thinks itself, action and passion coincide and the writing tablet writes by itself or, rather, writes its own passivity."

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"there is in effect something that humans are and have to be, but this something is not an essence nor properly a thing: it is the simple fact of one's own existence as possibility or potentiality. but precisely because of this things become complicated; precisely because of this ethics becomes effective.

since the being most proper to humankind is being one's own possibility or potentiality, then and only for this reason . . . humans have and feel a debt. humans, in their potentiality to be and not-be, are, in other words, always already in debt; they always already have a bad conscience without having to commit any blameworthy act. . .

this is why ethics has no room for repentance; this is why the only ethical experience (which, as such, cannot be a task or a subjective decision) is the experience of being (one's own) potentiality, of being (one's own) possibility -- exposing, that is, in every form one's own amorphousness and in every act one's own inactuality."

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"the process of technologization, instead of materially investing the body, was aimed at the construction of a separate sphere that had practically no point of contact with it: what was technologized was not the body, but its image. thus the glorious body of advertising has become the mask behind which the fragile, slight human body continues its precarious existence."

people

all quotes by giorgio agamben from homo sacer

". . . the technico-scientific problem of resuscitation: at stake was nothing less than a redefinition of death. until then, the task of determining death was given over to the physician, who made use of the traditional criteria that had remained substantially the same throughout the centuries: the stopping of the heartbeat and the cessation of breathing. overcoma rendered obsolete precisely these two ancient categories for the assessment of death and, opening a no-man's-land between coma and death, made it necessary to identity new criteria and establish new definitions as [mollaret and goulon] wrote, the problem expands 'to the point of putting the final borders of life in question, and even further, to the determination of a right to establish the hour of legal death.'"

"the hospital room in which the neomort, the overcomatose person, and the faux vivant waver between life and death delimits a space of exception in which a purely bare life, entirely controlled by man and his technology, appears for the first time. and since it is precisely a question not of a natural life but of an extreme embodiment of homo sacer (the comatose person has been defined as an intermediary being between man and an animal), what is at stake is, once again, the definition of a life that may be killed without the commission of homicide."

"the camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule. in the camp, the state of exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the rule of law on the basis of a factual state of danger, is now given a permanent spatial arrangement, which as such nevertheless remains outside the normal order."

"if this is true, if the essence of the camp consists in the materialization of the state of exception and in the subsequent creation of a space in which bare life and the juridical rule enter into a threshold of indistinction, then we must admit that we find ourselves virtually in the presence of a camp every time such a structure is created, independent of the kinds of crime that are committed there and whatever its denomination and specific topography. . . an apparently innocuous space (for example, the hotel arcades in roissy) actually delimits a space in which the normal order is de facto suspended and in which whether or not atrocities are committed depends not on law but on the civility and ethical sense of the police who temporarily act as sovereign (for example, in the four days during which foreigners can be held in the zone d'attente before the intervention of the judicial authority).

in this light, the birth of the camp in our time appears as an event that decisively signals the political space of modernity itself. it is produced at the point at which the political system of the modern nation-state, which was founded on the functional nexus between a determinate localization (land) and a determinate order (the state) and mediated by automatic rules for the inscription of life (birth or the nation), enters into a lasting crisis, and the state decides to assume directly the care of the nation's biological life as one of its proper tasks. if the structure of the nation-state is, in other words, defined by the three elements land, order, birth, the rupture of the old nomos is produced not in the two aspects that constituted it according to schmitt. . . but rather at the point marking the inscription of bare life (the birth that thus become nation) within the two of them. something can no longer function within the traditional mechanisms that regulated this inscription, and the camp is the new hidden regulator of the inscription of life in the order - or, rather, the sign of the system's inability to function without being transformed into a lethal machine. it is significant that the camps appear together with new laws on citizenship and the denationalization of citizens - not only the nuremberg laws on citizenship in the reich but also the laws on denationalization promulgated by almost all european states, including france, between 1915 and 1933. the state of exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the juridico-political order, now becomes a new and stable spatial arrangement inhabited by the bare life that more and more can no longer be inscribed in that order. the growing dissociation of birth (bare life) and the nation-state is the new fact of politics in our day, and what we call camp is this disjunction. . . the camp as dislocating localization is the hidden matrix of the politics in which we are still living, and it is this structure of the camp that we must learn to recognize in all its metamorphoses into the zones d'attentes of our airports and certain outskirts of our cities."

"every interpretation of the political meaning of the term 'people' must begin with the singular fact that in modern european languages, 'people' also always indicates the poor, the disinherited, and the excluded. one term thus names both the constitutive political subject and the class that is, de facto if not de jure, excluded from politics.

in common speech as in political parlance, the italian popolo, the french peuple, the spanish pueblo (like the corresponding adjectives popolare, populaire, popolar and late populus and popularis, from which they derive) designate both the complex of citizens as a unitary political body (as in 'the italian people' or 'the people's judge') and the members of the lower classes (as in homme du peuple, rione popolare, front populaire). even the english word 'people,' which has a less differentiated meaning, still conserves the sense of 'ordinary people' in contrast to the rich and the nobility. . .

such a diffuse and constant semantic ambiguity cannot be accidental: it must reflect an amphiboly inherent in the nature and function of the concept 'people' in western politics. it is as if what we call 'people' were in reality not a unitary subject but a dialectical oscillation between two opposite poles: on the one hand, the set of the People as a whole political body, and on the other, the subset of the people as a fragmentary multiplicity of needy and excluded bodies; or again, on the one hand, an inclusion that claims to be total, and on the other, and exclusion that is clearly hopeless; at one extreme, the total state of integrated and sovereign citizens, and at the other, the preserve - court of miracles or camp - of the wretched, the oppressed, and the defeated. in this sense, a single and compact referent for the term 'people' simply does not exist anywhere: like many fundamental political concepts. . . 'people' is a polar concept that indicates a double movement and a complex relation between two extremes."

limit zone

quotes by giorgio agamben from homo sacer

"in the notion of bare life the interlacing of politics and life has become so tight that it cannot easily be analyzed. until we become aware of the political nature of bare life and its modern avatars (biological life, sexuality, etc), we will not succeed in clarifying the opacity at their center. conversely, once modern politics enters into an intimate symbiosis with bare life, it loses the intelligibility that still seems to us to characterize the juridico-political foundation of classical politics."

"karl lowith was the first to define the fundamental character of totalitarian states as a 'politicization of life' and, at the same time, to note the curious contiguity between democracy and totalitarianism: 'since the emancipation of the third estate, the formation of bourgeois democracy and its transformation into mass industrial democracy, the neutralization of politically relevant differences and postponement of a decision about them has developed to the point of turning into its opposite: a total politicization of everything, even of seemingly neutral domains of life.'"

"it is almost as if, starting from a certain point, every decisive political event were double-sided: the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals' lives within the state order, thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate themselves."

"if there is a line in every modern state marking the point at which the decision on life becomes a decision on death, and biopolitics can turn into thanatopolitics, this line no longer appears today as a stable border dividing two clearly distinct zones. this line is now in motion and gradually moving into areas other than that of political life, areas in which the sovereign is entering into an ever more intimate symbiosis not only with the jurist but also with the doctor, the scientist, the expert, and the priest."

"modern democracy does not abolish sacred life but rather shatters it and disseminates it into every individual body, making it into what is at stake in political conflict. . . if it is true that law needs a body in order to be in force, and if one can speak, in this sense, of 'law's desire to have a body,' democracy responds to this desire by compelling law to assume the care of this body. this ambiguous (or polar) character of democracy appears even more clearly in the habeas corpus if one considers the fact that the same legal procedure that was originally intended to assure the presence of the accused at the trial and, therefore, to keep the accused from avoiding judgment, turns - in its new and definitive form - into grounds for the sheriff to detain and exhibit the body of the accused."

"in the system of the nation-state, the so-called sacred and inalienable rights of man show themselves to lack every protection and reality at the moment in which they can no longer take the form of rights belonging to citizens of a state."

"one of the essential characteristics of modern biopolitics (which will continue to increase in our century) is its constant need to redefine the threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside. once it crosses over the walls of the oikos and penetrates more and more deeply into the city, the foundation of sovereignty - nonpolitical life - is immediately transformed into a line that must be constantly redrawn."

 "sade stages. . . the theatrum politicum as a theater of bare life, in which the very physiological life of bodies appears, through sexuality, as the pure political element. . . not only philosophy but also and above all politics is sifted through the boudoir. indeed, in dolmance's project, the boudoir fully takes the place of the cite, in a dimension in which the public and the private, political existence and bare life change places. . . sade's modernity does not consist in his having foreseen the unpolitical primacy of sexuality in our unpolitical age. on the contrary, sade is as contemporary as he is because of his incomparable presentation of the absolutely political (that is, 'biopolitical') meaning of sexuality and physiological life itself."

"it is as if every valorization and every 'politicization' of life (which, after all, is implicit in the sovereignty of the individual over his own existence) necessarily implies a new decision concerning the threshold beyond which life ceases to be politically relevant, becomes only 'sacred life,' and can as such be eliminated without punishment. every society sets this limit; every society - even the most modern - decides who its 'sacred men' will be."

"the paradox of nazi biopolitics and the necessity by which it was bound to submit life itself to an incessant political mobilization could not be expressed better than by this transformation of natural heredity into a political task. the totalitarianism of our century has its ground in this dynamic identity of life and politics, without which it remains incomprehensible. . .  when life and politics - originally divided, and linked together by means of the no-man's-land of the state of exception that is inhabited by bare life - begin to become one, all life becomes sacred and all politics becomes the exception."

"what is decisively more disquieting is the fact (which is unequivocally shown by the scientific literature put forward by the defense and confirmed by the expert witnesses appointed by the court) that experiments on prisoners and persons sentenced to death had been performed several times and on a larger scale in our century, in particular in the united states (the very country from which most of the nuremberg judges came). . . what the well-meaning emphasis on the free will of the individual refuses to recognize here is that the concept of 'voluntary consent' is simply meaningless for someone interned at dachau, even if he or she is promised an improvement in living conditions. from this point of view, the inhumanity of the experiments in the united states and in the camps is, therefore, substantially equivalent."

"the only possible answer is that in both contexts the particular status of the VPs [human guinea pigs] was decisive; they were persons sentenced to death or detained in a camp, the entry into which meant the definitive exclusion from the political community. precisely because they were lacking almost all the rights and expectations that we customarily attribute to human existence, and yet were still biologically alive, they came to be situated in a limit zone between life and death, inside and outside, in which they were no longer anything but bare life."

the relation of abandonment

quotes from giorgio agamben from homo sacer

"the cipher of this capture of life in law is not sanction (which is not at all an exclusive characteristic of the juridical rule) but guilt (not in the technical sense that this concept has in penal law but in the originary sense that indicates a being-in-debt: in culpa esse). . . guilt refers not to transgression, that is, to the determination of the licit and the illicit, but to the pure force of the law, to the law's simple reference to something."

"the sovereign is the point of indistinction between violence and law, the threshold on which violence passes over into law and law passes over into violence."

"language also holds man in its ban insofar as man, as a speaking being, has always already entered into language without noticing it. everything that is presupposed for there to be language (in the forms of something nonlinguistic, something ineffable, etc.) is nothing other than a presupposition of language that is maintained as such in relation to language precisely insofar as it is excluded from language."

"one of the peculiar characteristics of kafka's allegories is that at their very end they offer the possibility of an about-face that completely upsets their meaning. the obstinacy of the man from the country thus suggests a certain analogy with the cleverness that allows ulysses to survive the song of the sirens. just as the law in 'before the law' is insuperable because it prescribes nothing, so the most terrible weapon in kafka's 'the sirens' is not song but silence ('it has never happened, but it might not be altogether unimaginable that someone could save himself from their song, but certainly never from their silence.')"

"the law of this oscillation [between the violence that posits law and the violence that preserves it] rests on the fact that all law-preserving violence, in its duration, indirectly weakens the lawmaking violence represented by it, through the suppression of hostile counterviolence. . . this lasts until either new forces or those earlier suppressed triumph over the violence that had posited law until now and thus found a new law destined to a new decay. in the interruption of this cycle, which is maintained by mythical forms of law, in the deposition of law and all the forces on which it depends (as they depend on it) and, therefore, finally in the deposition of state power, a new historical epoch is founded." -walter benjamin

"sovereign violence opens a zone of indistinction between law and nature, outside and inside, violence and law. and yet the sovereign is precisely the one who maintains the possibility of deciding on the two to the very degree that he renders them indistinguishable from each other. as long as the state of exception is distinguished from the normal case, the dialectic between the violence that posits law and the violence that preserves it is not truly broken, and the sovereign decision even appears simply as the medium in which the passage from the one to the other takes place."

"the sentiments provoked by the one and the other are not identical: disgust and horror are one thing and respect another. nonetheless, for actions to be the same in both cases, the feelings expressed must not be different in kind. in fact, there actually is a certain horror in religious respect, especially when it is very intense; and the fear inspired by malignant powers is not without a certain reverential quality. . . the pure and the impure are therefore not two separate genera, but rather two varieties of the same genus that includes sacred things. there are two kinds of sacred things, the auspicious and the inauspicious. not only is there no clear border between these two opposite kinds, but the same object can pass from one to the other without changing nature. the impure is made from the pure, and vice versa. the ambiguity of the sacred consists in the possibility of this transmutation." -emile durkheim

"once placed in relation with the ethnographic concept of taboo, this ambivalence is then used - with perfect circularity - to explain the figure of homo sacer. there is a moment in the life of concepts when they lose their immediate intelligibility and can then, like all empty terms, be overburdened with contradictory meanings."

"the sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred life - that is, life that may be killed but not sacrificed - is the life that has been captured in this sphere."

"sacred life is in some way tied to a political function. it is as if, by means of a striking symmetry, supreme power - which, as we have seen, is always vitae necisque potestas and always founded on a life that may be killed but not sacrificed - required that the very person of sovereign authority assume within itself the life held in its power. and if, for the surviving devotee, a missing death liberates this sacred life, for the sovereign, death reveals the excess that seems to be as such inherent in supreme power, as if supreme power were, in the last analysis, nothing other than the capacity to constitute oneself and others as life that may be killed but not sacrificed."

". . .ancient germanic law was founded on the concept of peace and the corresponding exclusion from the community of the wrongdoer, who therefore became friedlos, without peace, and whom anyone was permitted to kill without committing homicide. the medieval ban also present analogous traits: the bandit could be killed (. . . 'to ban' someone is to say that anyone can harm him) or was even considered to be already dead."

"we have seen that the state of nature is not a real epoch chronologically prior to the foundation of the city but a principle internal to the city, which appears at the moment the city is considered tanquam dissoluta, 'as if it were dissolved' (in this sense, therefore, the state of nature is something like the state of exception). accordingly, when hobbes founds sovereignty by means of a reference to the state in which 'man is a wolf to men,' homo hominis lupus, in the word 'wolf' (lupus) we ought to hear an echo of the wargus and the caput lupinem of the laws of edward the confessor: at issue is not simply fera bestia and natural life but rather a zone of indistinction between the human and the animal, a werewolf, a man who is transformed into a wolf and a wolf who is transformed into a man - in other words, a bandit, a homo sacer."

hobbes, from leviathan: "this is the foundation of that right of punishing, which is exercised in every common-wealth. for the subjects did not give the soveraign that right; but onely in laying down theirs, strengthened him to use his own, as he should think fit, for the preservation of them all: so that it was not given, but left to him, and to him onely; and (excepting the limits set him by naturall law) as entire, as in the condition of meer nature, and of warre of every one against his neighbour."

"the relation of abandonment is so ambiguous that nothing could be harder than breaking from it. the ban is essentially the power of delivering something over to itself, which is to say, the power of maintaining itself in relation to something presupposed as nonrelational. what has been banned is delivered over to its own separateness and, at the same time, consigned to the mercy of the one who abandons it - at once excluded and included, removed and at the same time captured. the age-old discussion in juridical historiography between those who conceive exile to be a punishment and those who instead understand it to be a right and a refuge. . . has its root in this ambiguity of the sovereign ban."

"we must learn to recognize this structure of the ban in the political relations and public spaces in which we still live. in the city, the banishment of sacred life is more internal than every interiority and more external than every extraneousness. the banishment of sacred life is the sovereign nomos that conditions every rule, the originary spatialization that governs and makes possible every localization and every territorialization."

relation of exception

quotes by giorgio agamben from homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life

"in his final years foucault seemed to orient this analysis according to two distinct directives for research: on the one hand, the study of the political techniques (such as the science of the police) with which the state assumes and integrates the care of the natural life of individuals into its very center; on the other hand, the examination of the technologies of the self by which processes of subjectivization bring the individual to bind himself to his own identity and consciousness and, at the same time, to an external power. . . in one of his last writings, foucault argues that the modern western state has integrated techniques of subjective individualization with procedures of objective totalization to an unprecedented degree, and he speaks of real 'political 'double bind,' constituted by individualization and the simultaneous totalization of structures of modern power.'"

"at once excluding bare life from and capturing it within the political order, the state of exception actually constituted, in its very separateness, the hidden foundation on which the entire political system rested. when its borders begin to be blurred, the bare life that dwelt there frees itself in the city and becomes both subject and object of the conflicts of the political order, the one place for both the organization of state power and emancipation from it. everything happens as if, along with the disciplinary process by which state power makes man as a living being into its own specific object, another process is set in motion that in large measure corresponds to the birth of modern democracy, in which man as a living being presents himself no longer as an object but as the subject of political power. these processes - which in many ways oppose and (at least apparently) bitterly conflict with each other - nevertheless converge insofar as both concern the bare life of the citizen, the new biopolitical body of humanity."

"there is no rule that is applicable to chaos. order must be established for juridical order to make sense. a regular situation must be created, and sovereign is he who definitely decides if this situation is actually effective. all law is 'situational law.' the sovereign creates and guarantees the situation as a whole in its totality. he has the monopoly over the final decision. therein consists the essence of state sovereignty, which must therefore be properly juridically defined not as the monopoly to sanction or to rule but as the monopoly to decide. . . the decision reveals the essence of state authority most clearly. here the decision must be distinguished from the juridical regulation, and (to formulate it paradoxically) authority proves itself not to need law to create law. . . the exception is more interesting than the regular case. the latter proves nothing; the exception proves everything. . .  when one really wants to study the general, one need only look around for a real exception. it brings everything to light more clearly than the general itself. after a while, one becomes disgusted with the endless talk about the general - there are exceptions. if they cannot be explained, then neither can the general be explained. usually the difficulty is not noticed, since the general is thought about not with passion but only with comfortable superficiality. the exception, on the other hand, thinks the general with intense passion." - carl schmitt

"the exception is an element in law that transcends positive law in the form of its suspension. the exception is to positive law what negative theology is to positive theology. while the latter affirms and predicates determinate qualities of god, negative (or mystical) theology, with its 'neither... nor...,' negates and suspends the attribution to god of any predicate whatsoever. yet negative theology is not outside theology and can actually be shown to function as the principle grounding the possibility in general of anything like a theology. only because it has been negatively presupposed as what subsists outside any possible predicate can divinity become the subject of a predication. analagously, only because its validity is suspended in the state of exception can positive law define the normal case as the realm of its own validity."

"it has often been observed that the juridico-political order has the structure of an inclusion of what is simultaneously pushed outside. gilles deleuze and felix guattari were thus able to write, 'sovereignty only rules over what it is capable of interiorizing;' and, concerning the 'great confinement' described by foucault in his madness and civilization, maurice blanchot spoke of society's attempt to 'confine the outside,' that is, to constitute it in an 'interiority of expectation or of exception.' confronted with an excess, the system interiorizes what exceeds it through an interdiction and in this way 'designates itself as exterior to itself.' the exception that defines the structure of sovereignty is, however, even more complex. here what is outside is included not simply by means of the juridical order's validity - by letting the juridical order, that is, withdraw from the exception and abandon it. the exception does not subtract itself from the rule; rather, the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the exception and, maintaining itself in relation to the exception, first constitutes itself as a rule. the particular 'force' of law consists in this capacity of law to maintain itself in relation to an exteriority. we shall give the name relation of exception to the extreme form of relation by which something is included solely through its exclusion."

"the paradox here is that a single utterance in no way distinguished from others of its kind is isolated from them precisely insofar as it belongs to them. if the syntagm 'i love you' is uttered as an example of a performative speech act, then this syntagm both cannot be understood as in a normal context and yet still must be treated as a real utterance in order for it to be taken as an example. what this example shows is its belonging to a class, but for this very reason the example steps out of its class in the very moment in which it exhibits and delimits it (in the case of a linguistic syntagm, the example thus shows its own signifying and, in this way, suspends its own meaning). if one now asks if the rule applies to the example, the answer is not easy, since the rule applies to the example only as to a normal case and obviously not as to an example. the example is thus excluded from the normal case not because it does not belong to it but, on the contrary, because it exhibits its own belonging to it. the example is truly a paradigm in the etymological sense: it is what is 'shown beside,' and a class can contain everything except its own paradigm.

the mechanism of the exception is different. while the example is excluded from the set insofar as it belongs to it, the exception is included in the normal case precisely because it does not belong to it. and just as belonging to a class can be shown only by an example - that is, outside of the class itself - so non-belonging can be shown only at the center of the class, by an exception. in every case (as is shown by the dispute between anomalists and analogists among the ancient grammarians), exception and example are correlative concepts that are ultimately indistinguishable and that come into play every time the very sense of the belonging and commonality of individuals is to be defined. in every logical system, just as in every social system, the relation between outside and inside, strangeness and intimacy, is this complicated."

state of exception

quotes from state of exception by giorgio agamben 

“what the law can never tolerate – what it feels as a threat with which it is impossible to come to terms – is the existence of a violence outside the law; and this is not because the ends of such a violence are incompatible with law, but because of 'its mere existence outside the law' (benjamin 1921, 183/239). the task of benjamin's critique is to prove the reality (bestand) of such a violence: 'if violence is also assured a reality outside the law, as pure immediate violence, this furnishes proof that revolutionary violence – which is the name for the highest manifestation of pure violence by man – is also possible' (202/252). the proper characteristic of this violence is that it neither makes nor preserves law, but deposes it (entsetzung des rechtes [202/251-52]) and thus inaugurates a new historical epoch.”

“in an extensive study published in 1980, h.s. versnel attempted to answer this question by proposing an analogy between the phenomenology of mourning – as attested to in the most diverse places by anthropological research – and periods of political crises, in which social institutions and rules seems suddenly to dissolve. Just as, during periods of anomie and crisis, normal social structures can collapse and social functions and roles break down to the point where culturally conditioned behaviors and customs are completely overturned, so are periods of mourning usually characterized by a suspension and alteration of all social relations. 'whoever characterizes the critical periods as. . . a temporary substitution of order by disorder, of culture by nature, of kosmos by chaos, of nomos by physis, of enomia by anomia, has implicitly characterized the period of mourning and its manifestations' (versnel 1980, 584-85). according to versnel, who here cites the analyses of the american sociologists berger and luckman, 'all societies are constructions in the face of chaos. the constant possibility of anomic terror is actualized whenever the legitimations that obscure the precariousness are threatened or collapse.' (585)”

potentiality

all quotes from homo sacer by giorgio agamben

"schmitt considers constituting power as a 'political will' capable of  'making the concrete, fundamental decision on the nature and form of one's own political existence.' as such, constituting power stands 'before and above every constitutional legislative procedure' and is irreducible to the level of juridical rules as well as theoretically distinct from sovereign power. but if constituting power is identified with the constituting will of the people or the nation . . . then the criterion that makes it possible to distinguish constituting power from popular or national sovereignty becomes unclear, and the constituting subject and the sovereign subject begin to become indistinguishable."

"'the truth of constituting power,' [antonio negri] writes, 'is not the one that can (in any way whatsoever) be attributed to the concept of sovereignty. this is not the truth of constituting power not only because constituting power is not (as is obvious) an emanation of constituted power, but also because constituting power is not the institution of constituted power: it is the act of choice, the punctual determination that opens a horizon, the radical enacting of something that did not exist before and whose conditions of existence stipulate that the creative act cannot lose its characteristics in creating. when constituting power sets the constituting process in motion, every determination is free and remains free. sovereignty, on the other hand, arises as the establishment - and therefore as the end - of constituting power, as the consumption of the freedom brought by constituting power.'"

"the strength of negri's book lies instead in the final perspective it opens insofar as it shows how constituting power, when conceived in all its radicality, ceases to be a strictly political concept and necessarily presents itself as a category of ontology. the problem of constituting power then becomes the problem of the 'constitution of potentiality', and the unresolved dialectic between constituting power and constituted power opens the way for a new articulation of the relation between potentiality and actuality, which requires nothing less than a rethinking of the ontological categories of modality in their totality."

"the relation between constituting power and constituted power is just as complicated as the relation aristotle established between potentiality and act, dynamis and energeia; and, in the last analysis, the relation between constituting and constituted power (perhaps like every authentic understanding of the problem of sovereignty) depends on how one thinks the existence and autonomy of potentiality. according to aristotle's thought, potentiality precedes actuality and conditions it, but also seems to remain essentially subordinate to it. . . aristotle always takes great care to affirm the autonomous existence of potentiality - the fact that the kithara player keeps his ability [potenza] to play even when he does not play, and that the architect keeps his ability [potenza] to build even when he does not build."

"if potentiality is to have its own consistency and not always disappear immediately into actuality, it is necessary that potentiality be able not to pass over into actuality, the potentiality constitutively be the potentiality not to (do or be), or, as aristotle says, that potentiality be also im-potentiality (adynamia). . . 'what is potential can both be and not be. for the same is potential as much with respect to being as to not being.'"

"this potentiality maintains itself in relation to actuality in the form of its suspension; it is capable of the act in not realizing it, it is sovereignly capable of its own im-potentiality [impotenza]. but how, from this perspective, to think the passage into actuality? if every potentiality (to be or do) is also originarily the potentiality not to (be or do), how will it be possible for an act to be realized?"

"'a thing is said to be potential if, when the act of which it is said to be potential is realized, there will be nothing im-potential (that is, there will be nothing able not to be)' (aristotle, metaphysics). the last three words of the definition do not mean, as the usual and completely trivializing reading maintains, 'there will be nothing impossible' (that is, what is not impossible is possible). they specify, rather, the condition into which potentiality - which can both be and not be - can realize itself. what is potential can pass over into actuality only at the point at which it sets aside its own potential not to be. to set im-potentiality aside is not to destroy it but, on the contrary, to fulfill it, to turn potentiality back upon itself in order to give itself to itself."

"the sovereign ban, which applies to the exception in no longer applying, corresponds to the structure of potentiality, which maintains itself in relation to actuality precisely through its ability not to be. potentiality (in its double appearance as potentiality to and as potentiality not to) is that through which being founds itself sovereignly, which is to say, without anything preceding or determining it other than its own ability not to be. and an act is sovereign when it realizes itself by simply taking away its own potentiality not to be, letting itself be, giving itself to itself."

"sovereignty is always double because being, as potentiality, suspends itself, maintaining itself in a relation of ban (or abandonment) with itself in order to realize itself as absolute actuality (which thus presupposes nothing other than its own potentiality). at the limit, pure potentiality and pure actuality are indistinguishable, and the sovereign is precisely this zone of indistinction."

"it has already been noted that a principle of potentiality is inherent in every definition of sovereignty. in this sense, gerard mairet observed that the sovereign state is founded on an 'ideology of potentiality' that consists in 'leading the two elements of every power back to a unity . . . the principle of potentiality and the form of its exercise'. the central idea here is that 'potentiality already exists before it is exercised, and that obedience precedes the institutions that make it possible'. that this ideology truly has a mythological character is suggested by the same author: 'it is a question of a real myth whose secrets we still do not know, but which constitutes, perhaps, the secret of every power.' it is the structure of this mystery [arcano] that we have undertaken to bring to light in the figure of abandonment and the 'potentiality not to'. but here we run up against not a mythologeme in the strict sense but, rather, the ontological root of every political power. (potentiality and actuality are, for aristotle, first of all categories of being, two ways 'in which being is said.')

in modern thought, there are rare but significant attempts to conceive of being beyond the principle of sovereignty. . . in the late nietzsche, the eternal return of the same gives form to the impossibility of distinguishing between potentiality and actuality, even as the amor fati gives shape to the impossibility of distinguishing between contingency and necessity. . . but the strongest objection against the principle of sovereignty is contained in melville's bartleby, the scrivener who, with his, 'i would prefer not to,' resists every possibility of deciding between potentiality and the potentiality not to. these figures push the aporia of sovereignty to the limit but still do not completely free themselves from its ban. they show that the dissolution of the ban, like the cutting of the gordian knot, resembles less the solution of a logical or mathematical problem than the solution of an enigma. here the metaphysical aporia shows its political nature."

umwelt

from the open: man and animal by giorgio agamben (translated by kevin attell)

"if the caesura between the human and the animal passes first of all within man, then it is the very question of man - and of "humanism" - that must be posed in a new way.  in our culture, man has always been thought of as the articulation and conjunction of a body and a soul, of a living thing and a logos, of a natural (or animal) element and a supernatural or social or divine element.  we must learn instead to think of man as what results from the incongruity of these two elements, and investigate not the metaphysical mystery of conjunction, but rather the practical and political mystery of separation.  what is man, if he is always the place - and, at the same time, the result - of ceaseless divisions and caesurae?"

"too often, [jakob von uexkull] affirms, we imagine that the relations a certain animal subject has to things in its environment take place in the same space and in the same time as those which bind us to the objects in our human world.  this illusion rests on the belief in a single world in which all living beings are situated.  uexxkull shows that such a unitary world does not exist, just as a space and a time that are equal for all living things do not exist.  the fly, the dragonfly, and the bee that we observe flying next to us on a sunny day do not move in the same world as the one in which we observe them, nor do they share with us - or with each other - the same time and the same space."

"there does not exist a forest as an objectively fixed environment: there exists a forest-for-the-park-ranger, a forest-for-the-hunter, a forest-for-the-botanist, a forest-for-the-wayfarer, a forest-for-the-nature-lover, a forest-for-the-carpenter, and finally a fable forest in which little red riding hood loses her way."

"every environment is a closed unity in itself, which results from the selective sampling of a series of elements or 'marks' in the umgebung, which, in turn, is nothing other than man's environment.  these are not, however, objectively and factically isolated, but rather constitute a close functional - or, as uexkull prefers to say, musical - unit with the animal's receptive organs that are assigned to perceive the mark (merkorgan) and to react to it (wirkorgan).  everything happens as if the external carrier of significance and its receiver in the animal's body constituted two elements in a single musical score, almost like two notes of the 'keyboard on which nature performs the supratemporal and extraspatial symphony of signification,' though it is impossible to say how two such heterogenous elements could ever have been so intimately connected."

"the two perceptual worlds of the fly and the spider are absolutely uncommunicating, and yet so perfectly in tune that we might say that the original score of the fly, which we can also call its original image or archetype, acts on that of the spider in such a way that the web the spider weaves can be described as 'fly-like'.  though the spider can in no way see the umwelt of the fly (uexkull affirms - and thus formulates a principle that would have some success - that 'no animal can enter into relation with an object as such,' but only with its own carriers of significance), the web expresses the paradoxical coincidence of this reciprocal blindness."

"uexkull informs us that in the laboratory in rostock, a tick was kept alive for eighteen years without nourishment, that is, in a condition of absolute isolation from its environment.  he gives no explanation of this peculiar fact, and limits himself to supposing that in that 'period of waiting' the tick lies in 'a sleep-like state similar to the one we experience every night.'  he then draws the sole conclusion that 'without a living subject, time cannot exist.'  but what becomes of the tick and its world in this state of suspension that lasts eighteen years?  how is is possible for a living being that consists entirely in its relationship with the environment to survive in absolute deprivation of that environment?  and what sense does it make to speak of 'waiting' without time and without world?"