Thomas Carl Wall
In the spring of 1929 Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer met at Davos, Switzerland for a discussion/debate. Cassirer, widely known and respected, represented Neo‐Kantism and was a student of Hermann Cohen. Heidegger was becoming known largely through his students such as Hannah Arendt who spoke of “the rumor of the hidden king” (Arendt 1971). He had recently published Being and Time (1927), which represented a path for philosophy that would attempt, in a most original and daring way, to think the phenomenological method together with existence so as to establish that existence is not a brutum factum but is called to a way of being: ontology as fundamental and structural (being‐in‐the‐world or being‐toward‐death). The Davos meeting was well attended by many who would become influential in twentieth‐century thought (Gordon 2010). What became evident in the course of this meeting was that Heidegger was not there to discuss or debate. He was there to destroy Cassirer’s reputation and a way of philosophizing—call it Neo‐Kantism or Age of Critique—and to continue nourishing his own stature and way of philosophizing as nearly cult‐like.
Among those attending was the young Emmanuel Levinas, a Lithuanian Jew, who had been in search of the guidance of Heidegger’s teacher, Edmund Husserl, but who stumbled upon and was swept up into the Heidegger phenomenon, so much so that he staged a rather sophomoric parody of Cassirer’s person at a student gathering after the day’s events. He came to regret this stunt, as well as his initial enthrallment with Heideggerianism, and late in life sought out Cassirer’s widow, Toni, to personally apologize only to discover she had died some years prior to his contrition (Gordon 2010: 104, 326–7). He would nonetheless declare that a young student attending the Davos confrontation (but one is tempted to say “ambush”) “could have the impression that he was witness to the creation and the end of the world” (Gordon 2010: 2). Within just a few years Levinas would begin his serpentine and inspired attempts to elude, evade, and escape the saturation of the human by Being through a series of short works largely inspired by careful interpretations of intuition and intentionality from Husserl, René Descartes’ cogito, and sharing literary scholar Maurice Blanchot’s critical work concerning the Neuter and the il y a (“there is”), just as he shared the concept of Trace with Jacques Derrida. This would culminate with his first major contribution to philosophy: Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1969), to be followed by his second great work: Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence (1974). These and others of his works do not merely integrate ethics into philosophy in the wake of Heidegger (who wrote no ethics), but attempt to instantiate ethics as “first philosophy” in that the rapport with the Other (Autrui) is “older” than and “otherwise” than Being.
At around the same time that Levinas published his first major works, the poet René Char, inspired by Heidegger’s writings on poetry, invited the aging but still active philosopher to his home in the Vaucluse in 1966, 1968, and 1969 to lead a series of intimate seminars with a handful of selected students. One of those selected was a young Italian, Giorgio Agamben, for whom the experience proved as decisive as it had for Levinas, for he would abandon his study of law and instead take up philosophy as a vocation, one that he himself would eventually understand as the unexpected discovery of “constellations” (Durantaye 2009: 1–3). Any reader new to Agamben’s work could not do better than Durantaye’s Critical Introduction, together with Catherine Mills’s concisely organized The Philosophy of Agamben (2008). In private correspondence with me, Agamben indeed describes his way of thinking as a “constellation” and as making visible “conceptual nets.” The nets or constellations Agamben discovers are simply too numerous to list, but they include: homo sacer, vocation, potentiality, ideas, community, Shekinah, infancy, command, state of exception, the camp (and no longer the city) as nomos and so on.
While Agamben may have been inspired by the Heidegger seminars, his manner of philosophizing could hardly be more distinct. Heidegger spent his career plowing through one major canonical philosopher after another (with the exception of Spinoza—not surprisingly with what we know of his anti‐Semitism) in order to “recover” the History of (the forgetting of) Being and the “destining” of Da‐sein. In sharp contrast, de la Durantaye aptly likens Agamben’s collected works to the renown idiosyncratic library of Aby Warburg (where Agamben was a fellow in 1974–75) from which none other than Ernst Cassirer declared one must either “flee” or in which one will “remain imprisoned for years” (Cassirer 2009: xviii). Unkind critics have said more than once that Agamben in effect “cherry picks” what he needs from this or that text to the extent of distorting meanings, and distorting historical significance. Pierre Mesnard, in a 2004 essay, is thoroughly critical of Agamben’s method which in effect, transforms political philosophy into a poetics of concepts instead of the more traditional social, political, and historical contextualizing. In his defense, what Agamben captures in his constellar nets are paradigms which are then applicable to, and explicable of, the present states of politics. The inspiration is Michel Foucault’s genealogies as “histories of the present.” What may irritate many a scholar of this or that major figure, period, or subject matter is that Agamben selects, finds a potential in, and then puts to a new use what he finds because in addition to examining a concept’s meaning he looks at its use—what political strategies it becomes part of, either overtly or covertly—from period to period. Indeed, his most recent work (2016, The Use of Bodies) concerns use itself as a political factor.
I have elected to introduce Emmanuel Levinas and Giorgio Agamben via Martin Heidegger because for each the personal encounter with him was life‐changing and because each has greater connection to Heidegger than to each other. In brief, Levinas wished to tear philosophy away from an allegiance to Being by way of an always anterior ethical rapport. Agamben seems intent on completing and then finally freeing Da‐sein to live beyond any particular destiny (to be “whatever” in his language). Levinas died in 1995 just as Agamben was beginning a professional scholarly career in publications. Although Agamben writes of ethics he distances himself from Levinas since his is closer to ethos or habitus—way of or manner of living—than to Levinas’s obligation, responsibility, gravity, hostage, and substitution. Although Levinas writes of art and literature fairly frequently he maintained an uneasy, suspicious, but not entirely allergic, relation to the arts, while Agamben was a professor of aesthetics and writes at length of Dante, Virgil, Melville, Kafka, and innumerable others. I do not pursue a triadic comparison although such would in fact produce three distinct philosophical callings of extraordinary significance and influence. Innumerable works are devoted to Heidegger and Levinas. Agamben, still our contemporary, has already inspired several graceful, nuanced studies—and in the cases of William Watkin’s The Literary Agamben: Adventures in Logopoesis (2010) and Agamben and Indifference: A Critical Overview (2013) and Aaron Hillyer’s (2013) critical studies which introduce new concepts alongside explication. Kevin Attell’s Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction (2014) fleshes out with extraordinary skill the long postponed engagement with Jacques Derrida’s unquestionably influential thinking (an engagement that Derrida kept at bay despite astute provocations here and there in Agamben’s works). These works and others (such as Whyte 2013: Snoek 2012: Dickinson 2011) are of such quality and breadth that it seems likely Agamben’s influence in literary study, as well as philosophy, theology, and political thought, will continue to blossom.
The importance of art, aesthetics, and poetry for Levinas consists in the contrast to the gravity of ethical initiative and responsibility. Exodus and Plato’s Republic are the classical indices of aesthetic seduction and ethical petrifaction. But there is no straightforward doctrinal prohibition. The mere fact that Levinas himself is willing to contemplate the contrast of poetry to ethics is itself evidence of an ethical rapport. Indeed, Levinas cites literary works numerous times throughout his career to illuminate his concepts. In reading a passage from Soviet novelist Vasily Grossman concerning prisoners marching single file and staring raptly at the nape of the neck of the prisoner in front, Levinas reads this as an example of what he means by “face” (visage) in the “face‐to‐face” encounter from his formulations in Totality and Infinity (1969). “Face” is not a person’s countenance but rather the trace of the possibility of relation to the Other prior to any special signification; that is, the “face‐to‐face” is an inversion of the recognition of another person in particular.
References to Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Moliere, Homer, Blanchot, Rimbaud, Celan, and many others abound to illuminate Levinas’s often confounding and hyperbolically expressed ideas.1 The Vasily Grossman passage mentioned above comes up in an important and seldom discussed interview with Françoise Armengaud (Levinas 1989) concerning sculptor Sacha Sosno, who literally “obliterates” or erases characteristics such as a face as personality, as countenance, as recognizable personage, and who likewise obliterates some of the potentially pernicious possibilities of art in general, which I discuss in this chapter, but he does not obliterate “face.” By way of the technique of obliteration, Sosno, in the eyes of Levinas, redeems art in relation to the always prior and irreducible ethical exigency. To put it another way, in Sosno’s works his art obliterates their very significance as “beautiful” and artistic in order to reveal another possibility. (Paul Celan, whom Levinas esteemed, does something quite similar with language in his later works such as Atemwende (Breathturn), in which signification is pre‐empted, or upstaged, by means of catastrophic syntax.) Armengaud asks: “Isn’t there a difference between obliterated faces and obliterated torsos?” To which Levinas replies: “There are different ways of being a face. Without mouth, eyes or nose, an arm or a hand by Rodin is already a face.” Earlier in the same interview Armengaud asks point blank: “Do you think that an ethical dimension can be found in obliteration?” “In the art of obliteration, yes. This would be an art which exposes the ease and lighthearted casualness of the beautiful and recalls the attrition of being,” Levinas replies.
This detour is to advise any reader attempting to grasp Levinas’s mature work in ethics to pay special attention to his remarks on art, aesthetics, and literature since the very contrast is a thread, however tenuous (this is what I attempted in my Radical Passivity 1999). I would not go as far as Henry McDonald in his 2008 “Aesthetics as First Ethics,” but that essay is well worth study because of its fascinating and careful attention to biblical language in relation to Levinas’s understanding of (modern) literary language and the attempt of S. Y. Agnon (1888–1970) to create a distinctly Hebrew literature at a time when East European Jewry was being destroyed.
By far the most quoted, discussed, and evaluated writing from Levinas on aesthetics is his 1948 “Reality and Its Shadow,” which Robbins declares “rather violent” (1999: 39). The essay was written prior to Levinas’s more thorough engagement with ethics and the ethical rapport—the rapport, always anterior, that makes any particular ethical position possible—that will mark his originality from Totality and Infinity on. But the seeds of the later extended books are already here. He is at this time writing of fatigue, restlessness, insomnia, the instant, and escape but also of the Other (Autrui) not as alter‐ego but as asymmetrically other, as a non‐spatial exteriority/proximity (the “neighbor” he frequently says), and as betrayed by what he says is the hypocrisy of a morality of reciprocity and intersubjectivity (because these pre‐suppose a “totality”). His Existence and Existents had just been published but was ignored.2 The work of this time is a continuation of the thinking in his 1935 “On Escape”—an attempt, as mentioned, to wrest himself from Heidegger’s spell. One possible escape is offered by art, aesthetics, drama, painting, sculpture, literature, and poetry: themselves “spells” from which we must wrest ourselves, hence the essay and its “violent” character. The essay is worth point‐by‐point analysis since the contrasts to his ethics are stark. Indeed, this essay, with its understanding of art as irresponsible, taken together with his essay “The Trace of the Other” (1963) are an excellent introduction to Levinas’s thought in general. The themes discussed here recur up through the interview with Armengaud, and the general orientation remains as touchstones for scholars interested in relations between Levinas and the poets (such as Hill 2005).
The artist initially compares to the metaphysician since both go beyond common perception. Where ordinary language ceases, art and metaphysics speak—of the ineffable, the absolute. The artist, like the metaphysician (and here, as always, Levinas is thinking of the Platonic philosopher) disengages from the world and apprehends essences where previously there were merely brute existents. However, does the artist disengage and move toward the beyond, the eternal, the realm of Platonic ideas, toward truth and knowledge? As it turns out, no. The artwork—whether statue, painting, drama, or poem—arrests the movement of transcendence, and since for Levinas the movement of ethical responsibility is a form of transcendence, art is the arrest of ethics.
The artist substitutes an image for a concept, and this determines everything, for Levinas. We exist and enact the world by conceiving of and grasping objects; art neutralizes that real relationship. Anything can become an image; the whole of the world can become an image, and an image marks us as fundamentally passive. I cannot grasp an image. It is the same passivity we witness in music, magic, and poetry as was taught by the influential ethnologist and philosopher Lucien Lévy‐Bruhl (1857–1939): a primitive (pre‐Judaic and pre‐Greek) experience. Rather than being disinterested or enslaved, we are rapt and attentive without the slightest inclination toward utility because what can I do with this tune, drama, or poem except be enthralled? Instead of initiative there is what Levinas terms “musical” sensation. All art, classical or modern, drives objects out of the world by the sheer conversion of beings to images. Even in a painting, the paint is imaginary: I do not see/experience the material pigment; I see/experience the image—even if it is non‐representational. If I closely study the brushwork, I see/experience the material, not the image per se. The language of a poem or a story, Blanchot says, is imaginary language; a language no one speaks. In the interview with Armengaud, Levinas says that art redeems matter from the brutality of its sheer being‐there and renders it musical. The categories proper to aesthetics are in contrast to any other categories—scientific or ethical or Heideggerian—since in art I am part of the aesthetic spectacle and not “here” “being‐in‐the‐world.” When I am moved by a tragedy or comedy it is not through compassion but because I forget that I am not Hecuba at Troy, not at the mercy of an obsessed ship’s captain, not about to be eaten by the creature just out of frame.
William Flesch, in his book Comeuppance (2009), brilliantly employs a Levinasian template (although Levinas’s name does not appear) to account via Darwinian evolution for the prevalence of narrative in human culture. He speaks of an attentiveness (or, as I prefer, enthrallment) that precedes identification, thought, or initiative. Further, like Levinas, he challenges the idea that the image is primarily a representation of some reality from which we learn, via identification, how we might react in this or that situation or register our compassionate feelings about this or that character thus exercising our ethical muscles. But in the 1948 essay Levinas makes the simple observation that images do not represent or refer to objects or individuals. The image is not a window on reality. Images resemble an object, a person, or a situation and are fundamentally distinct from symbols, signs, or words. This obviously entails that the object or person or situation in its or his or her reality already resembles an image. Reality is dual, Levinas says. The world and everyone and everything in it are already caricatures. Animal fables, Levinas insists, are so effective and affective because men are seen as the animals and not just through them. When a model sits for a portrait or an actor enacts take after take of a scene for a film, each is already becoming, via resemblance (not representation), the imaginary beings that will end up on the canvas or on the screen. The work of being, the existing of the existent, is always doubled up in a semblance of existing.
Captured in the artwork, this semblance of existing is, alas, mortified and rendered plastic. The artwork is irreducibly pagan—tragic—in that it introduces into time, fatality, or a parody of fatality: the caricature of lifeless life. The artwork cannot go beyond itself. Eternally, Mona Lisa is about to smile. Hamlet will ask that same question again and again. Art is idolatry. In it, the living, real relation with the Other—time itself—is petrified. Philosophical criticism (although Levinas does not define it) is essential because it reintegrates the idols into the world via interpretation and via concepts, the “muscles of the mind” (Levinas 1986a).
The necessity of, and urgency for, interpretation and philosophical criticism is certainly not lost on Giorgio Agamben. Exemplary for this I refer first to a 45‐minute talk he made at the European Graduate School in 2011 on the “Archaeology of Commandment.”3 As has become so characteristic for Agamben’s readers ever since the initiation of his multi‐volume Homo Sacer project (1995–2016), he begins with etymology and discovers that the Greek word for beginning, αρχη, also means command. The ancient Greek αρχω means both “to begin” and “to command.” The related word “archon” refers to the chief, the leader, the ultimate authority. The talk ends in secular Western Modernity and with a reference to one of Agamben’s most frequently cited works of literature—Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener.” In between will be a constellar network of references including the Bible, Christianity, Heidegger, Kant, Aristotle, and modern advertising, among others.
Agamben begins by noting that the Bible, of course, begins with a beginning, a commandment, and God. God creates the heavens and the earth by way of commandments. This too of necessity is the beginning of language; language can only begin with commandment so that John 1:1 could be translated as: “In the commandment was the word” (or, we might say, “In the commandment was language”). Were this to be understood there would be, Agamben asserts, more clarity in theology and politics because the beginning is that which commands the history, the purpose and practices, of which it is the origin because the beginning does not merely start something and then vanish; it continues to rule. In the Bible God does not vanish but continues to be the ruler. Heidegger is then invoked speaking of how the αρχη indeed begins but never passes away and this coincidence defines Heidegger’s understanding of the History of Being as a “sending” which is concealed in each historical epoch. Post‐Heidegger, Agamben cites Reiner Schürmann’s attempt to conceive of a beginning uncontaminated by commandment: an origin which commands nothing, is free of history, is a pure coming to presence—in brief, the principle of anarchy. This attempt is then contrasted to Derrida’s deconstructive attempt to neutralize the origin by means of the Trace (borrowed from Levinas) while a form of commandment is preserved resolving itself in a principle of democracy, namely commandments without commander. This is then followed, again so characteristic of Agamben, by a linguistic analysis beginning with Aristotle who promotes the apophantic—the discourse that may be true or false, the discourse that is about something real.4 This is certainly the discourse of philosophy (and then of science) and so other types of discourse, the prayer for example, are to be neglected by the philosopher and better left to poetics and rhetoric. Philosophy thus excludes a considerable number of other uses of discourse: oath, curse, exclamation, and commandment. This will have political and cultural significance that has barely been studied. Commandment was left to be attached to the question of will, which only preserves the obscurity, because what is will? What is the imperative (the command)? It is an “ought” and not a (true or false) “is.” Agamben then surmises, based on twentieth‐century linguistics, that the roots of all verbs are imperatives. This prompts Agamben to propose that in Western thought there are two related but distinguishable ontologies: the ontology of assertion, expressed in the indicative mood, and the ontology of commandment, expressed in the imperative.
Here, Agamben’s reader is in familiar territory as the philosopher frequently finds dual ontologies or metaphysics such as his most well‐known distinction between ζοη (the fact of having been born, common to gods, humans, animals) and βιος (a way of life, a manner of being). The Greeks did not have a single word for life, and this difference, when politicized, yields “bare life,” homo sacer, a figure from Roman law of a person who may be killed without there being any crime or any sacrifice. In this talk the two ontologies result in a divided culture: science and philosophy on the one hand and poetry, religion, and magic on the other. Agamben says that Western culture is a machine for the production of bipolar ontologies. Indeed, this splitting recurs in the discussion of life, as above, man and animal, poetry and prose, potentiality and actuality, signifier and signified, semiotic and semantic, language and experience.
This last division is the subject of masterpieces of analyses in his volume Potentialities (1999), primarily setting Aristotle with and apart from Heidegger, and his analyses there are the next step in his archeology. He asserts that in contemporary culture the ontology of commandment is slowly replacing the ontology of assertion. Not an ontology of commandment in its strong form but in the form of advertising, suggestion, advice, so that obedience takes the form of democratic cooperation. The next star in this already complex constellation is Nietzsche and the concept of will which is related to potentiality, to possibility, to the verb “can.” Turning back to the Christian era, Agamben looks at the doctrine of an omnipotent God and how this led to very concerning problems: an omnipotent God could lie, could become incarnate as a woman, as an insect. A solution was found when the theologians conceived of a potential power which requires will. To will is to command power in such a way as to preserve potentiality; it is a power that requires will, which in turn checks power via command.
The endpoint of Agamben’s lecture is Melville’s Bartleby: in preferring not to, Bartleby nonetheless can but will neither obey nor refuse to obey the command of the man of Law. Similarly, when Agamben examines Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” parable from The Trial, he departs from Derrida who reads the parable as a self‐referential text that suspends sense: an event that succeeds in not happening. For Agamben something really has happened in seeming not to happen: Law is rendered inoperative and is finally closed.5 Anke Snoek in Agamben’s Joyful Kafka (2012: 34–8) places the parable in the larger context of the novel and adopts an Agambenian reading. Likewise, in her Catastrophe and Redemption, Jessica Whyte (2013) adopts an Agambenian point of view with regard to his readings of Kafka. Above all, Kevin Attell (2015) Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction incisively contrasts Agamben’s readings of Kafka to deconstructive readings.
We may be astonished by the breathtaking swiftness with which Agamben passes from thinker to thinker, concept to concept, era to era, from the first words of the Bible and Aristotle to our era today and in so doing fundamentally rearranges our apprehension of Western culture beginning only with an investigation of “commandment.” But it is only an introduction to his current investigations and he is doubtless aware much is still to be fleshed out. At the same time it is a skeletally instructive X‐ray into how he works to create his “constellations,” an effulgent foliage growing out of a tiny seed. It is as if he were on a mission to rearrange all the names of history (and all the concepts) into a bipolarity that will always yield a potential danger and a potential threshold beyond. This ever‐expanding “method” of investigation began in his early works on poetics, which is perhaps more central to his career as a whole than his better known and more controversial political philosophy. Or at least that is the central claim of William Watkin in his two ground‐breaking books on Agamben.
Coming back to Levinas, it is in the volume Proper Names (1996) that Levinas puts to the test the theoretical apparatus of “Reality and Its Shadow,” the “violent” 1948 essay examined in this chapter. In this volume (originally published in English in 1975), he engages with Proust, Agnon, Jabès, Wahl, Celan, Delhomme, Laporte, together with three essays on and a conversation about his friend of thirty years, Maurice Blanchot. In “The Trace of the Other” (Levinas 1986b) there are important remarks about Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. He has also written an essay on Michel Leiris: “The Transcendence of Words.” What Levinas is looking for in any art form that he can recommend is a break‐up of the “primitive” experience in which we lose ourselves in a sort of pre‐theoretical participation that for Levinas is the essence of the aesthetic experience. Jill Robbins reports that Levinas saw in this pre‐theoretical participation a transcendence of the closed psychological ego (Robbins 1999: 89–90), but this is not the ethical transcendence Levinas is ultimately interested in. In this essay and in Proper Names, he is dealing with literature, poetry, and in the case of Leiris, autobiography (Biffures, which is a complex and suggestive word, but can mean “erasures” or “crossings out”), he will be attentive primarily to language. For Levinas, Leiris’s erasures break open and exhaust thought making possible a contact with the “perceptible matter of words” (Hand 1989: 149). Not language, but words. Curiously, Agamben says something similar in his piece “The Idea of Matter” from The Idea of Prose (Agamben 1995: 37) in which the person who touches on his own matter has reached the limits of language and then finds the words to say but is no longer imprisoned in representation. This liberation is defined by Levinas in the Leiris essay as a “prayer,” a “putting oneself forward,” (Levinas 2012: 149), which is ethical.
Levinas’s esteem of Celan, who famously said that he could “see no basic difference between a handshake and a poem,” is even greater, describing his as a “[l]anguage of proximity for proximity’s sake, older than that of ‘the truth of being’—which it probably carries and sustains—the first of the languages, response preceding question, responsibility for the neighbor, by its for the other, the whole marvel of giving” (Levinas 1996: 41). Indeed, words like hands shaking and so a face‐to‐face prior to any signification. Jill Robbins stresses Levinas’s focus on Celan’s 1960 speech accepting the Georg Büchner prize because it is “constantly interrupting itself” and “interrupts the ludic order of the beautiful, of the play of concepts and of the play of the world” and thus interrupts the “aesthetic state of mind […] hence to interrupt the self‐sufficiency and the irresponsibility of aesthetic experience” (Robbins 1999: 144–6). Erasures and interruptions are echoed in the Sacha Sosno conversation in regard to his “obliterations.”
Blanchot’s importance to Levinas is inestimable for many reasons considering their wartime experiences and friendship of over thirty years, and because Blanchot’s poetics represents “an invitation to leave the Heideggerian world” (Levinas 1996: 135). However, Gerald Bruns, in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, thinks he draws too broad a distinction “and misses the strangeness of Heidegger’s aesthetics” (Bruns 2002: 223). Be that as it may, Levinas finds in Blanchot an accomplice who, like himself, wishes to free himself from the Heidegger‐event. The il y a (there is) is the attempt to consider existence without a world hence not ontologically structured. Blanchot does not create an art that, as in Heidegger, opens the World but rather one that shrouds the World in ceaseless Night and exposes the subject to exile. But it is an exile in which intimacy, rather than being‐in‐language, is inevitable, if it does not rise to the ethical. In any case, Blanchot is perhaps the most significant writer‐artist for whom art, poetry, literature turn back from the classical discovery, and possibility, of transcendence and turns away from an ontological function, thus revealing or intimating another possibility. In Leiris, as in Celan, and as in Blanchot, language becomes words that face us.
In contrast, for Agamben, in his 1995 discussion of the films of Guy Debord, and in his 1996 volume The End of the Poem, poetry is verse in the sense of its Latin root “change of direction”: reverse, inverse, obverse, traverse, and so on. Verse is a strategy that goes beyond the linguistic bipolarity of semiotic‐semantic and becomes paradigmatic of the possibility of a History that is not a chronology but is messianic. This would be a History that is redeemed, restored to the reality of possibility rather than the monotony of accomplished and yet‐to‐be accomplished facts that characterize TV news.
Discussing Debord, Agamben defines cinema as montage, which is made possible by repetition and stoppage (technically, “enjambement”). In Debord, and also very forcefully in the Jean‐Luc Godard of Histoire(s), this montage is accentuated in such a way as to restore “what was” to its possibility. This creates a “zone of undecideability” because montage, like verse, shows a power to interrupt the monotony of History as ceaseless narrative. Just as montage rescues the image from its subordination to the plot, verse rescues the word from narrative and exposes the indecision between signifier and signified. For Agamben, poetry‐as‐verse is a strategy that allows language to reveal itself rather than remain that which always reveals everything except itself.
A most elaborate, enthusiastic, and creative discussion of Agamben’s poetics is chapter 5 of William Watkin’s The Literary Agamben (2010) where, in a complex theoretical maneuver, he explicates how poetry‐as‐verse creates the space of thought. Watkin coins the term logopoesis to characterize Agamben’s agenda. For Watkin, Agamben’s poetics is primarily a precondition for liberation, liberating us to re‐think History, politics and bio‐politics. Arne De Boever takes a similar route in his essay “Politics and Poetics of Divine Violence: On a Figure in Giorgio Agamben and Walter Benjamin,” in the collection The Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life (Clemens et al. 2008). These two thinkers, as by now many others, answer to what for Philippe Mesnard and others is a weakness or misdirection in Agamben’s political philosophy. For many of Agamben’s readers his work is indeed primarily a poetics—the condition for the possibility of a redeemed politics and history.