ABSTRACT

Numerous critics have recently pointed out a general problem that traverses the entirety of Giorgio Agamben’s work. In his analysis of the politico-ontological fates of various figures, such as, for example, Bartleby the Scrivener, homo sacer, and the Muselmann, Agamben does not leave room for any consistent and operative theory of the subject, even though he himself frequently relates these figures precisely to the possibility of a “new politics” that would suspend and transcend the structures of sovereign power and biopolitics. 1 The critics in question identify two main features of his thought as the cause for the absence of a theory of the subject. On the one hand, Agamben aims at developing the field of the Aristotelian ontology of potentiality, which is most convincingly condensed in Bartleby’s famous phrase “I would prefer not to.” 2 Agamben argues that the syntagm with which the scrivener answers his employer when he persistently assigns him various kinds of work tasks needs to be understood precisely as the “potentiality not to.” 3 The key consequence of this negative determination of potentiality lies precisely in the fact that, as potentiality, it is not realised in actuality. There is an absence of action. We are confronted here with the basic problem of Agamben’s philosophy. Such an approach does not allow us to formulate any concept of antagonistic subject, which, for instance, could be related to Badiou’s subject of fidelity to truth 4 or meet the classical double definition according to which he is, at the same time, an effect of structure and an autonomous agent that actively affects structure.