Giorgio Agamben's Godless Saints

In his rich and insightful commentary on Agamben’s work, “Giorgio Agamben: The Discreet Taste of the Dialectic,” Antonio Negri praises Agamben for his attempt to formulate a radically immanentist conception of redemption. He points out, however, that this thoroughly novel vision of redemption, according to which “this world, this being in which we are immersed, is also a source of possibility,” is rooted in an ontological choice, “a kind of Heideggerianism,” Negri observes, since for Agamben, just as for Heidegger, “being is given and destinal.” ¹ Owing to this “unresolved condition” of his thought, Negri argues that there are “two Agambens”: one that “recognizes and denounces the fact that the state of exception … has come to involve all structures of Power,” the other “traversing it with feverish utopian anxiety, grasping its internal antagonism” (DTD 118–19). Yet precisely to the extent that Agamben is unable or unwilling to separate the given from the destinal aspect of being, Negri continues, his ultimately “nihilistic conception of being” hardly leaves any room for “a radically inventive revolutionary activity” – except in the guise of “passive marginal resistance” (DTD 118–21). At this point, it becomes possible to see why Agamben’s position, which can recognise resistance “as passivity rather than as rebellion, represented by Bartleby, rather than Malcolm X, by homo sacer rather than by the slave or the proletariat” (DTD 123), is for Negri singularly unproductive. This is because behind “the heroism of the negative,” Negri argues, we only discover “the return to nothingness, to the destinal insignificance of being, to the marginality of refusal” (DTD 124). Ultimately, Agamben’s universe, in which all productive power is attributed to sovereign power alone, reminds Negri of that of an obscure philosopher of the seventeenth century, Arnold Geulincx. The latter envisioned “a world that the transcendent divine cause had so totally invested that it closed down all spaces for freedom and production” (DTD 125).