Elena:
I've made only two short comments in the second part of this article and put in bold areas what I find particularly significant. For the record, the parallels between esoteric knowledge as conceived by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Zen and others, with this philosophy is clear and that is a great pleasure for me for in the long run we are moving on the same final structure. Understanding the points of contact as much as the points that miss-match is equally important for my present work and research.
Dispositives and the study of law
In 2006 a short essay by Agamben was published: Che cos'è un dispositivo? (What is an
apparatus?). The word dispositive is, according to Agamben, a decisive term in Foucault’s stra-
tegy. Agamben explores the genealogy of this term, first within Foucault’s oeuvre but also in
broader context. The essay Che cos'è un dispositivo? gives a first glimpse of Agamben’s turn
from political theology to economic theology, as he states that dispositio is the Latin translation
of the Greek word oikonomia. But the essay not only marks this transition in Agamben’s work,
but also a transition between power and resistance.
Agamben distinguishes three dimensions of Foucault’s definition of the dispositive:
First, the dispositive is a general and heterogeneous set. It includes virtually everything,
linguistic and non-linguistic, discourses and institutions, architecture, laws, police measures,
scientific statements, philosophical and moral propositions, and so on. The dispositive is the
network or the web established between those elements. Second it always has a strategic
function, it's always inscribed in a power game, so it has a strong relationship to power.
Third it appears at the intersection of power relations and relations of knowledge, the dis-
positive is in a margin.42
Agamben’s definition of dispositive concerns ‚Literally anything that has in some way the
capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, beha-
viors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.‛43
Agamben not only describes the dehumanizing work of the dispositive, but also what
strategy we can develop against it:
At the root of each apparatus (dispositive) lies an all-too-human desire for happiness ... this
means that the strategy that we must adopt in our hand-to-hand combat with apparatuses
(dispositives) cannot be a simple one.44
It’s not about the destruction of the dispositives, nor using them in the right way; the strategy
we must maintain consists of rendering the dispositives inoperative by liberating that which
has been separated by them, i.e. liberating them by returning them to the common use.45
An example of liberation from the violence and power of the law is discussed in
Agamben’s review of Kafka’s story ‚The new attorney.‛ This new attorney does not practice
the law, but only studies it. This study renders the law inoperative.
42
Giorgio Agamben ‚What is an Apparatus,‛ in What is an Apparatus? (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2009), 3.
43
Ibid., 14.
44
Ibid., 17.
45
Giorgio Agamben, Qu'est-ce qu'un dispositif? (Paris: Éditions Payot & Rivages, 2006/2007), 34.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 44-67.
54
There is, therefore, still a possible figure of law after its nexus with violence and power has
been deposed, but it is a law that no longer has force or application, like the one in which the
‚new attorney,‛ leafing through ‚our old books,‛ buries himself in study, or like the one
that Foucault may have had in mind when he spoke of a ‚new law‛ that has been freed from
all discipline and all relation to sovereignty.46
Parallel with his exploration of the concept of biopower, Agamben explores possibilities for
‚resistance,‛—for ways of being free. This undercurrent mostly goes unnoticed. Foucault’s
shift from politics to a theory of art of life has puzzled many of his scholars, and the same goes
for Agamben’s considerations on freedom. Foucault’s and Agamben’s analyses of the power
which we are subjected to are so powerful that they mostly overshadow their efforts to work
on theories of freedom (which differ from the common view on resistance). Or, in the words
of David Butin while retrieving Foucault’s notion of resistance within education research, ‚If
this is resistance, I would hate to see domination.‛47 Nonetheless, the theory of freedom that
Foucault develops, with Agamben following in his footsteps, is fascinating.
3. Foucault’s influence on Agamben’s notion of freedom and art of life
In Homo Sacer I, Agamben remarks that the point at which Foucault’s two faces of power
(political techniques and the technologies of the self) converge remains strangely unclear in his
work, as these two lines converge but never cross.48 Agamben searches for the nexus in which
the two powers intertwine, and he finds it in the production of ‛bare life‛: life that is subjected
to power through the exclusion of its essential element. But this point of intersection is also
the place where Agamben develops his notion of resistance and ethics. Bare life is closely re-
lated to the ‚art of life,‛ or what Agamben calls a form-of-life. Foucault’s technologies of the
self are in themselves not a solution or response to political techniques. While the modern
state functions as a de-subjectivation machine, there is always a re-subjectivation of the de-
stroyed subject:
This is what Foucault showed: the risk is that one re-identifies oneself, that one invests this
situation with a new identity, that one produces a new subject< but one subjected to the
State; the risk is that one from then on carries out again, despite oneself, this infinite process
of subjectivation and subjection that precisely defines biopower.49
Agamben’s notion of freedom thus is closely related to Foucault’s idea of destruction of the
subject.
The references to Foucault concerning freedom, resistance, and art of life are more
scattered in Agamben’s work, but mostly they can be found in the books Quel che resta di
Auschwitz (1998), L’aperto. L’uomo e l’animale (2002), and the essay Absolute Immanence (1996).
46
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (California: California University Press, 2005), 63.
47
David Butin, ‚If This Is Resistance I Would Hate to See Domination: Retrieving Foucault’s Notion of
Resistance Within Educational Research,‛ Educational Studies 32 (2001), 157.
48
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 76.
49
Stany Grelet & Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, ‚Une biopolitique mineure. Entretien avec Giorgio Agamben,‛
Vacarme 10 (2000), 116.
Snoek: Agamben’s Foucault
55
Art of life50
Just as Foucault had, Agamben rejects the idea of an a-priori subject, there is no given
‚humanity of the human.‛ What politics and human sciences try to do is to decide about the
humanity of living man, to produce, in a human body, the absolute separation of the inhuman
and the human.51 In exactly the same movement wherein biopower tries to create a subject, a
naked life, Agamben sees a movement in which the subject turns this subjectivation inope-
rative in a pure immanence, in a being-thus, in a form-of-life wherein it is impossible to dis-
tinguish between an essence and an existence, a life that is showed but never represented or
possessed. Ethics must be based on the simple ‚being-thus‛ of whatever beings.
For Agamben the notion of ‚resistance‛ against power (or an art of life) is tightly
connected to Foucault’s notion of an author, or the absence of an author:
The idea that one should make his life a work of art is attributed mostly today to Foucault
and to his idea of the care of the self. Pierre Hadot, the great historian of ancient
philosophy, reproached Foucault that the care of the self of the ancient philosophers did not
mean the construction of life as a work of art, but on the contrary a sort of dispossession of
the self. What Hadot could not understand is that for Foucault, the two things coincide.
You must remember Foucault’s criticism of the notion of author, his radical dismissal of
authorship. In this sense, a philosophical life, a good and beautiful life, is something else:
when your life becomes a work of art, you are not the cause of it. I mean that at this point
you feel your own life and yourself as something ‚thought,‛ but the subject, the author, is
no longer there. The construction of life coincides with what Foucault referred to as ‚se
deprendre de soi.‛ And this is also Nietzsche’s idea of a work of art without the artist.52
In another interview Agamben further elaborates on this aporia in Foucault’s last works:
There is, on the one hand, all the work on the ‘care of self’< But at the same time he often
states the apparently opposite theme: the self must be let go. He says so on many occasions:
'life is over if one questions oneself about one’s identity; the art of living is to destroy
identity, to destroy psychology.'53
Agamben argues for a new structure of subjectivity—that is, being a subject only within the
framework of a strategy or tactic. Central to this idea is to make sure not to relapse into a
process of resubjectivation that would at the same time be a subjection. Agamben identifies
this as a practice, not a principle.
50
It will be interesting to compare Agamben’s notion of art of life by Foucault with that of Joep Dohmen,
who focuses on Foucault’s techniques of the self in relation to his art of life instead of letting go of the self.
See also: Joep Dohmen, ‚Philosophers on the ‘Art-of-Living’,‛ Journal of Happiness Studies 4 (2003).
51
Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 156.
52
Ulrich Raulff, ‚Interview with Giorgio Agamben – Life, A Work of Art Without an Author: The Sate of
Exception, the Administration of Disorder and Private life,‛ German Law Journal 5 (May 2004 – Special
Edition), 613.
53
Grelet & Potte-Bonneville, ‚Une biopolitique mineure,‛ 117.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 44-67.
56
(Non)authorship and the life of the infamous
The Foucauldian concept of non-authorship is central to Agamben’s idea of freedom and
resistance. Agamben’s text ‚The author as gesture‛54 profoundly illustrates the influence of
Foucault. The title’s two notions are important in this analysis: Agamben’s notion of gesture
and Foucault’s notion of an author. What is a gesture? A gesture is a kind of movement that
stands beside the traditional relationship of means to an end, it is not a relation in which an
actor is in command of a tool to achieve a goal. The body, the physical, the human vulne-
rability, has a central role in the gesture.55 A gesture puts your life into play, irrevocably and
without reserve—even at the risk that its happiness or its disgrace will be decided once and
for all.56 A political example of a gesture is the student at Tiananmen Square who stood before
the tank. The student made no demands, but gestured. This gesture had no specific goal—a
human cannot stop a tank—but opened a mediality. This is an entirely different type of resis-
tance than, for example, Che Guevara, which is very focused on a person who makes certain
demands.
Agamben explicitly connects this notion of gesture with Foucault’s notion of an
author—or more accurately, the indifference toward the author—to emphasize the point that a
gesture is not only a different relationship between means and end, but also between actor and
act: the agent remains deliberately obscure in the texts of Foucault.57 Let us first look at Agam-
ben’s interpretation of Foucault. In 1969 Foucault presented the lecture What is an Author, in
which he uses a quote from Samuel Beckett: ‚what matter who’s speaking, someone said what
matter who’s speaking,‛ to illustrate how an author as individual is transformed in an author
as functional. Here on the one hand, the author is deprived from all relevant identity: ‚what
matter who’s speaking.‛ On the other hand, the same gesture affirms his irreducible necessity:
‚someone said.‛ ‚The author is not an indefinite source of significations that fills the work;
the author does not precede his work. He is a certain functional principle.‛58 This does not
mean that the author, beside his function, does not exist—Foucault explicitly states that there
is an author-subject—but it can only remain unsatisfied and unsaid in the work. The trace of
the author is only found in the singularity of his absence.
Agamben connects this notion of the author to another text by Foucault: La vie des
homme infames59 (which he also discusses in Remnants of Auschwitz60). This text is an intro-
duction that Foucault wrote for a collection of early-18th-century internment records. These
54
Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (New York: Zone Books, 2005/2007), 61-73.
55
Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History. The destruction of experience (London/New York: Verso, 1993).
Giorgio Agamben, Means without end (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996/2000). René
ten Bos, ‚On the Possibility of Formless Life: Agamben’s Politics of the Gesture,‛ Ephemera: theory & politics
in organization, 5 (2005), 26-44.
56
Agamben, Profanations, 69.
57
Ibid., 67
58
Michel Foucault, ‚What Is an Author?,‛ in James D. Faubion (ed.), Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology,
(New York: New Press, 1998), 207.
59
Michel Foucault, ‚Lives of Infamous Men,‛ in James D. Faubion (ed.): Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology,
(New York: New Press, 2000).
60
Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 141-143.
Snoek: Agamben’s Foucault
57
‚infamous lives‛ appear only through quotes in the discourse of power, which fixes them as
responsible agents and authors of villainous acts. But to whom do these lives belong? Fou-
cault concludes that the real lives were ‚played out (jouées).‛ But, according to Agamben, who
played them out remains unclear. In French the word ‘jouée’ also means ‘put at risk’ in terms
of ‘playing.’ Agamben states:
The infamous life does not seem to belong completely to the infamous men, or the people in
charge of their internment. The infamous life is only played; it is never possessed, never
represented, never said—and that is why it is the possible but empty site of an ethics, of a
form a life.61
Agamben concludes:
The subject – like the author, like the life of the infamous man – is not something that can be
directly attained as a substantial reality present in some place; on the contrary, it is what
results from the encounter and from the hand-to-hand confrontation with the apparatuses in
which it has been put – and has put itself – into play< And just as the author must remain
unexpressed in the work while still attesting, in precisely this way, to his own irreducible
presence, so must subjectivity show itself and increase its resistance at the point where its
apparatuses capture it and put it into play.62
Elena:
It’s wonderful to find the same ideas of the System said with different words. The above understanding is no different to the idea of being present but unidentified. _________
Plebs
Close to the concept of the lives of infamous men, is Foucault’s notion of plebs as a form of
resistance. In Il tempo che resta (2000) Agamben refers to an interview between Jacques Ran-
cière and Michel Foucault from 1977, where Foucault spoke of the pleb as a non-demarcatable
element absolutely irreducible to power relationships, not simply external to them but mar-
king their limit in some manner:
The pleb does not exist in all probability, but there is something of the pleb, nevertheless (il y
a de la plèbe). Something of the pleb is in bodies, in spirits, in individuals, in the proletariat,
but, with each dimension, form, energy, and irreducibility, it differs in each and every in-
stance. This part of pleb does not represent some exteriority with regard to power rela-
tionships as much as it represents their limit, their ruin, their consequence.63
Just as in the study of the law and in the dispositive, a kind of resistance is developed that
marks another use and a rendering inoperative: the pleb also marks an end. But just as in non-
authorship and bare life, the pleb cannot be distinguished: it isn’t a property, an essence or an
existence.
61
See also: Charles Barbour & Greg Bowden, ‚The Subject as Author: Agamben’s Ethics,‛ presentation at the
Annual Meeting of the Canadian Sociological Association. University of British Columbia, Vancouver BC, June
2008.
62
Agamben, Profanations, 72, emphasis AS.
63
Foucault cited in Agamben, The time that remains, 57/58.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 44-67.
58
Sex and life as pure immanence
In L’aperto (2002, The Open) at the beginning of a chapter concerning the relationship between
man and nature and between creature and redeemed humanity in the work of Benjamin,
Agamben starts by citing Foucault: ‚All the enigmas of the world seem slight to us compared
to the tiny secret of sex.‛64 Yet in Homo Sacer, Agamben warns against Foucault’s plea at the
end of the first volume of the History of Sexuality for a ‚different economy of bodies and
pleasures‛ as a possible horizon for a different politics. Agamben is cautious in regard to this
statement because like
the concepts of sex and sexuality, the concept of the ‘body’ too is always already caught in a
deployment of power. The ‘body’ is always already a biopolitical body and bare life, and
nothing in it or the economy of its pleasure seems to allow us to find solid ground on which
to oppose the demands of sovereign power.65
But Agamben’s own solution concerning the powers which we are subjected to also has an
important role for bare life as a possible impossibility of being grasped by these powers. And
here Agamben sees an analogy with Foucault's phrase about sex:
What serves – not solves – the secret bond that ties man to life, however, is an element
which seems to belong totally to nature but instead everywhere surpasses it: sexual ful-
filment. In the paradoxical image of a life that, in the extreme vicissitudes of sensual
pleasure, frees itself of its mystery in order to, so to speak, recognize a nonnature, Benjamin
has set down something like the hieroglyph of a new in-humanity.66
Here the importance of a non-subject or a non-author in relation to freedom and resistance is
emphasized.
Not only the body, but also the definition of (human) life plays an important role in
relation to power—reckoning the limits and confines of life is intricately tied to the definition
and exercise of power:
As Foucault has shown, when the modern State, starting in the seventeenth century, began
to include the care of the population’s life as one of its essential tasks, thus transforming its
politics into biopolitics, it was primarily by means of a progressive generalization and
redefinition of the concept of vegetative life (now coinciding with the biological heritage of
the nation) that the State would carry out its new vocation.67
Any thought that considers life shares its object with power and must incessantly confront
power's strategies. As Foucault states in La volonté de savoir, the forces that resist rely for sup-
port on the very object of investment, that is, on life and man as a living being. A new notion
of life is necessary behind the division between organic life and animal life, biological life and
contemplative life, or bare life and the life of the mind. In the essay ‚Absolute Immanence‛
64
Giorgio Agamben, The Open. Man and Animal (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002/2004), 81.
65
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 120.
66
Agamben, The Open, 83.
67
Ibid., 15.
Snoek: Agamben’s Foucault
59
(1996) (chronologically closely related to Homo Sacer I), Agamben finds in the work of Foucault
‚a different way of approaching the notion of life‛ which can be a counterpart for biopower, a
point of departure for a new philosophy. Agamben discusses one of the last texts of Foucault:
‚Life: Experience and Science.‛ What interests him is a curious inversion of what had been
Foucault’s earlier understanding of the idea of life. While in The Birth of the Clinic Foucault
defined life (under the inspiration of Bichat) as ‚the set of functions that resist death,‛ in ‚Life:
Experience and Science‛ Foucault considered life instead as the proper domain of error:
At the limit, life< is what is capable of error< With man, life reaches a living being who is
never altogether in his place, a living being who is fated "to err" and "to be mistaken.68
Agamben claims that what is at issue here is surely more than pessimism: it is a new expe-
rience that necessitates a general reformulation of the relations between truth and the subject.
Tearing the subject from the terrain of the cogito and consciousness, this experience is
rooted in life: ‚Does not the entire theory of the subject have to be reformulated once know-
ledge, instead of opening onto the truth of the world, is rooted in the ‚errors of life?‛‛69
Agamben argues for a genealogical inquiry into the term ‘life’, which will demonstrate that
‘life’ is not a medical and scientific notion but a philosophical, political and theological
concept, and that many of the categories of our philosophical tradition must therefore be
rethought accordingly.
In Agamben’s art of life, the work of art has no author. Life is a contemplation without
knowledge, which will have a precise correlate in thought that has freed itself of all cognition
and intentionality.
Elena: What would be a better definition of presence?70
Tiqqun
In 2009 Agamben spoke at the (re)publication of some texts by a Paris collective named Tiq-
qun. Tiqqun was founded in 1999 as a space for experimentation with the aim of recreating
the conditions for another community. The term ‘Tiqqun’ is derived from the Lurianic Kab-
balah wherein it refers to the redemption of the world. According to Agamben, Tiqqun tries
to radicalize and blur together the two strategies of Foucault which never seemed to find a
point of junction in his work: the analysis of techniques of governance and the processes of
subjectivation. With Tiqqun there is no longer a relationship between mechanisms of power
and the subject. Tiqqun fully understood Foucault’s notion of non-authorship and non-sub-
ject. Not only is nothing in Tiqqun signed, all articles are more or less written collectively, but
Tiqqun also proposes a radical posture that is not concerned with the finding of a subject. The
gesture is not about looking for a subject that would take on the role of savior or revolutionary
subject; it begins with this flattening, symptomatic of the society in which we live, and tries to
search for unsuspected potentialities in it. In Tiqqun the anthropological critique that is pre-
68
Michel Foucault, cited in Giorgio Agamben, ‚Absolute immanence,‛ Potentialities. Collected essays in
Philosophy, edited by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 220.
69
Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits (Vol. 4) (Paris: Gallimard, 1994). Cited in Agamben, ‚Absolute immanence,‛
220-221.
70
Agamben, ‚Absolute immanence,‛ 239.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 44-67.
60
sent in the work of Foucault reemerges in a radical form: thinking political action without the
anthropological reference to a subject.71
4. Foucault’s influence on Agamben’s philosophy of language
One of the first references to the work of Foucault that Agamben makes concerns language.
But with regard to Agamben’s philosophy of language, Foucault stays remarkably absent, ex-
cept in Infanzia e storia (1979) and Quel che resta di Auschwitz (1998). Analogous with the idea of
a form of life in which biological life and contemplative life cannot be distinguished, Agamben
develops an idea of language in which ‚language itself, and the limits of language become
apparent not in the relation of language to a referent outside of it, but in the experience of
language as pure self reference.‛72 Agamben calls this an experimentum linguae, which he sees
closely related to a Foucauldian concept:
To carry out the experimentum linguae, however, is to venture into a perfectly empty
dimension (the leerer Raum of the Kantian concept-limit) in which one can encounter only
the pure exteriority of language, that ‚étalement du langage dans son être brut‛ of which
Foucault speaks in one of his most philosophically dense writings.73
The text Agamben refers to is ‚la Pensée du dehors.‛
In Quel che resta di Auschwitz (1998) Agamben connects Benveniste’s notion of enun-
ciation to Foucault’s foundation of a theory of statements (énoncés) in The Archaeology of
Knowledge (1969). Agamben also elaborates further on the concept of enunciation in The Sig-
nature of all Things (see the next section). Il sacramento del linguaggio is also heavily concerned
with the enunciation, with Benveniste, and with theory of language in relation to political and
existential questions.74 Benveniste’s enunciation concerns not what is said in discourse but the
pure fact that it is said—the event of language as such—which is by definition ephemeral.
Benveniste argues for a ‚metasemantics built on a semantics of enunciation.‛75 The incom-
parable novelty of The Archaeology of Knowledge consists, according to Agamben, in having
explicitly taken as its object neither sentences nor propositions but precisely ‚statements,‛ that
is, not the text of discourse but its taking place.
Like absolute immanence, or the plebs, enunciation is not a thing determined by real,
definite properties; it is rather pure existence, the fact that a certain being—language—takes
place. In the words of Foucault: ‚the statement is not therefore a structure
existence.‛ Foucault’s archeology perfectly realizes Benveniste’s program for a ‛meta-
semantics built on a semantics of enunciation.‛ But the novelty of Foucault’s method, accor-
71
For Agamben’s lecture see: www.contretemps.eu. For an (unauthorized) transcription of the text and the
following discussion, see http://anarchistwithoutcontent.wordpress.com/2010/04/18/tiqqun-apocrypha-
repost/. To read more about Tiqqun: http://tiqqunista.jottit.com/.
72
Agamben, Infancy and History, 11.
73
Ibid., 6.
74
This book is heavily concerned with veridiction (and performative speech), which is a key concept for
Foucault, although Foucault is only cited once in relation to man as political animal (and concerning the
relation between politics and language).
75
Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 138.
Snoek: Agamben’s Foucault
61
ding to Agamben, consists in its refusal to grasp the taking place of language through an ‚I.‛
The ethical implications of this theory of statements—how a subject can give an account of his
own ruin—is illustrated by Foucault in the text The Lives of Infamous Men.
After connecting Benveniste’s theory of enunciation to Foucault’s theory of statements,
Agamben connects Foucault’s notion of the ‘archive’ to the positive dimension that corre-
sponds to the plane of enunciation. The archive is a set of rules that define the events of
discourse, the archive is situated between langue (as the system of construction of possible
sentences—that is, of possibilities of speaking) and the corpus (that unites the set of what has
been said, the things actually uttered or written). The archive is the fragment of memory that
is always forgotten in the act of saying ‚I.‛ It is the relation between the unsaid and the said.76
Agamben transfers the problem that Foucault had sought to eliminate, namely, "how can a sub-
ject’s freedom be inserted into the rules of a language?" to a matter of situating the subject in the
disjunction between a possibility and an impossibility of speech: ‚how can something like a state-
ment exist in the site of langue?” Therefore Agamben develops the notion of the testimony: the
relation between a potentiality of speech and its existence. The relation between language and
its existence—between langue and the archive—demands subjectivity as that which, in its very
possibility of speech, bears witness to an impossibility of speech.77 This very dense analysis
contains in a nutshell Agamben’s ideas of freedom: non-authorship, potentiality, language,
and existence.
5. Foucault’s influence on Agamben’s methodology
The way Agamben uses historical phenomena like the Nazi concentration camps has puzzled
many readers. Although he has stated that he uses historical examples as paradigms and not
in a historiographical way, this did not resolve a lot of questions in terms of what he meant by
‚a historiographical way.‛ In The Signature of All Things (2008/2009) Agamben elaborates on
his method, on which he says Foucault is the most decisive influence. Agamben extensively
underlines his indebtedness to Foucault in the preface. But what belongs to the author of a
work and what is attributable to the interpreter becomes, in the light of the Entwicklungs-
fähigkeit, as essential as it is difficult to grasp: ‚I have therefore preferred to take the risk of
attributing to the texts of others what began its elaboration with them, rather than run the
reverse risk of appropriating thoughts of research paths that do not belong to me.‛78
The book consists of three essays: on archeology and genealogy, on paradigms, and on
a theory of signatures. All three of these show the indication of deep influence from Foucault.
Via the Entwicklungsfähigkeit Agamben sees himself as not necessarily verbatim repeating the
conceptual moves of Foucault, but following a line of inquiry and research produced through
his reading of the possibilities for development and further thought in Foucault's texts.
76
Ibid, 144.
77
Ibid, 146.
78
Agamben, The Signature of All Things, 8.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 44-67.
62
Philosophical archaeology
Central in Agamben’s method is, as he emphasized in an interview, archaeology: ‚I believe
that history—or better what Foucault called the archaeology of one’s own culture – is the only
way to reach the present.‛79 Agamben uses the terms genealogy and archaeology inter-
changeably, as they also remain unclearly distinct in Foucault’s body of work.80 Both terms
can be explicitly found in the titles of Agamben’s last publications of the Homo Sacer cycle,
Archeology of the oath and The Reign and the Glory: A theological genealogy of economy and
government.
In the last essay of The Signature of all things, ‚Philosophical Archaeology,‛81 Agamben
illuminates three points of the concept he derives from Foucault. First the idea of an essential
dishomogeneity between the arché and a factitious origin, which Foucault develops in his
essay of 1971, ‚Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire.‛ Foucault distinguishes two terms used by
Nietzsche: Ursprung, which he reserves for origin, and Herkunft, which he translates as ‚point
of emergence.‛ Genealogy is not about Ursprung but about Herkunft: what can be found at the
historical beginning of things is never the preserved identity of their origin. Agamben makes
a first definition of archaeology:
We could provisionally call ‚archaeology‛ the practice which, within any historical
investigation, has to do, not with the origin, but with the question of the point from which
the phenomenon takes its source, and must therefore confront itself anew with the sources
and with the tradition.82
The second point is the historical a priori, for Agamben philosophical archaeology is about
grasping the historical a priori, as described by Kant and Mauss. As Murray writes, thought is
never empirical and cannot have origins except those bequeathed to it. So philosophy cannot
reach back into the past and pinpoint an arché, a first principle from which the world develops;
instead it can only grasp the history of thought by positing a structure of thought, conditions
of possibility, from which it will explore the very nature of that thought.83
Agamben recovers this idea of historical a priori in Foucault’s Les mots et les choses in
which archaeology presents itself as the research of a dimension both paradigmatic (see next
paragraph) and transcendental, in which learning and knowledge find their condition of
possibility. The a priori, which conditions the possibility of knowledge, is its history itself, sei-
zed at a particular level. This level is the level of its simple existence at a given moment in
time and in a certain way—that of its point of emergence:
The a priori inscribes itself in a determined historical constellation. It makes true, there, the
paradox of an a priori condition inscribed in a history which cannot be constituted other than
79
Rieger, ‚Der Papst ist ein weltlicher Priester. Interview with Giorgio Agamben.‛
80
Alex Murray, Giorgio Agamben (London/New York: Routledge, 2010), 58. For an analysis of Foucault and
Agamben’s use of the terms archaeology and genealogy, see also: Sophie Fuggle, ‚Excavating Government:
Giorgio Agamben’s Archaeological Dig,‛ Foucault Studies 7 (2009), 88-89.
81
The article on philosophical archeology is also published in Law and Critique 20 (2009), 211-231.
82
Agamben, ‚Philosophical Archaeology,‛ 217.
83
Murray, Giorgio Agamben, 27-28.
Snoek: Agamben’s Foucault
63
a posteriori in respect to itself, a condition in which inquiry—in the case of Foucault, archae-
ology—must discover its object.84
Foucault describes a special kind of past which does not chronologically precede the present
as an origin, and which is not simply exterior to it. The archeologist, who chases an a priori, re-
treats back, so to speak, towards the present. In ‚What Is the Contemporary?‛ Agamben also
refers to this point, paraphrasing Foucault, who said that: ‚his historical investigations of the
past are only the shadow cast by his theoretical interrogation of the present.‛85
The third point Agamben derives from Foucault for his concept of archaeology consists
of the relationship between the past and the future. Important here is the analogy between
archaeology and psychoanalysis. In both archaeology and psychoanalysis it is a matter of
accessing a past which has not been lived but which has, on the contrary, remained present in
some way. The only way to access this past, is by going back to the point in which it has been
covered and neutralized: the point of emergence. In his preface to Binswanger’s Dream and
Existence Foucault describes the dream and imagination as strategies and gestures of archae-
ology:
The essential point of the dream is not so much what it resuscitates from the past, but what
it announces of the future. It foresees and announces the moment in which the patient will
reveal finally to her analyst that secret that she does not yet know and that is nevertheless
the heaviest load of her present It is the
omen of history, even before being the obligatory repetition of the traumatic past.86
The point of emergence, the arché of archaeology, is that which will happen, that which will
become accessible and present only when the archeological inquest will have fulfilled its ope-
ration. It has, therefore, the form of a futural past that is of a future perfect. It is that past
which will have been, once the gesture of the archaeologist has cleared the field. Only in the
form of this ‚will have been‛ can historical knowledge become effectively possible.
In the other two essays of the book Signature of All Things Agamben describes two other
strategies of archaeology which he derives (partly) from Foucault: the paradigm and the
signature.
The paradigm as an archaeological gesture
In the first essay, ‚What is a paradigm?‛, which is based on a lecture given at the European
Graduate School in 2002, Agamben explores the notion of the paradigm. He claims that para-
digms define the most characteristic gesture of Foucault’s method.87 Foucault frequently used
the term (and synonyms for it), although he never defined it precisely. In a lecture in May
1978 at the Société Française de Philosophie, Foucault defines a paradigm as ‚all procedures
84
Agamben, ‚Philosophical Archaeology,‛ 220.
85
Giorgio Agamben ‚What is the Contemporary,‛ in What is an Apparatus? (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2009), 53.
86
Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, volume I (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 127.
87
Giorgio Agamben ‚What is a Paradigm?,‛ in The Signature of all things. On method (New York: Zone Books,
2009), 17.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 44-67.
64
and all effects of knowledge which are acceptable at a given point in time and in a specific
domain.‛ At first glance Foucault’s notion of the paradigm resembles that of Thomas Kuhn in
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but Foucault almost never refers to him. This has a
practical reason: Foucault declares that he had read Kuhn’s book only after he had completed
The Order of Things. And maybe also a personal reason: Kuhn never cites Georges Canguilhem
as an historian of science who molded and inspired his thought. By not referring to Kuhn,
Foucault repays him for this discourtesy and cites only Canguilhem, who was a friend of his.
But the most important reason why Foucault does not cite Kuhn is that he wants to distinguish
his concept from that of Kuhn.
According to Agamben the analogy between the two concepts is only superficial: both
notions correspond to different problems, strategies and inquiries.
What is decisive for Foucault is the movement of the paradigm from epistemology to
politics. Unlike Kuhn’s paradigm, Foucault’s notion does not define what is knowable in a
given period, but what is implicit in the fact that a given discourse or epistemological figure
exists at all:
It is not so much a matter of knowing what external power imposes itself on science as or
what effects of power circulate among scientific statements, what constitutes, as it were,
their internal regime of power, and how and why at a certain moment that regime
undergoes a global modification.88
Agamben gives Foucault’s description of the Panopticon as an example: a model for a prison
as an annular building in the center of which a tower is built from which every cell can be
observed. The Panopticon not only performs a decisive strategic function for the under-
standing of the disciplinary modality of power, but it becomes an epistemological figure that,
in defining the disciplinary universe of modernity, also marks the threshold over which it
passes into the societies of control.89
Apart from Foucault, Agamben also investigates Aristotle's and Plato’s definitions of
the paradigm, as well as Victor Goldschmidt’s analysis of Plato’s use of paradigms (Gold-
schmidt was an author Foucault knew and admired). Two important insights for Agamben’s
definition of the paradigm are derived from Foucault: first, the movement of the paradigm
from epistemology to politics, and second, the connection between the paradigm and archae-
ology. In the paradigm, there is no origin or arche; every phenomenon is the origin, every
image archaic. Archaeology is always a paradigmatology. The paradigm determines the pos-
sibility of producing in the midst of the chronological archive the cleavages that alone make it
legible.90
88
Foucault in an interview with Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino, 1976. Michel Foucault, ‚Truth
and Power,‛ in James D. Faubion (ed.), Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984 (New York: New Press,
2000), 112-113.
89
Agamben ‚What is a Paradigm?,‛ 17.
90
Ibid., 32.
Snoek: Agamben’s Foucault
65
Signatures as an archaeological gesture
In the second section of Signatura rerum, ‚Theory of the signature,‛ Agamben describes
archaeology as the science of signatures. Central is Paracelsus’s idea of signatures and Fou-
cault’s interpretation of it. The original core of the Paracelsian episteme is the idea that all
things bear a sign that manifests and reveals their invisible qualities. Paracelsus names three
signators: man, the Archeus (the vital principle or force which presides over the growth and
continuation of living beings) and the stars. Examples of signatures of the stars are the signs
that stars have imprinted on men’s faces and limbs or the lines of their hands which physiog-
nomy and chiromancy try to decipher. But, as Paracelsus writes, we are not only subjected to
the stars, we can also dominate the stars. So the relation expressed by the signature is not a
causal relation, but has a retroactive effect on the signator which needs to be understood.
Examples of signatures of the Archeus are the resemblances between plants and human body
parts which reveal their therapeutic power. Pomegranate seeds, having the shape of teeth, al-
leviate their pain. Here the relation is not between a signifier and a signified, but entails the
following components: the figure in the plant, the part of the human body, the therapeutic
virtue, the disease, and the signator. Signatures, which should appear as signifiers always al-
ready slide into the position of the signified, so that signum and signatum exchange roles and
seem to enter into a zone of undecideability.
Agamben claims that the examples Paracelsus provides of signatures whose signator is
the human being remained a sort of dead end in the Paracelsian episteme, before being
provisionally resurrected in the thought of Foucault and Melandri.91 Examples of the signa-
ture provided by man are the insignia that soldiers on the battlefield wear, signs that indicate
the value of coins, and signatures of an artist to mark his own work. Letters of the alphabet
are signatures. This refers, according to Agamben, to a use of language that is constituted not
by sentences but by paradigms, similar to what Foucault must have had in mind when, to
define his enunciative statements, he wrote that A,Z,E,R,T is, in a typing handbook, the
statement of the alphabetical order adopted by French keyboards.92
What is essential of signatures whose signator is man is that they add no real properties
to the object at all, but decisively change our relation to the object as well as its function in
society. The signature on a painting does not change in any way the materiality of Titian’s
painting, but inscribes it in the complex network of relations of ‘authority’, the signature on
coins transforms a piece of metal into a coin, producing it as money. In this way, the signature
resembles the paradigm.
Foucault elaborates on Paracelsus’s idea of signatures in two places in his work: di-
rectly in The Order of Things and more indirectly in The Archeology of Knowledge. In The Order of
things Foucault cites Paracelsus’s treatise, and remarks that signatures introduce into the sy-
stem of resemblances a curious, incessant doubling:93
91
Giorgio Agamben ‚Theory of Signatures,‛ in The Signature of all things. On method (New York: Zone Books,
2009), 38.
92
Ibid., 40.
93
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 26.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 44-67.
66
Every resemblance receives a signature; but this signature is no more than an intermediate
form of the same resemblance. As a result, the totality of these marks, sliding over the great
circle of similitudes, forms a second circle which would be an exact duplication of the first.
obey a different law of distribution; the pattern from which they are cut is the same.94
Foucault distinguishes between semiology (the set of knowledges that allow us to recognize
what is a sign and what is not) and hermeneutics (the set of knowledges that allow us to
discover the meaning of signs, to make the signs speak). Between the two there remains a gap
where knowledge is produced. Signatures find their own locus in the gap and disconnection
between semiology and hermeneutics. Signs do not speak unless signatures make them speak.
This means that the theory of linguistic signification must be completed with a theory of
signatures.
Foucault does this in The Archaeology of Knowledge. According to Agamben, the
incomparable novelty of this book is to explicitly take as its object what Foucault calls ‚state-
ments.‛95 Statements are not merely reducible to the semantic sphere, nor to the semiotic
sphere, but enable groups of signs to exist, and enable rules or forms to become manifest.
Agamben’s hypothesis is that the statement in The Archaeology of Knowledge takes the place that
belonged to signatures in The Order of Things.
The theory of signatures (or of statements) rectifies the abstract and fallacious idea that there
are, as it were, pure and unmarked signs, that the signans neutrally signifies the signatum,
univocally and once and for all. Instead, the sign signifies because it carries a signature that
necessarily predetermines its interpretation and distributes its use and efficacy according to
rules, practices, and precepts that it is our task to recognize. In this sense, archaeology is the
science of signatures.96
Foucault’s archeology starts with the signature and its excess over signification. But, as there
is never a pure sign without signature, it is never possible to separate and move the signature
to an originary position. The archive of signatures in The Archaeology of Knowledge defines the
whole set of rules that determine the conditions of the existence and operation of signs, how
they make sense and are juxtaposed to one another, and how they succeed one another in
space and time. Foucauldian archaeology does not seek origin, but seeks in every event the
signature that characterizes and specifies it, and in every signature the event and the sign that
carry and condition it.
Criticism on Agamben’s Foucauldian method
Despite a number of points of relation, not all readers believe that Agamben's interpretations
of Foucault are accurate or astute. Some of Agamben’s critics show more skepticism about his
Foucauldian method. Not everyone is convinced that his readings of Foucault are accurate, or
that he fairly makes use of the same methodological approaches as Foucault. Alison Ross
94
Ibid., 28-29.
95
Agamben ‚Theory of Signatures,‛ 62; Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz.
96
Agamben ‚Theory of Signatures,‛ 64.
Snoek: Agamben’s Foucault
67
finds that Agamben’s ‚approach reverses Foucault’s ascending methodology and leaves us to
ask what the reasoning from extreme instances tells us about the hold of Agamben’s analysis
of the phenomena it wishes to decode.‛97 Mills writes that ‚Foucault’s methodological ap-
proach to the concept of biopower is genealogical and historical, while Agamben strives for an
ontologization of the political.‛98 Agamben’s heritage is not so much the Nietzschean em-
phasis on relations of force that informs Foucault’s genealogical approach but the ontological
concerns of Aristotle and Heidegger.99 According to some, while Foucault’s genealogy rejects
the search for origins and instead traces the emergence of particular configurations of relations
of force, Agamben seeks to illuminate the ‚originary‛ relations (though Agamben may well
dispute this claim, especially given his analysis of the arche).100 Neal claims that ‚Agamben
reads Foucault structurally rather than genealogically‛—namely that he draws on concepts
and terms in Foucault, but that he largely leaves aside the meticulousness of the genealogical
accounts.101 For Neal, as for the critics above, this would constitute an important point of
divergence between the two thinkers.
Agamben looks for the Entwicklungsfähigkeit in the work of the authors he likes. He
focuses especially on those points in their thought which seem amenable to, indeed to call out
for, further development and elaboration. Perhaps this accounts for the peculiar tension in
which his interpretations, of Foucault above all, are held to be both close appropriations and
disloyal breaks. His approach is a guarantee for unorthodox interpretations and ‚quarter
turns in basic concepts.‛ His interpretations of Foucault’s work are rich and dense and almost
always develop in an unexpected way. Given Agamben’s insistence of Foucault's importance
to his thought and the myriad and increasing citations of Foucault's writings in Agamben’s
work, it will remain important to philosophically account for the influence between them. I
have tried here to give a general yet philosophically rigorous overview of the main points of
conceptual crossover between them.
Anke Snoek102
Department of Philosophy
Macquarie University
Sydney
Australia
97
Alison Ross, ‚Introduction,‛ South Atlantic Quaterly 107 – Special Issue: ‚The Agamben Effect‛ (2008), 6.
Cited in Deladurantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 422.
98
Mills, ‚Biopolitics, Liberal Eugenics, and Nihilism,‛ 180.
99
Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben, 60.
100
Ibid., 60.
101
Andrew W. Neal, ‚Foucault in Guant{namo: Towards an Archaeology of the Exception,‛ Security Dialogue
37 (2006), 39. Cited in Deladurantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 422.
102
The author wants to thank Gijsbert van der Heijden for the numerous discussions on Agamben.
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