Passive Resistance:

Giorgio Agamben and the Bequest of

Early German Romanticism and Hegel
THEODORE D. GEORGE
Texas A&M University

Abstract: The purpose of this essay is to examine Giorgio Agambens important

but underappreciated debts to the early German Romantics and to Hegel. While
maintaining critical distance from these figures, Agamben develops crucial aspects
of his approach to radical passivity with reference to them. The focus of this essay is
on Agambens consideration of the early German Romantics notions of criticism and
irony, Hegels notion of language, and the implications of this view of language for his
notion of community.

Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.

Herman Melville, Bartleby1

he extensive scholarly reception of Giorgio Agamben in recent years is no

doubt due both to his advancement of central debates in current continental
thought and to his perceptive responses to a number of urgent political realities
and crises of our times. Yet, readers of Agamben will recognize that Agamben
develops his ideas with reference to a daunting range of figures and themes from
the history of philosophy and other disciplines. Although the breadth of Agambens
erudition suggests that his thought admits of no single master key, some of his
deepestif, perhaps, underappreciatedinsights may be seen to derive from
his engagement with early German Romanticism and Hegel. As I wish to show,
Agambens interest in this classical period of German intellectual life forms an
important touchstone for his approach to radical passivity and, with this, gives
new contour to some of the roles played by the notion of inopericity, or, unworking (inoperosit) in his thought.
2011. Epoch, Volume 16, Issue 1 (Fall 2011). ISSN 1085-1968.

3748

38

Theodore George

Because Agambens discussions of passivity lead him to take up the early

German Romantics and Hegel under a wide range of different auspices and at
numerous junctures in his writings, it has to remain beyond the scope of this essay
to provide a complete picture of Agambens relation to them. It is my hope that
some of the significance Agamben attaches to this period of the German heritage
and the implications it has for his own thought may, however, be discerned in
outline from three aspects of his considerations. In the first part of my paper, I
wish to show that Agambens discursive style has significant taproots in the notions of criticism and irony developed by Friedrich Schlegel and others in early
German Romanticism. In the second part, I examine Agambens use of Hegels
thought to identify a passive element of language. In the third part, I consider the
consequences Agamben draws from this passivity of language for community.

1. Agamben and Early German Romanticism: Criticism and Irony

Scholars have observed that Agambens discursive style is so rich and ranging as
to defy any simple characterization. No doubt there are several reasons for this.
First among them, perhaps, is that Agamben challenges received ideas about
the lines between philosophy and other disciplines; he relies on sensibilities
and concerns that arise not only from philosophy but also from literary theory,
jurisprudence, and philology.2 What I wish to point out in this part of my essay,
however, is that Agamben elucidates his discursive style at least in part with
reference to the notion of criticism that he finds in Friedrich Schlegel and other
early German Romantics. In his Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture,
Agamben appears to position himself alongside the Romantics because he sees in
their notion of criticism a passive figure of thought, namely, Romantic irony, that
resists, and even destabilizes, the pretensions of completeness and certitude that
continue to guide so many philosophical and scientific programs of our times.
Agamben associates his own project with the early German Romantics outlook
on criticism in the Introduction to Stanzas. Here, Agamben aligns himself above
all with Walter Benjamin, but Agamben betrays the guidance he takes from the
early German Romantics with his claim that Benjamin is the only critic in the last
two centuries of comparable quality.3 It is true that Agambens overall orientation
toward the early German Romantics is ambivalent.4 With this claim in Stanzas,
however, Agamben suggests that criticism in our times continues to stand in the
long shadow cast by the origins of the Romantic Movement in Germany.
It might be that Agamben is attracted to the Romantics in part because he
sees reflected in them a disavowal of traditional boundaries between philosophy,
literature, poetry, and other areas. Yet, as Agamben appears to indicate, the Romantics believed this transgression of boundaries to arise not from intellectual
extravagance, but rather from a more thoroughgoing confrontation with the

Giorgio Agamben and the Bequest of Early German Romanticism

39

limitations of human knowledge than had been undertaken by their predecessors

in modernity. In particular, their dedication to the finitude of human knowledge
may be said to arise from an effort to deepen, even move beyond, Kants critical
project of discerning the possibilities and limits of cognition. For the Romantics, it is not the task of criticism to provide something like positive knowledge
of our limits, but rather, as Agamben has it, to undertake inquiry at the limits
of knowledge precisely about that which can be neither posed nor grasped.5
Romantic criticism, moreover, orients itself by an ineluctable form of passivity,
as a critical work worthy of the name was one that included its own negation; it
was, therefore, one whose essential content consisted in precisely what it did not
contain.6 The purpose of criticism is not to present substantive knowledge but,
rather, to enact the very limits of thinking as such.
In the Introduction to Stanzas, Agamben indicates that this peculiar character
of critical inquiry unfolds in and as a form of irony. It is true that in early German
Romanticism, contributions to the problem of passivity may extend beyond the
issue of irony to a number of other themes that pervade it. In recent literature,
one might even see the Romantics commitments to the problem of passivity, for
example, in David Krells elucidation of the meaning of languor in the classical
period of German thought.7 Instructive for us, however, is that Agamben discerns
the Romantic devotion to passivity as a sort of absolute irony that provides
nothing short of a foil to Hegels belief in an absolute science (Wissenschaft).
Agamben explains,
Hegels objection, that Mister Friedrich von Schlegel, Solger, Novalis and
other theoreticians of irony remained stalled at absolute infinite negativity ...
misses the point: that the negativity of irony is not the provisional negativity of
the dialectic, which the magic wand of sublation (Aufhebung) is always already
in the act of transforming into a positive, but an absolute and irretrievable
negativity that does not, for that, renounce knowledge.8

If Romantic criticism relies on the passivity of absolute irony, then it turns on

a form of negation that outstrips the Hegelian notion of supersession, or, sublation (Aufhebung), and, thus, harbors a power to resist the logic by which Hegels
dialectic operates to integrate the difference and otherness of all limits. Thus, as
Agamben has it, Romantic criticism may be seen as a passive force that disaffirms,
disarms, or, perhaps, unworks the fulfillment of Hegels quest for absolute science.
It would of course be reductive to suppose that Agamben identifies his discursive style exclusively with the early German Romantics and the antagonism
they pose to Hegel. Nonetheless it may be said that his consideration of Romantic
criticism in the Introduction to Stanzas provides a helpful entre to the sensibilities that guide Agambens writings. From this standpoint, the aims of intellectual
inquiry focus not so much on the establishment of completeness and certitude
of our knowledge, whether these are conceived in terms set forth by Hegel or by

40

Theodore George

contemporary philosophers and scientists. Rather, intellectual endeavor unfolds

in no small part along lines of an irony that would point out the ineluctable limits
we face in our efforts to make good on such pretenses.
Agambens allegiances with the early German Romantics views of criticism
and irony also open up new lines of comparison between him and other figures
in recent continental thought. One could, perhaps, compare Agamben with other
thinkers of radical passivity, such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot, who
also key many of their ideas to early German Romanticism. We may also, though,
find new avenues of contrast between Agamben and figures, such as Jean-Francois
Lyotard, who suggest that the postmodern program requires us to break with the
heritage of early German Romanticism. While Lyotard does not address the early
German Romantics views of criticism or irony directly in his essay, Answering the
Question: What is Postmodernism?, we can recall his indictment of their related
notion of the critical fragment. It seems to me, Lyotard tells us, that the essay
(Montaigne) is postmodern, while the fragment (The Athaeneum) is modern.9
Whatever fruits these comparisons might bear, however, Agambens relation to
the early German Romantics not only promises to situate him within current
debate but also brings important aspects of his own discursive style into focus.

2. Agamben and Hegel: Language

If Agamben associates himself with the early German Romantics views of criticism and irony in Stanzas, then he develops his conception of language in no
small part in reference to Hegel. Yet, Agamben does not simply endorse or embrace Hegels view. Rather, Agamben arrives at original insights into language by
means of an interpretive engagement that reads both with and against the grain
of Hegels claims. With this, as we shall see, Agamben may be said to build on
some Hegelian ideas that he believes continue to set the terms for our relation to
language today. At the same time, though, Agamben may also be seen to distance
himself from Hegel, arguing that Hegel misses the most important implications of
his own view because he remains beholden to traditional metaphysical prejudices
for completeness, certitude, stability, and unity.
The terms of Agambens relation to Hegel begin to come into focus with Agambens analysis of what he calls the presuppositional structure of language.10 In
Homo Sacer, Agamben characterizes this structural feature of language in terms
of a fracture that makes itself felt in our employment of language in concrete
acts of speech. In a discussion of the relationship between juridical rule and
language, Agamben enlists terminology familiar to us from poststructuralist and
structuralist discourse to assert that,
in the occurrence of actual speech, a word acquires its ability to denote a segment of reality only insofar as it is also meaningful in its non-denoting (that

Giorgio Agamben and the Bequest of Early German Romanticism

41

is as langue as opposed to parole, as a term in its mere lexical consistency,

independent of its concrete use in discourse).11

Here, language as langue may be taken as a necessary condition of speech, or

parole. Yet, language understood in this sense never comes to speech itself, since
in its function as a condition of speech, it remains always logically prior to, and
thus never denoted in, any particular act of speech. Language must be presupposed in every act of speech, even though, and for this very reason, language
as such can never be presented in any denotation. Because of this, language as
langue may even be said to be non-linguistic, insofar as it withdraws in its own
enactment as speech. Agamben writes,
language presupposes the nonlinguistic as that with which it must maintain
itself in a virtual relation (in the form of a langue or, more precisely, a grammatical game, that is, in the form of a discourse whose actual denotation is
maintained in infinite suspension).12

Language conceived of in these terms suggests a structure by which it remains

in a condition of interminable deferral with respect to its own iteration, insofar
as language as such, though organized by the role it plays in saying something,
cannot itself come to be said. For Agamben, the presuppositional structure of
language refers precisely to its status in light of this form of deferral.
Despite his reliance on terms more consonant with a Saussure or, perhaps, even
a Wittgenstein than Hegel, Agamben nonetheless argues that Hegel comes to form
the decisive moment in the history of the idea of this presuppositional character of
language. In Stanzas, Agamben tells us that Hegel may be seen as the first to bring
to full articulation the conflicted character of language that has accompanied
Western reflection on signification since the beginning.13 Agamben illuminates
Hegels insights into language with regard to the Lectures on Aesthetics, asserting
that in Hegels depiction of symbolic art, he defines the symbol as a sign, that is,
as a unity of a signified and its expression.14 Furthermore, Hegel holds that this
complex unity of the sign entails a tension between what he calls, in anticipation
of the structuralist distinction of language and speech,form and signification.15
Just as prescient, however, Hegels philosophy of language allows us to see in
the conflict of language and speechform and significationimportant consequences for the relationship between language and reality. Agamben draws out
the Hegelian insight into these implications in his Language and Death, focusing
not foremost on Hegels Lectures on Aesthetics, but, rather, the Jena period work
culminating in the Phenomenology of Spirit. As in Stanzas, Agambens purpose in
Language and Death is, as Matthew Calarco puts it, to consider how the transition from language to speech remains unthought within Western metaphysics.16
Here, however, Agamben returns to Hegel not only to draw out the dynamic by
which langue withdraws in every parole, but, moreover, to emphasize that this

42

Theodore George

enactment of language in speech forces us to lose the immediacy and singularity

of our relation to what is.
Agambens reinvigoration of Hegels insight into this loss reaches one of its
summits in his explication of what he refers to as Hegels analysis of the This and
indication in the Phenomenology.17 Hegels elucidation of language in this portion
of his work is notoriously difficult, and the fuller range of its implications cannot
be treated here. What foremost appears to interest Agamben, however, is that Hegel
takes the enactment of language in speech as a negation of the immediacy and
singularity we experience in sense-certainty. For Hegel, consciousness at the level
of sense-certainty may be understood to identify the purpose of language with
the preservation of the intimacy of our relation to being in speech. However, as
Steven D. DeCaroli explains, the moment language attempts to preserve sensecertaintys immediate relation to being it inevitably mediates the relation.18 Thus,
the pronouncement of something in speech must be seen not only as an expression of something, but, at the same time, also a rebuff of any intention we might
have to come into direct contact with reality itself. For this reason Agamben tells
us that any attempt to express sense-certainty signifies, for Hegel, to experience
the impossibility of saying what one means.19
To Agambens mind, Hegels examination of the presuppositional structure
of language, and, ultimately, the relinquishment of our intimacy with reality
experienced in the transition from language to speech implied by this view, point
to forms of ineluctable passivity harbored in the word. Hegels discovery of these
structural limits of language means that in all of our efforts to employ language to
express what is, its character of immediacy and singularity disappears. Agambens
acceptance of this marrow of the Hegelian position points to his recognition of
human limits that arise in our exercise of language. One of the principal upshots,
we might conclude, is that language, in virtue of its very structure, betrays a form
of finitude by which its aim to bring us into contact with the world recoils on itself.
Yet, Agamben believes that notwithstanding all of his innovations, Hegels
philosophy of language nonetheless succumbs to metaphysical biases typical of
the Western tradition that contravene and cover over the radicality of his own
approach. It is true that in his Language and Death, Agamben seems to indicate
that some of Hegels earliest ideas, such as those contained in his poem Eleusis,
penned in 1796 and dedicated to Hlderlin, harbor insights that begin to overcome
some of the predilections of the tradition of Western metaphysics. But, Agamben
suggests that by the time Hegels 1807 Phenomenology appears, Hegel reinscribes
into his position familiar prejudices of the Western tradition.20 Because of this,
Agamben may be said to hold that one of the principal problems for intellectual
inquiry today is to free ourselves from metaphysical presumptions that Hegel
introduces into his writings, so that we might reexamine the passivity of language
initially ascertained by him.

Giorgio Agamben and the Bequest of Early German Romanticism

43

Agamben associates Hegels failure with his unwarranted faith in the work
performed by supersession (Aufhebung) in his absolute Idealism. From this perch,
Agamben rejects Hegels belief that the work of supersession ultimately results
in a form of negation that would itself negate the schisms opened up in language
between form and signification, words and the immediacy and singularity of
being. In Stanzas, Agamben reminds us that in the Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel
believes that the presuppositional character of language revealed in symbolic art
is superceded by higher forms of art, and, ultimately, in philosophy.21 Because
of this, the original deferral of presence, which is properly what deserves to be
questioned, is dismissed and confined in the apparent evidence of the expressive convergence between form and content, exterior and interior, manifestation
and latency.22 In a related vein, Agamben argues in Language and Death that
the enactment of language in speech actually signals something of an increase
in our relation to being, and not simply a loss of closeness and contact. For, as
Agamben reminds us, Hegels belief in the presence of the concept in the work of
supersession, understood as both negation and retention, allows him to suppose
that speech forms not only a negation of the immediacy and singularity of being,
but, in a sense, also contains them within it.23
Agamben derives a number of consequences from his interpretive engagement
with Hegel. Some of Agambens writings suggest that he identifies certain hopes
for our relation to aesthetic life and art in the present age with the finitude of
language discovered by Hegel. For example, Agambens interest in certain writers,
such as Kafka, may be seen to grow in part from the belief that Kafka understands
and exploits the limitations of denotation exposed by Hegel.24 However, Agamben
recognizes implications not only of what he sees as Hegels great insights, but also,
and equally, of Hegels retreat back into traditional philosophical prejudices. Although Agamben puts both sides of his interpretation of Hegels view of language
into the service of an array of issues, he believes that some of their most pressing
repercussions arise in the arena of politics.

3. Agamben on Community after Hegel

Agambens discussions of sovereignty, the Homo Sacer, bare life, the state of exception, and biopolitics, as well as his treatment of a range of themes, such as the
camp and the refugee, serve to help him develop a critical stance against abuses
that may be, and so often have been, carried out in politics against that form of
life, which finds itself, as Agamben puts it,exposed to death.25 In this part of my
essay, I wish to focus on one of Agambens early and celebrated contributions to
political philosophyhis notion of communityand examine the ambiguous
debts his view owes to Hegel. In a piece on recent theories of community, Brian
Elliott recognizes the affinity between Agambens reflections on community and

44

Theodore George

motifs in Jacques Derrida and Nancy (we might also mention Blanchot) and
observes that Agambens conception focuses on the issue of singularity.26 Yet,
Agambens conception of community may also be said to build on his engagement with Hegel because of the connection Agamben makes between political
life and language.
Agamben poses his view of community as a response against a philosophical
tradition that identifies political activity as the proper work of the human being, and, in turn, leads to the idea of a politics that reaches its height in a united
project, or work, of a nation.27 Yet, he maintains that in this same tradition, claims
about the political task of the human being ultimately depend on our relation to
language. Indeed, constitutive of the political work of the human being is its use
of language, understood as that in and through which political practice receives
its determinate shapes. For Agamben, Aristotles definition of the human being
as political animal would have to be read in conjunction with his further portrayal of the human being as an animal that has language. Agambens concern to
achieve a politics that twists free from this heritage demands a critical analysis
of traditional prejudices about our relation to language itself.
In Homo Sacer and a number of other writings, Agamben asserts that the
relationship between the political sphere and language emerges from an isomorphism between the work of juridical rule, or, law, and the employment of
language.28 Indeed, at the same juncture we took up earlier in regard to Agambens
approach to language, he goes so far as to argue that the particular structure of
law has its foundation in the presuppositional structure of human language.29
As we have seen, however, his interpretation of this structure of language comes
to focus on Hegel, as Hegel, Agamben tells us,was the first truly to understand
it.30 Agambens aspiration to develop a theory of the political that would wrest
us from the politics of work leads him to take up the implications that Hegels
reflections on language, despite the operation by which Hegel conceals his own
discoveries, help to expose.
Although Agamben develops the political import of Hegelian Idealism along
a number of lines, he uses some of the lessons he learns from the Hegelian vision
of language to elucidate his view of community life in the celebrated chapter of
The Coming Community on the concept of the example. Agambens treatment of
the relationship between community and language in this portion of his book,
though he does not mention Hegel by name, nonetheless accords with the take
Agamben has in other writings on him. If anything, Agambens The Coming Community may be seen to expand on his other discussions, given that Agamben here
appears to have not only Hegels Aesthetics and Phenomenology in mind, but also
some of Hegels other writings from the Jena period that focus on the problem of
naming.31 On this score, it might also be that Agamben is closely aligned with the

Giorgio Agamben and the Bequest of Early German Romanticism

45

Blanchot of Literature and the Right to Death, insofar as this piece, too, takes
up similar questions of language with regard to Hegels Jena conception of it.32
Be that as it may, in his The Coming Community Agamben argues that some
of our greatest prospects for community life are bound up with the relation we
bear to the form of passivity that makes itself felt in the enactment of language as
speech. In The Coming Community, Agamben associates the political antinomy
of the individual and the universal with Hegels description of the generality of
speech as a negation of the immediacy and singularity of our encounters with
being.33 In the sphere of language, The word tree, Agamben illustrates, designates all trees indifferently, insofar as it posits the proper universal significance
in place of singular ineffable trees.34 Agambens position suggests, however, that
in the political sphere, the establishment and application of law, precisely because
it is itself founded in the enactment of speech, operates to obviate, exclude, and
expel the ineffable immediacy and singularity of those beings that it takes to be
its subjects. From this standpoint, it is not only the transgression of the law that
leads to the violence of exclusion. Rather, it would be the employment of law itself,
owing to its foundations in the structure of language, which always already commits violence against the individual as immediate and singular.
Agamben may be said to argue that our deepest prospects for community rest
not on the effectiveness of the law, then, with its foundations in the enactment of
language in speech, but, instead, on a passive resistance to the generality toward
which juridical rule and language are directed. Indeed, for forms of community
that take the efficacy of juridical rule and language as the common ground of the
political sphere actually exclude what we most originally share. The human being,
deprived of his necessary connection to the faculties of death and language, as
Calarco has it, is thus deprived of the common ground of human community.35
On this score, Hegels failurehis retreat to prejudices that obviate the finitude
of languageprovides perhaps something of a model for the operations by
which we cut ourselves off from genuine being together with others. The active
rule of law, founded, ultimately, in the forgetfulness of the passivity of language,
forecloses our potential to overcome the violence of exclusion.
Some of our greatest prospects for shared life, by contrast, coalesce for
Agamben around our passive potential to resist the operation, or work, of juridical rule and language. Community turns not foremost on the establishment or
enforcement of law, nor the denotation of shared projects or beliefs, but, rather,
on our resistance to these acts. For Agamben, this passivity is neither apathy nor
promiscuity nor resignation.36 Instead, it may be understood as a passive force
to resist, even unwork, the operations of juridical rule and denotative speech. In
this chapter of The Coming Community, Agamben associates these suspensions
with the peculiarity of the example. Much might be said about his discourse on

46

Theodore George

the example and related issues, such as his concept of whatever being, and it
remains beyond the scope of the present study to address his view fully.37
Decisive for our consideration here is that in contrast to the enactment of
language in denotative speech, the employment of examples does not result in the
loss of our contact with the singularity of whatever we encounter. For, in contrast
to denotation, in which the generality of the name takes shape as a supersession
of immediacy and singularity, the example is one singularity among others,
which however, stands for each of them and stands for all.38 As in a denotation,
an example directs itself toward the expression of something general. Whereas
denotation operates to reach this aim through a loss of our contact with immediacy and singularity, though, the employment of an example leaves this work
unconsummated, thus providing for and safeguarding the singularity of what
we wish to express.
If our prospects for community lie in our resistance to the exclusions that
result from the effectiveness of juridical rule, and if this resistance requires us
to subvert the enactment of language in speech, then the employment of the
example may be seen as an exemplar of our relation to others. Community, from
this standpoint, would thus be contingent on our prospect to communicate only
in the empty space of the example, without being tied by any common property,
by any identity.39 From this standpoint, the possibility of community would not
form around our collective acquiescence to the law, our mutual adherence to
political or cultural beliefs, or, for that matter, to some shared characteristic trait.
Nor does Agamben think that this prospect for community should be seen to take
shape as only a negative community (a view he associates with Blanchot).40
Rather, he holds, community forged in the idiom of the example is characterized
by belonging itself.41 In contrast with the political sphere achieved in juridical
rule, grounded in an operation of language that supersedes the immediate and
singular, the community modeled on the example points to a sense of the common that would allow us to belong together without violence to the differences
that emerge from our respective uniqueness.

***
The scholarly reception of Agamben has already begun to demonstrate not only
his important position in the landscape of contemporary continental European
intellectual life, but also the significance of his contributions to questions typically
found in philosophy, philology, literary criticism, and other disciplines. One of the
chief motivations for this essay has been to suggest that from among the many
aspects of Agambens projects that demand further study, the role of his complex
and subtle relation to early German Romanticism and to Hegel are of special
interest. Although it would require more investigation to determine the fuller

Giorgio Agamben and the Bequest of Early German Romanticism

47

scope of Agambens creative and critical uses of these resources, his discussions
of intellectual inquiry, of language, and of political community all show evidence
of their trace. Of course, Agambens appropriation of figures and themes from the
classical period in Germany not only contribute to our grasp of Agamben. It also
reminds us of the abiding bequest of the Jena group and Hegel evenperhaps
especiallyin an age that has become suspect of its ties to its own heritage.

Notes
1. Herman Melville, Bartleby, in Billy Budd and Other Stories (New York: Penguin
Books, 1986), 17.
2. Thomas Carl Wall refers to Agamben as variously erudite in regard to The Coming
Community. Thomas Carl Wall, Radical Passivity, Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 122. Eva Geulen observes, for example,
that Agambens intellectual sphere is too heterogeneous that one could oblige it to a
methodological approach or ascribe it a philosophical school. Eva Geulen, Giorgio
Agamben zur Einfhrung (Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 2005), 17. Translation mine.
3. Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald Martinez
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), xv. See also Geulen, Agamben
zur Einfhrung, 36.
4. See, for example, Agambens discussion of figures from the German Romantic period in The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1994), 76ff.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. David Ferrell Krell discusses languor as a crucial theme of the period in his The Tragic
Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of God. See, for example, David Ferrell
Krell, The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of God (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2005), 84ff.
8. Agamben, Stanzas, xvi.
9. Jean-Franois Lyotard, Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?, trans.
Rgis Durand, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979,
ninth printing 1993), 81.
10. See Agamben, Homo Sacer, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1998), 201.
11. Ibid., 20.
12. Ibid.
13. Agamben, Stanzas, 135.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.

48

Theodore George

16. Matthew Calarco,On the Borders of Language and Death: Agamben and the Question
of the Animal, Philosophy Today 44 Supplement (2000): 917, 93.
17. Agamben, Language and Death, trans. Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 10.
18. Steven D. DeCaroli,Visibility and History: Agamben and the Question of the Animal,
Philosophy Today 45 Supplement (2001): 917, 9.
19. Agamben, Language and Death, 11.
20. Agamben suggests this trajectory for Hegels thought in the difference between Hegels
Phenomenology account of the Eleusinian mysteries and his treatment of similar
matters in the earlier poem. See Agamben, Language and Death, 12ff.
21. Agamben, Stanzas, 136.
22. Ibid., 137.
23. Agamben, Language And Death, 145.
24. This might be suggested, for example, by some of the comments on Agambens use
of Kafka in his discussion of the law, and, by association, language, in Homo Sacer,
49ff.
25. Ibid., 88.
26. Brian Elliott,Theories of Community in Habermas, Nancy, and Agamben: A Critical
Evaluation, Philosophy Compass 4:6 (2009): 893903.
27. See, for example, Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo
Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
For a helpful commentary on these issues in Agamben, see Stefano Franchi,Passive
Politics, Contratemps 5 (December 2000): 3041.
28. See Agamben, Homo Sacer, 201.
29. Ibid., 21. For an examination of the relation of language and law in Agambens thought
from another viewpoint, see Daniel Paul McLoughlin,The Politics of Caesura: Giorgio
Agamben on Language and the Law, Law and Critique 20:2 (2009):16376.
30. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 21.
31. Calarco appears to indicate such a connection, for example, in his On the Borders
of Language and Death, 93.
32. Calarco alludes to as much in On the Borders of Language and Death, 93.
33. Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1993), 9.
34. Ibid.
35. Calarco, On the Borders of Language and Death, 95.
36. Agamben, The Coming Community, 10.
37. Agamben discusses whatever being in The Coming Community, 1ff.
38. Ibid., 10.
39. Ibid., 11.
40. Ibid., 84.
41. Ibid.