Agamben’s Politics of the Performative

Abstract

In this article I offer a critical examination of Giorgio Agamben’s vision of political liberation as it is articulated in his philosophy of language. Focusing on his affirmative politics as a particular kind of performance, I show that he has in mind a radically ‘pure’ performative that affirms only language as such. This conception is very different from other influential approaches to performativity in the contemporary scene of political thought, such as those developed by Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler. Rather than offering a meaningful alternative to these approaches, however, I argue that this pure performative makes visible the specific problems connected to Agamben’s model. Ultimately, Agamben risks affirming what he sees as problematic in political terms, namely the isolation of his preferred type of experience of language to a separate ‘sphere’. It is, moreover, questionable whether his performative points to a plausible model of political contestation in an age where careless and void utterances have become widespread.

Introduction

Language has been a key interest of Giorgio Agamben since his earliest writings. As he notes in the often-cited preface added to Infancy and History, the main task of his philosophy has been to stubbornly explore the meaning of the words ‘I speak’ (Agamben, 2007a: 6). In his enigmatic style, he has time and again painted his vision of ‘language as such’ – not language in its referential or signifying function but the event and facticity of language as such.

As has been amply discussed in the commentary on Agamben’s thought, the work on language is integrally connected to his understanding of politics, which becomes an explicit concern in his 1990s’ works. It is in analogy to the main arguments concerning language that Agamben formulates both his critical diagnosis of the problem of Western politics and his ideas of a solution to it. As will be recapitulated below, what Agamben sees as the problem with Western apparatuses of power is that they are incapable of forming a type of political organization that would grant us access to the experience of being or doing ‘as such’ but must always presuppose it in a negated form. To put it in the context of language very briefly at this point: for meaningful discourse to be produced, the experience of the taking place of language must be presupposed yet negated and preserved. When we move from sign to discourse, we indeed experience language, but only as a presupposition that cannot really be accessed but only pointed to as a ‘having-been’. It is this logic of presupposition and its critique, voiced in the register of metaphysics in Language and Death (Agamben, 1991), that Agamben later incorporates into his well-known diagnosis of Western politics as a structure that negates or excludes ‘bare life’ yet lets it live within its confines in an excluded form (Agamben, 1998).

To escape this problem, Agamben has weaved together an affirmative account that goes under such names as ‘deactivation’, ‘suspension’ and ‘rendering inoperative’. In general terms, the affirmative operation he has in mind is always directed at an apparatus – be it in the field of aesthetics, law, or religion – with the aim of ‘stopping it in its tracks’, as some scholars have put it (Kotsko, 2020: 109; Prozorov, 2009: 527). It is this deactivation that enables a different experience of human activities. In the context of language, Agamben has approached this operation as a suspension of sense and reference in his exploration of the messianic experience of the word (Agamben, 2005a) and in his investigation of the oath (Agamben, 2011). This suspension activates a different experience of language, one that is not about communicating a particular content but about dwelling in language as such.

In this article I offer a critical examination of Agamben’s idea of political liberation as articulated in the context of his philosophy of language. While Agamben’s emancipatory ideas have certainly been criticized from various perspectives, their specifically linguistic implications have been insufficiently discussed. Thus, to delineate what the specific point of critique offered here is, the following section (2) presents a brief overview of the reception of Agamben’s affirmative ideas. Directing the focus onto language, section 3 starts with a summary of Agamben’s central arguments about language and then narrows the exploration down to an exploration of language as gestural activity. As will be discussed in this context, the notion of ‘gesture’ is the name Agamben has given to his affirmative politics insofar as it refers to a specific type of performance. As he makes clear, gesture pertains not only to corporeal activity but to a particular kind of discursive performance. This, in turn, offers the opportunity to analyze Agamben’s gestural politics as a performative, that is, as something performed in and through language. By briefly juxtaposing this to the understanding of performatives by J.L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, we see that Agamben takes a strikingly different route than these authors in his radical affirmation of a ‘pure’ performative that affirms only the word as such. Rather than offering a meaningful or innovative alternative to these approaches, however, I argue that with this pure performative Agamben risks affirming precisely what he sees as problematic in political terms, namely the isolation of his preferred type of experience of language to a separate ‘sphere’. I moreover argue that it is precisely his notion of linguistic gestures, and the political performance implied in it, that has not yet received enough critical attention.

The wider context of this article is the fundamental question concerning the political force of utterances. Indeed, the Western understanding of politics has, since antiquity, built on the insight that politics unfolds in the medium of language; it is language that provides us with the possibility of debate, contestation, and public reasoning. It is this conception that works, in a general sense, in the background of investigations into what we do in politics with words. Politics evidently has a material dimension, power being exercised both on bodies and arising from them, but it is to a crucial extent through discursive means that politics is enacted. Exploring this dimension has lost none of its pertinence, especially in an age where utterances – those of politicians or of anyone else – circulate online at a speed completely unthinkable a few decades ago. Widely discussed under the rubric of ‘post-truth’ politics, a general tendency today is that all utterances have become equivalent to each other. While the scope of this article does not allow a discussion of these worrying tendencies as such, I conclude by pointing to the potential risks that follow if we adopt too uncritically the type of ‘pure performative’ that Agamben praises.

From Radical Passivity to Parody: The Reception of Agamben’s Affirmative Politics

As the focus will be on the reception of Agamben’s affirmative ideas, let us briefly rehearse what he seeks to solve by formulating them. Within the framework of his influential theory of biopolitics, Agamben has criticized Western political institutions for governing human life in a manner that renders it to a state of ‘bareness’, ‘mere’ biological life that is managed through various apparatuses, be they medical, juridical, or otherwise. In this setting, life in its different shapes and manners cannot simply unfold as it is but is always separated from its form, such that power may be more easily exercised on it.

It is parallel to and in response to this approach that Agamben has developed his affirmative account of politics. Against the biopolitical apparatuses that always capture life to the point of leaving almost nothing intact, Agamben has envisioned a strategy that liberates human life from these shackles. As noted above, the key strategy of Agamben has been to focus on how to suspend the ‘normal’ functioning of power apparatuses. One of his exemplary figures is Herman Melville’s Bartleby, who in his famous ‘preferring not to’ withdraws from obeying the commands of his office (see Agamben, 1999: 243–71). Neither acting nor wholly withdrawing from action but simply preferring not to, Bartleby wavers somewhere between potentiality and actuality, in consequence jamming the machine, so to speak.

From another perspective, Agamben has stressed the importance of a ‘new, possible use’ of the various human activities that remained trapped in apparatuses. As he articulates through the concept of profanation (Agamben, 2007b), to suspend apparatuses is neither a matter of inventing new ones nor of remaining completely inactive, but points to the possibility of using them in a different manner. To evoke one of the most straightforward examples used by Agamben, children playing with tools reveal another use of abandoned use objects. As Pellizzoni (2021: 375) has put it, it is more a matter of ‘doing things differently than doing different things’.

The perhaps best known strand of critique that Agamben’s idiosyncratic examples of liberatory figures have given rise to is that he champions a kind of radical passivity that makes it hard to envision modes of resistance and political agency. At its extreme, Agamben’s hints of the ‘secret’ redemptive forces of such utterly powerless figures as the Muselmann have been seen as outrageous (Bernstein, 2004). In the first book-length exploration of Agamben’s philosophy, Mills (2008: 137) also worries that beneath the apparent philosophical radicalism of Agamben hides a passivity that risks obscuring any meaningful emancipatory action. After all, the continuous discussion of potential and act that Agamben refers to in various works clearly gives prominence to potentiality. Humans are, for him, beings of ‘pure potentiality’, radically devoid of any determined function or identity and should essentially stay so.

It is against this charge of passivity that the literature emphasizing the more transformative side of Agamben’s alternative politics can be seen. It has been pointed out that despite the apparent valorization of ‘weak’ figures, potentiality, and suspension, Agamben has nevertheless consistently put forward his idea of use of and play with apparatuses of power. This may be seen, for example, in the way Agamben’s liberatory ideas have been applied and developed in specific fields. Studies in the field of education, for example, have shown how Agamben’s ideas of play, profanation, and pure mediality can be used to envision new educational strategies (Lewis, 2013). In the field of aesthetics, in turn, Agamben’s vision of using potentiality to act otherwise in interpreting an artistic work has been an important point of discussion (Marijsse, 2019; Salvo, 2018).

Recently, some commentators have highlighted some of the problematic characteristics of Agamben’s affirmative politics. I wish to mention two interpretations that touch upon themes that are relevant for the present purposes, namely gestures and performatives. In a very critical key, Prozorov (2022) treats Agamben’s politics of gesture as a parody of Arendt’s concept of praxis. According to this reading, Agamben fails to see the similarities between his own model of gesture and Arendt’s action, but even more detrimentally, ends up affirming a ‘strangely impoverished version’ of Arendt’s public speech and action by elevating the empty gestures of mime and dance to a privileged position in politics. With a focus on Agamben’s reading of the oath, in turn, Doja (2023) denounces Agamben’s own philosophical discourse as empty ‘intellectual self-gratification’ that has no other aim than affirming itself. This paper underlines points of critique that remain partly uncovered in these texts. First, Prozorov’s critique does not explore the specific problem with Agamben’s discursive gesture and performance. Second, while Doja explicitly conducts his critique in the context of reading Agamben’s understanding of linguistic performatives, he does not interrogate in more detail what import this has for understanding politics in general and for the Italian thinker’s own liberatory thought in particular.

In summary, one can see roughly the following trajectory in the reception of Agamben’s affirmative approach: first, a denouncement of his ‘passive’ politics; second, a literature applying his more transformative ideas; and third, a critical re-evaluation of his ‘alternative’ politics. It is in the last current that this text unfolds, casting a light on Agamben’s affirmative politics as implicated in his theory of language. Following this line of critique, I argue that is not so much that Agamben favors passivity – an accusation that has already been levelled on multiple occasions – but that his preferred activity has questionable import for understanding politics and contradicts his own logic of freeing human activities from apparatuses of power.

Gestures and Performatives

Agamben’s philosophy of language has spurred vivid discussion in the preceding decades. Before concentrating on Agamben’s affirmative political activity as a specific type of linguistic performance, I will attempt a very short summary of the main argument he presents in the early works on language (Agamben, 1991, 1995, 2007a). Although developed with reference to an astounding number of sources, the central argument concerning language that Agamben develops in these works can be stated as follows: language takes place. Before and beyond referring to this or that content, humans are the creatures that can experience the fact of having language, the potential for signification. This is what Agamben also terms the experimentum linguae (Agamben, 2007a). In metaphysical terms, the general problem he identifies in the occidental tradition is the inability to say this ‘sayability’, to understand the ‘thing’ and ‘matter’ of language, even as this is the very experience that gives rise to the philosophical inquiry of being. As Agamben notes about shifters, such as ‘I’ or ‘here’: ‘Only because language permits a reference to its own instance through shifters, something like being and the world are open to speculation’ (Agamben, 1991: 25–6, emphasis in original).

Apart from the ontological question of language and its ‘matter’, Agamben has also approached language as a specific kind of discursive activity and performance. In the political essays from the early 1990s, when he started engaging with the concept of gesture as a liberatory type of political action, he defined gesture as an act that exposes the pure communicability of language (Agamben, 2000: 59). This was one of the first explicit thoughts that Agamben formulated concerning ‘proper’ politics: it is an activity that exposes the sheer taking place of language and thus grants us access to a different experience of communicability. We find this idea of politics as a gesture that exposes language reiterated whenever Agamben takes up his affirmative vision of politics. In Profanations, politics is about ‘speaking in gestures alone’ (Agamben, 2007b: 22), and in Karman, which otherwise does not focus on language, gesture marks ‘the speech in speech’ (Agamben, 2018a: 84). It is in the latter work that Agamben has most recently discussed his politics of gesture, positing it as neither action (praxis) nor production (poiesis) but something different from both. In gesture, something is supported and endured, allowing the agent to be attentive to various possibilities of action. In other words, gesture is Agamben’s preferred model of action that escapes the negating powers of Western apparatuses. This preference of mediality over instrumentality is also captured by the notion of ‘pure means’, which he uses interchangeably with ‘gesturality’.

Despite the clear linguistic implications of Agamben’s gesture, a substantial part of the scholarship on it unfolds in the context of theater, cinema, or other artistic practices (see, e.g., Cermatori, 2020; Harbord, 2019; Väliaho, 2015). However, even though Agamben writes about actual corporeal gestures (of dancers, actors, and so on), there is a specifically linguistic-discursive dimension in the operation he views as properly political. This is most clearly addressed in The Time that Remains (Agamben, 2005a) and The Sacrament of Language (Agamben, 2011), which I discuss below. What Agamben envisions in these works is an activity performed through language, one that exposes language as such and allows humans to ‘live in the truth of language’. Gesture designates this discursive performance; as Catherine Mills also puts it, gesture ‘is a name for the sheer communicability of language’ (Mills, 2008: 48).

Before exploring Agamben’s performative in more detail, it may be added that a characteristic trait of his thought is that even when working with concepts derived from different fields, such as law, religion, or aesthetics, they are always put forward to articulate the same type of operation. To render something inoperative is to expose a state of pure means, just as speaking in gestures reveals the mediality of language. Thus, while this article focuses on language, this does not imply that his preferred type of politics could not be studied from alternative perspectives.

Let us start our exploration of Agamben’s gestural language by discussing his understanding of performative utterances. I will first contrast it to J.L. Austin, the iconic philosopher associated with what we commonly call performatives, and then briefly juxtapose it to the citational approaches of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler. The purpose of this engagement is twofold. On the one hand, zooming into Agamben’s understanding of performatives permits us to view his idea of political liberation as a specific kind of discursive action. On the other hand, juxtaposing this understanding with Austin, Derrida, and Butler, who have also addressed performativity, serves the purpose of marking its difference to approaches that are influential in the contemporary scene of political thought. After this we will be able to interrogate two important questions: to what extent is Agamben’s performative an alternative and, if so, how does this alternative live up to its promise of enabling a politically meaningful ‘different use’ of language?

When taking up Austin in The Time that Remains and The Sacrament of Language, Agamben suggests, first of all, that the performative should be understood as an operation that deactivates and suspends the constative dictum (Agamben, 2005a: 132–3; Agamben, 2011: 55). For example, the dictum ‘I will do my homework today’ ceases to function as a constatation when it is coupled with a performative verb, such as ‘I swear’ or ‘I promise’. And conversely, the performative element has no force unless it acts upon another dictum: ‘I swear does not have any force if it is not followed – or preceded – by a dictum that fills it in’ (Agamben, 2011: 55). In this sense, Agamben first draws attention away from the more general senses of the performative that Austin discussed by extending his more institutional focus to various kinds of implicit performatives (exclamations, traffic signs, and ultimately even the constative) and, instead, takes the explicit performative as a starting point for his discussion. However, it quickly becomes clear that what Agamben has in mind is not the performative in the modern juridical sense. Instead, he wishes to detach the performative from any such rigorous conditions of felicity or conventional procedures that are usually attributed to Austin.

As I delineate below, Agamben sees performative speech acts as relics of a stage in which humans came to experience the fact and pure force of language. He traces this experience to a pre-modern setting in which law, religion, and politics are not yet separated into their own branches; the paradigm of the oath is in this regard central to his exploration. In The Time that Remains, Agamben focuses on Paul’s understanding of a messianic community to highlight this very same experience. As in the case of the oath, what is important for him in the messianic experience is a certain serious commitment to the word. He writes of a performative connected to faith (performativum fidei) and ‘speaking from the heart’. Contrasting this to the performativum sacramenti, which designates a sphere of formal procedures and rituals, he is clearly distancing himself from the Austinian framework. He also carefully detaches the performativum fidei from a ‘vain use’ of words and laments the contemporary condition of words having lost their efficacy.

Let us first focus on the oath. As Agamben shows by analyzing both the Greek and Roman experiences of the oath in The Sacrament of Language, an important aspect of the oath is that it entails an experience of faith in the word (fides, Latin; pistis, Greek). What is at stake in the oath is the mode in which humans tie their words to their actions; in the oath, reality and words correspond to each other. It is in this serious tone that Agamben also discusses the function of the curse that usually accompanied the oath: ‘What the curse sanctions is the loosening of the correspondence between words and things that is in question in the oath’ (Agamben, 2011: 42).

Even though Agamben at times speaks of the oath as belonging to a ‘pre-juridical’ sphere, this notion of ‘prelaw’ should be understood as a type of conduct that knows no strict boundaries between law and religion. It is in this sense that he contests the view that the oath belongs to a pre-juridical sphere of ‘religious’ practice in ancient societies. Instead, he argues that the divinity called upon in the oath points to the event of naming itself beyond any strictly religious function in the modern sense. As he exemplifies by alluding to the work of the philologist Herman Usener, the names of gods in agricultural societies usually named seasonal activities themselves, such as plowing, harvesting, or harrowing, instead of representing them. What is evident for Agamben is that this type of divinity does not witness a particular event but ‘is the very event of language in which words and things are indissolubly linked’ (Agamben, 2011: 46).

It is in the above sense that Agamben also speaks of a ‘reciprocal implication between God and the oath’ (Agamben, 2011: 21), between the divine and language: whether the context of discussion is pantheistic or monotheistic religions, the faith in the word and the word-deed correspondence is absolutely central. Approaching this through Paul’s understanding of faith in The Time that Remains, Agamben argues that faith is in the Pauline sense first and foremost faith in the word, that is, faith in language itself. To live in the Messiah is to live ‘in the nearness of the word’. When Paul continuously refers to ‘Jesus Messiah’, he does not constate that ‘Jesus is Messiah’ but expresses the very experience of living in or within the messianic (Agamben, 2005a: 127–31). From the perspective of language, this experience does not concern the relation between words and things but is above all an experience of language itself; having one’s mouth in the nearness of the heart is the event of constituting a presence in language as such: ‘in Paul, the correspondence is not between different words, or between words and deeds; rather this correspondence is internal to the word itself, between mouth and heart’ (Agamben, 2005a: 130).

At the end of this same chapter, he also refers to Paul’s conception of the law (nomos) and faith (pistis) as two closely intertwined elements in an experience where law and religion are not yet separated into their own institutions. In language, nomos shows itself as an attempt to codify language in terms of fixed semantic contents, and the element of pistis, in turn, points to an experience that stays open and resists determinate significations (Agamben, 2005a: 134–5). According to Agamben, the centerpiece of Paul’s understanding of the faith in the word is that nomos and pistis are put in tension with each other in the messianic experience. The messianic is the experience of the word itself that establishes itself between the two tensions in language. And this is ultimately not confined to an obscure sphere of prelaw but remains something constantly available for the speaking being:

[The messianic] points, beyond prelaw, toward an experience of the word, which – without tying itself denotatively to things, or taking itself as a thing, without being infinitely suspended in its openness or fastening itself up in dogma – manifests itself as a pure and common potentiality of saying, open to a free and gratuitous use of time and the world. (Agamben, 2005a: 135–6)

It is the central experience implied in the oath and the messianic word – committing oneself to the ‘truth’ of language itself – that Agamben claims has been lost or is in decline during the course of time. The loss of this experience has rather sinister implications in Agamben’s diagnosis. Staying true to one’s words gradually became a juridical and religious concern in a technical sense, ‘an obsessive and scrupulous concern with appropriate formulas and ceremonies, that is, religio and ius’ (Agamben, 2011: 70). As the human responsibility and fidelity to the word was thus delegated to formal institutions, we now find ourselves in a condition where words can only be uttered in vain and have lost all their efficacy. This happens precisely if the oath becomes only a technical concern with ‘right use’ of language, monitored by religious or juridical institutions. As Agamben writes in The Time that Remains, this points to a condition where the oath itself degenerates into a ritualized procedure, a performativum sacramenti that takes over the performativum fidei. If the experience at stake in the oath becomes sacralized, that is, confined to a separate sphere, human life endures a serious loss – one that is so serious that it amounts to nothing less than the loss of ‘all grace and vitality’ (Agamben, 2005a: 135).

The above discussion on the performativum fidei, which finds its paradigms both in the oath and the messianic experience, shows that the performative dimension of language is the very place and basis for his articulation of a ‘proper’ political experience. What is performed here is a suspension of the ‘law’ of sense and reference that gives rise to another experience of language, precisely as suggested in the essays of the 1990s. Austin’s theory is ultimately not of central importance to this argument; Agamben merely uses his notion of the performative as an occasion to speak of the self-referentiality of language, the experimentum linguae that he already put forward in his earlier works. What is central in the oath and the messianic experience of the word is the experience of the word itself, and it is in this sense that Agamben’s performative can be characterized as pure – it has no other content than the word as such. Hence also the allusions to a certain ‘emptiness’ that Agamben evoked in earlier texts. When entering language and staying true to one’s words, one enters ‘a perfectly empty dimension’ (Agamben, 2007a: 6).

Let us now juxtapose this understanding of the performative to that of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler. The purpose of this brief comparison is not to delineate the thought of these thinkers in detail but to show that Agamben is clearly attempting to take a route that differs from Derrida’s citational approach, which Butler also follows. It is the purchase of this alternative to our understanding of the political force of utterances that we are interested in.

Like Agamben, Derrida took a clear distance to Austin’s rigorous conditions of felicity in his 1972 essay ‘Signature Event Context’, originally given as a lecture and later included in Margins of Philosophy (Derrida, 1982). In the first part of the essay Derrida first introduces his understanding of all signs – written, spoken, or otherwise propagated – as conditioned by the possibility of breaking from their original context. That is, not only the written sign, but all human communication has the capacity to function in the absence of a particular addressee, which grants all signs the force to break with their context (Derrida, 1982: 320). He conceptualizes this as citationality or iterability (iter as derived from itara, Sanskrit for other). As the etymology of Derrida’s concept of iterability points to, all speech (as subsumed under the graphematic in general) must be repeatable, and this repetition is bound to introduce an alterity that makes it impossible to trace an ‘original’ or ‘proper’ context.

Thus, what Austin called ills or infelicities that may affect the performative are not, in Derrida’s understanding, unfortunate anomalies in human communication. Instead, these negativities are part of the very structure of every mark: there is always the possibility of ‘failure’ in the case of the performative, as with any other utterance. That Austin tends to delegate these to the sphere of abuses and the abnormal is one of Derrida’s main points of critique in the essay in question. As Derrida argues, these are ultimately what grant the possibility of a successful performative: only in relation to a ‘non-serious’ use of an utterance, such as by an actor on a stage, can we establish something like a real efficacy and ‘serious use’ of the performative in particular contexts. There is always, in Derrida’s well-known approach, a ‘structural parasitism’ in language that does not point to a failure or malfunctioning in any negative sense but to a ‘positive condition of possibility’ (Derrida, 1982: 325). Some utterances may have more of an illocutionary force than others; there is a ‘relative purity’ of what Austin named the performative, as Derrida contends. But ‘these effects do not exclude what is generally opposed to them term by term, but on the contrary presuppose it in dissymmetrical fashion, as the general space of their possibility’ (Derrida, 1982: 327). The possibility of a non-serious or improper performative is what opens the space of different possibilities, including that of the relatively serious one. In this sense, Austin’s successful performative would be ‘[a] determined modification of a general citationality’ for Derrida (Derrida, 1982: 325).

Since any ‘serious’ communication is thus ultimately dependent upon a ‘non-serious’ use of language, Derrida’s model of iterability is evidently different from Agamben’s. As we saw above, Agamben is concerned with the phenomenon of ‘vain speech’, particularly in The Sacrament of Language: the careless and void uttering of words that (no longer) ties humans to the truth of language. In this sense, even though both authors use Austin’s performative as an occasion to advance a more general approach to language and communication, these encounters with Austin yield fundamentally different conceptions of what the performative efficacy of language amounts to. Whatever force language can assume, in Derrida’s view, will depend on its capacity to break from any prior context, and from this perspective Agamben’s radically pure performative would be an impossibility. For Agamben, in turn, the non-serious citation would designate a problematic form of vain speech and a loss of the originary human experience of the force of language.

The distance between Agamben’s faithful performative and iterability is perhaps even clearer if we consider Judith Butler’s emphasis on iterability as parody. Following Derrida, Butler understands language to be citational, and what is important for her is that this points to the possibility of subverting and contesting originally injurious language (Butler, 1997). Because language has the capacity to break from its original context, it remains open to future resignifications and alternative uses that the ‘original’ utterer can never control. Racist or homophobic slurs can be parodied in a manner that neutralizes the originally negative connotation, such as has happened with the term ‘queer’, to use one of Butler’s examples.

The non-serious use of the word that Agamben laments is thus placed at the very center of her approach as the positive condition of politics: non-serious uses can turn even hateful speech into a joke that emancipates the addressee. Conversely, the direct correspondence of word and deed is problematic for her. What she criticizes in Excitable Speech are precisely portrayals that assume language to exert direct force, such as Mari Matsuda’s argument that hate speech does not merely reflect social domination of one group over another but enacts it. From the perspective of Butler’s account, Agamben’s lamentation over the loss of an experience of the power to tie discourse to action would fall under what she calls a ‘nostalgia’ for sovereign power. She notes that in the absence of clear power structures, we look at times of sovereignty with a nostalgic hope of their return (Butler, 1997: 78).

Based on what we have outlined so far, we have two very different understandings of what grants the force of an utterance. For Agamben, the power of language lies in the possibility of binding oneself to one’s words, in ‘entering language’ and constituting a subject responsible for its words. For Derrida and Butler, the force of an utterance is always dependent on the break with any prior context, the loosening of the word from the deed. But what does it ultimately mean to dwell in language, to speak in gestures that expose it?

The Shadow of Derrida and the Unfortunate Sliding into a Separate ‘Sphere’

To pinpoint the problems with Agamben’s approach to language and the politics implied in it, it is useful to briefly revisit his critique of Derrida. This will allow us to interrogate whether Agamben’s understanding of discursive performativity is, on a closer look, radically different from the citational approach. As is well known, Derrida’s deconstructive approach is one of the major philosophical positions that Agamben has, since the earliest stages of his philosophical career, criticized and used as a contrast for his own affirmative theses (Attell, 2014; Thurschwell, 2005).

To put Agamben’s critique very briefly at first: deconstruction identifies a problem but does not solve it or go beyond it. What is this problem? As briefly mentioned above, Agamben has since the beginning of his work argued for an understanding of language that succeeds in grasping the existence of language as such without any recourse to negativity and presupposition. This is what he sees as a problematic legacy of the occidental tradition: for meaning to be produced, the pure potentiality for signification must be negated; in the passage from sign to signified, the movement between them has always already sunken into a having-been. The problem with deconstruction, according to Agamben, is that while it succeeds in accounting for this presuppositional structure that guides Western reflection, it does not ‘solve’ it or ‘surpass’ it. As Attell (2014) also shows in his detailed mapping of the explicit and implicit critiques against Derrida and deconstruction in Agamben’s work, this polemic against Derrida’s understanding of language starts to unfold already in Stanzas, published originally in 1977. In this book Agamben characterizes deconstruction and grammatology as a ‘salutary critique’ of the Western metaphysical inheritance, which nevertheless does not ‘transcend’ it (Agamben, 1993a: 156).

In a later essay on language, ‘The Thing Itself’ from 1984 (Agamben, 1999: 27–61), he in turn discusses Plato’s late dialogues and the notion of ‘the thing itself’ to, once again, criticize the presuppositional structure of our conception of language and the limitations of deconstruction to find a ‘solution’ to it. In an obviously provocative gesture, the essay in question is dedicated to Derrida without him being mentioned a single time in the text. In short, ‘the thing itself’ points to this very sayability, the fact that language and deconstruction fails, in Agamben’s verdict, to offer us a full understanding of it. As he will imply later in a similar manner, albeit under the thematic of law and sovereignty, Derrida’s approach assigns us to an ‘infinite deconstruction’ of the law from which we cannot escape (Agamben, 2005b: 64). Thus, for Agamben, Derrida’s ‘play of differences’, and the endless chains of signifiers that cannot bring the signified into full presence, is insufficient insofar as it brings to light the negativity that is at work in our production of meaning but does not free us from its anchors.

These critiques are largely in line with the difference between Derrida’s and Agamben’s approaches to language that we noted above when discussing their understanding of performatives. In contrast to deconstruction, which captures the movements between sign and signified, Agamben calls for an exposure of the taking place of language as such. We might thus conclude that the suspension of referential language that Agamben practices with his concept of gesture simply leads to a thoroughly different experience and understanding of language than Derrida’s deconstructive method.

However, Agamben’s favored activity of exposing communicability bears a strange resemblance to what he has criticized Derrida for. In Agamben’s texts on messianism, including The Time that Remains and the essay ‘The Messiah and the Sovereign’, Derrida also appears as a key interlocutor. For Agamben, the messianic is not the arrival at the end of chronological time but a break within khronos in which we both experience a now-time and receive our representation of time. In both above-mentioned texts, Agamben suggests that Derrida’s model of ‘infinite deferral’ of signification is likewise a misunderstanding or at least a problematic conception of the messianic. He accuses deconstruction of being a ‘thwarted messianism’ (Agamben, 2005a: 103), a ‘petrified’ or ‘paralyzed’ messianism (Agamben, 1999: 171). This is the very same point he brings up in a passage we cited above, where he places the Pauline experience of the word between a ‘fastening up in dogma’ and ‘infinite openness’, although in this chapter of the book he makes no explicit reference to Derrida. It is precisely this ‘infinite openness’ that Agamben sees as ‘thwarted’ or ‘paralyzed’ messianism. Wandering in an endless web of differences and polarities, deconstruction remains incapable of grasping the messianic ‘now’.

Yet, one cannot avoid detecting a resemblance in Agamben’s own attempt to ‘solve’ this problem of ‘paralysis’. As delineated above when discussing Agamben’s understanding of the performative, he has in mind an operation that suspends denotation – it is this operation that establishes another experience of language. This, as we mentioned above, is also what Agamben suggests could be the sole task of a properly political action: politics is an activity that performs an exposition of language as such. In a certain sense, then, the messianic suspension of denotation, the moment of standstill and absolute indistinction between sign and signified, is precisely a certain moment of paralysis: language as gesture consists in momentarily ‘thwarting’ referential discourse and exposing language as such. For a speaker to deactivate constative dictums, he or she must, in a certain sense, ‘cite’ a dictum outside its ‘normal’ denotational context, such that it can be exposed, marveled at and ‘sounded out’ as such, to use one of Agamben’s phrasings when writing about gestures (see Agamben, 2018a: 82). If this is the case, then Agamben’s gesture would be subsumed under Derrida’s citationality. It would be a ‘determined modification of citationality’ in Derrida’s words, perhaps relatively pure but nevertheless dependent on and practiced on its other.

Let us, however, still hold on to a perspective from which Agamben’s pure performative is different from a citational approach, as there is indeed a peculiar way in which Agamben does take a very different route than Derrida. Unlike Derrida, whose deconstructive approach allows the possibility of different kinds of citations (serious, non-serious, successful, unsuccessful, etc.), Agamben’s ‘different experience of language’ always appears to take us to the same address: the word as such. That is, even though discussed with a different focus in various works, from the ‘marvel’ of language (Agamben, 1991: 25) through experiencing ‘emptiness’ (Agamben, 2007a: 6) to ‘speaking from the heart’ (Agamben, 2005a: 129–31), the core argument remains the same: when speaking in gestures, one affirms nothing but language as such. Granted, this is different from the ‘normal’ economy of signification, but since it is the only different use that Agamben invites us to aim at when acting politically, suspicions should arise as concerns its transformative or liberatory potential.

As has been recently pointed out (Prozorov, 2024), the same strategy is at work in Agamben’s attempt to articulate an authentic human nature that has been occluded by the Christian doctrine of original sin (Agamben, 2020). As Prozorov suggests, the only liberatory act that remains in sight for Agamben is to suspend the religious apparatuses that hamper the grasping of our human nature as such, but this ‘as such’ cannot itself be altered or experimented with. It is what we have always already been, the untouched condition that all the evil apparatuses have corrupted with tales of original sin, and to emancipate is always and only to appropriate this originary nature. The same can be said in the context of language. The experience of language is already there, it is ‘the unpresupposable non-latency in which men have always dwelt, and in which, speaking, they move and breathe’ (Agamben, 2007a: 10). That is, to suspend sense and reference is not to return to an earlier developmental state nor to produce a new experience of language; it is rather to expose this experience that we already have but have so much trouble with getting connected to. But we cannot invent any new uses of this experience itself but must instead be content with exposing it in a continuous fashion, lest it become degraded again.

There is another related and equally problematic aspect of this ‘one option only’ approach. In fact, Agamben seems to take his gestural approach to such a rigorous degree of autonomy that it risks becoming its own ‘sphere’. As briefly mentioned earlier, one of the major problems that Agamben has identified in Western apparatuses of power is that they lock human activities into separate spheres. As we saw above when discussing the oath, one of his main points of critique is that the activity implied in the oath gradually becomes separated into the juridical and religious spheres instead of being openly available to all. Conducting this same critique in Opus Dei (Agamben, 2013), Agamben shows how this experience is confined in the sphere of liturgical and ritualized activity – it is ‘confiscated’ by the church, as it were. Thus, for Agamben’s gesture to fulfill its liberatory promise, it should at all costs avoid becoming another sphere of its own.

Yet, trails of a separate field can be found in Agamben’s own approach. Readers of the Italian philosopher will be familiar with his celebration of limit figures. Between voice and logos, or between potentiality and actuality, there is a middle zone that he wishes to ‘expose’; hence the often-evoked notions of ‘stopping language in its tracks’ and finding a ‘standstill’. At first glance, it is rather clear that by zooming into this mediality Agamben does not wish to form another positivity, an apparatus or sphere of its own. And yet, he refers to a ‘sphere of gesturality’, not sporadically but continuously (Agamben, 1999: 85; Agamben, 2000: 117, Agamben, 2018a: 82). He also characterizes the linguistic experience he has in mind as an empty ‘dimension’ (Agamben, 2007a: 6) and a ‘space’ between voice and logos (Agamben, 2007a: 10). More sympathetic readers may argue that despite these spatial references, this experience can be activated in all areas of life. However, it should be kept in mind that Agamben has insisted that his liberatory activity is, in fact, not in the here and now but remains to be invented – it is a politics that remains ‘to come’ (see Agamben, 1993b; Agamben 2018b). Thus, it should at least be acknowledged that by continuously referring to a ‘sphere’ and by postponing this experience to the future, Agamben evades the difficult question of whether one can guarantee that this does not end up forming another sphere.

In the commentary on Agamben’s vision of language and the political performance connected to it, there is sometimes a tendency to simply reiterate his poetic phrasings and take for granted their liberatory import. To cite a recent discussion of the oath, Özden (2022) argues that Agamben’s approach avoids the proliferation of new apparatuses since it has rendered the modern apparatus of the oath in a destitute mode. Yet, the author finishes the text by alluding to one of the most obscure (even if very beautiful) passages in Profanations: ‘Happy, and without a name, the creature knocks at the gate of the land of the magi, who speak in gestures alone’ (Agamben, 2007b: 22). More generally, the relation of Agamben’s approach to Derridean citationality has been partly uninterrogated as concerns its political plausibility. In the perhaps most thorough book carefully delineating the ‘debate’ between Agamben and Derrida, Attell (2014) firmly holds that Agamben’s approach to language is ‘fundamentally different’ but does not seriously question whether this alternative is meaningful in political terms. The citational model may not be the most revolutionary one – derailing slurs and giving them new connotations, for example, may have its limits. But at least this implies a different use of something, that one can act on language. In contrast, Agamben’s exposition of language as such makes it at least difficult, if not impossible, to grasp how this might destabilize existing modes of power.

Conclusions

The purpose of this article has been to show that Agamben’s view of a properly political linguistic performance reveals a problematic model for political liberation. While the scope of this article does not permit us to make far-reaching conclusions about how this ‘empty’ linguistic gesturality relates to current societal tendencies, there is one evident and crucial point where the critique offered here connects to the present scenery of politics. As noted in the introduction, our current societies are increasingly marked by a certain negligence toward truthful speech, a tendency that has deteriorated important democratic procedures in Europe and elsewhere. While Agamben evidently scorns this condition in his lamentation over the loss of the efficacy of the word, it is not at all clear that his celebration of an empty experience of discursive gestures points to a credible contestation of this condition. At worst, his vision of a sphere where humans immerse themselves in empty utterances risks enforcing or at least coming dangerously close to precisely the type of pointless and careless speech that plagues our democracies today.