Abstract
A parody of action: Politics and pantomime in Agamben's critique of Arendt
Highlights
Hannah Arendt’s thought has been a major influence on Giorgio Agamben’s political theory
Agamben’s appreciation of Arendt dates back at least to 1970 when he sent her a note expressing his admiration and gratitude (De la Durantaye, 2009, p. 41). It clearly persists in the first volume of Homo Sacer, where Arendt is presented as the first author to address the entry of biological life to the forefront of Western politics
This appreciation has been accompanied by a certain distancing, since Arendt’s line of reasoning in The Human Condition and other works appears not merely incomplete from Agamben’s perspective, for example, in the lack of biopolitical perspective to her study of totalitarianism (Arendt, 1968; see Agamben, 1998, p. 4), and complicit in the very process of the inclusive exclusion of bare life into the political domain
Summary
Hannah Arendt’s thought has been a major influence on Giorgio Agamben’s political theory. Whereas in Arendt’s account potentiality and actuality coincide entirely in action, Agamben’s affirmation of potentiality seeks to separate it from actualization and expose it as such in an “inoperative” state This leads us to a concluding argument that interprets Agamben’s “third paradigm” as less an alternative to than a parody of Arendt’s notion of action that seeks to profane it and deactivate its every relation to an end and to a subject. The price of this deactivation, is a strangely impoverished activity of pantomime, whose “new possible use” is difficult to ascertain. Agamben’s critique of Arendt illuminates the limits of his political theory, which cannot advance beyond what it criticizes but is resigned to producing parodies of it
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