Agamben's limbos: Robert Walser and the refugee

Abstract

Giorgio Agamben's reading of the Swiss German writer Robert Walser constitutes an underappreciated corrective to his bleak assessment of the biopolitical catastrophe to which he believes modern sovereignty is headed. Walser, whose characters Agamben himself compares to cartoons for their thoughtlessness and impassibility, provides Agamben with the image of utopia that informs his critique of existing conditions and saves him from both resignation and reformism. Agamben calls this utopia, however, limbo. This limbo has necessarily to be distinguished from the limbo of internment camps in which Agamben sees anticipated the fate of modern politics. The stakes of Agamben's reading of Walser, its role in his political philosophy in general, its heavy-handedness in relation to Walser, and its debts to the earlier interpretations of Benjamin and Kafka are issues addressed in the following paper.