Reditus into Self-Inflicted Immaturity: Agamben’s Regressions

Abstract

The article proposes an analysis of Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy in the context of the idea of self-inflicted immaturity. If Kant’s definition of Enlightenment as an exit out of the condition of immaturity marks the pinnacle of the human effort of maturation, Agamben’s philosophy locates itself on the opposite pole. This opposition is justified by the fact that the main task of the Italian philosopher is to develop the concept of a “simply human life”: undivided and unproblematic. In Agamben’s books the simply human life emerges in the realm beyond “the world of guilt and justice” as well as beyond God, spirit, and history, that is, beyond any overarching transcendental structure which the human subject used to assume in order to give its life a form and charge it with a task of bringing this form to perfection. It has neither form nor task, nor vocation, nor mission. It just is what it is, like an infant left to itself from the moment of its inception, counting for nothing in great eschatological schemes, and precisely because of that “naturally joyful.” In order to demonstrate the problematic nature of this approach to defining human life, the article offers an analysis of the basic concepts of Agamben’s philosophy in relation to the works of Johann Gottfried Herder, Otto Rank, Jean Laplanche and others. A reading of Agamben’s writings in the context of the psychoanalytic tradition of thought allows us to question the foundations of ethics and the politics of form-of-life, which the last volumes of the Homo Sacer series aim to clarify. As a result, it is possible to show that the underlying motif in Agamben’s work — the reversion of the trauma of birth, now taking the form of living as if this wish could indeed be realized, by putting into operation a “destituent potential,” virtually regressing the psyche to the prenatal bliss — despite its appeal is seen as problematic. Agamben’s philosophy paints an image of life that no livable or attributable life can sustain, yet he tempts us, by putting forward a seemingly possible messianic agent: a perverse de-natus, either un-born (most preferably) or already-dead/dying (as a second option).