The Inappropriable: The Landscape

Abstract

This article aims to further develop Giorgio Agamben’s argument that the landcape, along with the body and language, is a phenomenon of the “inappropriable”. According to Agamben, the landscape inherently resists being captured as property and can only be revealed through the experience of simple use. Agamben presents this claim in his works The Use of Bodies (L’Uso dei corpi), the final volume of the Homo sacer project, and Creation and Anarchy: The Work of Art and he Religion of Capitalism. The article asserts that the landscape is not merely another example of the inappropriable, but rather its most complex manifestation, encompassing relationships with both language and embodiment. A significant aspect of this discussion is Agamben’s dispute with Husserl, who diminishes psychologism and physicalism in his phenomenological project but upholds juridiism as a foundational attitude of consciousness that shapes the constitution of its objects. Consequently, the recognition of the “inappropriable” as an original realm of human experience can be achieved through the deconstruction of the “I” that falsely assumes possession of something unique. Ultimately, the landscape unveils itself when we no longer exist as subjects of rights, but rather as “persons” in the legal sense. To illustrate the precise emergence of such an experience with the inappropriable, the article analyzes artistic works, specifically a story by Alexander Grin and two paintings by Edvard Munch.