Nonparticipation, The Power Of Life

By the time Agamben was a teenager, the scorching traces o f the Second
World War, during which he was only an infant, were virtually imperceptible
in the unabashed bustle of Rome. His formative years coincide with the short­
lived cultural and economic renaissance that the city experienced between the collapse of the Fascist regime in the mid-i940S and the spread of its corrupt
politics in the mid-1970s. Because his father operated a movie theater, Agam­
ben saw many films as a child, sometimes even two in a single day. But there
were also many books in the Agambens’ household, some of them works of philosophy, and they constituted the first items in what would become the
mammoth reading list that shaped his mature thought. Sitting in his small
apartment in Venice, which can be reached after climbing a rather steep set
of stairs, he said that before his mother passed away, she gave him a piece of
paper that she had saved since the time he was seven years old. “It was all
there!” he said with astonishment. On this page, Agamben claimed, was a
condensed version of his entire mature philosophy. As for its content, he re­
mained mute.
After familiarizing himself with the required classical languages and lit­
erature taught at school, he managed to complete a first degree with a concen­
tration in law before losing faith in formal education, which he still deems,
at least in his case, worthless. It was instead the intelligentsia’s demimonde
outside the dogmatic bounds of academia that formed his subsequent career.
Living in Rome, Paris, and London, he moved in various circles, befriending
writers such as Elsa Morante and Italo Calvino, poets such as Ingeborg Bach-
mann and Jose Bergamin, philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc
Nancy, and radical intellectuals-turned-filmmakers such as Pier Paolo Paso­
lini and Guy Debord. But more important, it was his immersion in the writ­
ings of a swelling number of (mostly dead) authors, together with his ability
to spin them within his own studies into an intricate web of references, that
gave his work its distinct charm. It is quite surprising to realize that the eerie
breadth of his erudition comes from the mind of an almost complete auto-
didact. This fact became clearer during a midday walk through the streets of
Venice. “Look at these buildings,” he said while stopping in a typical piazza;
“none of them were built by professional architects.” One of the easier argu­
ments to make is that modern structures, those Corbusian “machines for liv­
ing” produced by university-trained architects, are palpable eyesores when
placed next to the (essentially objective) beauty of Venice. But isn’t it also possible, in light of Agamben’s work, to make a similar argument concerning
many of the texts produced by “professional” philosophers these days?
When Agamben came upon Arendt’s writings in the late 1960s, he was
so thrilled to discover their sense of promise and urgency that he sent her
a personal note expressing his gratitude. But as the events of the 1960s sub­
sided, as Arendt’s work was somewhat forgotten and generally dismissed
by the professional naysayers, the air of possibility was replaced by that of
a missed opportunity. The fact that some years after her death she was ad­
mitted into the philosophical pantheon through an endless parade of con­
ferences and monographs does not change much, as the opportunity to act
upon the thought was missed for the sake of opportunism. In other words,
something that could have happened did not take place.w At the turn of the
new millennium, it was suddenly Agamben’s name that was whispered in
knowing circles around the globe with a sense of exigency. But the lessons of
the past make it clear that the potency of this new way of thinking will have
to face enormous, perhaps insurmountable, obstacles (starting with those
mounted by a new generation of professional naysayers) before it can some­
how imprint itself on our way of living. In this spirit, Agamben laments in an
essay from the mid-1970s that our age “is not the epoch of faith and not even
the epoch of incredulity,” but rather “it is more than anything else the epoch
of bad faith” in which “the first duty of each intellectual must consist in the
nonparticipation in this lie.”11
It is easy to assume and pretentious to assert that, unlike any other human
activity, philosophy exists in some sort of eternal vacuum. Ignoring the aca­
demic context in which theoretical work is done today is like disregarding
unsustainable practices that upset our faltering ecological system. The notion
that the campus is a hotbed for revolt is a common myth that does not take
into account the usual passivity and dispassion that prevails in classrooms
and during faculty office hours around the world. Remember that even in the
1960s, when student unrest shook the foundations of entire cities and states,
one of the protestors’ main targets was the academic apparatus itself. The rea­
son is that the college was never meant to perpetuate the revolutionary desires of the young generation but rather to block them, or to channel those desires
into so-called productive (read “futile”) avenues. Even if deviation is allowed,
it is circumscribed to specific times and places, or exceptions, that never in­
terfere with the overall rule of the status quo. The teaching and writing of the
professor are not really meant to agitate anyone, as radical creativity is trans­
formed into timid and monotonous production. To some extent, the cherished
academic freedom, much like the coveted tenure position, is nothing but the
sleeping pill of comfortable living. Today, it becomes increasingly obvious
that forms of resistance rarely converge with forms of academic discourse,
which is not infrequently fueled by bad faith. When one realizes that the main
agenda behind the demonstrations of the current student body is to protect
its own privileges and those of its professors, one knows that something has
gone terribly amiss. But even though it is not easy to see how the hegemony
of the university-factory could be effectively contested, Agamben’s lifework
still offers a viable model for a kind of nonparticipatory participation in the
operation of this sprawling, monopolistic institution.