Agamben Memorial

8/2/2019 Agamben Memorial

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Agamben at Ground ZeroA Memorial without Content

Joel McKim

Abstract

Construction has recently begun on Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s

‘Reflecting Absence’ 9/11 memorial in New York. The design, with its

emphasis on traumatic absences and silent contemplation, has moved from

selection to construction with relatively little public debate, an indication of

a problematic creative and critical consensus forming around contemporary

memorial aesthetics. The article seeks to re-open this critical discussion by

turning to the philosophy of aesthetics, poetics and language developed by

Giorgio Agamben. Agamben reminds us of the classical Greek association of

art to poiesis, a passive act of bringing into being, rather than praxis, theactive expression of the artist’s creative will. Taking this distinction as his

starting point, Agamben develops a theory of aesthetics that is neither a

modernist embrace of nihilism nor a conservative call for a return to the

classical pursuit of universal truths. Agamben posits instead an art concerned

not with the transmission of any particular content, but with the task of

transmission itself. For Agamben it is the potentiality of the event of

language, a kind of pure communicability, that is the ground for our

common belonging in the world. Agamben’s theories of poetics and

language may help us imagine a Ground Zero memorial that moves beyond

a strictly didactic or therapeutic role and seeks instead to bring into beinga radical space of communication.

Key words

■ 9/11 ■ aesthetics ■ Agamben ■ architecture ■ memorialization ■ poiesis

O

N 19 NOVEMBER 2003, the Lower Manhattan DevelopmentCommittee (LMDC) announced the selection of eight finalists for thecompetition to design the memorial at Ground Zero (an open compe-

tition yielded 5201 entries from 63 nations). In comparison to the

■ Theory, Culture & Society 2008 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore),

Vol. 25(5): 83–103

DOI: 10.1177/0263276408095217



controversy surrounding the site’s master plan, the memorial competition

seemed to pass with relatively little argument. Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s ‘Reflecting Absence’ design, which turned the footprints of the twintowers into recessed pools of cascading water, emerged the winner.

Yet the lack of controversy generated by the memorial competition mayrepresent a failure rather than a success, indicative of the safe approachfollowed by the designers rather than the innovation of the responses.Indeed, some viewed the short-listed proposals as little more than a collec-tion of clichéd elements brought forward from what has become a familiar tradition of contemporary memorial aesthetics. Suzanne Stephens, a writer

for Architectural Record, notes that the ‘schemes appeared too similar,emphasizing waterfalls and reflecting pools, beams of light, long planar wallswith names carved in them’ and criticizes the reliance on heavy-handedsymbolism as justification, ‘water representing tears; beams of light for starsand victims’ souls’ (2004: 36–7). Architecture critic Philip Nobel claimsthat the memorial design was virtually predetermined by the strict guide-lines of the LMDC brief (including the preservation of the tower footprintsand the inclusion of the name of each victim) and the restrictions of DanielLibeskind’s master plan. He suggests that ‘Michael Arad had given back tothe process that which it had already made’ (2005: 252). Perhaps more

troubling than the limitation of any individual design is the development of what appears to be a creative, institutional and critical consensus concern-ing the aesthetics of such a memorial site. The recurring tropes and tech-niques of contemporary memorial aesthetics risk covering over theassumptions that underpin our conception of what it is a memorial – and

84 Theory, Culture & Society 25(5)

Reflecting Absence, National September 11 MemorialSource: Courtesy of Handel Architects LLP.



this memorial in particular – is intended to be and do. What are thepresumed social functions of such a site? What kinds of truths, if any, arememorials assumed to reveal? When John C. Whitehead, the Chairman of the LMDC, claims: ‘The memorial will not only recall life, it will reaffirm

life itself’ (LMDC, 2003) and the competition guidelines ask designers to‘[r]espect and enhance the sacred quality’ (LMDC, 2003) of the site, we mustquestion both the philosophical and aesthetic assumptions at work withinthese statements.

With this context in mind, this article will look primarily towards thethought of Giorgio Agamben in order to reopen some of the questions thathave been foreclosed by the Ground Zero memorial competition. Thedecision to turn to the writing of Giorgio Agamben for an alternative methodof thinking aesthetics is motivated by a number of considerations.

Agamben’s recent political writings, such as Homo Sacer and State of Exception, have become key reference points for cultural theory’s attemptto think our contemporary global situation. But Agamben is a philosopher who developed his system of thought predominantly by contemplating issuesconcerning language, aesthetics and poetics. It seems to me that thesewritings on aesthetics and language are less often discussed in currentacademic debates, yet they provide the foundations for some of Agamben’smost radical political claims. Considering the inseparable mix of poeticsand politics inherent in the attempt to build a memorial at Ground Zero, it

seems an appropriate moment in which to return to the insights on ques-tions of aesthetics provided by a writer who has altered the grounds of political theory.

Occupying a position between the social and the aesthetic, memorialsand monuments hold an uncertain aesthetic position and this article willbegin by attempting to determine what place they occupy within the theoryof art. Alain Badiou’s thoughts on aesthetics help expose a prevalentassumption that memorials must either serve a didactic or catharticfunction; they must either instruct or initiate a healing process. The fact that

the Ground Zero memorial attempts to perform both of these functionssimultaneously is an indication of the problematic nature of the currentdiscourse supporting memorial design. The article will then turn toAgamben’s writings in the hope that they may suggest new paths out of thedeadlock of consensus developing around contemporary memorial aesthet-ics. Agamben’s philosophical assertions will be explored primarily throughhis writing on art, poetry and language contained in books and essay collec-tions such as The Man without Content (1999a) and Potentialities (1999b).What emerges from these readings is the possibility of a memorial aesthet-ics founded not on instruction or catharsis, but on the radical potentialityof language and the kind of community without predetermination it may becapable of initiating.

McKim – A Memorial without Content 85



Three Schemata of Art and Truth

The difficult aesthetic questions that arise around the proposed Ground Zeromemorial are reflective of the uncertain status memorials and monumentshold generally within art theory. Noël Carroll suggests it is the fact thatmemorials are specifically designed to perform social functions, and notsimply to provide a disinterested aesthetic experience, that produces areluctance to acknowledge their status as art. He writes that aesthetic theoryholds precious the idea ‘that something is an artwork if and only if it isdesigned with the primary intention of affording or having the capacity toafford experiences valuable for their own sakes’ (2005: 1). Social and politi-cal demands are viewed as unwelcome intrusions into the realm of artisticexperience. Yet, as Caroll recognizes, works possessing a social and specifi-cally memorial function (from religious art to political portraiture) are

arguably more the norm than the exception in the history of art. If thememorial function of art remains an unacknowledged secret within aesthetictheory, then how may we begin to situate a contemporary memorial atGround Zero within this tradition of thought? What currents of art theorydoes it draw from and what aesthetic assumptions implicitly justify its socialrole? In his meditation on the relationship of art and philosophy, the Handbook of Inaesthetics (2005), Alain Badiou provides a concise history of aesthetic thought that, although certainly polemical, offers one starting pointfor a consideration of the place of contemporary memorials within this

history.Badiou’s study opens with an attempt to plot art’s changing relation-

ship to truth in Western thought. He claims that there are essentially threedistinct schemata depicting this relationship that recur throughout Westernthought under different guises. The first is the didactic schema which, begin-ning with Plato, holds a deep distrust of the persuasive character of art. Itmaintains that art, while appearing to provide access to an immediate or naked truth, is in fact incapable of truth. Within this representation artbecomes a dangerous and seductive simulacrum of truth, capable of divert-

ing us from its actual pursuit in slow and disciplined thought. Badiousuggests: ‘The heart of the Platonic polemic about mimesis designates artnot so much as an imitation of things, but as the imitation of the effect of truth’ (2005: 2). Art then must be controlled either through censorship, asin Plato’s insistence on banishing the poet from the polis, or strict surveil-lance wherein its persuasive immediacy is placed in the service of ‘a truththat is prescribed from outside’ (2005: 2). The goal of art becomes education,but an education that is strictly policed by truths derived not from art itself but from philosophy. Badiou presents Marxist aesthetics as the 20th-century

exemplar of the didactic schema in which art’s purpose becomes to transfer to the masses the truth of class struggle, a truth that is not immanent to artbut comes instead from dialectical thinking. For Marxist aesthetics, Badiouargues, art left unmonitored by this philosophical truth is at risk of descend-ing into bourgeois hedonism.




Badiou places in polar opposition to this didactic formation what henames the romantic schema. ‘Its thesis is that art alone is capable of truth’(2005: 3). In the romantic schema, art provides a privileged point of accessto a truth that philosophy grasps for, but ultimately fails to attain. Art is

therefore assigned the task of redeeming both an incoherent world andthe inadequate concepts of philosophical thought. From this romanticperspective, Badiou argues:

. . . it is art itself that educates, because it teaches of the power of the infinityheld within the tormented cohesion of a form. Art delivers us from thesubjective barrenness of the concept. Art is the absolute as subject – it isincarnation. (2005: 3)

German hermeneutics, with Heidegger being its chief proponent, is, Badiouclaims, the 20th-century’s representative of the romantic tradition. The priv-ileged relationship between art and the unveiling of truth is certainly inevidence in Heidegger’s essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1977), whereHeidegger presents art as the opening and preservation of a ‘world’, one inwhich the unconcealment of truth may occur. He writes:

The truth that discloses itself in the work can never be proved or derivedfrom what went before . . . What art founds can therefore never be compen-sated and made up for by what is already at hand and available. Founding is

an overflow, a bestowal. (1977: 200).

Finally, Badiou adds to the polarity of the didactic and romanticschemas a position that suggests a relative peace between art and phil-osophy. He names this the classical schema and attributes its formation toAristotle, who eases the discomfort of the Platonic recognition of art as thedangerous semblance of truth by claiming that the purpose of art is not truthat all. Aristotle, according to Badiou, maintains that art ‘involves the depo-sition of the passions in a transference onto semblance’ (2005: 4). Aristotle

therefore consigns art not to the realm of knowledge, but to that of ‘cathar-sis’. Its purpose, according to Badiou, is neither cognitive nor revelatory,but therapeutic. For Badiou, this evacuation of truth means that the criterionfor the judgment of art becomes ‘liking’, not in terms of a rule of opinion,but in terms of its ability to engage the spectator in ‘an identification thatorganizes transference and thus in a deposition of the passions’ (2005: 4).In other words, art must correspond to our imaginary assumptions of reality,unperturbed by intrusions of the truth of the Real, as what is likely is notnecessarily true. The register of art is therefore shifted from the realm of

truth to that of verisimilitude. According to Badiou, the 20th century’supholder of this classical model of art is clearly psychoanalysis. While theobject of desire remains for both Freud and Lacan beyond symbolization,art provides a threshold in which this object of desire subtractively emergesas an excessive Real at the limits of the symbolic. Art therefore serves as




a point of transference in which ‘the work leads to the dissipation of theunspeakable scintillation of the lost object’ (2005: 7). Badiou suggests thatthe price for the classical schema’s removal of truth from the domain of art,with the psychoanalytic version being no exception, is the reduction of art

to the level of public service measured by its effective utility in treating thehuman soul or psyche.

Badiou maintains that all three schemas limit art’s potential to seektruths that are immanent and unique to art. They do so by relegating art toa subsidiary role in the promotion of a truth imposed from outside (didactic);making art a privileged path to a return of the absolute (romantic); or byreducing art to a conservative mechanism of relief (classical). He claimsthat our current aesthetic field is polluted with saturated versions of all threeof these schemas. Yet, despite his dissatisfaction with these dominant

conceptions of the role of art, Badiou’s short history of aesthetics gives usa framework for beginning to think through the aesthetic position held bymonuments and memorials. Badiou’s categories may in fact provide a groundfor distinguishing between those two, sometimes interchangeable, terms for sites of remembrance. The art historian Arthur Danto, writing on Maya Lin’sVietnam Veterans Memorial, does make a distinction between memorialsand monuments, claiming that the former seek to initiate a process of healing and reconciliation, while the latter present a triumphalist referenceto past events (in Rowlands, 1999: 130). Carroll (2005) likewise claims that

monuments have historically been celebrations of heroic nationalism,serving as a mode of transmitting cultural assumptions and preserving socialorder. The traditional monument would seem to fall firmly within Badiou’sdidactic tradition, seeking to promote an officially sanctioned version of historical events.

As Danto notes, contemporary memorials have shied away from thisexplicitly didactic role. The subtle form of Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial,with its minimalist black stone walls, maintains an ambiguous view of theevents to which it refers, certainly refusing an outright characterization of

them as heroic. The aesthetic discourse of the memorial shifts from thedidactic register of the monument to a therapeutic one; the language used todescribe these memorials is increasingly psychoanalytic rather than nation-alistic. These sites of remembrance become envisioned as locations for working through the traumatic events of the past and can therefore be saidto participate in the aesthetic schema of classical catharsis. The connectionof the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to this therapeutic role is made explicitby the name given to the half-scale replica of the memorial that travelsthroughout the US, ‘The Wall That Heals’. Carroll suggests that this cathar-tic mode has become the norm for contemporary memorials and writes thatthese sites ‘give articulate focus to the unease the loss has caused and allowfor the reassessment of the event in retrospect; this enables mourners tomanage their emotions, to move from shock to healing’ (2005: 9).

Upon first appraisal, the contemporary memorial’s shift from a didacticto cathartic aesthetic schema would seem an unquestionably productive




movement. Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, for example, is generallypraised for its ability to accommodate multiple experiences of the war andfor its healing qualities. Carole Blair claims that Lin’s memorial initiates arhetoric of enactment that brings to life the events commemorated with their

complexities and contradictions intact (Blair and Michel, 2000; Blair et al.,1991). Jenny Edkins claims that successful memorials, like Lin’s, arrest theflow of linear time and initiate a ‘trauma time’, in which ‘the ethical moment,the moment of decision, the moment of the political’ becomes possible(2003: 84). Yet Badiou is suspicious of the movement of art into the register of catharsis and psychoanalysis, where it is no longer concerned with theproduction of shared ‘generic truths’ and is limited to the role of assuagingpersonal pain or despair. The contemporary memorial’s unquestionedemphasis on an internalized and individual response to past events would

seem to dampen the collective and political potential of these sites. We mustask whether contemporary memorials are actually capable of initiating themoment of the political sought by Edkins, or whether they occupy insteadthe position of public and state service, as Badiou fears. Even the much-praised Vietnam Veterans Memorial appears to encourage an isolated actof healing rather than more collective processes. Maya Lin writes in her artist’s statement: ‘death is in the end a personal and private matter, and thearea contained within this memorial is a quiet place, meant for personalreflection and private reckoning’ (in Edkins, 2003: 79).

The proposals for the Ground Zero site highlight the potentialproblems of this cathartic memorial aesthetic in several ways. Most apparentis the emergence of a series of recurring design tropes whose references totraumatic absences and healing processes verge on the mechanical.Commentators have noted Lin’s inclusion in the selection committee andhave remarked on the similarities of these proposals to her acclaimedmemorial designs. The inscription of names on a reflective surface used inher Vietnam Veterans Memorial is present in nearly all of the designsubmissions and the running water featured in her Civil Rights Memorial

in Montgomery, Alabama is also a frequent inclusion. The language of absences and voids employed in many of the design descriptions borrowsheavily from the recent German tradition of building ‘countermonuments’in memory of the Holocaust and would certainly be familiar to James E.Young, who coined the term and who is also a member of the selectioncommittee. Contemporary memorial design would appear to be a primeexample of the aesthetic saturation identified by Badiou.

Further problems arise from the LMDC’s intention that the memorialoccupy both a didactic and a cathartic position simultaneously. The missionstatement accompanying the submission guidelines makes the didacticambitions of the site apparent: ‘May the lives remembered, the deeds recog-nized, and the spirit reawakened be eternal beacons, which reaffirm respectfor life, strengthen our resolve to preserve freedom, and inspire an end tohatred, ignorance and intolerance’ (2003). Yet Daniel Libeskind alludes tothe site’s therapeutic function elsewhere in the guidelines: ‘We have to be




the desired effect or result is present from the beginning but not yet actu-alized. When I begin to walk across the room to fetch a book, I already havethe wanted outcome in mind. The completion of the act is a fulfilment of this predetermined desire. The essential characteristic of the work of art,

on the other hand, is that something passes from non-being into being, or,as Aristotle writes: ‘every art is concerned with giving birth’ (Agamben,1999a: 73). In the Greek conception, poiesis brings something into beingthat is outside itself and also outside the sphere of man as living animal. Itis only in the work of art that universal truths emerge from singular forms.According to Agamben, this intimate relationship to the unconcealment of truths elevates poiesis above praxis in the Greek hierarchy of production.2

We can already see that Agamben’s account of classical aesthetics blursconsiderably the conceptual boundaries between Badiou’s classical and

romantic schemas. Agamben clearly establishes a strong line of relationbetween classical conceptions of poiesis and Heidegger’s hermeneuticperspective on art, which emphasizes art’s role as the unconcealment andpreservation of a truth. Absent so far in Agamben’s account are both thedidactic and cathartic conceptions of art discussed by Badiou.

Agamben further elaborates the particular spatial and temporalworkings of poiesis through a deliberation on the Greek concept of rhythm.It is the dimension of rhythm, Agamben maintains, that opens a space for the work of art’s particular unveiling of truth. He closely associates this

concept of rhythm to the Greek verbword, e `povg , meaning a kind of pauseor suspension. Rhythm introduces into the eternal flow of time and matter a stop; it is an interruption in the otherwise endless flow of instants.3

Agamben describes the force of rhythm acting when we find ourselves beforea work of art and ‘we perceive a stop in time, as though we were suddenlythrown into a more original time’ (1999a: 99). Through rhythm the mode of temporality belonging to praxis, a linear one of causal action and reaction,is put on hold. Agamben continues:

By opening to man his authentic temporal dimension, the work of art alsoopens for him the space of his belonging to the world, only within which hecan take the original measure of his dwelling on earth and find again hispresent truth in the unstoppable flow of linear time. (1999a: 101)

Man attains in the poetic act a suspension of the endless movement of timethat allows him to be a historical being (and not simply a living animal) for whom the past and the future are at stake. Rhythm opens up the space of the present for man to act and is thus not unlike the ‘now time’ put forwardby Walter Benjamin in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, which over-

comes empty, homogeneous time and succeeds in blasting the past ‘out of the continuum of history’ (1999: 253).

Crucial for Agamben is that the truth process of rhythm and poiesis isprecisely not the expression of will, but is instead a power of productioninto space that is a prerequisite of praxis; it opens a space that allows for




willed and free activity to occur. Poiesis thus entails a kind of passivity, agiving oneself over to the original productivity of rhythm that requires asuspension of will. Modern aesthetics, according to Agamben, forgets thisclassical notion of poiesis and the centrality of creative will becomes a

virtually unquestioned assumption in contemporary notions of artisticproduction. A large part of the task set forth in The Man without Content isthe interrogation of this assumption. Agamben suggests that modernityproduces a conception of art defined by a fundamental schism. The notionof art as poiesis, the process of revealing a shared space of living for allmen, is dissolved in the divide between the creation and the reception of the work of art, each side fostering its own breed of alienation. The modernartist on one side of this split is characterized by his isolation and removalfrom society, while on the other side the spectator is entirely alienated from

the creative act of production. The artist, driven by art’s ‘ promesse debonheur’, enters into a harrowing encounter with his powers of creation –his spiritual health and indeed his very life are dependent on the outcome.For the disinterested spectator, incapable of creative genius, the work of artis increasingly inoculated and removed from the sphere of life, becomingsimply an opportunity for the exercise of good taste. Agamben sees this splitreflected in Balzac’s tormented painter Frenhofer in the story ‘The UnknownMasterpiece’. For Frenhofer, his painting is irreconcilably divided: ‘The sidethat faces the artist is the living reality in which he reads his promise of

happiness; but the other side, which faces the spectator, is an assemblageof lifeless elements that can only mirror itself in the aesthetic judgment’sreflection of it’ (1999a: 11).

The fracture of modern art between the creative genius and thedetached spectator is reflected in the emergence of a different philosophyfor each side of the divide. On the side of the spectator, Kant’s aesthetictheory of the beautiful as disinterested pleasure finds its distorted materi-alization in the figure of the man of taste. And in reaction, Nietzsche, firmlyon the side of the artist, presents the production of art as the ultimate vital

human act. Agamben writes that: ‘ Art is the name [Nietzsche] gives to theessential trait of the will to power: the will that recognizes itself everywherein the world and feels every event as the fundamental trait of its character’,and Nietzsche is thus able to say that ‘art is worth more than truth’(Agamben, 1999a: 92). Agamben traces a lineage from Novalis throughNietzsche and Marx that equates man’s essential being to the exercise of this free, vital will expressed as pure creativity. As a consequence of thisfreedom, the artist becomes superior to any content. ‘If the artist now seekshis certainty in a particular content or faith’, writes Agamben, ‘he is lying,because he knows that pure artistic subjectivity is the essence of everything’(1999a: 54). The artist emerges in the incarnation of the man without contentwho has no other identity than his own powers of creation, the infinitetranscendence of the artistic principle. Having freed himself from thecontingencies of the world, the content of which is unworthy of his focus,the artist enacts the self-conscious process of reflecting on his own artistic




subjectivity. The museum, removed from the flow of life and time, emergesas the only place where the alienation of artist and spectator is artificiallyovercome. It is the site in which the aesthetic judgement of the man of tasteand the artistic subjectivity without content of the artist refer back and forth

to each other endlessly. The original time and space opened to man by poeticrhythm, in which artist and spectator experience a common ground, havebeen replaced by the nihilistic space of the museum.

The Event of Language

Thus far we have seen Agamben identify a forgetting of the Greek concep-tion of poiesis as a bringing into presence, it being replaced to alienatingeffect in the modern period by the centrality of the creative will of the artist.Should we then assume that Agamben’s thoughts on aesthetics amount to acall for a return to a classical conception of art, one that is not affiliatedwith Badiou’s schema of catharsis but instead with a romantic unveiling of truth? If so, what truths should we expect the process of poiesis to unveil?Is this a conservative call by Agamben for a re-establishment of the worthycontent of tradition or religion? Agamben’s thought moves in exactly theopposite direction from any such return to tradition – and here I think abreak with Heidegger is made – calling instead for a direct confrontationwith the implications of a contentless communication. The Man withoutContent concludes by describing a modern condition in which the transmis-

sibility of culture guaranteed by tradition, a system of beliefs transferreddirectly from past to present without residue, is irrevocably lost. Agambenclaims that without the assuredness of this transmission the past begins toaccumulate and burden the present, a reservoir without meaning or sense(a condition described by Walter Benjamin [1999] through Klee’s image of the angel of history). In such a situation, unable to decipher what is mean-ingful and what is not, ‘man keeps his cultural heritage in its totality, andin fact the value of this heritage multiplies vertiginously’ (Agamben, 1999a:108). This accumulation of pure culture, culture alienated from life, is

redeemed only negatively through the act of aesthetic judgement and in thespace of the museum. Agamben makes reference to Kafka’s castle upon thehill, which houses this accumulated culture and hangs over the villagersbelow:

. . . on the one hand, the wealth of the past, in which man can in no wayrecognize himself, is accumulated to be offered to the aesthetic enjoyment of the members of the community, and, on the other, this enjoyment is possibleonly through the alienation that deprives it of its immediate meaning and of its poietic capacity to open its space to man’s action and knowledge. (1999a:110)

But instead of lamenting the loss of this poetic capacity or perpetuating anihilistic aesthetics, Agamben claims that Kafka indicates the potential for an art that takes as its content the act of transmissibility itself, regardless




of the content that is to be transmitted. Kafka’s writing, according toAgamben, intensifies rather than redeems negatively the contentlesstransmissibility of art. It therefore points to an art that, ‘[renounces] theguarantees of truth for love of transmissibility’ and:

. . . succeeds once again in transforming man’s inability to exit his historicalstatus, perennially suspended in the inter-world between old and new, pastand future, into the very space in which he can take the original measure of his dwelling in the present and recover each time the meaning of his action.(1999a: 114)

The recovery of the rhythm and opening of poiesis for modern manis thus dependent on the relinquishing of its guarantee of truth in favour

of a recognition of the potential of pure transmissibility. It is here thatAgamben’s theory of aesthetics (or anti-aesthetics) links to his overarch-ing concerns with the pure communicability of language, apart from anycontents of communication.4 In his essay entitled ‘Tradition of theImmemorial’, Agamben maintains that it is an openness to language itself,apart from the preservation of any particular truth, that remains theconstant that runs through every specific ritual of memory. He writes: ‘Thetradition of transmissibility is therefore immemorially contained in everyspecific tradition, and this immemorial legacy, this transmission of uncon-

cealment, constitutes human language as such’ (1999b: 105). It is thisimmemorial foundation of all tradition, rather than any particular tradition,that Agamben seeks to bring into thought. Again pursuing his interest inthe conditions of this pure transmissibility, in his essay entitled ‘The Ideaof Language’, Agamben considers the meaning of the word ‘revelation’ inChristian and Jewish religious traditions. He finds that the theologicalusage of the term ‘revelation’ always corresponds to an unveiling of notonly something we do not know, but the very possibility of knowledge ingeneral. This possibility of knowledge is the revelation of the ‘word of God’,

the presupposition of all being, but that which human reason cannot knowon its own. For Agamben, this mystery of the word of God is equivalentto the concealment of language itself. He writes: ‘The meaning of revela-tion is that humans can reveal beings through language but cannot reveallanguage itself. In other words: humans see the world through languagebut do not see language’ (1999b: 40). Language for Agamben is a sourceof bringing into presence that which never fully reveals itself in the act of creation. The pure potentiality of language is always in excess of theparticular speech and knowledge that it brings to light. As Agamben states:‘The proper sense of revelation is therefore that all human speech andknowledge has at its root and foundation an openness that infinitely tran-scends it’ (1999b: 41). The task of philosophy, according to Agamben, isto think the openness of language without recourse to the meta-languageposited by religion or to the nihilistic claim that Nothingness is the finalrevelation. The universal truths sought by the Greeks are thus replaced by




the potential of the pure event of language conceived as ‘immediate medi-ation’ (1999b: 47).

Agamben’s concept of pure language and his displacement of thecreative will of nihilism come together precisely in his thinking of the

relationship between potentiality and impotentiality. Here Agamben makesreference to Aristotle’s somewhat unexpected conclusion that the mode of existence as potentiality involves the possession of a faculty that is poten-tial precisely in so far is it is not in use. To possess potential then is to bein a state of suspension, to posses the faculty to build or to write, for example, without actualizing this potential. In other words: ‘It is a poten-tiality that is not simply the potential to do this or that but potential to not-do, potential not to pass into actuality’ (1999b: 179–80). In a discussion of Derrida’s philosophy of inscription entitled ‘ Pardes: The Writing of

Potentiality’, Agamben makes the related claim that: ‘Between the experi-ence of something and the experience of nothing there lies the experienceof one’s own passivity’ (1999b: 217). This is not the experience of poten-tiality passing into actuality, but rather the experience of the writing tabletprior to form being impressed on its surface. It is the self-affection weexperience when temporarily deprived of our senses, our eyes in darknessmade aware of their incapacity to see. It is through this impotentiality, thissuspended potential, that we enter into the open space of rhythm and experi-ence the radical potential of pure language. This leads Agamben to the

initially strange assertion that, ‘Other living beings are capable only of their specific potentiality; they can only do this or that. But human beings are theanimals who are capable of their own impotentiality. The greatness of human potentiality is measured by the abyss of human impotentiality’ (1999b: 182,italics in original). Whereas the actualizing of this or that potential is anexpression of will and thus an act of praxis, the impotentiality Agambenspeaks of is the experience of potential itself. Only through this experience,an experience of poiesis, can something come into being which is not prede-termined by the will or conditioned by a presupposition: in other words,

something radically new.

5

But how does Agamben’s radical passivity and idea of potentialmanifest itself? There are several figures in Agamben’s work that point to apossible manifestation of the potentiality of language. In Herman Melville’scharacter Bartleby, the scrivener who has stopped writing, Agamben findsan example of potentiality recognized as always also a potential ‘not to do’.Through his unwavering ‘I would prefer not to’ response to any request,Bartleby the scribe becomes the embodiment of the writing tablet beforeany mark has been made. Agamben describes him as ‘the extreme figureof the Nothing from which all creation derives . . . pure, absolute potential-

ity’ (1999b: 253–4). Barlteby’s act of verbal suspension has its precedent inthe Skeptics’ use of the expression ‘no more than’ as noted by Diogenes, aswhen they refute an argument by saying, ‘Scylla exists no more than . . . achimera’ (1999b: 256). As Daniel Heller-Roazen notes, ‘this suspension . . .marks the point at which language retreats from actual predication into a




mode in which it appears as pure potential, capable of expression preciselyby virtue of actually saying nothing’ (1999: 20).

Bartleby’s enactment of pure potentiality through language finds aphysical counterpoint in the figure of the gesture, a concept that Agamben

returns to frequently in his writing. Agamben suggests that the functioningof the gesture can neither be understood within the logic of production inwhich a means leads to an end (he gives the example of marching seen asa means to move from point A to point B), nor within the logic of praxis inwhich the means is itself the end (he gives the example of dance seen asan aesthetic dimension). He argues that the gesture ‘breaks with the falsealternative between ends and means that paralyzes morality and presentsinstead means that, as such, evade the orbit of mediality without becoming,for this reasons, ends’ (2000: 57). Dance, then, can be interpreted as gesture

not because it represents an end in itself, but only in so far as it exhibitsthe media character of the human body in movement. He stresses: ‘The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such’ (2000: 57, italics in original). Ultimately for Agamben thegesture is ‘a communication of a communicability. It has nothing to saybecause what it shows is the being-in-language of human beings as puremediality’ (2000: 59). Agamben points to Walter Benjamin’s reading of theOklahoma Nature Theatre (a theatre in which ‘everyone is welcome’ andwhat is performed is life itself), which appears in the last chapter of Kafka’s

America. Benjamin writes of Kafka:

One of the most significant functions of this theatre is to dissolve happeningsinto their gestic components. . . . Kafka’s entire work constitutes a code of gestures which surely had no definite symbolic meaning for the author fromthe outset; rather, the author tried to derive such a meaning from them inever-changing contexts and experimental groupings. (in Agamben, 1999b: 80)

In The Coming Community (1993a), Agamben’s concept of potential-ity emerges in the strange form of the coming ‘whatever being’, which

Agamben states does not simply signify an indifference to any form of identification, but rather an insistence on being ‘such as it is’ (1993a: 1).Agamben asks us to think:

What could be the politics of whatever singularity, that is, of a being whosecommunity is mediated not by any condition of belonging (being red, beingItalian, being Communist) nor by the simple absence of conditions (a negativecommunity, such as that recently proposed in France by Maurice Blanchot),but by belonging itself? (1993a: 85)

He finds a potential response in the demonstrations of the Chinese May andtheir culmination in the occupation of Tiananmen Square. What was signifi-cant about these events, Agamben claims, is that despite various attemptsto characterize the protest as a confrontation between communism and anemerging desire for democracy, the movement refused to identify itself in




any such terms. He writes: ‘What the state cannot tolerate in any way,however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming anidentity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging (even in the form of a simple presupposition)’ (1993a: 86).

Tiananmen was, then, a manifestation of belonging itself, a kind of passivewilling into existence of a community based on no other grounds than thecommon humanity of being-in-language. Tiananmen returns politics to thelogic of the gesture, where what is communicated is not a particular some-thing, but the fact of communicability.6 He states elsewhere:

There can be no true community on the basis of a presupposition – be it anation, a language. . . . What unites human beings among themselves is nota nature, a voice, or a common imprisonment in signifying language; it is the

vision of language itself. (1999b: 47)

Such a community, Agamben claims, will always meet violent oppositionby the state, which refuses to allow access to the potentiality of languageitself.

A Memorial of Pure Mediality?

At this point it seems appropriate to ask whether Agamben’s thought onaesthetics and language can truly be brought to bear on the memorial taskat hand at Ground Zero. How might Agamben’s consideration of the purepotential of language, which after all amounts to a kind of anti-aesthetics,translate into an actual memorial design? What kind of material form cana thinking of pure mediality assume? Agamben of course offers no simpleprescription in response to these questions. His theory calls for a consider-ation of how public spaces might activate the potential of language without





a prescribed outcome or predetermined role. Agamben’s challenge is for architects and artists to incorporate a productive passivity into their designs,one that suspends the willed activity of praxis and allows something newand unforeseen to come into being. These spaces would rely not on a repre-

sentational aesthetics, but on the prompting of gestural responses withinitially uncertain meanings. The design of such spaces would be necess-arily risky ventures, envisioning new forms of social relations and allowingfor unpredictable results. Agamben calls for the creation of spaces of communication that would be unlikely to sit comfortably within the calcu-lated planning of mayoral offices and city development committees.

Yet the coming aesthetics alluded to by Agamben is arguably notwithout precedent amongst recent experiments in memorial design. Thepublic works of the German artist Jochen Gerz often attempt to replace the

materiality of art objects with immaterial spaces of communication. Theartist’s projects are important examples of what James E. Young labels‘countermonuments’ due to their self-conscious questioning of the very roleof the memorial within a post-Second World War Germany. The MonumentAgainst Fascism in the Hamburg suburb of Harburg, completed by Jochenand Esther Gerz in 1986, is perhaps the most frequently discussed contem-porary memorial in Germany. The work involved a monumental column thatwas to be lowered into the ground as its surface was gradually covered withthe engraved signatures of local inhabitants, a gesture signifying their

commitment against fascism. In reality the memorial was imprinted withboth signatures and unanticipated racist graffiti, becoming a non-verbalexpression of the conflicting memory of the Harburg community

But it is an unrealized proposal by Gerz, one for Berlin’s nowcompleted Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe designed by Peter Eisenman, that best represents an attempt to materialize some of the centraltenets of Agamben’s philosophy. The proposed design was entitled ‘Warum?’German for ‘Why?’ (Young, 2000: 147–51). It called not for a therapeuticcontemplation of traumatic events or a didactic warning against the possi-

bility of recurrence, but instead asked visitors to engage in conversation,discussion and debate on the topic of why the Shoah could have occurred.The central focus of the proposal was a building designed by the Iranianarchitect Nasrine Seraji, a discussion centre entitled ‘the Ear’, in whichthese encounters would take place. Gerz’s proposal does not seek to mate-rialize an aesthetics of trauma or loss, but instead calls for the formation of a temporary community, one with no other presupposition than a desire toengage, through language, a set of historical events and their impact on thepresent. Implicit in Gerz’s design is a realization that something mustemerge from the memorial site that goes beyond a willed act of memory or the acquisition of knowledge about an event. The artist seems to shareAgamben’s conviction that it is only our common belonging-in-language thatpresents the grounds for the kind of coming community capable of respond-ing to an event like the Holocaust. Gerz’s memorial seeks to create a spacethat elicits a moment of poiesis, a suspension of the flow of common time,




that might allow such a community to emerge, if only temporarily. Such aspace would be as much a zone of risk as a place of comfort, and it is perhapsunsurprising that the Berlin selection committee deemed the memorialunsuitable, opting instead for a memorial that engenders a safer and more

predictably solitary and meditative experience.Unfortunately, the building projects at the Ground Zero site seem

equally closed to the kind of communication without predetermination thatAgamben seeks to encourage. Security has won out over openness in thedesign of the ‘Freedom Tower’ centrepiece. A 200-foot blast-resistantconcrete pedestal has replaced the glass entrance hall envisioned in DanielLibeskind’s original design (Dunlap and Collins, 2005: A1). The recentlyunveiled designs (by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Fumihiko Maki)for three skyscrapers to accompany the ‘Freedom Tower’ fail to compensate

for the armature of their taller neighbour. Described by the New York Timesas ‘conservative and coolly corporate’ (Ouroussoff, 2006), the towers aremodels of efficient design, but add little to the site’s potential for non-instrumental communication.

While the security and commercial emphasis of the Ground Zeroskyscrapers may seem inevitable, even more disturbing are the results of the mandate for the inclusion of culture at the site. The Drawing Center, anart gallery currently located in SoHo which was to move to the site, has beenbanished due to protests by families of 9/11 victims over formerly exhibited

‘unpatriotic’ artwork (Feiden, 2005: 1). The proposed International FreedomCenter, an educational and cultural centre with the directive to ‘nurture aglobal conversation on freedom in our world today’, held some promise toinitiate a form of dialogue, but it too has been removed from constructionplans after victims’ families protested that the centre’s global historicaloutlook would take focus away from the ‘sacred ground’ of the site (Fisher,2005: B4). The potentially innovative methods of remembering, forms of discussion and types of relations that may have emerged at the Ground Zerosite are quickly being curtailed, channelled and codified.

The possibility for the inclusion of a space of open communication atthe site appears to fall entirely on the memorial itself, yet as was the casein Berlin, the selection committee has shied away from any proposal thatquestions the typical didactic-therapeutic role of the memorial. The selected‘Reflecting Absence’ design, with its beneath ground walls engraved withvictims’ names and its chamber of contemplation, also encourages solitaryand silent meditation. The sheer enormity of the cascading walls of water flowing from the reflecting pools that cover the footprints of the collapsedtowers into two central voids seem intent on overwhelming both visually andaurally any possibility of communication between visitors to the site. Withits references to the impressive scale of destruction, Arad and Walker’sdesign attempts to provide the visitor with an experience, however partial,of the tragic gravity of the 9/11 event itself. The emphasis, therefore, is onremembering the event as it occurred and ensuring its place within anofficial national history. The memorial makes no attempt to generate




Agamben’s moment of poiesis that would see the event not as a fixed moment

of history, but as the catalyst for the generation of a space of radical partici-pation and exchange in the present. By enacting the magnitude of the eventit memorializes, the Ground Zero design actually suggests the impossibilityof language in response to such a disaster. The memorial fails to acknowl-edge the potential of communication itself and as such misses an oppor-tunity to create a space for the kind of open community Agamben insists isboth possible and necessary.

Agamben’s thought does not fall within the three saturated schemas of art described by Badiou, but nor does it adopt Badiou’s strategy of severingthe connection between politics and aesthetics. For Agamben, the space of

communication made possible by art is inherently political, but it isprecisely this political potential that the majority of state-sponsored memo-rials attempt to manage and codify. Agamben encourages us to re-evaluatethe aesthetic assumptions that present memorial sites as locations for either initiating private healing processes or re-establishing national unity. The





possibility exists for a memorial that is neither conservative nor cathartic,but instead permits the radically new to pass into being.

Notes

1. Peter Hallward contrasts Badiou’s isolation of the sphere of art to Adorno’sinvestment in a materialist aesthetics. He suggests that Badiou’s conception of artdeliberately invites the Adornian accusation that he ‘capitulates before the problemof the relationship between art and the social’ (2003: 387–8). In recent publiclectures, Badiou seems to suggest there is the potential for a more productiverelationship between art and politics, claiming that contemporary event-based artmay provide a model for the creation of new subjects – something contemporarypolitics no longer seems capable of achieving.

2. Agamben reminds us that, for the Greeks, the sphere of work as required for themaintenance of life was undertaken by slaves and thus could not even be consideredwithin the poiesis–praxis hierarchy. He makes a compelling argument that allproduction (artistic or otherwise) is now conceived of within this sphere of work andis therefore connected to the domain of the maintenance of animal life – anassociation that would have been unthinkable for the Greeks.

3. For Agamben, rhythm also carries the double sense of the Greek verb e `pe vx,meaning both an offering and a holding back. Rhythm thus holds both the promiseof this access to an original time and the possibility of the fall into calculated time.Whether rhythm’s gift is granted or withheld seems contingent on our method of approach.

4. Agamben could hardly be more specific about his overall concerns when hewrites in Infancy and History: ‘In both my written and unwritten books, I have stub-bornly pursued only one train of thought: what is the meaning of “there is language”;what is the meaning of “I speak”?’ (1993b: 5)

5. Agamben’s return to the Greek distinction between poiesis and praxis, and hiscritique of the modern prioritization of will, invite comparisons to the work of Hannah Arendt, another philosopher poised between the thought of Heidegger andBenjamin. For Arendt it is not poiesis, but the concept of action (as distinguishedfrom labour and work – the reproductive and economic modes of praxis) that mustbe recovered from Greek thought. Action, closely associated with speech, serves a

similar role for Arendt as the concept of poiesis does for Agamben. Its ‘revelatoryquality’ she writes, ‘comes to the fore where people are with others and neither for nor against them – that is, in sheer human togetherness’ (1958: 180). But Agambenultimately rejects as no longer tenable the clear divisions Arendt maintains betweenbare life and political life. Rather than isolating political speech from all other formsof language, Agamben highlights the political potential inherent in the event of language itself.

6. Indeed Agamben claims that true politics ‘is the sphere of pure means, that is,of the absolute and complete gesturality of human beings’ (2000: 60).

ReferencesAgamben, G. (1993a) The Coming Community, trans. M. Hardt. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press.

Agamben, G. (1993b) Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience, trans.L. Heron. London: Verso.




Agamben, G. (1999a) The Man without Content, trans. G. Albert. Stanford, CA:Stanford University Press.

Agamben, G. (1999b) Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans.D. Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Arendt, A. (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Benjamin, W. (1999) ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, ed.H. Arendt, trans. H. Zorn. London: Pimlico.

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Hallward, P. (2003) Badiou: A Subject to Truth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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LMDC (Lower Manhattan Development Corporation) (2003) World Trade CenterSite Memorial Competition Guidelines, URL (consulted June 2008): www.wtcsitememorial.org/about_guidelines.html

Nobel, P. (2005) Sixteen Acres: Architecture and the Outrageous Struggle for theFuture of Ground Zero. New York: Metropolitan Books.

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Joel McKim is a lecturer in the Department of Communication Studies,Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) and a PhD candidate at the Centrefor Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, London. He is currently writingon aesthetics and architecture in post 9/11 New York and has recently

contributed to the collection Informal Architectures (Black Dog Publishing).


Agamben Memorial

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