Symposium to transcend an oeuvre: The use and abuse of Agamben

During the Covid pandemic, nobody had the privilege of not knowing what it means to live in a state of exception. Remarkably this was also the moment Giorgio Agamben fell out of grace, even with many of his most dedicated readers. Was this really due to Agamben’s intransigence, his staying improper, or does it also point to a problem in the reception of his work? In other words: does this disqualifaction invoke a more joyful, messianic reading of his oeuvre? Today’s significance of management and cybernetic reason – the permanent administration of the absent order – marks the substitution of resilience for happiness as the ultimate legitimating category. As Agamben has shown, it consists of the triumph of the theological paradigm of an oikonomia of salvation over every other aspect of human life. Hence there is a task of thought to reclaim our ‘sabbatical nature’ from its exhaustion in a metaphysics of will, duty, labor, and command. Our aim is to invite scholars who use Agamben’s work to collectively explore the mode of existence of potentiality – that is, for whom reception is not about appropriating, judging, and exhausting Agamben’s positionality, but about making his work resonate with other tonalities.

Decolonizing Agamben

Agamben’s work has often been criticized for its European exceptionalism: not Auschwitz, but the plantation and the slave ship are the exemplary juridico-political exemplars of a biopolitical space in which the norm and the exception become indiscernible. To what extent does the escalation of the siege on Gaza ‘profanate’ the Agambean concepts of the state of exception or the ‘human’? At the same time it seems possible to decolonize Agamben and put his philosophical archeology and its findings to an otherwise use. For example, the Pauline concept of use could be read in tandem with Sara Ahmed’s phenomenology of use. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney have further developed the key distinction between use and usufruct in their deactivation of possessive individualism. Do these uses falsify or expand Agamben’s thought?

A destructive or reactivating method?

As far as methodology is concerned, the Agambian procedure lies in applying a philosophical archaeology, carving out the presupposed archai (principles) that rule in regimes of ‘including exclusion.’ The aim is to deactivate all manifestations of the (bio-)political. By unveiling the sacrifying, glorifying and other implicit repressive modalities of the prevailing discourses and their media spectacles, a new form-of life may appear. An autonomous form-of-life, based on new options for use beyond property, exploitation and exclusion. At the same time, iconic Agambean paradigms like the state-of-exception, the refugee camp, Auschwitz, and homo sacer, originally introduced to debunk the Western bio-/thanato-political power system, have become instruments in the discursive toolbox of conservative cultural critique and the alt-right. How to understand and reframe these antithetical, counter-affirmative uses of Agamben?

Tentative Programme

10:00 Coffee
10:15 Opening by Sjoerd van Tuinen, ‘Mapping some avenues in the Agamben debate’
10:30 Ype de Boer
10:50 Willem Schinkel
11:10 Matthijs van de Sande
11:30 Discussion

12:00 lunch

13:00 Menno Grootveld
13:20 Anke Snoek
13:40 Tim Christaens
14:00 Discussion

14:20 Coffee

14:40 Willem Bliekendaal: ‘A Profination of Physical Education - beyond Sportification and Biopolitics?’
15:00 Stijn De Cauwer
15:20 Erik Bordeleau

15:40 Discussion

16:00 Coffee and snack

16:20 Georgios Tsagdis
16:40 Ad Verbrugge
17:00 Sandra Meeuwsen: ‘Agamben’s Chora, fuelling potentiality in uncertain times.’
17:30 Concluding discussion
18:00-20:00 Dinner Paviljoen
20:00 Drinks in town

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