Resistence in Art Giorgio Agamben

Lecture at Division of Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought, The European Graduate School, 2014

Before beginning I would just like to remind you something which seems obvious, that is to say, that I will give my talk in English. But, as English is not my mother tongue, something relevant will certainly be lost. Why say that? What I would like to underline is that today general domination of English in conferences, universities and other places of that kind, should not be considered so innocent. The commonplace here is that English is used as a kind of lingua franca as Latin was used in europe in fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth century——the analogy is misleading, because Latin did not belong to any particular country was not spoken to by any particular country, while english, as you know, is proper let's say to a couple of nations. And I think we should reflect on that.

Now let's begin my talk.

The title of my talk echoes the title of a lecture that Gilles Deleuze gave in Paris in March 1987. If by chance you have seen the video which was taken that moment, you will remember that Deleuze defines the act of creation as an act of resistance. Resistance to death first of all but also resistance to the paradigm of information to which the power is exerted in those society that Deleuze called control society. Each act of creation according to Deleuze resists to something, so, for instance, Bach music is an act of resistance against the separation of the holy and the profane. As you see, Deleuze did not define what does resistance mean, and seems to give to the term the current meaning of the opposition to an external force or threat. The way in which I work is often an attempt to perceive what Feuerbach called the capability of development contained in the work of the authors I love. So, in this case I will try to develop this idea of an act of creation is an act of resistance. So I will try to interrogate what remain unsaid in Deleuze’s lecture. I must first say that I do not feel at ease concerning the usage of the term ‘creation’ referring to artistic practice. By the way, while I was investigating the genealogy of this term, I discover that a part of its responsibility belongs to the architects: when medieval theologians trying to explain the divine creation of the world, they had this example: they will say, as the house pre-exists in the mind of the architect, so God created the world looking to a model in his mind. So Thomas (Aquinas?) will write like this: Thomas distinguished clearly between the ‘creare ex nihilo’ or ‘to create starting from nothing’ which defines divine creation, and ‘facere de materia’ and ‘to make from matter’ that defines human productions. But as you see, the comparison between the activity of the architect and God's creation contains already the transposition of a theological paradigm to the activity of the artist. So I prefer to speak instead of an act of creation of a poetic act. And if in my talk I will continue to use the term 'creation' and it should be understood simply in the sense of the greek verb ‘poie’, produce.




The fact of explaining resistance only as an opposition to an external force does not seem sufficient, adequate to me, in order to comprehend, to understand what a poetic act is. I think and I’m convinced that as the potentiality which the act of creation allows, frees, must be internal to act, in the same way, also the resistance must be internal to the act of creation. Let me now say something about this concept of potentiality, as you know the concept of potentiality in western philosophy has a long history and starting from Aristotle’s has indeed a central position. As you know Aristotle opposes and links together at same time, potentiality ‘dynamis’ and actuality ‘energeia’, and this opposition has been transmitted as an heritage to western philosophy and also to western science. And it is true that this opposition of potentiality and actuality that Aristotle explains what we call poetic act, act of creation, which coincided for him mostly with the exercise of ‘tecknai’. So the example which he uses in order to explain the passage from potentiality into actuality are simply that the architect, the flute player, the sculptor, the grammarian etc . , in any case, each time that a certain technique is processed by certain man. But according to Aristotle, the man who has a potentiality can both exert it, realize it in the act, but also not to exert it. Potentiality, and this is the real genius thesis of Aristotle, is essentially defined in its possibility of not being exerted. So the architect has a potentiality because it can build but also cannot build. there were philosophers called Megarians that objected to Aristotle that a potentiality can only exist in act. But Aristotle answered, if this would be true, then an architect would be an architect only when builds, while we considered an architect or poet being a architect or poet also in the moment when they do not build or exert the potentiality.




So what defines the mode of being of potentiality is that it exists in the form of the mastery on a privation. So a potentiality, the man has the potentiality, must remain in relation to this potentiality also when it does not exert it. and Aristotle will push to the extreme these thesis and he will say, I quote him: “ Impotentiality is a privation contrary to potentiality. Each potentiality is impotentiality of the same and with respect to the same. So each potentiality of doing something is at the same time potentiality not to do something. So there is a kind of specific ambivalence in each human potentiality, which maintains potentiality in relation to its privation, and this relation defines, according to Aristotle, the essence of potentiality. So, Man, we could say, is the living being which exists in the mode of potentiality, that is to say, that he can its impotentiality. He possesses his potentiality in the mode of impotentiality. So he can do and be because he can remain in a relation which is not being and not doing.




So now if we remember that in the example that Aristotle gives for potentiality-impotentiality refers to essentially to technologies: music, grammar architecture, medicine etc., then we can say that man is the living being which exists essentially in the dimension of the potentiality, but also at the same time in the dimension of impotentiality. Each human potentiality is at the same time impotentiality. Each ability to do or to be is constitutively related to its own privation. And this is precisely the origin of the exorbitance of human potentiality. Human potentiality is so stronger than any animal potentiality because it can remain in relation with its own privation. Other animals, other living beings can only their specific potentiality, can this or that behavior which is described in their biological vocation. Men, on the contrary, is an animal who can its own impotentiality. And the greatness of his potentiality is measured by the abyss of his impotentiality.




Now after this philosophical digression let me go back to our interrogation of the act of creation. If we consider what we said, this means that the poetic act cannot be understood according to the an ordinary representation, as a simple transition from potentiality to actuality. The artist is not a man who has a potentiality to create that, at certain moment, we do not know how and the why, he will carry out into actuality. If any potentiality is constitutively impotentiality, potentiality-not-to, how can we understand the passage to the act? Let's say, if the pianist, if for the pianist, the realization of its potentialities to play is certainly the execution of the sonata on the piano, what happens to his potentiality not to play in the very moment in which he begins to play? how can a potentiality-not-to realize itself? I think that we can now understand in a better way perhaps, the relation between creation and resistance: in any poetic act there is something that resists to creation and counters expression. You know, the verb resist comes from the latin ‘sisto’ which means etymologically to arrest, to restrain something but also to stand still. This power that hinders and arrests potentiality in its movement towards the act is what Aristotle calls impotentiality: the power not to. Potentiality contains within itself an ambivalence: it is an ambiguous being which not only can both a thing and it's contrary, but contains in itself an intimate and irreducible resistance. Now, if this be true, we must look at the act of creation, the poetic act as a field of tensions stretching out between potency and impotency, to can and cannot, acting and resisting. Man can master his potentiality only through his impotentiality, but precisely for that reason there is not such a thing as a mastery on potentiality. This means that to be a poet means to be fully and helplessly delivered to one’s own impotentiality, this is a poet: A man who is completely abandoned to its impotentiality. So the highest potentiality is a potentiality that can both its potency and it's impotency. If every potentiality is potentiality to be to do or not to be to do, the transition to the act can take place only transferring into the act the potentiality-not-to: the resistance. This means that each pianist has the potentiality to play and the potentiality not to play, but Glenn Gould is only the pianist who cannot-not play. And turning his potentiality to his own impotentiality, can, so to say, his potentiality not to play. Contrary to the mere ability and to talent which can only play, thus the act, maestria and mastery keeps and exerts in the act the potentiality not to play. Let's now consider more tentatively the action of the resistance in a poetic art, what is this inner resistance in the poetic act. Similarly to Walter Benjamin calls the inexpressive , which breaks and interrupt in the work the pretension of the appearance to give itself to totality, in the same way, resistance acts as a critical power which holds back and restrains the blind drive of potentiality towards the act, and in this way it impedes that potentiality consumes itself and exhaust itself entirely in the work. If creation was only a potentiality to do something, potentiality which can only pass blindly into the act, then art would be reduced to an execution of an order or even a prescription which has dismissed and denied the resistance and the potentiality-not-to. So it would be really an inadequate conception of art : as something that must be necessarily passing to the act. So contrary to a common misunderstanding, the maestria is not a formal perfection, it is rather the ability to conserve impotency and potency in the act. It is the retention of an imperfection in the perfect form. This is like the Navacho woman who said that she would rather leave a little imperfection in the tissue she was weaving in order not to remain imprisoned in it. If she did not leave an imperfection in the tissue then there would have been no exit for her, and she will remain in prison, and the same is true for the artist and the maestro has to leave an imperfection.

So in the painting of the maestro and in the page of the great writer, the resistance of the potentiality-not-to, inscribes itself as an inner mannerism always present in every true artwork, every true masterwork. And it is precisely on these internal resistance that also critique can find its foundation. What an error of taste, the lack of taste, reveals is always a lack concerning the potentiality not to. An artist who lacks of taste is incapable to refrain from doing or adding something, so the lack of taste is always the impossibility of a refraining from doing an act, this spoils very often artworks.




So we can represent in this perspective the act of creation as a complicated dialectics between an impersonal element which precedes and overcomes the subject and the personal element which tenaciously resists to the first. The style of an artist does not depend only from the impersonal element, from his creative power, it depends also from what seems to resist to it and almost fight against it. This is the inner mannerism I mentioned before, that always marks the style of a great artist. A real artist, the style of great artists contains always an inner mannerism. A well-known example: an art historians knows that the old Tiziano completely changes his style. The late painting of the Titian are so different from what it used to be his style, that art historians say that Titian becomes Impressionists, if you are familiar with the later Titian paintings. If you like, for instance, the Annunciation in San Salvatore in Venice, there you will see that the color becomes a kind of confused magma, and the brush paint seems to strike and injure the canvas; and, that's very interesting, Titian used to sign his painting with the formula “Titian made it” but these late paintings for instance the Annunciation in San Salvador is signed “Titian made it, made it”: twice. meaning he made it and unmade it, exaggerated, there is an undoing. That is also true for the style of the old Goethe and also for Plato. Allready ancient commentators say that in the late dialogues Plato becomes completely artificial, full of a mannerism and repetitions. The old Goethe, according to some linguists did not write anymore in German etc etc., this is true for, always true. ... the late Shakespeare becomes mannerist.

But another and in my opinion even better example is the allegories of the creation in Kafka, where the great artist is defined by its absolute incapability concerning its own art. If you remember the marvelous short piece by Kafka and it's the confession of the great swimmer. I quote it: “I have, admittedly, broken a world record. But if, however, you were to ask me how I have achieved this, I could not answer adequately. Actually, I cannot even swim. I have always wanted to learn, but have never had the opportunity”. And then another instance of the same thing famous story of Josephine the Songstress of The Mouse Folk, who does not know how to sing and can only whistle like any mouse can do but even not so good as the other mouse. But precisely, Kalka wrote, precisely for this inability she, I quote, “can produce effects that no other singer would ever realize and that only her inadequate means can achieve” . I think that nowhere as in this two figures, the usual representation of the artist has been so radically called into question. Josephine sings with her impotentiality of singing, like the great swimmer swims with his incapability to swim. The fact is that the potentiality-not-to is not simply another potentiality besides the potentiality to do. It is what I will call its inoperativity. That is to say something that results from the deactivation of the usual conception, the usual relation between potentiality and actuality. I mean that there is an inner link between the potentiality-not-to and what I will call inoperability. Like Josephine, through her inability to sing, makes inoperative and exhibits, so to say, the whistle each single mouse can do, in the same way potentiality-not-to suspending and deactivating potentiality-to, shows it as such, exposes it as such. So the right way how to represent the relation between potentiality and impotentiality, we must not think that there is a potentiality-not-to which precede the potentiality-to ( for instance the potentiality-not-to sing which precedes the potentiality-to sing), and that must therefore abolish itself so that the potentiality can realize itself into the act. The potentiality-not-to is a resistance internal to potentiality which impedes it's exhaustion in the act and oblige potentiality to turn towards itself and to become, so to say a potentiae potentiae: a potentiality which can its own impotency. Let me do an example: the work of Velasquez Las Meninas, which results from this suspension of potentiality, does not represent and expose only its subjects its objects. It presents itself at the same time, and in the same gesture the potentiality through which the painting came into being. Great poetry does not simply says what is saying but also says the fact that it is saying it: the potentiality and the impotentiality of saying.

Painting is the suspension and the exposition of the potentiality of the sight, exactly like poetry is the suspension and exposition of language. And I think this is the only possible meaning of expressions such as: poetry-of-poetry or painting-of-painting. Poetry is suspended and exposed in the poem like painting is suspended and exposed in the painting. I am aware that terms such as: suspension, inoperativity, deactivation, continuously punctuate my lecture, and therefore it is perhaps time for me to try to define something as a-poetics-of-inoperativity . In order to do that let me just quote again an extraordinary passage from Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, where the philosopher is reflecting on the problem of what is the work of man, what is the Ergo, the work of man. I go to this extraordinary passage : “as for the flute player for the sculptor for every artisian and more generally for all those who have a work, an ergo and the praxis, it should be in the same way also for men as such, if there is for men as such a thing as a work. Or should we rather say that for the carpenter and for the shoemaker there is a work, but for men as such there is none, because he was born Argos: without a precise work. So man he is born without a proper work, man as such”. This very interesting hypotheses of the kind of the constitutive worklessness of men as such, absence of a work for man as such, is so disturbing that Aristotle immediately abandoned the question. So he will not continue to take seriously this question. Let me try on the contrary to take it to take this hypothesis seriously and attempt to take man as a being without any possible work. A being that no proper work can pretend to define. By the way these hypotheses is not scandalous and does not cease to appear in the history of Western culture. We will just quote two example to appreciate the reappearances of this worklessness of man in 20th century.




There are two little books and just two little books. the first one is the extraordinary little book by the Dutch anatomist Ludvig Bulk, the title is the the problem of mentioned: Becoming Human of Men as of in Anthropogenesis. According to Bulk, it's very interesting, men does not derive from adult primate but from the baby phase of a primate, a primate who had not acquired the capability of reproducing themselves. So man is a baby of monkey who has constituted himself in an autonomous species. He proved that anatomy of men which is a similar not to the anatomy of an adult monkey but is similar to the anatomy of the baby of the monkey. But then this futility of men explains the peculiar effect that compared as you know with other animals men remain forever in a potential condition so that we can adapt themselves to all environment to all of our limitation to all formal activity but no one of these activities can define him. So you know so men is a potential being which lacks any biological predetermined location. The second case comes from a history of art, it is an extraordinary little booklet by Kazimir Malevich, the title is Inoperativity as the Real Truth of the Man. Against the tradition which says man's realization only in work, Malevich states clearly that in Inoperativity is the highest form of humanity. And then what in his painting responds to this highest form of humanity is the use of the blank, the white, all white paintings: the last stage of Suprematism in painting. So it is an example of the poetics of Inoperativity at work.




I think that we can now better understand the essential function, the traditional role that western philosophy always assigned to theory and contemplation and Inoperativity. The true human praxes is a praxes which by making inoperative all the works and functions of living being opens then to a new possible usage. Contemplation and Inoperativity (but Inoperativity does not mean do nothing, quite the contrary) are in this perspective the metaphysic agent operators of anthropogenesis: of the becoming human of man, which frees men by any biological or social destiny or vocation, opens him to those peculiar form of worklessness that we are accustomed to name politics and art.




I hope that what I meant when I spoke of poetics of inoperativity is now perhaps better understandable. And perhaps the most appropriate paradigm for this operation, this activity which consists in making inoperative all human work, is poetry itself. Because what is poetry if not an operation in language and on language that deactivates and renders inoperative the usual communication and information functions of language, in order to open it to a new possible use? I mean that Divine Comedy and Cavalcanti’s poems are the contemplation of Italian language. ( ? ) troubadour are the contemplation of provençal language. Rimbaud’s Illuminations are the contemplation of the French language. Holderlin Hymn are the contemplation of German. Hopkins or John Donne's poem are the contemplation of the English language. And what poetry accomplishes for the potentiality of speaking, politics and philosophy must achieve for the potentiality to act: by making inoperative all economical, religious and social whatever works, they show what the human body can and open it to new possible usage.