The Man Without Content by Giorgio Agamben

Author:Giorgio Agamben [Agamben, Giorgio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2009-02-21T17:14:00+00:00

The rise of the poetics of the open work and of the work-inprogress, founded not on an energetic but on a dynamic status of the work of art, signifies precisely this extreme moment of the exile of the work of art from its essence, the moment in which-having become pure potentiality, mere being-available in itself and for itself-it consciously takes on its own inability to possess itself in its end. "Open work" means: work that does not possess itself in its own ei os as in its end, work that is never at work, that is (if it is true that work is ~vepyeta), nonwork, Svvaµt;, availability, and potentiality.

Precisely because it is in the mode of availability for .... because it plays more or less consciously on the aesthetic status of the work of art as mere availability for aesthetic enjoyment, the open work constitutes not a surpassing of aesthetics but only one of the forms of its fulfillment, and points beyond aesthetics only negatively.

In the same way, the "ready-made" and pop art play on the double status of the productive activity of the man of our time, perverting it; thus, they are also in the mode of Svvapt;, and of a Svvagi; that can never possess itself in its end. Yet precisely because they escape both the aesthetic enjoyment of the work of art and the consumption of the technical product, they actualize at least for an instant a suspension of these two statuses, push the consciousness of laceration much further than does the open work, and present themselves as a true availability-toward-nothingness. Since they properly belong neither to artistic activity nor to technical production, nothing in them really comes into being; likewise, one can say that since they offer themselves neither for aesthetic enjoyment nor for consumption, in their case availability and potentiality are turned toward nothingness, and in this way they are able to possess-themselves-in-their-end.

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