Containing Community by Bird Greg;

Author:Bird, Greg;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2016-07-09T16:00:00+00:00

V. Whatever

Two of Agamben’s most prominent critics in Italy are Negri and Esposito. In Bíos, Esposito argues that Agamben’s reading of biopolitics is too negative. He has also noted in “Dialogue on the Philosophy to Come” that although Agamben’s “politics of ‘pure means’ … is a suggestive formula,” it remains “very indeterminate” (2010, 84). Negri has been less restrained. He has likened Agamben’s notion of “bare life” to a “‘utopian escape’” (cited in Salzani, 2012, 228). In Empire, he and Hardt criticize the Bartlebian model of the refusal on the grounds that it merely indicates the “beginning of a liberatory politics.” An “empty” and “solitary” refusal, they contend, “leads only to a kind of social suicide.” What is really called for is a constitution of “a new mode of life and above all a new community” (2000, 204). Put in more traditional Marxist terms, the politics of refusal merely represents an initial phase of revolutionary action. At best, it represents the development of a private economic consciousness, not class-consciousness and certainly not a revolutionary consciousness that will give rise to revolutionary reappropriation. One might go even further and question the conditions of liberation in Agamben’s formula. How can the so-called “lumpen proletariats” of our time, those that are completely abandoned, hold any transferable political currency, especially when they are forbidden from using traditional political means for their cause? But this would be a step too far.

In the last part of this chapter I turn to Agamben’s more recent efforts to address these concerns, but for now it is necessary to end my examination of this book by turning to what is arguably the most contentious concept: “whatever” (qualunque). The first sentence of this work reads, “The coming being is whatever being” (L’essere che viene è l’essere qualunque) (CV, 9; CC, 1). Agamben uses this term to disrupt presuppositional language, the dualism of universality and particularity, and the operative logic that is employed in the generic potentiality that requires actualization. “Whatever” even provides a passageway beyond the duality of the common (genus or nature) and the proper. “Common and proper, genus and individual,” he pronounces, “are only the two slopes dropping down from either side of the watershed of the whatever” (CV, 21; CC, 20).

To the English ear, it is hard to read this term without thinking about young adolescents whose very ethos is defined by their lack of concern or indifference to the world, “Whatever, I don’t care” or “it doesn’t matter to me.” The implication is that they are willing to let things pass through them without latching onto them. Their orientation to the world, much to the consternation of older generations, is noncategorical. They are, in other words, without presuppositions or judgments. Agamben is critical of this commonplace notion of the whatever, which we find when put in terms such as “‘it is not important which, indifferently’” (“‘non importa quale, indifferentemente’”) (modified, CV, 9; CC, 1). If we trace the term back to its origin in Latin, he

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