reviews books
Profanations
by Giorgio Agamben
Translated by Jeff Fort, Zone books, £16.95 / $25.95 (hardcover)
If Giorgio Agamben remains best known (or at
least most often cited) for Homo sacer, his 1995
study of the legal and biopolitical structure of
the Nazi death camps, it is perhaps because the
rest of the Italian philosopher’s capacious oeuvre
remains somewhat unclassifiable, even at times What ghosts these apparently nugatory
maddeningly gnomic and self-enclosed. Despite pronouncements is a larger project of reanimating
a familiar range of reference in his many writings the secret machinery behind concepts that seem
on literature, politics, art and daily life – from his outdated or familiar to the point of banality in
early mentors Heidegger and Pasolini, through contemporary culture. Parody, for example, is
Benjamin, Deleuze and Foucault to the films revealed, by some devious etymological footwork,
of Guy Debord and the logic of contemporary to have been the founding principle of Western
pornography – Agamben’s work remains hard aesthetics: the classical name for the separation
to divert to the hurried requirements of cultural of prose from song. The idea of the author (via
theory and, especially, art criticism, despite the a reflection on Foucault’s 1969 lecture ‘What Is
inclusion of his concept of ‘bare life’ as a guiding an Author?’) becomes neither the Romantic
rubric for Documenta 12. phantom behind a work of art nor a myth to be
Profanations, a svelte selection of recent polemically trashed, but ‘the point at which a life
essays on aesthetics, cinema, capitalism and is offered up and played out in the work’. Familiar
metaphysics, does little to suggest he has tailored images, too, such as early photographs and the
his thought to current curatorial interests. It’s all films of Orson Welles, fracture on close analysis
the more essential for that obtuseness. A good into pictures of a ‘sublime breach between the
part of the obliquity of Agamben’s writing resides sensible and the intelligible’.
in his style, which verges here on the aphoristic, It’s in the final, longest essay, ‘In Praise
if not wholly oracular. In an essay on the ideas of Profanation’, however, that the full reach of
of magic and happiness (he has never been shy Agamben’s thinking on contemporary aesthetics
of treating vast themes in tiny texts) he avers becomes clear. The realm of the profane, he
that ‘whatever we can achieve through merit argues, is explicitly not that of the secular,
and effort, cannot make us truly happy’. Rather, which merely inverts the concept of the sacred
happiness is precisely a kind of magic: a spell that inherited from Christianity and replaces the
short-circuits strenuous efforts at fulfilment. In sacerdotal handling of objects with their capitalist
‘Desiring’, Agamben notes that ‘we are unable to apotheosis: the commodity. The future task of
put our desires into language because we have politics (Agamben is fond of these messianic
imagined them’: this split between image and calls-to-arms) is to profane the unprofanable:
language is exactly what contemporary art, and all those aspects of material, visual and textual
the words that surround it, would have us avoid. culture that seem to have disturbed traditional
moral, bodily and aesthetic regimes but are in
reality thoroughly corralled by power, including
that of the museum. In the last analysis, he insists
a little alarmingly, we will have to find new and
Edited by Gilda Williams
revolutionary uses even for our own faeces.
MIT Press, $22.95 (paperback)
Brian Dillon
Nov_books_.indd 207 26/9/07 12:46:48
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