Means Without End: Notes on Politics (Theory Out Of Bounds)

This collection of occasional pieces from the nineteen-nineties can seem slight and derivative by comparison to Agamben's major works of the same decade, coming on the heels of Homo sacer, The Coming Community, The Man Without Content, and The Remaining Time. Means without ends is supercilious about dance, and shows unexpected pietism in the hope for rights "Beyond Human Rights": how meaningful are rights without the conjunction of law and enforcement, i.e. something resembling the state? And there's a puzzling reference to "Beckett's Traum und Nacht" (p. 55). But Means without ends also contains some pearls close to the persistent heart of Giorgio Agamben's uniquely disquieting train of thought: how is it possible to think politics today, in the wake of the Holocaust on the one hand, imposing the heritage of extermination camps that incorporate the state of exception as the essential model of state sovereignty? Agamben's bracing paradoxicalization of politics remains incisively challenging in the "Marginal Notes" on Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, in the dialogue on "The Face" (whose unidentified interlocutor is presumably Emmanuel Levinas), and in the deeply personal reflections on contemporary politics, especially in Italy. Curiously, the initial words of a passage repeated word-for-word on pages 81 & 95 suggests the absent totalization, and perhaps the subtitle of a major new Agamben in the offing: "an integrated Marxian analysis..."