Agamben’s Cat-and-Mouse Game
Jenny Doussan, Time, Language, and Visuality in Agamben’s Philosophy
Palgrave Macmillan, 248pp, £55.00, ISBN 9781137286253
reviewed by Alex Fletcher
To borrow Foucault’s quip that this century would become known as ‘Deleuzian’, one could argue that the last few years – or decade, perhaps – would in fact be better titled Agambanien. Both celebrated and reviled, Giorgio Agamben’s prominence in contemporary philosophy and political theory cannot be denied. Although often (uncritically) cited in fields such as aesthetics, art theory/history, and visual culture, there is little sustained critical engagement with the philosopher’s work and its implications for such studies. For that reason, it is the word ‘visual’ in the title to this work that will most likely draw readers to it.
As is evident from the title of Jenny Doussan’s critical account of Agamben’s philosophy, it is through the concepts of time, language and visuality that his corpus is approached. Doussan deploys these three framing terms in order to uncover and grasp a grammar behind Agamben’s often highly variable and, as she contends, ‘discrepant’ usage of philosophical terminology.
These three terms circle around the central philosophical problem for Agamben: the problem of (or with) metaphysics and how to escape it. Doussan attentively traces this problem via Agamben’s usage of the protean term ‘taking place’ [aver luogo] in its various manifestations in order to glean a shifting structure at work in the philosopher’s texts. This structure derives from Agamben’s appropriation of the semiotics of the linguist Benveniste, establishing the problem of metaphysics as one of language and its taking place. This taking place is based on the division between semiotic and semantic, a scission Doussan shows to be at work throughout Agamben’s texts; for instance, its shift in Remnants of Auschwitz to the lacuna of testimony.
This meta-linguistic scission of the taking place also grounds the theme of ‘liminality’ – all-pervasive in Agamben’s work - which assumes a number of forms; appearing at times to be emancipatory or annihlatory. Sovereignty, for Agamben, prevents this ‘undecidable threshold’ from coming to light, congealing rule and exception into a fixed relation. Agamben’s notorious thesis concerning ‘the state of exception’ is the spatio-temporal production of this undecidablity.
Doussan sees in Agamben’s later philosophical enquiries an attempt to shift or displace this binary problematic, not by dwelling in its in-between space, but by taking a step to the side it. As Doussan shows, this move is ‘signalled by his increasing use of the prefix para- (literally beside), which:
Agamben’s efforts to establish, what Doussan describes as a para-ontology, however, turn into, according to Doussan, a ‘great cat-and-mouse game that he both plays and in which he is ensnared’. Although Agamben labours to critique deconstruction’s ‘infinite deferral’, Doussan demonstrates Agamben’s work to be ‘little different’. Like a cat playing with a mouse, Agamben’s linguistic structures are stuck in a mechanistic repetition of capture and release.
The concept of visuality – the term in the title I found most intriguing – is by far the least discussed, compared with the detailed analyses of language and time. This seems to because, similarly to the later terms, Agamben simply reiterates the same move with visuality, attempting to emancipate it from the capture of representation. As Doussan is quick to point out,
There is an unexpected and critical shift towards the end of the book. Doussan’s determinately subtle and critical close reading of Agamben’s shifting terminological and linguistic games reaches fever pitch, so to speak. Doussan can no longer follow Agamben’s insistence on the singularity of his paradigms and semantic structures, stating that his ‘method works more like deduction’, subsuming ‘so many historical phenomena … and so many disparate philosophical traditions.’ For Doussan, Agamben’s paradigms appear before their examples and their phenomena, not beside; Agamben’s models are deductive not analogical.
Doussan asks the meaning of conflating vision with language, ‘of projecting the linguistic structure of the temporality of enunciation onto all human sensibility and culture.’ As she acerbically remarks,
As Doussan states in the Preface, this is not a critical introduction whose purpose is to unify Agamben’s work positively under explicitly deployed concepts such as ‘potentiality’. Instead, Doussan’s focus on the implicit threads of temporal, linguistic and visual themes render this book both challenging and worthwhile for readers who want to critically engage with Agamben’s project, and ask how to begin to relate it to fields such as visual culture. It also provides more than enough ammunition for those revilers of Agambenian times who have not had the patience to perform Doussan’s scholarship in order to pull apart the seams stitching together Agamben’s inconsistencies, and the traps he sets for us to be ensnared in. It is only by working through Agamben’s corpus, that one can knowingly state, as Doussan does: ‘The only way to win the cat-and-mouse game is never to play.’
As is evident from the title of Jenny Doussan’s critical account of Agamben’s philosophy, it is through the concepts of time, language and visuality that his corpus is approached. Doussan deploys these three framing terms in order to uncover and grasp a grammar behind Agamben’s often highly variable and, as she contends, ‘discrepant’ usage of philosophical terminology.
These three terms circle around the central philosophical problem for Agamben: the problem of (or with) metaphysics and how to escape it. Doussan attentively traces this problem via Agamben’s usage of the protean term ‘taking place’ [aver luogo] in its various manifestations in order to glean a shifting structure at work in the philosopher’s texts. This structure derives from Agamben’s appropriation of the semiotics of the linguist Benveniste, establishing the problem of metaphysics as one of language and its taking place. This taking place is based on the division between semiotic and semantic, a scission Doussan shows to be at work throughout Agamben’s texts; for instance, its shift in Remnants of Auschwitz to the lacuna of testimony.
This meta-linguistic scission of the taking place also grounds the theme of ‘liminality’ – all-pervasive in Agamben’s work - which assumes a number of forms; appearing at times to be emancipatory or annihlatory. Sovereignty, for Agamben, prevents this ‘undecidable threshold’ from coming to light, congealing rule and exception into a fixed relation. Agamben’s notorious thesis concerning ‘the state of exception’ is the spatio-temporal production of this undecidablity.
Doussan sees in Agamben’s later philosophical enquiries an attempt to shift or displace this binary problematic, not by dwelling in its in-between space, but by taking a step to the side it. As Doussan shows, this move is ‘signalled by his increasing use of the prefix para- (literally beside), which:
para-, the space in which the phenomenon is suspended and becomes visible as a paradigm, a beside being.
…introduces the prospect of moving beyond the meta- by locating a position beside it in the
Agamben’s efforts to establish, what Doussan describes as a para-ontology, however, turn into, according to Doussan, a ‘great cat-and-mouse game that he both plays and in which he is ensnared’. Although Agamben labours to critique deconstruction’s ‘infinite deferral’, Doussan demonstrates Agamben’s work to be ‘little different’. Like a cat playing with a mouse, Agamben’s linguistic structures are stuck in a mechanistic repetition of capture and release.
The concept of visuality – the term in the title I found most intriguing – is by far the least discussed, compared with the detailed analyses of language and time. This seems to because, similarly to the later terms, Agamben simply reiterates the same move with visuality, attempting to emancipate it from the capture of representation. As Doussan is quick to point out,
[d]espite his inversion of presupposition into exhibition, the visual never leaves the linguistic register with which it is conflated. Visibility is but another face of the same ontological construct that is bound by the temporality of enunciation.
There is an unexpected and critical shift towards the end of the book. Doussan’s determinately subtle and critical close reading of Agamben’s shifting terminological and linguistic games reaches fever pitch, so to speak. Doussan can no longer follow Agamben’s insistence on the singularity of his paradigms and semantic structures, stating that his ‘method works more like deduction’, subsuming ‘so many historical phenomena … and so many disparate philosophical traditions.’ For Doussan, Agamben’s paradigms appear before their examples and their phenomena, not beside; Agamben’s models are deductive not analogical.
Doussan asks the meaning of conflating vision with language, ‘of projecting the linguistic structure of the temporality of enunciation onto all human sensibility and culture.’ As she acerbically remarks,
Irrespective of the validity of these rules for speech or the taking place of language, their force does not hold for either vision or cognition in general.
As Doussan states in the Preface, this is not a critical introduction whose purpose is to unify Agamben’s work positively under explicitly deployed concepts such as ‘potentiality’. Instead, Doussan’s focus on the implicit threads of temporal, linguistic and visual themes render this book both challenging and worthwhile for readers who want to critically engage with Agamben’s project, and ask how to begin to relate it to fields such as visual culture. It also provides more than enough ammunition for those revilers of Agambenian times who have not had the patience to perform Doussan’s scholarship in order to pull apart the seams stitching together Agamben’s inconsistencies, and the traps he sets for us to be ensnared in. It is only by working through Agamben’s corpus, that one can knowingly state, as Doussan does: ‘The only way to win the cat-and-mouse game is never to play.’