On the poet and the philosopher – Adam Kirsch in NYRB:

‘In 2004 the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben was scheduled to spend the spring semester as a visiting professor at NYU. On January 5 of that year, however, the Department of Homeland Security launched a new program to collect fingerprints from foreign visitors. Though EU citizens were exempted, three days later Agamben announced that “personally, I have no intention of submitting myself to such procedures,” and he refused to come to the US. In a statement first published in La Repubblica, he warned that collecting fingerprints marked a new “threshold in the control and manipulation of bodies”—what Michel Foucault had named “biopolitics.” Agamben described fingerprint collection as a perfect example of this tyranny over bodies and called it “biopolitical tattooing,” analogous to the tattooing of numbers on prisoners’ arms at Auschwitz.
Born in Rome in 1942, Agamben began his career in the 1970s and 1980s as what Adam Kotsko, who has translated many of his books into English, calls “a hermetic aesthetic thinker” mainly interested in problems of language.’

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‘“Why were there no protests and opposition, as is usually the case in these situations?” he asked in March 2020 in a short text titled “Reflections on the Plague.” The reason was that “people no longer believe in anything other than a bare biological existence”; to save their skins, they were ready to turn themselves into the very “bare life” that Agamben had long seen as the ultimate degradation. He warned that, having renounced its freedoms in the name of safety, the Western public would find it difficult to reclaim them: “The fear of losing one’s life can only serve as the foundation of tyranny, of the monstrous Leviathan with his unsheathed sword.”’

(…)

‘Indeed, when conspiracy theorists claimed that Covid vaccines were merely a cover for Bill Gates to inject Americans with tracking devices, they were telling a folk version of the same story Agamben had told about fingerprinting being a kind of “biopolitical tattooing.” In both cases, of course, his dire prophecies proved false. Covid restrictions disappeared along with Covid; Italians are no less free in 2025 than they were in 2019. And Americans have yet to be issued Auschwitz-style tattoos.’

(…)

‘This poetic understanding of the philosopher’s calling is one of Agamben’s legacies from Martin Heidegger. Self-Portrait is structured as a series of meditations on objects in his writing studio—photographs, books, artworks—and the first is a photo of the young Agamben with the aged Heidegger in 1966, at one of his famous late seminars in Le Thor in Provence. Agamben remembers this as a transformative experience: “In life there are events and meetings that are so decisive that it is impossible for them to enter into reality completely…. These meetings never cease to accompany us until the end.”’

(…)

‘One might have thought that a citizen of Europe in 2003 was a great deal safer from state violence than one in 1943, when World War II was raging and Auschwitz was operating at peak capacity. But as we have seen, this kind of merely empirical consideration has never carried much weight with Agamben. The absence of actual death camps does not impair his conviction that “the camp…is the hidden matrix of the politics in which we are still living.”’

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‘To illuminate this modern plight, Agamben turns to the term homo sacer, which is drawn from Roman jurisprudence. While it could be literally translated as “holy man,” the homo sacer was actually an outlaw, someone who had been placed outside the protection of the legal system and so could be killed by anyone without punishment. In Agamben’s repeated formula, “life that cannot be sacrificed and yet may be killed is sacred life.” The homo sacer is thus deeply paradoxical: he cannot be sacrificed to the gods in an act of official violence, because in a sense he already belongs to the gods, being sacred. Yet removing him from the human realm renders him defenseless against unofficial violence.’

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‘In Christian iconography the empty throne is an emblem of divine majesty, but for Agamben it serves as a metaphor for the radical subversion of power—not just the power of this or that state or ruler but power itself. In its place, Agamben exalts an ideal he calls “inoperativity,” which “does not mean inertia or inactivity…but a form of action that implies neither suffering nor effort.” If government means controlling human beings in order to accomplish certain goals, then liberation requires freeing ourselves from the very notions of goal and accomplishment.’

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‘“Urination is entirely homogeneous with thought,” Agamben insists, and “plants are…a form of life in every way superior to ours.” It is difficult to say what a political order built on the model of autism and urination would look like in concrete terms. But Agamben concludes The Use of Bodies by insisting that, whatever his readers and commentators may have thought, the Homo Sacer project “did not propose to critique or correct this or that concept, this or that institution of Western politics.” Rather, his goal was “to call into question the place and the very originary structure of politics.” Another way of putting it is that Agamben challenges the definition of human beings as political animals, which has been at the foundation of Western thought since Aristotle. Perhaps that is what we have always been in practice, he suggests, but it is not our essence, and since living politically has led to world wars, the Holocaust, and a perpetual “state of exception,” we must begin to look for other, more essential ways to live.’

(…)

‘After tracing the fatal flaw of Western metaphysics from Plato to the twentieth century, Heidegger came to the conclusion that the only way to escape it was to embrace a new ethic of Gelassenheit, “letting go” (or “releasement,” as it is often translated). Agamben’s late work, too, celebrates a kind of passivity as an antidote to the West’s addiction to assertion and domination.
Heidegger took the term Gelassenheit from the Christian mysticism of Meister Eckhart, just as Agamben draws inspiration from Christian theology and monasticism.’

(…)

‘ In Agamben’s case, it seems wise to take him at his word in Self-Portrait in the Studio: “I became a philosopher in order to deal with a poetic aporia that I could not get to the bottom of. In this sense, I am perhaps not a philosopher but a poet.”’

Read the article here.

Traces of Gelassenheit can be found not only in Christian mysticism, but also in Buddhism, Taoism, stoicism, et cetera.

How much Gelasssenheit do we need?

Anytime, I encounter an activist I tend to fall in love with the concept of Gelassenheit, but in an old-age-home I tend to find activism sexy.

Also, the question is, what is an essential way to live?

Urinating is extremely important indeed. And I’m willing to embrace the position – I urinate, therefore I am – but as a beginning not as an end.

There should be more to life than urinating, but I’m open to the possibility that we should appreciate urinating more.