On Agamben's Literary View

In recent years,Agamben has a prominent fame in the academia as a representative of the contemporary Western radical left-wing thinkers,who keeps pace with ?i?ek ? Rancière ?Badiou and others.However,it is regrettable that the academic research and acceptance of Agamben concentrates on the category of political philosophy.Little do they know,Agamben's attention was aesthetic and artistic issues when he entered the academic field in the beginning.Not only that,Agamben never give up thinking about literary aesthetics.His views on “potentiality”?“profanation” and “gesture” are in response to the bio-political dilemma,and also closely related to literary aesthetics.Therefore,the purpose of this paper is to analyze two problems by combing and elucidating related texts,which includes the serious situation of the literary in the biopolitical age and how to deal with the dilemma.On this basis,the article further reveals the profound and weak points of Agamben's literary view.The article is divided into four chapters:The first chapter outlines the framework of Agamben's biopolitical theory.Foucault's biopolitical thought opened up a new approach to political philosophy in his later years.Foucault believed that biopolitics had the negative force of oppression and the positive power of production.Agamben critically accepted and developed Foucault's argument,he had more emphasis on the violence of power.Generally,Agamben's biopolitical theory mainly includes two core clues: Homo Sacer and State of Exception.The life of Homo Sacer is bare life,and his life can be deprived without breaking the law.It takes form of a double exception,both from the sphere of the profane and from that of the religious.State of Exception produces homo sacer all the time,and bare life is actually life forms in State of Exception.With the normalization of State of Exception,the political system of the nation-state is seriously challenged,concentration camp becomes the new judicial-political structure in modern society,its result is that everyone is potential homo sacer.The second chapter focuses on the dilemma of the literary in the modern society.Agamben points out that initial causes mainly include three aspects: firstly,as well as artistic creation overemphasizes subjectivity,aestheticization of aesthetic judgment leads to artistic nihility.Art will not ends,but it will be in the twilight;secondly,in modern society,theexistence of technology and art are servely divided.As a result,art is invaded and deconstructed by technology.Art can no longer opens the authenticity of existence,which manifests itself as the crisis of “poetry(poiesis)”;thirdly,under the segmentation and administration of power,art has been alienated.Art commercializes dramatically,associating with power as apparatus to capture life.The third chapter illuminates Agamben's literary potential view,answering the second questions of the article——what is the function of the literary in the face of the dilemma of biopolitics?This chapter focuses on two aspects: firstly,it analyzes the potential theory of Agamben.Agamben's pure potentiality is distinct from Aristotle's potential theory.Pure potentiality is also called the “adynamia”,which is the ability of not converting into acting;secondly,it discusses the potentiality of art,which mainly includes three aspects: above all,the play(/art)can break apparatus as the profane activity,the profane play(/art)must be regarded as the gesture of art with mediality,which is able to open new use of the play(/art);afterwards,Rhythm is the original characteristic of works of art.The heterogeneity of irreducible space is inserted in time by rhythm,and it is the original area of art.Restoring rhythm is restoring the original structure of art;at last but not least,inactivity is essential form of adynamia,and art plays political roles in the inactive way.The art of inactivity is the art of interrupting human habitual thinking and meditating on the thought itself.Art maintains inactivity further,the more political it is.The fourth chapter analyzes the image problem in Agamben's literary view.He accepted the views of Benjamin and Warburg,believing that image is essentially nymph.Image is frozen into a ghost but still does not die thoroughly,awakening the energy of image must relies on subjectivity.Meanwhile,subject is reshaped in the encounter with image,thus contributing to becoming of new subject.Subject and image are not binary opposite,but are produced by each other.Paradoxically,image immediately exposes its dangerous tendency:image needs to be produced by subject,and then it tries to break away from subject into spectacle.At this point,Agamben continued the critical path of Debord,disclosing the society of the spectacle from four aspects: the worldwide spectacle ? the physical spectacle ? the linguistic spectacle and the class spectacle.Agamben also gives the turning point whenpushing the issue to the ultimate limit.In Agamben's view,image contains gesture.The gesture is the exhibition of mediality,which allows us to escape from administration of the society of the spectacle.