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THE MAN WITHOUT CONTENT

Giorgio Agamben

The Man Without Content was originally published in Italian in 1994 under the title L'uomo

To Giovanni Urbani as a token of friendship and gratitude

Contents

Translator's Note xi

§ 1 The Most Uncanny Thing 1

§ 2 Frenhofer and His Double 8

§ 3 The Man of Taste and the Dialectic

of the Split 13

§ 4 The Cabinet of Wonder 28

§ 5 "Les jugements sur la poésie ont plus

de valeur que la poésie" 40

§ 6 A SelfAnnihilating Nothing 52

§ 7 Privation Is Like a Face 59

§ 8 Poiesis and Praxis 68

§ 9 The Original Structure of the Work of Art 94

§ 10 The Melancholy Angel 104

Notes 119

Translator's Note

The Man Without Content engages in a dialogue with a large number of literary and

especially philosophical figures, from Plato to Walter Benjamin. With the exception of the

Greek and French sources, Agamben quotes in Italian translation, frequently his own. In

the instances in which I have located English translations for the passages quoted, I have

routinely modified them to follow more closely the wording of Agamben's Italian

translations. In cases where no published translation is cited, the translations are mine.

Thanks to Thomas Albrecht, David Arndt, Jennifer Bajorek, E. S. Burt, Erin Ferris, Kevin

Newmark, Richard Regosin, and Elizabeth Rottenberg for help with sources, and to Nancy

Young for her excellent editing.

THE MAN WITHOUT CONTENT

§I The Most Uncanny Thing

In the third essay of the Genealogy of Morals , Nietzsche subjects the Kantian definition of

the beautiful as disinterested pleasure to a radical critique:

Kant thought he was honoring art when among the predicates of beauty he emphasized

and gave prominence to those which established the honor of knowledge: impersonality

and universality. This is not the place to inquire whether this was essentially a mistake; all

I wish to underline is that Kant, like all philosophers, instead of envisaging the aesthetic

problem from the point of view of the artist (the creator), considered art and the beautiful

purely from that of the "spectator," and unconsciously introduced the "spectator" into the

concept "beautiful." It would not have been so bad if this "spectator" had at least been

sufficiently familiar to the philosophers of beautynamely, as a great personal fact and

experience, as an abundance of vivid authentic experiences, desires, surprises, and

delights in the realm of the beautiful! But I fear that the reverse has always been the case;

and so they have offered us, from the beginning, definitions in which, as in Kant's famous

definition of the beautiful, a lack of any refined firsthand experience reposes in the shape

of a fat worm of error. "That is beautiful," said Kant, "which gives us pleasure without

interest ." Without interest! Compare with this definition one framed by a genuine

"spectator" and artistStendhal, who once called the beautiful une promesse de bonheur .

At any rate he rejected and repudiated the one point about the aesthetic condition which

Kant had stressed: le désinteressement . Who is right, Kant or Stendhal?

If our aestheticians never weary of asserting in Kant's favor that, under the spell of

beauty, one can even view undraped female statues "without interest," one may laugh a

little at their expense: the experiences of artists on this ticklish point are more

"interesting," and Pygmalion was in any event not necessarily an "unaesthetic man." 1

The experience of art that is described in these words is in no way an aesthetics for

Nietzsche. On the contrary: the point is precisely to purify the concept of "beauty" by

filtering out the α ἴ σθησις, the sensory involvement of the spectator, and thus to consider

art from the point of view of its creator. This purification takes place as a reversal of the

traditional perspective on the work of art: the aesthetic dimensionthe sensible

apprehension of the beautiful object on the part of the spectatoris replaced by the

creative experience of the artist who sees in his work only une promesse de bonheur , a

promise of happiness. Having reached the furthest limit of its destiny in the "hour of the

shortest shadow," art leaves behind the neutral horizon of the aesthetic and recognizes

itself in the "golden ball" of the will to power. Pygmalion, the sculptor who becomes so

enamored of his creation as to wish that it belonged no longer to art but to life, is the

symbol of this turn from the idea of disinterested beauty as a denominator of art to the

idea of happiness, that is, of an unlimited growth and strengthening of the vital values,

while the focal point of the reflection on art moves from the disinterested spectator to the

interested artist.

In foreseeing this change, Nietzsche was a good prophet as usual. If one compares what

he writes in the third essay of the Genealogy of Morals with the terms Antonin Artaud uses

in the preface to Theater and Its Double to describe the agony of Western culture, one

notices, precisely on this point, a surprising agreement in their views. "It is our occidental

idea of art that has caused us to lose culture. . . . To our inert and disinterested idea of art

an authentic culture opposes a violently egoistic and magical, i.e., interested idea.'' 2 In a

sense, the idea that art is not a disinterested experience was perfectly familiar in other

eras. When Artaud, in "Theater and Plague," Plague," remembers the decree issued by

Scipio Nasica, the grand pontiff who had the Roman theaters razed, and the fury with

which Saint Augustine attacks the "scenic games," responsible for the death of the soul,

one can hear in his words the nostalgia that a soul such as his, who thought that theater

drew its only worth "from an excruciating magical relation to reality and danger," must

have felt for a time that had such a concrete and interested notion of the theater as to

deem it necessary to destroy it for the health of soul and city. It is no doubt superfluous to

note that today it would be impossible to find such ideas even among censors. However, it

may be useful to point out that the first time that something similar to an autonomous

examination of the aesthetic phenomenon appears in European medieval society, it takes

the form of aversion and repugnance toward art, in the instructions given by those bishops

who, faced with the musical innovations of the ars nova , prohibited the modulation of the

song and the fractio vocis during the religious services because they distracted the faithful

with their charm. Thus, among the statements in favor of interested art, Nietzsche might

have cited a passage in Plato Republic that is often invoked when speaking about art, even

though this has not made the paradoxical attitude that is expressed there any less

scandalous to the modern ear. Plato, as is well known, sees the poet as a danger and a

cause of ruin for the city:

If a man who was capable by his cunning of assuming every kind of shape and imitating all

things should arrive in our city, bringing with himself the poems which he wished to

exhibit, we should fall down and worship him as a holy and wondrous and delightful

creature, but should say to him that there is no man of that kind among us in our city, nor

is it lawful for such a man to arise among us, and we should send him away to another

city, after pouring myrrh down over his head and crowning him with fillets of wood.

"We can admit no poetry into our city," adds Plato with an expression that shocks our

aesthetic sensibility, "save only hymns to the gods and the praises of good men 3

Even before Plato, however, a condemnation of art, or at least a suspicious stance toward

it, had already been expressed in the words of a poet, namely Sophocles, at the end of the

first stasimon of his Antigone . After characterizing man, insofar as he is the one who has

τέχνη (that is, in the broad meaning the Greeks gave this term, the ability to produce, to

bring a thing from nonbeing into being), as the most uncanny thing there is, the chorus

continues by saying that this power can lead to happiness as easily as to ruin, and

concludes with a wish that recalls the Platonic ban on poets: "Not by my fire, / never to

share my thoughts, who does these things." 4

Edgar Wind has observed that the reason why Plato's statement is so surprising to us is

that art does not exert the same influence on us as it did on him. 5 Only because art has

left the sphere of interest to become merely interesting do we welcome it so warmly. In a

draft of The Man Without Qualities that Robert Musil wrote at a time when the definitive

design of his novel was not yet clear in his mind, Ulrich (who still appears with his earlier

name, Anders) enters the room where Agathe is playing the piano and feels an obscure

and irresistible impulse that drives him to fire some gun shots at the instrument that is

diffusing through the house such a "desolatingly" beautiful harmony. As for us, however, it

is likely that if we attempted to go to the bottom of the peaceful contemplation that we,

unlike Ulrich, usually reserve for works of art, we would eventually find ourselves in

agreement with Nietzsche, who thought that his time had no right to answer Plato's

question about art's moral influence, since "even if we had the artwhere do we see the

influence, any influence from art?" 6 Plato, and Greek classical antiquity in general, had a

very different experience of art, an experience having little to do with disinterest and

aesthetic enjoyment. The power of art over the soul seemed to him so great that he

thought it could by itself destroy the very foundations of his city; but nonetheless, while he

was forced to banish it, he did so reluctantly, "since we ourselves are very conscious of her

spell." 7 The term he uses when he wants to define the effects of inspired imagination is

θει + ̑ ος ϕ οβός, "divine terror," a term that we, benevolent spectators, no doubt find

inappropriate to define our reactions, but that nevertheless is found with increasing

frequency, after a certain time, in the notes in which modern artists attempt to capture

their experience of art.

It appears, in fact, that simultaneously with the process through which the spectator

insinuates himself into the concept of "art," confining it to the τόπος ο ὐ ράνιος , the

heavenly place, of aesthetics, we see the opposite process taking place from the point of

view of the artist. For the one who creates it, art becomes an increasingly uncanny

experience, with respect to which speaking of interest is at the very least a euphemism,

because what is at stake seems to be not in any way the production of a beautiful work

but instead the life and death of the author, or at least his or her spiritual health. To the

increasing innocence of the spectator's experience in front of the beautiful object

corresponds the increasing danger inherent in the artist's experience, for whom art's

promesse de bonheur becomes the poison that contaminates and destroys his existence.

The idea that extreme risk is implicit in the artist's activity begins to gain currency, almost

as thoughso thought Baudelaireit were a sort of duel to the death "où l'artiste crie de

frayeur avant d'être vaincu" ("where the artist cries out in fright before being defeated");

and to prove how little this idea is merely one metaphor among those forming the

"properties" of the "literary histrio,' it suffices to quote what Hölderlin wrote on the brink of

madness: "I fear that I might end like the old Tantalus who received more from the Gods

than he could take," and "I may say that Apollo struck me.'' 8 Or the note found in Van

Gogh's pocket on the day of his death: "Well, as for my own work, I risk my life in it and

my sanity has already half melted away in it." Or Rilke, in a letter to Clara Rilke: "Works of

art are always the product of a risk one has run, of an experience taken to its extreme

limit, to the point where man can no longer go on."

Another notion that we encounter more and more frequently in artists' opinions is that art

is something fundamentally dangerous not only for the one who produces it but for society

as well. Hölderlin, in the notes in which he attempts to condense the meaning of his

unfinished tragedy, finds a close connection, almost a unity, between the principle of the

Agrigentans' anarchic unbridledness and Empedocles' titanic poetry; and he appears, in a

projected hymn, to consider art the essential cause that led to the ruin of Greece:

for they wanted to found

a kingdom of art. But they missed

the national [ das Vaterländische ] in the attempt

and wretchedly

Greece, the highest beauty, was ruined. 9

And it is likely that in all of modern literature neither Monsieur Teste, nor Werft Rönne, nor

Adrian Leverkühn would disagree with him, but only a character with such seemingly

hopeless bad taste as Romain Rolland's Jean Christophe.

Everything, then, leads one to think that if today we gave the artists themselves the task

of judging whether art should be allowed in the city, they would judge from their own

experience and agree with Plato on the necessity of banishing it. If this is true, then the

entrance of art into the aesthetic dimensionand the understanding of it starting from the

α ἴ σθησις of the spectatoris not as innocent and natural a phenomenon as we commonly

think. Perhaps nothing is more urgentif we really want to engage the problem of art in

our timethan a destruction of aesthetics that would, by clearing away what is usually

taken for granted, allow us to bring into question the very meaning of aesthetics as the

science of the work of art. The question, however, is whether the time is ripe for such a

destruction , or whether instead the consequence of such an act would not be the loss of

any possible horizon for the understanding of the work of art and the creation of an abyss

in front of it that could only be crossed with a radical leap. But perhaps just such a loss

and such an abyss are what we most need if we want the work of art to reacquire its

original stature. And if it is true that the fundamental architectural problem becomes

visible only in the house ravaged by fire, then perhaps we are today in a privileged

position to understand the authentic significance of the Western aesthetic project.

Fourteen years before Nietzsche published the third essay of the Genealogy of Morals , a

poet, whose word remains inscribed like a Medusa's head in the destiny of Western art,

had asked poetry neither to produce beautiful works nor to respond to a disinterested

aesthetic ideal, but to change man's life and reopen the gates of Eden for him. In this

experience, in which la magique étude du bonheur (the magical study of happiness)

obscures all other design to the point of becoming the sole fatality of poetry and life,

Rimbaud had encountered Terror. Thus the "embarkation for the island of Cythera" of

modern art was to lead the artist not to the promised happiness but to a competition with

the Most Uncanny, with the divine terror that had driven Plato to banish the poets from his

city. Only if understood as the final moment of this ongoing process, through which art

purifies itself of the spectator to find itself faced by an absolute threat, does Nietzsche's

invocation in the preface to the Gay Science acquire all its enigmatic meaning: "Ah, if you

could really understand why we of all people need art . . . ," but "another kind of art . . .

an art for artists, for artists only!" 10

§2 Frenhofer and His Double

How can art, this most innocent of occupations, pit man against Terror? In Les fleurs de

Tarbes, Jean Paulhan takes as his premise a fundamental ambiguity in languagenamely,

the fact that it is constituted on the one hand by signs that are perceived by the senses,

and on the other by ideas associated with these signs in such a way as to be immediately

evoked by themand makes a distinction between two kinds of writers. There are the

Rhetoricians, who dissolve all meaning into form and make form into the sole law of

literature, and the Terrorists, who refuse to bend to this law and instead pursue the

opposite dream of a language that would be nothing but meaning, of a thought in whose

flame the sign would be fully consumed, putting the writer face to face with the Absolute.

The Terrorist is a misologist, and does not recognize in the drop of water that remains on

his fingertips the sea in which he thought he had immersed himself; the Rhetorician looks

to the words and appears to distrust thought.

That the work of art is something other than what is simple in it is almost too obvious. This

is what the Greeks expressed with the concept of allegory: the work of art ἄ λλο ἀ γορεύει,

communicates something else, is something other than the material that contains it. 1 But

there are objectsfor example, a block of stone, a drop of water, and generally all natural

objectsin which form seems to be determined and almost canceled out by matter, and

other objectsa vase, a spade, or any other manmade objectin which form seems to be

what determines matter. The dream of the Terror is to create works that are in the world

in the same way as the block of stone or the drop of water; it is the dream of a product

that exists according to the statute of the thing. "Les chefsd'oeuvres sont bêtes," wrote

Flaubert; "ils ont la mine tranquille comme les productions mêmes de la nature, comme les

grands animaux et les montagnes" ("Masterpieces are stupid: they have placid faces like

the very products of nature, like big animals and mountains"); and Degas, Valéry writes,

used to say "C'est plat comme la belle peinture!" ("It's just as dull as beautiful painting!").

The painter Frenhofer, in Balzac The Unknown Masterpiece , is the perfect type of the

Terrorist. Frenhofer has attempted for ten years to create on his canvas something that

would not be just a work of art, albeit that of a genius; like Pygmalion, he has erased art

with art to make out of his Swimmer not an assemblage of signs and colors but the living

reality of his thought and his imagination. He tells his two visitors, "My painting [ ma

peinture ] is not a painting, but a feeling, a passion! Born in my studio, it [ elle ] must

remain here as a virgin and not leave if not covered." And later: "You are in front of a

woman, and you are looking for a picture. There is such depth on this canvas, its air is so

true, that you can't distinguish it from the air that surrounds us. Where is art? Lost,

vanished!" But in this quest for absolute meaning, Frenhofer has succeeded only in

obscuring his idea and erasing from the canvas any human form, disfiguring it into "a

chaos of colors, tones, hesitating nuances, a kind of shapeless fog." In front of this absurd

wall of paint, the young Poussin's cry"but sooner or later he will have to realize that

there is nothing on his canvas!"sounds like an alarm responding to the threat that the

Terror starts posing for Western art. 3

But let us take a second look at Frenhofer's painting. On the canvas there is only a

confused mass of colors contained inside a jumble of indecipherable lines. All meaning has

been dissolved, all content has vanished, except the tip of a foot that stands out from the

rest of the canvas "like the torso of a Venus sculpted in Paros marble standing among the

ruins of a city destroyed by fire" ( Chef d'oeuvre, p. 305). The quest for absolute meaning

has devoured all meaning, allowing only signs, meaningless forms, to survive. But, then,

isn't the unknown masterpiece instead the masterpiece of Rhetoric? Has the meaning

erased the sign, or has the sign abolished the meaning? And here the Terrorist comes face

to face with the paradox of the Terror. In order to leave the evanescent world of forms, he

has no other means than form itself, and the more he wants to erase it, the more he has

to concentrate on it to render it permeable to the inexpressible content he wants to

express. But in the attempt, he ends up with nothing in his hands but signssigns that,

although they have traversed the limbo of nonmeaning, are no less extraneous to the

meaning he was pursuing. Fleeing from Rhetoric has led him to the Terror, but the Terror

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