Law Critique (2009) 20:271–280

DOI 10.1007/s10978-009-9056-z

Agamben and Authenticity

Robert Eaglestone

Published online: 12 August 2009

Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract The article argues that the contentious and complex concept of
‘authenticity’, which Agamben develops from Heidegger, forms a central continuity
between Agamben’s earlier work, which focuses more on language and art, and his
later work, which focuses more on politics. Moreover, I suggest that although this
concept is often unquestioned and elided in his work, it plays a crucial role in the
deep structures of his thought. Moreover, the ‘unthought concept’ of ‘authenticity’
is of concern because, while authenticity might possibly have a role to play in the
sphere of how we come to understand and relate to artworks, there are reasons to be
suspicious of this concept in the political realm if, indeed, these two ‘realms’ can be
understood separately. If these two spheres cannot be clearly separated, as seems
more likely, then it is even more important to explore and question the terms and
cluster of concepts around ‘authenticity’.

Keywords Adorno
Agamben
Authenticity
Derrida
Poiesis

Authenticity Today

Despite its occasional invocation—by, for example, Charles Taylor—the concept of

‘authenticity’ is very much out of favour. ‘Authenticity’ sounds like a terrible pre-
modern naivety, which is easily disabused by any view of the world influenced by
the thinkers Jacques Derrida calls the ‘masters of suspicion’. ‘Authenticity’ also
speaks of a political naivety and of an ignorance of real events. In art, it sounds like
a mawkish Romantic sincerity, which is not only betrayed by the nature of language
but passed through as one ages. More philosophically, talk about authenticity is
blocked by arguments like those in Adorno’s The Jargon of Authenticity. At the

R. Eaglestone (&)
Department of English, Royal Holloway, University of London, London, UK
e-mail: R.Eaglestone@rhul.ac.uk

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heart of this essay is the discussion of authenticity in Heidegger’s Rectoral Address:

this discussion, Adorno rightly says, is a ‘smouldering evil’ which ‘expresses itself
as though it were salvation’ (Adorno 2003, p. 3). And, of course, concern over
authenticity comes from reflections on the indivisible conjunction of the Third
Reich and the Holocaust and, by refraction, all other cases (for example, the ‘war on
terror’) where the term ‘authenticity’ stands in conjunction with evil and hypocrisy.
Yet, importantly, Adorno’s book is not an attack on authenticity itself. Rather, it is
an attack on how
dignity contains the form of its decadence within itself. The fact can be
observed when intellectuals become accomplices of that power which they
don’t have and which they should resist (Adorno 2003, p. 136).
However, ‘authenticity’ is certainly an idea which underlies Agamben’s work, if
not as a destination (as in Heidegger’s address) then as a concept which carries
weight.

Authenticity in Agamben’s Early Work

Authenticity is most clearly and unequivocally invoked by Agamben in his

Language and Death from 1982 (translated 1991). As an essay on Heidegger, it
takes this as its key concept: in what I take to be its crucial pages—The Sixth Day—
the book focuses on a very detailed account of authenticity from Being and Time as
the ‘negative foundation of its own negativity’. ‘The experience of voice’, Agamben
argues, ‘reveals its fundamental ontological duty’ (Agamben 1991, p. 61) and he
suggests that Heidegger ‘evokes the resoluteness’
intended in Sein und Zeit and presents it (as in essence, a ‘letting-oneself-be’
called by the Voice) on the horizon of will, not as a will to anything or as the
decisive action of a subject, but as the ‘opening up of Dasein, out of its
captivity in the entity, to the openness of being’ (Agamben 1991, p. 61).
Here, authenticity and ‘resoluteness’ are evoked but not further explored, and are
crucial to the argument.
This nexus occurs in one of his earlier texts, The Man Without Content. At the
start of this text Agamben makes an interesting elision. In analysing the state of art
in our time, he cites Antonin Artaud: 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 egotistical and
magical i.e. interested idea (Agamben 1999, p. 2).
This word ‘interested’ now stands for the sort of art an authentic culture offers or
inhabits. For example, Agamben suggests, the reason why Plato’s exile of the poets
is so ‘surprising to us is that art does not exert the same influence on us as it did on
him… only because art has left the sphere of interest to become merely interesting
do we welcome it so warmly’ (Agamben 1999, p. 4). Art, for Agamben’s Plato, is
not to do with disinterest and aesthetic enjoyment but ‘Divine terror’. Again, for the

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artist, Agamben goes further: ‘speaking of interest is at the very least a euphemism,
because what seems at stake seems to be not in any way the production of a
beautiful work but instead the life and death of the author’ (Agamben 1999, p. 5).
More, this ‘interested’ art threatens society. Agamben implies that the discourses
about art, both formal and informal, are attempts to delimit it in its ‘authentic’ state:
for Agamben, we need to destroy or leap over aesthetics ‘if we want the work of art
to reacquire its original stature’ (Agamben 1999, p. 6). Following Rimbaud, an
encounter with this ‘original stature’ will lead to an encounter with Terror: the
Divine (and authentic) Terror of Plato. This destructive gesture, of course, echoes
Heidegger’s whole method as well as Hegel’s dismissal of taste and so on in the
Lectures on Aesthetics (and countless other aesthetic/anti-aesthetic manifestos—F.
R. Leavis’s disavowal of literary values in favour of ‘life’, for example). But also, in
the slip between ‘authentic’ and its code word ‘interested’, it highlights the sense
that runs throughout Agamben of his deep understanding of Heidegger’s work: ‘the
greatest achievement of Heidegger’s philosophical genius was to have elaborated
the philosophical categories that kept facticity from presenting itself as fact’
(Agamben 1998, p. 152).
The Man Without Content continues by positing, then complicating, a division of
two different forms of artist. One, the Rhetorician, interested only in form; and the
other, the Terrorist, interested in pure meaning. Agamben argues that these two
categories are both entwined in each other. To get to pure meaning, form is
ineluctable: Frenhofer’s painting is an ‘absurd wall of paint’ (Agamben 1999, p. 9).
But here, Agamben asks if this circularity is a result of the idea that art is for the
spectator: what would, following Nietzsche, an art only for artists look like? The
spectator, the man of taste (not the involved, the interested patron like Julius II) is
the ruination of art, because ‘[G]ood taste does not simply have a tendency to
pervert itself into its opposite; it is, in some way, the very principle of any
perversion’ (Agamben 1999, p. 22). Rameau’s nephew, the figure for the man of
taste, is the figure of the split between the artist and the spectator. In admiring an
artwork, he feels
defrauded and cannot suppress the wish that he had been its author. He is in
front of something that, as it seems to him, puts him back in contact with his
innermost truth, yet he cannot identify with it (Agamben 1999, pp. 23–24).
The man of taste is split, yet that ‘essence’ (as a man of taste)
is in that which by definition does not belong to him. Taste, in order to be, has
to become separate from the principle of creation; but without genius, taste
becomes a pure reversal, that is, the very principle of perversion (Agamben
1999, p. 24).
Rameau’s nephew can judge, but not grasp. This is not simply, here, the sort of
attack on taste familiar from Hegel: it is, as Agamben points out, for Heidegger a
fundamental movement of thought in the West. But what Agamben passes over is
that for Heidegger this is a split between the authentic and the inauthentic:
Rameau’s nephew is the ‘they-self’ of chatter and taste, not a dasein struggling
authentically to engage with the artwork.

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Agamben echoes much in Heidegger’s essay ‘On the Origin of the Work of Art’
in arguing that museums and galleries take art from its place in the world and make
it a collector’s item: art is no longer an ‘essential measure of man’s dwelling on the
earth’ but has ‘now built its own world for itself’ (Agamben 1999, p. 33). This
current inauthentic art contrasts with the art of the past: when
the medieval man looked at the tympanum of the Vezeleay cathedral… he had
the aesthetic impression not that he was observing a work of art but rather that
he was measuring, more concretely for him, the borders of his world
(Agamben 1999, p. 34).
The Cathedral is not an art work, but an authentic ‘world work’. But a fracture
occurs, for Agamben, following Hegel, when the artist moves from his materials, his
content, his world to the moment when art becomes a ‘free instrument’. It is, for
Agamben, the very ‘creative subjectivity’ (Agamben 1999, p. 36)—praised in
modernity—of the artist that places him above his material and so creates the split
between himself and the spectator, and so creates the split in the spectator.
Everything that the spectator can still find in the work of art is, now, mediated
by aesthetic representation, which is itself, independently of any content, the
supreme value and the most intimate truth that unfolds its power in the artwork
itself and starting from the artwork itself (Agamben 1999, p. 37).
Agamben’s point is that the category of the artwork itself, the conception of a
work as an artwork, degrades the work, makes it inauthentic. One consequence and
example of this problem is familiar to all who work in the arts and humanities: the
ways in which artworks become tokens in debates, objects for courses and
assessment. More, they become mines for positivist historical facts and opinions.
Agamben notes the parallels between the way we talk of nature and the way we talk
of art (again, this stems from Heidegger), as a sort of ‘standing reserve’.
Yet despite this, and Agamben follows Hegel here, art does not ‘die’: ‘because its
link with the real world has grown weak’ (Agamben 1999, p. 57) it has become a ‘self-
annihilating nothing’ which wants the real precisely as Nothingness (Agamben 1999,
p. 57). However, Agamben is about to outline the possibility of a renewed—and
authentic—art. Following a well-established argument about the etymology of poiesis
as production, he argues that art is produced and in modern times, is considered to
have ‘been identified with originality (or authenticity)’ (Agamben 1999, p. 61) (the
two terms have become synonymous for Agamben here). He goes on:
What does originality mean? When we say that the work of art has the
character of originality (or authenticity), we do not simply mean by this that
the work is unique… Originality means proximity to the origin. The work of
art… derives from the latter and confirms to it but also remains in a
relationship of permanent proximity to it (Agamben 1999, p. 61).
Reproducibility is the essence of technics: originality is the essential status of art,
yet, here Agamben argues that Duchamp’s readymades and pop art (technics as art,
art as technics) means that the ‘very poietic substance of man… is bought to a crisis
point’ (Agamben 1999, p. 64). But, Agamben argues, artworks have entelechy, and

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technic works (industrial works) only have potentiality. But this split itself between
the ‘for itself’—one might say, authentic—and the made potential is not set: of
course, art works become objects. Yet Agamben seems to suggest that even the
readymades question this boundary, and that this questioning itself makes or marks
a difference.
But what is the difference between poiesis and praxis? Agamben analyses the
Greeks, Marx, Nietzsche, and finds the two constantly interwoven and opposed to
each other. Then he turns to a remark of Holderlin’s:
Everything is rhythm, the entire destiny of man is one heavenly rhythm, just as
every work of art is rhythm, and everything swings from the poetizing lips of
the Gods (Agamben 1999, p. 94).
Rhythm underlies space and time (it is a link between number and structure, for
example). Rhythm, for Agamben, both is the site of our extasis and of our
involvement in our own temporality, our ‘fall into the flight of measurable time’
(Agamben 1999, p. 100). And rhythm is the original structure of art.
By opening man to his authentic temporal dimension, the work of art also
open for him the space of his belonging to the world, only within which he can
take the original measure of his dwelling on earth and find again his present
truth in the unstoppable flow of linear time (Agamben 1999, p. 101).
Art, then, is the ‘production of origin’:
To look at a work of art, therefore, means to be hurled out into a more original
time: it means ecstasy in the epoch opening of rhythm, which gives and holds
back. Only by starting from this situation of man’s relationship with the work
of art is it possible to comprehend how this relationship—if it is authentic—is
also for man the highest engagement that is, the engagement that keeps him in
the truth and grants to his dwelling on earth its original status (Agamben 1999,
p. 102).
It is this fundamental structure that, as Agamben says, give arts its ability to
transmit who and what we are over time.
Now, one does not have to agree with these final and very Heideggerian feelings
to follow the force of my argument. ‘Authentic’ has two significations here: first,
that which opens an ‘authentic temporal dimension’ (Agamben 1999, p. 101) and so
gives us our original measure; second, it also—adjectivally, as it were—describes a
sort of relationship between ‘man’, art and dwelling. Agamben relies, for the
structure of his argument here on art, on a series of oppositions that reflect an idea of
the inauthentic and the authentic. The inert and disinterested contrasts with the
authentic and interested idea; the aesthetic with the material; Rameau’s nephew, the
man of taste with medieval man; poiesis and production with poiesis as production.
What Agamben offers is not something like a deconstructive reading but rather a
more historical post-Heideggerian ‘history of being’, or (less charitably) ‘just so’
story. Each opposition, each step in the argument relies on a contrast and in each,
the category that he claims is authentic or original is preferred. What is ‘inside’ and
historical is found to be inauthentic and enervating compared to what is ‘outside’,

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authentic and moving. The ‘outside’, authentic, works as the quasi-transcendental

grounds of possibility for the ‘inside’ inauthentic.

Authenticity in Agamben’s Later Work

How far does this structure, then, project into his later work? One might suggest, for
example, that the question ‘what does it mean to act politically?’ that structures
State of Exception can be heard as ‘what does it mean to act authentically
politically?’ Again, like many others, Agamben believes that ‘almost none of the
ethical principles our age believes it could recognise as valid have stood the decisive
test, that of an Ethica more Auschwitz demonstrata’: what, then, is a real moral
principle? The implication is that it is one that ‘originally’ or ‘authentically’
survives this test. Where Heidegger finds the human ‘conditioned by metaphysics’,
Agamben finds the human ‘conditioned by politics’ in biopolitics. The ‘human’
operates here as the space ‘outside’, unconditioned, that I have been naming
authentic (and is, indeed, very like the ‘voice’ in Language and Death). In
modernity, the ‘modern state does nothing other than bring to light the secret tie
uniting power and bare life’ (Agamben 1998, p. 6) and for Agamben, the
Muselmann is the ultimate figure of this biopolitical power which ‘not only shows
the efficacy of biopower, but also reveals its secret cipher… a survival separated
from every possibility of testimony, a kind of absolute biopolitical substance’. It is
because the Muselmann is a ‘life that is absolutely indistinguishable from law’
(Agamben 1998, p. 185) and because in turn that the camps created the Muselmann,
that the camps are the ‘biopolitical paradigm of the modern’ (Agamben 1998, p.
117).1 Here again, as in The Man Without Content, an authentic division is replaced
by a (terrible) modern one, via his ‘just so’ story.
It might be possible to suggest, perhaps, that Agamben’s concept of authenticity
leads to an aporia in his work. On the one hand, his work is unthinkable without it:
on the other, he has already given it up as a possibility. This accounts for the
melancholia of the later work. It has become (in Derrida’s terms) a transcendental
signifier, which both guarantees meaning but is inaccessible. He gives a clue to this
in the very last pages of Homo Sacer. He writes that
we no longer know anything of the classical distinction between zoe and bios,
between private life and political existence… this is why the restoration of
political categories proposed by Leo Strauss and, in a different sense, by
Hannah Arendt can only have a critical sense (Agamben 1998, p. 187).
There can be no return to an original state nor, he suggests a movement to a ‘new
body’ (Agamben 1998, p. 188). Yet in this—and throughout his work—lies a
complex clue, in the use of his term ‘critical sense’. This is the idea that, from
‘outside’ the discourse or language game a critique of that discourse can be offered.

1
There are a number of problems, philosophical, theoretical and historical (in as much as these can be
distinguished), with Agamben’s account of the Holocaust which I have discussed at length elsewhere. See
Eaglestone (2002), pp. 52–67 and (2004).

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To put this crudely, if we genuinely did not know ‘anything of the classical
distinction between zoe and bios’ this distinction which structures the book would
render the book illegible. Or, again, to put this crudely, the case of the neo-mort
Karen Quinlan would evoke literally no debate, public or private. If, in the earlier
work on art, the ‘authentic’ was that which stood ‘outside’, against which the
contingent flows of modernity washed, then in the more political work, the
‘authentic’ serves a critical if unspoken point which allows Agamben’s critique to
work. The authentic is the human both ‘before modernity’ and ‘before individu-
ation’ (that is, both social and alone), there but inexpressible (though, for Agamben,
the ‘ineffable is, in reality, infancy. Experience is the mysterion which every
individual intuits from the fact of having had an infancy’ (Agamben 1993, p. 58).
Space restricts the fuller necessary analysis, so, as above, I am going to analyse
one crucial and exemplary section of State of Exception to illustrate this point
indicatively. At the centre of this book is a discussion of the ‘state of exception’
through a comparison between Benjamin and Schmitt, with the Third Reich as both
the example and the pressing intellectual, political and historical context. In the
Reich, ‘every fiction of a nexus between violence and law disappears… there is
nothing but a zone of anomie, in which a violence without any juridical form acts’
(Agamben 2005, p. 59). Agamben goes on to argue that the state power then
attempts to ‘annex anomie’ and via Benjamin argues that this is a fiction which
‘maintains the law in its very suspension as force-of-law. What now takes place are
civil war and revolutionary violence, that is, a human action that has shed every
relation to law’ (Agamben 2005, p. 59). This ‘zone of anomie’ functions in the same
way as the authentic does in his earlier work. In many ways, this is historically right
about the Nazi regime, especially in the years just before the War, especially if we
consider the Nazis as racially motivated conservative revolutionaries. However—as
Agamben acknowledges with Schmitt—attempts to understand the Nazi regime as if
it were like others are bound to fail. The Nazis both used and ignored legal codes
(and, arguably did both at once: the Nazi call for calm and order during
Kristallnacht was widely understood as a call to violence). Indeed, there is no one
model for understanding Nazi behaviour. The Nazi ideology changed freely (except
its deep hatred of the Jews) to such an extent that it can only be called an ideology in
a vague sense: almost ‘every other element’ except the anti-Semitism ‘varied
according to the audience addressed and the political possibilities of the moment.
The enemy might be Communism or capitalism, the elite or the rabble, France or
Russia or the Weimar government, just as interests dictated’ (Midgley 1984, pp. 61–
62). Raul Hilberg, the great historian of the Holocaust, defined the perpetrators as
‘Zealots, Vulgarians and Bearers of Burdens’ unable to pin them down to a coherent
statement of beliefs: thus, also, Lyotard’s claim that
one does not dare think out Nazism because it has been beaten down like a
mad dog, by a police action, and not in conformity with the rules accepted by
its adversaries’ genres of discourse (argumentation for liberalism, contradic-
tion for marxism). It has not been refuted (Lyotard 1998, p. 106).
That is, whichever path of explanation one chooses, one finds that the experience
of Nazis is always excessive to explanation (which is one reason why discussions of

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Nazism and the Holocaust so often have a ring of negative theology or of

sententiousness about them). And it is this, of course, that made Schmitt’s (and
Heidegger’s) ambitions futile. There was and could be no legal/philosophical (or
metaphysical) system for Nazism.
But the philosophical corollary of this for Agamben, here, is that there is another,
supplemental term in his debate which he does not really acknowledge: that is, that
Nazism is not reducible to Schmitt’s formulation, nor really to Benjamin’s. This
means that his next claim, an enormous and fruitful analogy, is also flawed. For
Agamben, the struggle for anomie [Schmitt to ‘re-inscribe it within a juridical
context’ (Agamben 2005, p. 59), Benjamin to see it as ‘pure violence—an existence
outside the law’ (p. 59)] is the ‘battle of giants concerning being’ that defines
western metaphysics (Agamben 2005, p. 59). This analogy works thus: ‘pure
violence as the extreme political object, as the thing of politics, is the counterpart to
pure being, to pure existence as the ultimate metaphysical stakes’ and ‘the strategy
of exception, which must ensure the relation between anomic violence and law, is
the counterpart to the onto-theo-logical strategy aimed at capturing pure being in the
meshes of the logos’ (Agamben 2005, pp. 59–60). Pure violence is analogous to
pure being: the state of exception is the explanation—and so capturing—of this pure
being, viz the logocentric philosophy that does that. Thus, law and logos both
require the anomie to ‘ground their reference in the world of life’ (Agamben 2005,
p. 60), that is, to function. This is, in many ways, a very Derridean explanation (the
‘dangerous supplement’), but Agamben’s argument works by analogy not by textual
deconstruction. He goes on to assert that law ‘seems able to subsist only by
capturing anomie, just as language can subsist only by grasping the non-linguistic’
(Agamben 2005, p. 60): this sub-clause is, of course, his claim about art and
language in Language and Death and in all his analyses of art. But just as the
‘authentic’ was not something which could be returned to (we cannot go back to
being ‘medieval men’ in the cathedral) but rather arrived at, likewise the ‘pure
violence’ of anomie is not an originary state of affairs (a Hobbesian natural state,
perhaps) but rather the stake in the ‘state of exception’ (Agamben 2005, p. 60).
Here, the sense of authenticity, the ‘outside’ is clearly present. However, as I
suggested at the start of this essay, there are also complex and troubling
consequences for this. It leads to a strange reversal (one identified by Derrida) in
the mapping of ‘anomie’ onto ‘pure violence’. Agamben argues that ‘pure violence’,
like ‘pure language’ (another image of authenticity) is not one form of violence
among others (as pure language is not another language) but rather severs the link
‘between violence and law’ (Agamben 2005, p. 62) and ‘purely acts and manifests’
(Agamben 2005, p. 62). But he goes further: pure violence is in turn that which is
aligned with Benjamin’s (mystical) statement which Agamben cites that ‘the
Scripture without the key is not Scripture but life’ (Agamben 2005, p. 63) and,
again, the ‘law which is studied but is no longer practiced is the gate to justice’
(Agamben 2005, p. 63). This, for Agamben, is a cipher for the ‘State of exception’
(the being with out law, in this Benjaminian rather than Schmittian interpretation)
and in turn is a new law, a law ‘freed from all discipline and all relation to
sovereignty’ (Agamben 2005, p. 63); the law, as it were, to be the law after ‘its
messianic fulfilment’ (Agamben 2005, p. 63). Agamben goes on:

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What opens a passage towards justice is not the erasure of law, but its
deactivation and inactivity—that is, another use of the law (Agamben 2005,
p. 63).
But this pure violence—the gate to justice—has just been indentified with the
situation of anomie that existed in the most frantic pre-war years of the Third Reich.
Here Schmitt, with his hopeless and misguided attempts to justify or even to ground
the behaviour of the Reich (hopeless and misguided as the behaviour had no logic to
it, not even the logic of criminality), looks like the guardian of the law: in contrast,
Benjamin looks utterly inverted, as his grounds for the possibility of law become or
sound like the anomie that Nazis encouraged.
Derrida has noticed this about Benjamin at the end of his essay Force of Law.
Speculating on how Benjamin might respond to the ‘final solution’, to (that is) the
whole interwoven panoply of the Third Reich, he writes that
Benjamin would have judged vain and without pertinence… any juridical trial
of Nazism… any judgmental apparatus, any historiography still homogenous
with the space in which Nazism developed…any interpretation drawing on
philosophical, moral, sociological, psychological or psychoanalytic concepts’
(Derrida 1992, p. 60).
More than this, this utter separation itself leads to an evil, ‘from a certain
undecidability, from the fact that one could not distinguish between founding
violence and conserving violence’ (Derrida 1992, p. 61). Indeed, as soon as this
undecibability appears (and it is this precisely that Agamben is trying to determine,
or to complicate, in Benjamin) the ability to judge is no longer human (or, if it is
human, it is human in a way as yet unknown, when law is no longer practiced but
studied) and becomes divine: Derrida follows the line of thought further. The
interpretation for the final solution, as of everything that constitutes the set and
the delimitation of the two orders (the mythological and the divine) is not in
the measure of man. No anthropology, no humanism, no discourse of man on
man, even on human rights, can be proportionate to either the rupture between
the mythical and the divine, or to limit experience such as the final solution
(Derrida 1992, p. 61).
Derrida finds something ‘intolerable’ in this interpretation. If the final solution
can only be measured by what is outside all these concepts, then it is ‘an
uninterpretable manifestation of divine violence’ (Derrida 1992, p. 61). Derrida
writes that one ‘is terrified at the idea of an interpretation that would make of the
holocaust an expiation and an indecipherable signature of the just and violent anger
of God’ (Derrida 1992, p. 62), and finds Benjamin, and these alternatives, ‘too
Heideggerian, too messianico-marxist or too archeo-eschatological for me’ (Derrida
1992, p. 62). This is to say that an explanation that begins with anomie, and finds in
this the pure violence itself, harks back to a sense of the authentic, the ‘out of time
and space’ which Agamben has rediscovered in Benjamin. Agamben’s sense of
authenticity as the grounds of possibility of art, metamorphosed into his sense of
authenticity (as anomie, as pure violence) as the grounds of possibility of politics

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aligns him (and his Benjamin) in a complex way with the Nazis: for both, the
‘anomie’ is the condition of possibility on which other structures (juridical ones, for
example) rest. For the Nazis, this meant that they could just be swept away or
corrupted as they so desired. Perhaps this too is Agamben’s melancholy conclusion,
though it seems harsh to think of Nazism as the origin of Law.
In this article, I suggested that it might be possible to suggest that ‘Authenticity’
is an ‘unthought category’ in Agamben’s work, both early and late. I have argued
that in his early work on aesthetics, the ‘authentic’—often disguised—marks the
ground of possibility for art in general. In his later work—using an example from
State of Exception—I argued that the same structure exists: the ‘authentic’ makes up
the ‘zone of anomie’ which in turn becomes the ‘pure violence’ which he sees as the
grounds of possibility for law (law ‘seems able to subsist only by capturing anomie,
just as language can subsist only by grasping the non-linguistic’ (Agamben 2005, p.
60)). This in turn, and following an argument about Benjamin from Derrida, leads to
the conclusion that Agamben’s concept is in parallel with some unfocussed Nazi
conceptions of violence and the state (a parallel that Derrida observes in versions of
Benjamin). Agamben’s work has been led into this by his conception of the
‘authentic’ and it is this that calls for further critique and analysis beyond what is
suggested here.

References

Adorno, Theodor. 2003. The Jargon of authenticity (trans: Tarnowski, K. and Will, F.). London:
Routledge.
Agamben, Giorgio. 1991. Language and death: The place of negativity (trans: Pinkus, K. E. and Hardt,
M.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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