LOVE AND LET BE: AGAMBEN ON THE FACTICITY OF LOVE
The project of the world outstrips the possible; the Why arises in this outstripping.
The free use of the proper is the most difficult task.
It is only in the recognition of itself as an object of desire or of love, that Dasein becomes a free ethical being; at least this is what Agamben asks us to consider at the beginning of the section ‘Facticity and Fetishism’. And this question is posed throughout the remainder of his essay—and indeed throughout Agamben’s writings as a whole. Let us first say, by way of introduction, that by a ‘free ethical being’ I take Agamben to be not merely (only) saying that Dasein becomes ontologically free from external constraints or that Dasein possesses a free will. Instead I take him to be stating that Dasein frees itself from the temptation to use the logic and the de-fining power of Sovereignty. In the course of Love, Dasein is free from a logic of disinterestedness, a logic that de-fines man as a political-being through-and-through, a being who is laid bare as homo sacer, a being of pure biological and eugenic worth “making it into the site of an incessant decision on value and non-value in which biopolitics continually turns into thanatopolitics and in which the camp, consequently, becomes the absolute political space.” Perhaps, we will see that what frees Dasein from the temptation of this logic of de-fined space is Love and the intrinsic notion of interest that the erotic brings with it.
Origin of the Fetish: So that Dasein’s facticity can be revealed to constitute its own original ontological structure, Agamben etymologically uncovers the first appearance of the German word fetisch. He links fetisch to the 13th century French faitis, which means to be well-made, or with skill. As such, and especially with regard to the human-body, the word denotes attraction, love, or desire due to the skill one notices with which the object is made. A Freudian analysis of fetisch reveals that the fetish is not an object that has nothing to do with the original object it represents, but rather acts as a substitute in the original’s place. In other words, the fetish is a representation that embodies the eroticism of some object that one is attracted to, desires, or loves. As being the erotic embodiment of said object, according to Freud, the fetish is a sign both of the presence and the absence of the desired object—it both is and is not the object. The fetish, in other words, is the object of erotic attachment in the sense that one is erotically stimulated by this object, but at the same time, the fetish is precisely that, an object merely associated with, or representative of the true object of desire. Possessing this odd structure, the fetish attracts one’s desire without ever being able to fulfill the desire. The fetish is an erotic ‘tease’ par excellence—it can only gesture toward that which it represents, while nonetheless promising the erotic fulfillment of desire. For Agamben, this structure of the fetish seems to apply to Dasein’s originary structure. From the very beginning, Dasein has the structure of attracting itself to itself without ever fulfilling or appropriating its desirous and ‘real’ structure. It always already desires to be what it is, without ever reaching this end, e.g., in Being-toward-death, Dasein never factically arrives at Being-toward-death. Consequently, it desires what it cannot have—and this is Dasein’s original ēthos, or dwelling place. One can hardly ignore Agamben’s emphasis on topology, which is an important motif in his work. Elsewhere, the topology was concerned with borders, and the arbitrary ‘de-cision’, or cut, the sovereign power made in drawing these borders. Here, and if we keep in mind the incredibly important note in Homo Sacer, pp.150-53, the topology is concerned with the body of Dasein. Dasein’s own body, its Da, becomes for itself a dwelling place, the ēthos, whose borders cannot be so cleanly distinguished. Dasein’s very way of being, the Being-such of Dasein, its guise, runs afoul of a clean border, since Dasein can never reach that which it desires, its own body as Being-such—we will return to Agamben’s view on topology in greater detail at the end of my presentation.
The propriety of the improper of Dasein: Yet all the while, we must pay close attention to Agamben’s words, “Authentic existence has no content other than inauthentic existence; the proper is nothing other than the apprehension of the improper.” The way in which Dasein is open to the world, its body—its Da—is inherently marked by the improper. The proper is in fact nothing other than the recognition of Dasein’s factical, or fetish-like, structure. To apprehend the proper is to apprehend that which does not belong, and is, as such, improper to Dasein, or its factical Self. In other words, Dasein’s originary character is a cobelonging to both what it is in truth and what it is in its untruth. To say it differently, for Dasein to exist in its proper manner is for it to exist in an improper manner—it desires, but what it must desire (its own Being-such) it cannot ever possess.
The passions Love and Hate: The remaining portion of Agamben’s essay is concerned with the passions, love and hate as the modes in which Dasein confronts the space of its Da as the way beings are revealed or concealed. Associated with passions [leidenschaften], as opposed to affects, there is “a reaching out and opening up of oneself,” they are the Grundweisen through which “Dasein experiences the Da, the opening and retreating of the being that it is and must be.” Love and Hate are never blind, they instead give one focus. Hate is focused upon that which one distains and how one premeditates vengeance; likewise with Love, Love gives one a sort of premeditation as to how best woo and court the object, and as a result, Dasein is made aware not only of what it desires, but that it desires at all. Dasein is made aware of its capacity to be affected by the world—in finding passion in the Da, Dasein is opened to its own receptivity to the world. To love (and hate), to be passionate, is to become aware that Dasein is lacking something toward which it strives. To draw our attention to another piece of Agamben’s writings, let us call to mind what he means by ‘thought’ , for it seems that thought and the passions take on the same role: both open oneself to the different forms-of-life. Thought, we are told, is “to be affected by one’s own receptiveness and experience in each and every thing that is thought a pure power of thinking.” To be affected by one’s own receptiveness suggests that one is aware of one’s own lack, of one’s own ability to suffer: Only if I am not always already and solely enacted, but rather delivered to a possibility and a power, only if living and intending and apprehending themselves are at stake each time in what I live and intend and apprehend—only if, in other words, there is thought—only then can a form of life become, in its own factness and thingness, form-of-life, in which it is never possible to isolate something like naked life.
Thought, then, seems to be the philosophical contemplation, or perhaps the premeditation of what is potential in the object of its inquiry. Hence, thought itself, like the passions, is not a form of life among other forms in one’s life, but rather is that power that allows for the multitude of potential forms of life to be thought as form-of-life. To think (to communicate communicability), to love, to be passionate demands potentiality—it demands that which is unclear be made more clear. If the project of the world is for Dasein to understand the world and this possibility is impossible, this impossibility demands the unanswerable ‘Why’. Only in this way is Life found in all its different forms. In other words, only in apprehending the improper or what will immediately below be seen to be the impotentiality of one’s own being, will one be freed from the force of the sovereign de-cision—Dasein will no longer be tempted to believe that it is complete but will love and desire its own obscurity. But in order to show this, let us look further still into Agamben’s writings on Love.
What is Love?: To love [lieben] is equated with mögen, which as Agamben tells us can mean both ‘to want’ and ‘to be able’. For both Agamben and Heidegger this equating could not hold more significance. To quote from Heidegger on page 199:
To embrace a thing or a person in its essence means to love it [sie lieben], to favor it [sie mögen]. Thought in a more originary way, such favoring [mögen] means to bestow essence as a gift. Such favoring is the proper essence of enabling [Vermögen], which not only can achieve this or that but also can let something essentially unfold [wesen] in its provenance, that is, let it be…The enabling is what is properly ‘possible’ [das eigentlich ‘Mögliche’], that whose essence resides in favoring….Being is the enabling-favoring, the ‘may be’…the possible.
To lieben is to mögen: to love is to want an object. ‘Wanting’ suggests that the object is over and beyond the individual. Hence, one loves or favors only that which is obscured, that whose essence is not immediately transparent. But since the essence is not immediately transparent, to love is to allow the essence to come out of obscurity as well. Love is marks the ability of the emergence from obscurity. The likening of lieben and mögen has its significance in love’s originary structure of Dasein in the double meaning ‘to be able’ can take, i.e., its active and passive meanings. ‘To be able’ can suggest having either the ability to do something—favoring, wanting or reaching out to an object—or it can suggest the ability to undergo the influence of something—in favoring an object it unfolds its essence in front of oneself. Only in comporting oneself toward beings in this dual way can beings reveal themselves authentically. That is, only by acknowledging one’s powerlessness in confronting beings does one even acknowledge that the being exists. It is due to the resistance of beings in general that Dasein is interested in them, favors them, wants them, it possesses mögen for them; it asks the ‘Why’ of them—we will return to this at the end of this essay. This is the mode of freedom and possibility that Dasein possesses. In favoring [mögen] an object, Dasein’s attention is drawn to it and as such allows the object to affect Dasein. And in loving it, a seemingly inevitable outcome of mögen, Dasein asks what the object is; it wants to uncover the object, asking ‘why’. So, if this is reflected back upon Dasein’s own structure as fetish, we can perhaps see that Dasein asks of itself, Why? Dasein is inherently interested in itself when it understands its passionate and erotic originary structure. Again, Agamben emphasizes the cobelonging of two opposed terms: the capacity and the incapacity that Dasein possesses, harkening back to the cobelonging of the proper and the improper.
The potentiality of Love: Here, Agamben returns us to his discussion of Aristotle’s notion that all potentiality is impotentiality—surely it’s no mistake that this essay immediately follows his essay on Aristotle. If we remember: something can only be said to be potential in relation to its own lack, that is to say, in relation to its own incapacity; “the potential welcomes non-Being, and this welcoming of non-Being is potentiality, fundamentally passivity. It is passive potentiality, but not a passivity that undergoes something other than itself; rather, it undergoes and suffers its own non-Being.” And to be free, to love, is precisely this capacity to be concerned with one’s own impotentiality—one’s form-of-life. To return to our present essay, mögen is the capacity that is not only capable of potentiality, what Agamben considers “the manners of Being that are in fact possible,” but also most importantly of impotentiality. As such, mögen, and passion more generally, allows both the possible and the impossible to exist within Dasein. Mögen as ‘wanting’ and ‘being able’ allows for Dasein’s wanting its own impotentiality, that is to say being receptive to it, and in being receptive to it allows its own impotentiality to occur. The ground that is opened via mögen, that which human-beings appropriate and make proper, is not that which is hidden—this would not make it an impossibility, but a possibility—instead the fact of hiddenness itself is opened. To be properly Dasein, then, once again, is to be properly improper. The human-being is always concealed and opaque. (Hence, the phrase “the immobile force of the possible.” ) This immobile force should perhaps not be read as an imperfect nihilistic phrase, but rather as the perfect nihilism of Benjamin, a phrase that gives us the “openness to the mystery” of the human-being. The human-being as constituted without destiny, without a properly proper essence. Absence of a destiny allows for the greatest investigations into the depths of the ways of being a human-being, where not even the validity of human-essence has a meaning. Essence is not a given truth as such, but instead in looking into its ‘essence’, the human safeguards the lēthē, the nontruth, of the way of being of Dasein. In fact it is only in this safeguarding of the nontruth that something like knowledge arises, if by knowledge we understand the uncovering of the impropriety of Dasein’s structure. The possibility of knowledge must be understood as the possibility of understanding that the human-being is not something solid, not something with a given nature, but something which, to be understood, must always and forever be investigated. Perhaps no positive qualities can come out of such knowledge other than the human-being in its very ground is properly improper, it conceals more than it shows, it must always inhabit the ēthos of impropriety, i.e., its capacity for its incapacity.
Love without Borders: Let us return to the discussion of topology but now let us couple it with our understanding of lieben as mögen. Lieben is not an affirmation of the self; instead, lieben is the facticity in which an individual endures his nonbelonging, his darkness. “In love, the lover and the beloved come to light in their concealment, in an eternal facticity beyond Being” (I take Being here to mean some pre-ontological givenness of objects). We love what is most improper to us, we mögen that which we do not understand. It is precisely in our non-understanding of something, in its strangeness, our interest in piqued, we begin our search, or hunt for that which we love, and our senses heighten. And if we should ever catch up with that which we search, our interest is lost; for we no longer lieben it because we no longer feel mögen for it; instead we cast it aside as already understood, as banal. But since Dasein is always already dwelling within the ēthos of love, Dasein can never catch up to itself. Dasein knows that it loves itself, it always already feels mögen toward itself precisely because it is outside of itself, Dasein resists a full probing of its depths. Thus it presents itself as concealed to itself, it entices, charms, and lures itself to itself in its concealment, in its obscurity—it is the darkness, the obscurity, the exceeding presence of itself that Dasein find so erotic. And as experiencing itself as this exceeding presence, the space, its Da, in which Dasein experiences its lust for itself, explodes—the space is uncloseable, it outstrips itself in its erotic desire. We must be careful and admit that there is a kind of space—the Da—a border in which Dasein experiences itself, or else it would experience the Nothing and emptiness of imperfect nihilism. But in experiencing itself within this border and yet nevertheless still interested and having mögen for itself, Dasein understands that it holds a relation to itself that is already understood to be insufficient. As such, it can no longer hold itself in relation to itself, within this space of erotic love. Instead, it can only gesture toward itself, and in gesturing recognizes it has no language to which it can relate itself to itself. It must expand its vocabulary, it must ask ‘why?’. Dasein is the place, the space, the border, in which it cannot contain itself, it is in excess of what it is and this is what makes its Being-such so—it contains that from which it withdraws. As such, we may perhaps say that the sovereign power can have no control over Dasein if it understands its passionate-self. The sovereign power can no longer make an arbitrary de-cision, since the borders within which Dasein now understands itself to exist already gesture beyond anything the sovereign can de-cide upon. Dasein is freed from the banality of the sovereign de-cision. Yet, Agamben asks, “Is today something like a form-of-life, a life for which living itself would be at stake in its own living, possible? Is today a life of power available?” In other words, can man look into himself and only gesture? Does man have the power to ask ‘Why’ in the face of that which is beyond even the Nothing and demand no answer? Does man have the power, in other words, to freely use that which is most proper to him, the most improper, the obscure, the unanswerable ‘Why’? This is the ethical life, the life of lieben and mögen; we must not only be able to stand in front of the obscurity but we must also use it properly. We must not flee from the obscurity, but to learn how ‘use’ it; and in using it, gather together every aspect of the human-being, especially those aspects which are now, under the defining power of sovereignty, too ghastly, filthy, and nauseating to even cast our eyes upon. We must mögen even the most disgusting aspects of the human-possibility, the muselmann, and in so doing love it, desire it, and open ourselves to it—we must allow it to occur. Or, are we doomed to live in the Sovereign de-cision, even if it is one’s own sovereign de-cision, as defining what is dignified and what is undignified? Can we desire to live outside of such a de-cision? Can we embrace the darkness; can we form an ethic based upon obscurity? Or, are we too afraid to look into ourselves, and not see something, even the undignified Nothing? These are Agamben’s questions to us, to which I am afraid I do not have the courage to answer.