Impotentiality & Potentiation: Opening Pathways of Resistance in Agamben and Malabou

Energetic explosion is the idea of nature. In passing from one motor to the other, from one energetic device to the other, force simultaneously loses itself and forms itself differently, just as the metamorphic crisis frees a butterfly from its chrysalis. –Catherine Malabou[1]

I would prefer not to. –Bartleby, the Scrivener

How does one resist? What are the preconditions for resistance to the destructive forces of our times? For Catherine Malabou and Giorgio Agamben, the answers to these questions will have to be located in more fundamental ones: for Agamben, our path to resistance must begin with an examination of what it means to be human, and what exactly is the nature of the mechanism that separates the human from other forms of life, for only then will we able to struggle for a truly qualified life that has not been rendered bare; for Malabou, the question of resistance will need to turn inward, into a question of physiology and the proper use of that most vital of organs, our brains. The ontological characteristics of what it means to be human, and what it means to have a meta-conscious brain, will have to be considered in any questioning towards means of resistance to the violence of neoliberal capitalism and the modern war machine. For both Agamben and Malabou, these questions will generate new concepts, which will self-replicate out into the world, creating a fractal-like structure of a new model of human life. Formulating critiques of the current forms of oppression will be the necessary first step for determining the goals and stakes of the resistance, so I will begin with an overview of the various forms of critique described in the work of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello. I will then focus on one broad strategy of resistance in its various semblances. I will argue for the concept of désoeuvrement, that I will locate in Malabou’s What Should We Do With Our Brain? and Agamben’s The Open: Man and Animal, as a possible path of resistance that has not yet been assimilated by the very forces that we are attempting to overthrow. I will illustrate aspects of the argument by tracing a line of flight in the work of Michelangelo Antonioni—from the enclosed, endogenic whorl of capital’s machinations localized in the bowels of the Roman stock exchange in L’eclisse (1962), to the exogenic openness and impotentiality of the California desert in Zabriskie Point (1970).

Critique has been quiescent for some time now. This is one of the central claims made by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello (hereafter B+C) in The New Spirit of Capitalism. It is here that they outline the major modes of critique that have traditionally been leveled against capitalism, diagnose the waning of critique in the last thirty-odd years (i.e. during the rise of “the new spirit”), and weigh the potential for a new critique against the neoliberal Leviathan as we know it today. As B+C explain, the critique of capitalism is as old as capitalism itself, and the modalities of critique have always presupposed “a bad experience prompting protest, whether it is personally endured by critics or they are aroused by the fate of others” (B+C 2005, 36). This bad experience leads to what B+C highlight as the affect driving the critique of capitalism: indignation (36). But the gap between an affect of indignation and lucid, contestatory discourse can be quite wide, as B+C explain: “Without this prior emotional—almost sentimental—reaction, no critique can take off. On the other hand, it is a long way from spectacle of suffering to articulated critique; critique requires a theoretical fulcrum and an argumentative rhetoric to give voice to individual suffering and translate it onto terms that refer to the common good” (36). The fulcrum on which critique has traditionally been leveraged is twofold: artistic critique and social critique. B+C group four sorts of indignation into these two basic forms of critique. Under the umbrella of artistic critique we find discourses which couch “capitalism as a source of disenchantment and inauthenticity of objects, persons, emotions and, more generally, the kind of existence associated with it,” as well as denunciations that see “capitalism as a source of oppression, inasmuch as it is opposed to the freedom, autonomy and creativity of the human beings who are subject, under its sway”—subject both to the exigencies of the market and to the subordination of wage-labor (37). Under the heading of social critique we see criticisms of “capitalism as a source of poverty among workers and of inequalities on an unprecedented scale” as well as opprobrium of “capitalism as a source of opportunism and egoism which, by exclusively encouraging private interests, proves destructive of social bonds and collective solidarity, especially of minimal solidarity between rich and power” (37). The current task for theoreticians, as well as all concerned citizens, is to seek new tools (“new weapons,” as Deleuze might say) to develop one or both strands of critique laid out by B+C in an effort to point towards a brighter, more human(e) future beyond the horizon of violent capitalist exploitation and subjugation.

 Agamben doesn’t address capitalism and questions of political economy head-on in The Open: Man and Animal [2]; instead he turns his attention to an even more omnifarious reality of modern life, what he calls the “anthropological machine.” This is the term that Agamben gives to the tropes and mechanisms that determine which life forms get to be included among the realm of the human. Agamben locates both an ancient anthropological machine (which works to humanize the animal) and its modern iteration (which animalizes the human), but both share fundamental properties in common:

Both machines are able to function only by establishing a zone of indifference at their centers, within which—like a “missing link” which is always lacking because it is already virtually present—the articulation between human and animal, man and non-man, speaking being and living being, must take place. Like every space of exception, this zone is, in truth, perfectly empty, and the truly human being who should occur there is only the place of the ceaselessly updated decision in which the caesurae and their rearticulation are always dislocated and displaced anew. What would thus be obtained, however, is neither an animal life nor a human life, but only a life that is separated and excluded from itself—only a bare life. (Agamben 2004, 37-38)

With the contemporary forms of capitalism increasingly dependent on the virtuosic performance of laborers—that is, precisely their ability to be speaking humans that can elicit affective connectivity among other humans—this anthropological machine will also, by logical extension, be separating those that can perform (and thus survive) in this new economy from those that cannot. From the point of view of the new owners of capital, these “animalized” humans are an economic liability that cannot contribute to the “new spirit” of capitalism.

  The anthropological machine in its modern guise is part and parcel of the globalized machine of spectacle: image as spectacle, and the optics of capitalization in an age when, at least since Debord, it has been understood that the image has assumed the form of the commodity. For indeed, in Agamben’s thought, the anthropological machine is also “an optical machine constructed of a series of mirrors in which man, looking at himself, sees his own image always already deformed in the features of an ape” (Agamben 2004, 26-27; my emphasis).

The modern spectacle is an apparatus of capture, captivation, and captivity, with the monetization of attention becoming an increasingly primary mode of capitalist production under the rubric of this “new spirit.” Agamben argues, via Heidegger, that captivation is one of the essential conditionals of animality. One of the main functions of the anthropological machine is to create within the human this sense of captivation, which in turn animalizes and debases the human. When the animal is captivated by the world, they are closed off, banned from the “openness” of what it means to be human. The animal experiences what Heidegger calls “poverty in world (Weltarmut)” (Agamben 2004, 50); the anthropological machine, of which cultural capitalism is only the most quotidian manifestation, produces a similar “poverty in world,” a similar captivation and caesura between the openness of (what Heidegger considers) a properly human life and the enclosure of the animal and the human-becoming-animal leading to what Heidegger calls a “profound boredom.” As Heidegger puts it in:

It will be seen how this fundamental attunement, and everything bound up with it, is set off over against captivation. This contrast [between animal captivation and profound boredom] will become all the more decisive for us insofar as captivation, as precisely the essence of animality, apparently finds itself in the closet proximity to what we identified as a characteristic element of profound boredom and described as the enchantment-enchainment [Gebanntheit] of Dasein within beings in their totality. (qtd. in Agamben 2004, 62)

This conjunction of enchantment and enchainment described by Heidegger could also serve as an apt description of the phenomenological experience of the new spirit of capitalism itself: that is, our current, post-68 version of the anthropological machine, so ideologically effective in holding at bay the sense of disenchantment, described by B+C, that could potentially lead to a revitalization of the practice of resistance with real teeth. To remain enchanted is to remain captivated in captivity, in the hold of the machine.

To stop this captivation to the spectacle of capital, this enchantment that becomes enchainment, we would do well to jam the gears of the anthropological machine, of which capital is a crucial dimension. In The Open, Agamben describes, in his typically crypto-philological way, a possible strategy of resistance that stems from what B+C would likely describe as an “artistic” critique because it is responding precisely to the deleterious effects of the (dis)enchantment of the world, the condition of being “poor in world,” which is not reduced to merely economic poverty, but rather a spiritual, ethical, and aesthetic poverty. We can name this form of resistance: désoeuvrement (“inoperativeness,” or, in Agamben’s Italian, “inoperosità”). This is a concept that Agamben has developed over a number of his works, and the French word appears as the title of the penultimate chapter in The Open.[3] It is a trope that he takes largely from Georges Bataille. Indeed, Bataille, who is invoked in the opening of Agamben’s book and only again in its closing pages, nevertheless functions as a specter presiding over the whole of the text as a kind of patron anti-saint. Agamben begins by recounting the debate between Bataille and Alexandre Kojève following Kojève’s famous lectures on Hegel at the École des Hautes Études in the late 1930s. The disagreement regarded the question of which features of humanity would survive the end of history, with Bataille unable to “accept at any cost” that “‘art, love, play,’ as well as laughter, ecstasy, luxury . . . ceased to be superhuman, negative, and sacred, in order to be given back to animal praxis” (Agamben 2004, 6). Bataille was willing to wager his argument for the continuation of these ludic excesses on “the idea of a ‘negativity with no use’ {negatività senza impiego; also ‘unemployed negativity’}, that is, of a negativity that somehow survives the end of history and for which he can provide no proof other than his own life” (Agamben 2004, 7).

  This negativity with no use, the unemployed negativity so valorized by Bataille, can point the way to resistance—to becoming the monkey wrench in the anthropological machine. The best strategy to render the machine inoperative may be to assume an irrecuperable indifference. B+C have shown how capitalism has become extremely adept at subsuming nearly all criticisms of his machinations into the logic of capital itself; but what it may not be able to recuperate is the “absolute indifference” of unemployed negativity (Agamben 2004, 66). Agamben speaks of this potentially emancipatory refusal, this lying inactive [brachliegende], in the terms of a Heideggerian pastoral: “The verb brachliegen . . . comes from the language of agriculture. Brache means ‘fallow ground,’ that is, the field is left unworked in order to be planted the following year. Brachliegen means ‘to leave fallow,’ that is, inactive, uncultivated” (2004, 66). Agamben valorizes the uncultivated, the held-in-suspense; a sentiment that Agamben certainly holds in common with his former teacher. Indeed, this leaving fallow is precisely what is not allowed to happen in the process of what Heidegger refers to as “Enframing” [Ge-stell]. In this process, everything is made available as “standing-reserve” through the “monstrous” challenging-forth of modern technology: “That challenging happens in that the energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is, in turn, distributed, and what is distributed is switched over ever anew” (Heidegger 1977, 16). Nothing is allowed to be uncultivated in this Enframing: “Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing-reserve [Bestand]” (17).

The vast potential of the resources of standing-reserve that the process of Enframing challenges forth and makes immediately at hand finds its opposite number in the impotentiality not to engage in the process of “ordering the real,” as articulated by Heidegger  (Heidegger 1977, 19). For Agamben, impotentiality is the very origin of potentiality itself. This is an essential point:

What appears for the first time as such in deactivation (in the Brachliegen) of possibility, then, is the very origin of potentiality—and with it, of Dasein, that is, the being which exists in the form of potentiality-for-being {poter-essere}. But precisely for this reason, this potentiality or originary possibilitization constitutively has the form of a potential-not-to {Potenza-di-no}, of an impotentiality, insofar as it is able to {può} only in the beginning from a being able not to {poter non}, that is, from the deactivation of single, specific, factical possibilities. (Agamben 2004 67; emphasis in original)

This potential-not-to of impotentiality is evinced in the Bataillean program of désoeuvrement, the unworkability of human energy that is channeled into the irrecuperable realms of life, however diminished those domains may be today. Agamben has described this move away from the realm of work and into the subversive realm of play, a sphere that has, of course, already been co-opted by neoliberal capital, but, at least for Agamben, remains one of liberation and release from the anthropological machine. In “The Author as Gesture,” Agamben is willing to bet everything on the impotential of play: “A life is ethical not when it simply submits to moral laws but when it accepts putting itself into play in its gestures, irrevocably and without reserve—even at the risk that its happiness or its disgrace will be decided once and for all” (Agamben 2007, 69; my emphasis). In State of Exception, inoperativity also points to a new formulation of the coming juridical order: “What opens a passage to justice is not the erasure of law, but its deactivation and inactivity [inoperosità]—that is, another use of the law” (Agamben 2005, 64). That other use is to be found in play:

One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes law, but a new use value that is born after it. And use, which has been contaminated by law, must also be free from its own value. This liberation is the task of study, or of play. (2005, 64).

The implementation of a strategy of désoeuvrement as an effective artistic critique of the anthropological machine—a machine that mobilizes both neoliberal capitalism and juridical governance, to be sure—will require an act of courage on the part of those who are willing to face the abyssal caesura that separates humanity from animality: “To render inoperative the machine that governs our conception of man will therefore mean no longer to seek new—more effective or more authentic—articulations, but rather to show the central emptiness, the hiatus that—within man—separates man from animal, and risk ourselves in this emptiness: the suspension of suspension, Shabbat of both animal and man” (Agamben 2004, 92). This is the plea that Agamben makes for a radical politics to emerge from this opening in the caesura, the very space towards which the anthropological machine directs its violent process of division—a dangerously categorical political position to assume.

The previous forms-of-life (to use another Agambenian formulation) that had once provided a reprieve from the mechanical churning of the anthropological machine have all been vitiated “in the name of the triumph of the economy” (Agamben 2004, 76). As Agamben says: “The traditional historical potentialities—poetry, religion, philosophy—which from both the Hegelo-Kojevian and Heideggerian perspectives kept the historico-political destiny of peoples awake, have long since been transformed into cultural spectacles and private experiences, and have lost all historical efficacy” (2004, 76-77). Here is where Agamben’s description of the rendering of the human into bare life [nuda vita] by the anthropological machine, as described in The Open, connects to broader articulations of the concept in his oeuvre:

Faced with this eclipse,[4] the only task that still seems to retain some seriousness is the assumption of the burden—and the “total management”—of biological life, that is, of the very animality of man. Genome, global economy, and humanitarian ideology are all the united three faces of this process in which the posthistorical humanity seems to take on its own physiology as its last, impolitical mandate. (Agamben 2004, 77; my emphasis).

Agamben seems to be pointing here to the nightmarish biopolitical landscape that he has described so vividly in his Homo Sacer series, in which “the juridico-political system transforms itself into a killing machine,” prompting all living in this state of exception to “ceaselessly try to interrupt the working of the machine that is leading the West toward global civil war” (Agamben 2005, 86, 87).[5] But the move to the human’s own physiology need not be as fatalistic as Agamben would have us believe; moreover, it need not be impolitical at all. Indeed, for Catherine Malabou, the move to a critical focus on the brain is always a decidedly political maneuver.

In What Should We Do With Our Brain?, Malabou is directly confronting our current post-Fordist, post-68 iteration of the new spirit of capitalism in which the flexibility of the laborer is paramount. B+C provide a comprehensive list of “the qualities that are guarantees of success in this new spirit”:

autonomy, spontaneity, rhizomorphous capacity, multitasking (in contrast to the narrow specialization of the old division of labor), conviviality, openness to others and novelty, availability, creativity, visionary intuition, sensitivity to differences, listening to lived experience and receptiveness to a whole range of experiences, being attracted to informality and the search for interpersonal contacts. (B+C 2005, 97)

All of these “are taken directly from the repertoire of May 1968” (97), and all have been integrated into the new political and social forms. Malabou shows how doesn’t have “to be acquainted with the results of the current discoveries in the neurosciences in order to have an immediate, daily experience of the neuronal form of political and social functioning, a form that today deeply coincides with the current face of capitalism” (Malabou 2008, 10). The new discoveries in the plasticity of the brain provide an allegorical correspondence to the new requirements of flexibility of the workforce under neoliberalism. But the distinction between these two terms is very important for Malabou: plasticity is normatively positive, while flexibility is normatively negative. As Malabou explains, “today, the true sense of plasticity is hidden, and we tend constantly to substitute for it its mistake cognate, flexibility. The difference between these two terms appears insignificant. Nevertheless, flexibility is the ideological avatar of plasticity—at once its mask, its diversion, and its confiscation” (2008, 12). The new regime of flexibility functions like Agamben’s anthropological machine: those who can operate within the system are kept, while those that cannot are spirited away, made to disappear:

Employability is synonymous with flexibility. We recall that flexibility, a management watchword since the seventies, means above all the possibility of instantly adapting productive apparatus and labor to the evolution of demand. It thus becomes, in a single stroke, a necessary quality of both managers and employees. If I insist on how close certain managerial discourses are to neuroscientific discourses, this is because it seems to me that the phenomenon called "brain plasticity" is in reality more often described in terms of an economy of flexibility. Indeed, the process of potentiation, which is the very basis of plasticity, is often presented simply as the possibility of increasing or decreasing performance. . . . Suppleness, the ability to bend, and docility thus appear to join together in constituting a new structural norm that functions immediately to exclude . . . In effect, anyone who is not flexible deserves to disappear. (Malabou 2008, 46)

Because we are “living at the hour of neuronal liberation” (8), with the “coming consciousness”[6] of our own plasticity (12), it is our duty to determine how best to use our brains (and the rest of our bodies) in a way that emphasizes the positives of plasticity and rejects the confiscation of the brain’s neuronal potential by flexibility.

For Malabou, the logical extrapolation of the new knowledge about the brain would lead to nothing less than revolution; anything short of a total reordering of our brain and society would be a squandering of this profound insight into the structuring of the encephalon which has been recursively replicated in our current social, political, and economic formations:

[W]hat’s the point of having an all-new brain if we don’t have an all-new identity, if synaptic change changes nothing? And what do we get from all these discourses, from all these descriptions of neuronal man, from all these scientific revolutions, if not the absence of revolution in our lives, the absence of revolution in our selves? What new horizons do the new brains, the new theoreticians of the brain, open up? (2008, 66)

Malabou would like to see the new theoreticians “free this freedom” of the plastic brain, “disengage it from a certain number of ideological presuppositions that implicitly govern the entire neuroscientific field and, by a mirror effect, the entire field of politics—and in this way rescue philosophy from its irresponsible torpor” (2008, 11). The revolution in the brain, the revolution in philosophy, the revolution in politics—all of these projects must begin with a rejection of the neuronal ideology of flexibility that has come to pervade the discourses of neoliberalism, particularly evident in the management literature analyzed by B+C, which advocate the same sort of “rhizomorphous capacity” that may have been a strategy of resistance at one point (in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, for example), but has now been completely assimilated by capital.

The way out of this bind of co-opted resistance for Malabou, as for Bataille-cum-Agamben, is a turn towards désoeuvrement, and the unemployed (and unemployable) affect of negativity.[7] This sequence of resistance can start with “explosions of rage,” which are a good, productive thing for Malabou:

Perhaps we ought to relearn how to enrage ourselves, to explode against a certain culture of docility, of amenity, of the effacement of all conflict even as we live in a state of permanent war. It is not because the struggle has changed form, it is not because it is no longer really possible to fight a boss, owner, or father that there is no struggle to wage against exploitation. To ask “What should we do with our brain?” is above all to visualize the possibility of saying no to an afflicting economic, political, and mediatic culture that celebrates only the triumph of flexibility, blessing obedient individuals who have no greater merit than that of knowing how to bow their heads with a smile. (Malabou 2008, 79)

Here Malabou is, in a manner that she is no doubt conscious of, closely echoing Heidegger’s words from “The Question Concerning Technology”: “Always the unconcealment of that which is goes upon a way of revealing. Always the destining of revealing holds complete sway over man. But that destining is never a fate that compels. For man becomes truly free only insofar as he belongs to the realm of destining and becomes one who hears [Hörender], and not one who is simply constrained to obey [Höringer]” (Heidegger 1977, 25). To simply bow one’s head, to simply obey, is to be flexible. Contrarily, to allow the explosion of rage to be sublimated into an act of refusal, without reason or renunciation, like Melville’s Bartleby, is to be exhibit plasticity: “What flexibility lacks is the resources of giving form, the power to create, to invent or even to erase an impression, the power to style. Flexibility is plasticity minus its genius” (Malabou 2008, 12). Bartleby’s genius (“I would prefer not to”) is to give form to an act of resistance that is pure inoperativity, a form of resistance that is irrecuperable by capital because there is no fulcrum on which capital can pivot the resistance and turn it back upon itself. Bartleby’s potential is his impotentialty, the potential-not-to. The impotentiality of resistance is the very thing that creates a new life in Malabou’s neurophilosophy. As she puts it, “What we are lacking is life, which is to say: resistance. Resistance is what we want. Resistance to flexibility, to this ideological norm advanced consciously or otherwise by a reductionist discourse that models and naturalizes the neuronal process in order to legitimate a certain social and political functioning” (2008, 68). The rage and désoeuvrement present in this approach are both part of a productive project of negativity that, for Malabou, is an integral part of an emancipatory plasticity and what gets occluded by most neuroscientists who are too beholden to the prevailing neuronal ideology:

In excluding all negativity from their discourse, . . . certain neuroscientists cannot, most of the time, escape the confines of a well-meaning conception of successful personality, “harmonious and mature.” But we have no use for harmony and maturity if they only serve to make us “scrappers” or “prodigal elders.” Creating resistance to neuronal ideology is what our brain wants, and what we want for it. (Malabou, 2008, 77; empahsis in original)

We need to learn to embrace, unapologetically and without reserve, the neuronal, philosophical, and political potentialities of life-restoring resistance, by rejecting harmony and so-called maturity and instead burrowing into the depths of negativity like the noble termite into rotting wood.

The new formations of life will have to find ways to connect the newly enlivened and plastic brain with the body in which it is housed, a body which has become over-stretched and worn thin through the requirements of flexibility. This conjunction is a concern of Malabou’s, and thus she turns to the work of Gilles Deleuze, “one of the rare philosophers to have taken an interest in neuroscientific research since the 1980s” (Malabou 2008, 36). In it is in Deleuze’s two books on cinema that he offers the richest account of his own neurophilosophy, particularly in Chapter 8, “Cinema, body and brain, thought,” of Cinema 2: The Time-Image, in which Deleuze distinguishes between what he calls a “cinema of the brain” (exemplified by filmmakers such as Alain Resnais and Stanley Kubrick) and a “cinema of the body” (Jean-Luc Godard, John Cassavetes). It is not surprising, then, that Malabou would quote from this section when considering how these neuro-somatic integrations will operate in an embodied subjectivity: “About Antonioni’s cinematic work, Deleuze declares: ‘Antonioni does not criticize the modern world, in whose possibility he profoundly ‘believes’: he criticizes the coexistence in the world of the modern brain and an exhausted body.’ We could say in the same way that today we live the ‘coexistence of a modern brain and an exhausted identity’” (Malabou 2008, 66-67). The profound disappointment that Malabou expresses in her book concerns that fact that, despite revolutionary advances in our knowledge of the brain, very little in the way of positive social and political progress has come from it: “it seems that the neuronal revolution has revolutionized nothing for us, if it is true that our brains serve only to displace ourselves better, work better, or obey better” (Malabou 2008, 68). The vitalization of the brain has not helped the depleted body, and the transformation of identity, possible through its continual individuation in neuronal firings, has been stalled. Malabou imagines a perpetually reiterative process of identity formation, one that operates like the author-function described by Agamben in “The Author as Gesture”: “The author marks the point at which a life is offered up and played out in the work. Offered up and played out, not expressed or fulfilled” (Agamben 2007, 69). Malabou’s ideal identity would exist at the same liminal margins as the gesture of the author-function, as the “irreducible presence of an inexpressive outer edge” (Agamben 2007, 70). The bad polymorphism of an entirely flexible identity must be rejected in favor of the destiny-changing potentiality of plasticity that is always being played out and never totally fulfilled:

The plasticity of the self, which supposes that it simultaneously receives and gives itself its own form, implies a necessary split and the search for an equilibrium between the preservation of constancy (or, basically, the autobiographical self) and the exposure of this constancy to accidents, to the outside, to otherness in general (identity, in order to endure, ought paradoxically to alter itself or accidentialize itself). What results is a tension born of the resistance that constancy and creation mutually oppose to each other. It is thus that every form carries within itself its own contradictions. And precisely this resistance makes transformation possible. (Malabou 2008, 71)

 The plastic identity would be one that is at once always in the play-of-formation and always poised to resist a remolding of form; as Malabou notes, “Identity resists its own occurrence to the very extent that it forms it” (74). Identity would then assume its rightful destiny as poetry: “The place of the poem . . . is in the gesture through which the author and reader put themselves into play in the text and, at the same time, are indefinitely withdrawn from it” (Agamben 2007, 71).

Depression and a Heideggerian “profound boredom” have been the result of the failed potential of what we might call “identity as gesture,” which is perhaps why Malabou turns to Antonioni, popularly known as cinema’s great poet of malaise and listlessness (hence Andrew Sarris’ famous coinage “Antoniennui”[8]), to help diagnose this societal malady. What Malabou neglects in her citing of Deleuze, however, is that it is in Antonioni’s work that a fusion of two cinemas—that of the brain and that of the body—is made possible as in no other auteur. As Deleuze writes:

Antonioni would be the perfect example of a double composition. The unity of his work has often been sought in the established themes of solitude and incommunicability, as characteristics of the modern world. Nevertheless, according to him, we walk at two very different paces, one for the body, one for the brain. . . . If Antonioni is a great colourist, it is because he has always believed in the colours of the world, in the possibility for creating them, and of renewing our cerebral knowledge. He is not an author who moans about the impossibility of communicating in the world. It is just that the world is painted in splendid colours, while the bodies which people it are still insipid and colourless. The world awaits its inhabitants, who are still lost in neurosis. . . . The unity of Antonioni’s work is the confrontation of the body-character with his weariness and his past, and of the brain-colour with all its future potentialities, but the two making up one and the same world, ours, its hopes and its despairs. (Deleuze 1989, 204-05; my emphasis)

Antonioni’s work shows a clear progression from the weariness of the body to the renewing of the brain in the world: from the black-and-white world of financial speculation and narrative erasure, to the future potentialities of a world-in-color, populated by bodies full of hope.

The stock exchange in L'eclisse

           In L’eclisse, the world awaits its inhabitants; indeed, by the film’s conclusion, the world has been all but emptied of people. The final shot of the white-hot light of a street lamp does not bode well for the future of this world. We do glimpse a brief moment of inoperativity in this film set in the world of bourgeois finance. When Vittoria (Monica Vitti) goes to visit her mother at the floor of the Roman stock exchange, all trading is momentarily stopped. It is precisely this moment of désoeuvrement, of unworkability, that will play an integral part in the narrative of Bernard Stiegler’s film-philosophy. As Stiegler writes:

In The Eclipse [L’eclisse] (1962), Michelangelo Antonioni shows the announcement on the trading floor of the Stock Market, of a courier’s death, then films a “minute of silence”—that actually lasts nearly a full minute (56 seconds, according to the timer on the VCR). The unfolding of this “real time” does not mean that the cinematic time is any more true or “realistic” when it coincides with “real-time.” In fact, in this case it means a minute of death-time. And further, in that long immobilized silence, on the contrary it becomes clearer for the living consciousness of the spectator that time in every guise is always the time of contraction, condensation, abbreviation—the time of montage: it is always cinematic time, and there is a conjunction between the cinematic flux and that of the viewer’s consciousness. The viewer can adopt the character’s time, grafted onto the viewer’s own time as selection and contradiction, and as a montage of the viewer’s own memories. (Stiegler 2011, 30-31; emphasis in original)

For Stiegler, this moment is crucial for showing that the flux of the film is adopted by the flux of the consciousness of the spectator watching the film. This always already cinematic nature of time and consciousness is what makes the captivation of the spectator in the optical machine of capitalist spectacle possible; and this is particularly true when considering the pharmacological effects of this specifically cinematic captivation, for as Agamben says, “On the one hand, captivation is a more spellbinding and intense openness than any human knowledge; on the other . . . it is closed in a total opacity” (2004, 59). This could certainly serve as an apt description of the epistemic possibilities of cinema, especially in the high modernist form of Antonioni. We then come to the third flux evident in this scene, the most important one for the machinery of spectacle, when Piero (Alain Delon) informs Vittoria that this lost minute of trading is going to “cost billions,” and the final element in this tripartite division of fluxes—cinema, consciousness, capital—is made explicit. To interrupt the trading, even to honor the death of a colleague, is time wasted; and time is money. Stiegler continues in his description of this scene:

How much does a minute of film cost? Does “a minute” really cost “billions”? The coincidence of a minute with a minute indicates that without this coincidence there is cinema, and that cinema, which brings many such coincidences into juxtaposition, has no need of them—and that everything has a price: the price of passing time, for example, and of the irreducibility and irreversibility of selection. (2011, 31)

Eight years after L’eclisse, Antonioni makes a film that attempts to show a path out of this enclosure of hypercapitalism, this topos where everything has a price and one minute spent not working can cost billions. In Zabriskie Point, the protagonists Mark and Daria (played by Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin in arresting one-off performances), retreat to the titular spot in the California desert, to a place in which the “anthropological machine seems to be completely out of play” (Agamben 2004, 81). Filmed in distinctly saturated late-60s Metrocolor®, Zabriskie Point shows precisely the movement from the closed world of the animalized human and the auto-asphyxiation of that notorious capital of smog, Los Angeles, to the open space of freedom. For Heidegger, “All revealing comes out of the open, goes into the open, and brings into the open. The freedom of the open consists neither in the unfettered arbitrariness nor in the constraint of mere laws. Freedom is that which conceals in a way that opens to light, in whose clearing there shimmers that veil that covers what comes to presence of all truth and lets the veil appear as what veils” (1977, 25). Here the one-minute of inoperativity in L’eclisse is extended to comprise the whole second half of the film, and the integration of the brain and the body, the distinct feature of Antonioni’s cinema according to Deleuze, is most clearly on display.

The smooth and striated space of encephalonic inoperativity.

Mark and Daria escape their working lives in Los Angeles in favor of the pure expenditure of libidinal energy in the openness of the desert. It is in this zone of play and inoperability, Agamben suggests, that the unworkability of the anthropological machine can be found: “The anthropological machine no longer articulates nature and man in order to produce the human through the suspension and capture of the inhuman. The machine is, so to speak, stopped; it is ‘at a standstill’” (Agamben 2004, 83). In one of the film’s most celebrated sequences (and the one most likely to be mocked by the cynical), Mark and Daria make love on the sand dunes; and, through some mystico-exogenic confabulation, various other couples (and trios) appear to participate in this great lysergic orgy. For Agamben, this is the highest form of inoperativity, and the best weapon against the anthropological machine: “an element which seems to belong totally to nature but instead everywhere surpasses it: sexual fulfillment . . . the hieroglyph of a new in-humanity” (Agamben 2004, 83). But this is an in-humanity in the most productive sense: not the reduction of the human into the debased category of the animal, but a rendering inoperative of the binary categories themselves: “To be sure, in their fulfillment the lovers learn something of each other that they should not have known—they have lost their mystery—and yet have not become any less impenetrable. But in this mutual disenchantment from their secret they enter, just as in Benjamin’s aphorism,[9] a new blessed life, that is neither animal nor human” (Agamben 2004, 87). This new life of individuation between the animal and the human is the inexpressive outer edge of a plastic identity.

Unlike L’eclisse, which ends with the icy foreboding of the modernist architecture of the outskirts of Rome, devoid of people, Zabriskie Point’s denouement imagines the explosive potential of plasticity. As Dalia is driving away from the Frank Lloyd Wright-style desert house of her boss, a real estate executive, she stops the car and gets out to stare back at it; we do not know why. Suddenly the house explodes into a spectacular conflagration, viewed from multiple camera angles and repeated several times. Then, in closer, slow motion shots, we see the contents of the house flying through the air—televisions sets and Wonder Bread among them. We can read this explosion very literally—that is to say, Deleuzianly—as an expression of the destructive aspects of Malabou’s plasticity:

 [I]t must be remarked that plasticity is also the capacity to annihilate the very form it is able to receiver or create. We should not forget that plastique, from which we get the words plastiquage and plastiquer, is an explosive substance made of nitroglycerine and nitrocellulose, capable of causing violent explosions. We thus note that plasticity is situated between two extremes: on the one side the sensible image of taking form (sculpture or plastic objects), and on the other side that of the annihilation of all form (explosion). (Malabou 2008, 5)

These explosions turn out not to be real; they are only images in the mind of the character, but that does nothing to lessen the impact of this gourmandizing of the capitalist order by the joint energetic discharge of libido and neuroglycerine.

The artistic critique presented here can be the starting point of a further social critique and, hopefully, real political reforms. If the ecstatic exigencies of recent displays of désoeuvrement, such as those seen in Tahrir Square, have taught us anything it is this: an emancipatory inoperativity has exploded open a pathway of resistance for others to follow, like the potentiation of a nerve that had atrophied and has once again been stimulated.

Bibliography

Agamben, Giorgio. 2004. The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

———. 2005. State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 2007. Profanations. Trans. Jeff Fort. New York: Zone Books.

Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello. 2005. The New Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Gregory Elliot. London and New York: Verso.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper Perennial.

Malabou, Catherine. 2008. What Should We Do With Our Brain?. Trans. Sebastian Rand. New York: Fordham University Press.

Sarris, Andrew. 1968. The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968. New York: Da Capo Press.

Stiegler, Bernard. 2011. Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise. Trans. Stephen Barker. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2006. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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[1] Malabou 2008, 73-74.

[2] That critique would have to wait for his most recent entry in the Homo Sacer series, Il Regno e la Gloria: Per una genealogica teologica dell’ economia e del governo (Milan: Neri Pozza, 2007), forthcoming in translation from Stanford as The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government.

[3] Although it is misspelled in the English translation from Stanford University Press where it is missing the accent aigu.

[4] More on the eclipse [l’eclisse] below.

[5] I cite here Kevin Attell’s translation of State of Exception as representative of Agamben’s Homo Sacer series even though the University of Chicago Press edition makes no indication that this book is indeed part of Agamben’s multi-volume project. The subtitle of the original edition is explicit on this important bibliographical detail; see Statio di eccezione: Homo Sacer II, I (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003).

[6] There is an intriguing resonance here with Agamben’s “coming community.”

[7] By foregrounding this aspect I follow Žižek, who in his commentary on Que faire de notre cerveau? emphasizes the affect of negativity operating in Malabou’s account: “in terms of plasticity: do we mean by this merely a capacity for infinite accommodation to the needs and conditions given in advance by our environs—in which case we get the infinitely adaptable ‘protean self’—or do we mean a Self capable of ‘negativity,’ of resisting and subverting the pressure of its environs, of breaking out of the ‘self-maintenance’ whose ideal is to maintain one’s homeostasis” (Žižek 2006, 209-10; my emphasis).

[8] Here is Sarris’ neologism in context: “Antonioni had become adept at exploiting the sentimental pessimism and sentimental prying of his age, and the American market was ripe for his brilliant coup. Ripe to the tune of eight million dollars. In some ways, Antonioni was more honest in Blow-Up than in La Notte, Eclipse, and The Red Desert, films in which he sought to graft Antoniennui onto the world at large. In Blow-Up, Antonioni acknowledged for the first time his own divided sensibility, half mod and half Marxist” (Sarris 1968, 146). Sophia Coppola is oft cited as a filmmaker carrying on the legacy of Antoniennui (although with a far greater emphasis on the mod than the Marx)—obvious examples being the languorous inertia of Scarlet Johansen and Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, two American animals lost in the profoundly human world of what Kojève called “Japanese snobbery” (qtd. in Agamben 2004, 11), and the existential dilemma of Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), an aimless movie star adrift at the Chateau Marmont in Somewhere. (A relic of the bad-boy 90s, Dorff himself is an embodiment of unwanted désoeuvrement, an unworkability in Hollywood.)

[9] “Sexual fulfillment delivers the man from his mystery, which does not consist in sexuality but which in its fulfillment, and perhaps in it alone, is severed—not solved. It is comparable to the fetters that bind him to life. The woman cuts them, and the man is free to die because his life has lost its mystery. Thereby he is reborn, and as his beloved frees him from the mother’s spell, the woman literally detaches him from Mother Earth—a midwife who cuts the umbilical cord which the mystery of nature has woven.” Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” quoted in Agamben 2004, 83-84.