The Hyper-​Hermeneutic Gesture of a Subtle RevolutionR

Draw­ing upon the thought of Gior­gio Agam­ben, this paper focuses upon the poten­tial of a single act to change a polit­ical order. Agamben’s writ­ings on the excep­tion and the fig­ure of whatever-​being retain the pos­sib­il­ity for a paradig­matic ges­ture that opens up a space for a polit­ics not foun­ded on a form of belong­ing groun­ded in a par­tic­u­lar prop­erty or sub­stance, such as national iden­tity, race or religion.

To illus­trate this event this paper turns to Agamben’s con­struc­tion of whatever-​being, the form-​of-​life that can chal­lenge sov­er­eign viol­ence and the cre­ation of homo sacer. The fig­ure of whatever-​being is con­struc­ted hyper-​hermeneutically. This term is chosen delib­er­ately. Agam­ben con­structs whatever-​being through sin­gu­lar paradig­matic examples. These examples serve as evid­ence for whatever-being’s exist­ence as a pure sin­gu­lar­ity, unable to be reduced to a par­tic­u­lar qual­ity or sub­stance. Such examples stand as ges­tures that allow future modes of belong­ing to sep­ar­ate them­selves from oppress­ive found­a­tions and dom­in­at­ing con­struc­tions of polit­ical exist­ence. They do so through reveal­ing the pos­sib­il­ity of a new way of being that does not require a revolu­tion­ary ‘zero hour’ to be brought about.

Cru­cially, whatever-​being retains a her­men­eutic struc­ture. This allows for polit­ical life to be foun­ded on noth­ing else but whatever-being’s own way of being. Such a ges­ture and its poten­tial for such a ‘subtle revolu­tion’ is illus­trated by the self-​immolation of Tarek al-​Tayyib Muhammad Bou­azizi, which sparked a ‘Wer­ther effect’ that con­trib­uted to the Tunisian Revolu­tion and formed the cata­lyst for the Arab Spring movement.

The fig­ure of whatever-​being

The main theme of this year’s con­fer­ence asks (amongst other things) how crit­ical legal schol­ars can con­ceive of forms of inter­ven­tion in order to make the unthought pos­sible. This paper poses a ques­tion of its own, relat­ing to whether the work of Gior­gio Agam­ben sug­gests the pos­sib­il­ity of a ‘subtle revolu­tion’ that has the poten­tial to ground a polit­ics that is not based in a prop­erty or sub­stance such as national iden­tity, race or religion.

This polit­ics is based around the fig­ure of whatever-​being which Agam­ben intro­duces. I will assume some famili­ar­ity with Agamben’s ‘cor­rec­tion, or at least com­ple­tion’ of Michel Foucault’s hypo­thesis of biopower and Agamben’s sub­sequent devel­op­ment of Fou­cault. If I can sum­mar­ise (if indeed such a thing is pos­sible) Agam­ben con­tends that mod­ern­ity today is char­ac­ter­ised by the biopol­it­ical dom­in­a­tion of life by sov­er­eign power, which ulti­mately leads to the cre­ation of the fig­ure of homo sacer, the sac­red man. Homo sacer can be seen as being at the heart of the biopol­it­ical order Agam­ben argues is the paradig­matic form of polit­ics in the West today. It is whatever-​being that is the fig­ure that ulti­mately can form the basis for a polit­ics which does not have homo sacer at its heart.

The word ‘whatever’ should be under­stood in a par­tic­u­lar way. The trans­la­tion arises from the Italian word qua­lunque, a word that has many uses in Italian that are awk­ward in Eng­lish. ‘Whatever’ should be thought of as that which is neither par­tic­u­lar nor gen­eral, indi­vidual nor gen­eric.[1] Whatever-​being is ‘being such-​as-​it-​is’, with all its prop­er­ties. Whatever-​being is a being freed from the dilemma of the uni­ver­sal and par­tic­u­lar. It does not belong to a class or set. In fact, the notion of belong­ing is irrel­ev­ant for whatever-​being.[2] This is because whatever-​being (Agam­ben also uses the term ‘being-​such’) “remains con­stantly hid­den in the con­di­tion of belong­ing”.[3] Whatever-​being does not ‘belong’ to any­thing, but rather it is a sin­gu­lar­ity that is exposed as pure poten­ti­al­ity. Pure poten­ti­al­ity is seen by Agam­ben as the pure exper­i­ence of lan­guage as such. Agam­ben sees an ana­logy to this exist­ence in the form of love:

Love is never dir­ec­ted toward this or that prop­erty of the loved one (being blond, being small, being tender, being lame), but neither does it neg­lect the prop­er­ties in favour of an insipid gen­er­al­ity (uni­ver­sal love): The lover wants the loved one with all of its pre­dic­ates, its being such as it is.[4]

The key ques­tion for Agam­ben relates to what form of polit­ical exist­ence can be con­ceived that would provide for whatever-​being: “what could be the polit­ics of whatever sin­gu­lar­ity?”[5]

Agamben’s Mes­si­anic Law

This polit­ics is based upon mes­si­an­ism, and it is to a mes­si­anic ges­ture that this paper focuses. Mes­si­an­ism does not des­troy but rather ful­fils – in rela­tion to law, mes­si­an­ism does not des­troy the law but ful­fils the law.[6] The mes­si­anic under­pin­nings of Agamben’s thought have received atten­tion, but nowhere near as much as his writ­ings on sov­er­eignty and homo sacer.[7]

Thanos Zartaloudis sees such a mes­si­anic out­look as dis­tinctly mod­est. It is mod­est in the sense that mes­si­an­ism does not seek a revolu­tion, or a pro­found change in the way we think about law and life. Mes­si­an­ism seeks to pic­ture the world after the biopol­it­ical law has been deac­tiv­ated. It is clear from a pas­sage that Agam­ben cites from Ernst Bloch that the mes­si­anic king­dom is very sim­ilar to the cur­rent world, and requires only a slight shift in thinking:

The Hassi­dim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little dif­fer­ent.[8]

It is the law’s mes­si­anic ful­fil­ment that leads to justice, which is related to the ques­tion of poten­ti­al­ity. Poten­ti­al­ity returns both law, and the human being back to its pos­sib­il­it­ies.[9] Whatever-​being is a being of pure poten­ti­al­ity. As such whatever-​being is thought of in terms of pure pos­sib­il­ity. A polit­ics of pure pos­sib­il­ity would focus upon what is can be, rather than what it is.

The ques­tion of poten­ti­al­ity of both whatever-​being and mes­si­an­ism is linked by Agam­ben to the pro­fane. Agam­ben traces a par­tic­u­lar use of the term profan­a­tion to ancient Rome. The pro­fane can be placed in oppos­i­tion to the sac­red. Whereas to be sac­red was to be in the thrall of the gods, to pro­fane an object or cus­tom was to return it to the free use of men.[10] What is pro­faned back to free use is free from all sac­red names. To pro­fane life and to pro­fane the law is to open up life and law to their own poten­ti­al­ity and pos­sib­il­it­ies. The act of profan­a­tion opens up the law and makes it avail­able to a new use, return­ing to com­mon use the spaces that power had seized.[11] Such a new use can be brought about by the curi­ous example of play.[12] As Agam­ben states:

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.[13]

To play with law is to pro­fane law. To play with life is to pro­fane life. Such a move renders the sac­red hold over both inoperative.

Thus the fig­ure of whatever-​being renders homo sacer inop­er­at­ive by being defined not through a neg­at­ive ground, but rather through its own potentiality-​to-​be. Whatever-​being is mes­si­an­ic­ally freed unto a new use and new polit­ical pos­sib­il­it­ies. It is this ‘new use’ that can form the basis for new forms of polit­ical inter­ven­tion. This is surely what Agam­ben con­ceives of when he spoke of “a polit­ics no longer foun­ded on the excep­tio of bare life”.[14] Whatever-​being is a sin­gu­lar­ity. In order to affirm its ?thos, its way of being, it should be con­sidered as a sin­gu­lar­ity, neither its mere par­tic­u­lar prop­er­ties nor the mere total­ity of its prop­er­ties.[15] Zartaloudis argues:

To show the pure poten­ti­al­ity of law neces­sit­ates the con­tem­por­ary pres­ence of its poten­ti­al­ity in the integ­ral actu­al­ity of pos­ited law, which returns law to the domain of pure poten­ti­al­ity, to its com­mon use(s).[16]

The Con­struc­tion of whatever-​being

The key to whatever-being’s abil­ity to form the basis for a mes­si­anic polit­ics relates to its con­struc­tion. This con­struc­tion reveals that whatever-​being can be said to be con­nec­ted to homo sacer through its hyper-​hermeneutic con­struc­tion. This is a neo­lo­gism coined delib­er­ately to reflect the pos­i­tion of how mes­si­an­ism can offer a new form of polit­ical inter­ven­tion. It refers to both the ground­ing of Agamben’s thought as well as Agamben’s mes­si­anic move with the excep­tion and whatever-​being. Agam­ben sees homo sacer as cre­ated through the oper­a­tion of the excep­tion. In turn, Agam­ben sees the excep­tion (in the form of the remainder from the legal decision) as tied to hermeneutics:

Between the norm and it applic­a­tion there is no internal nexus that allows one to be derived imme­di­ately from the other … the impossible task of weld­ing norm and real­ity together, and thereby con­sti­tut­ing the nor­mal sphere, is car­ried out in the form of the excep­tion, that is to say, by pre­sup­pos­ing their nexus.[17]

In turn, her­men­eut­ics leads to a com­pletely inde­term­in­ate law. This can be explained with ref­er­ence to the exception’s characteristics.

The excep­tion oper­ates as a rad­ic­ally destabil­ising force that intro­duces inde­term­in­acy into the law. This inde­term­in­acy is intro­duced into every poten­tial mean­ing of a legal norm. It is worth recount­ing Agamben’s most con­tro­ver­sial claim regard­ing the excep­tion. For Agam­ben, the excep­tion means that:

The norm­at­ive aspect of law can … be oblit­er­ated and con­tra­dicted with impun­ity by a gov­ern­mental viol­ence that – whilst ignor­ing inter­na­tional law extern­ally and pro­du­cing a state of excep­tion intern­ally – nev­er­the­less claims to be apply­ing the law.[18]

If the excep­tion is a neces­sary part of every legal decision as Agam­ben states, then every legal decision made by the judge would be inde­term­in­ate. This con­clu­sion can be reached as poten­tially any legal action taken in the excep­tion can gain legal force.[19] The force-​of-​law (without law) allows any act to gain legal force, as it is appro­pri­able by any­one for any reason.[20] Thus, the excep­tion could render all legal norms inde­term­in­ate. Any inter­pret­a­tion of a legal norm could be rendered legal, and any inter­pret­a­tion of a legal norm can lead to the cre­ation of bare life.[21] It is the excep­tion that leads to the cre­ation of bare life, homo sacer.

Des­pite tak­ing this pos­i­tion, it can be argued that Agamben’s thought lends itself to the pos­i­tion that Agamben’s own thought, and the fig­ure of whatever-​being, remain within the her­men­eutic tra­di­tion. From Agamben’s own state­ments and work, it is clear that he remains immersed within the her­men­eutic tra­di­tion.[22] In What is an Appar­atus? Agam­ben noted, with respect to read­ing the works of Fou­cault, that:

Whenever we inter­pret and develop the text of an author in this way, there comes a moment when we are aware of our inab­il­ity to pro­ceed any fur­ther without con­tra­ven­ing the most ele­ment­ary rules of her­men­eut­ics.[23]

It is surely no coin­cid­ence that Agamben’s rad­ic­al­isa­tion of Foucault’s concept of the appar­atus included Agam­ben arguing that “lan­guage itself” was “the most ancient of appar­at­uses”.[24] Agam­ben con­ceives of the appar­atus as a mech­an­ism by which human life was ordered and struc­tured by power.

By includ­ing lan­guage as an appar­atus, Agam­ben appears to see lan­guage as a device by which human life can be struc­tured and ordered in rela­tion to a neg­at­ive found­a­tion – homo sacer. Agam­ben thus appears to make it clear that remain­ing within the her­men­eutic tra­di­tion is not an option for his mes­si­anic thought.

This attempt to no longer remain within the her­men­eutic tra­di­tion can be traced to his treat­ment and con­sid­er­a­tion of Heidegger’s her­men­eutic circle. Agam­ben, through his read­ing of Heide­g­ger, sees the her­men­eutic circle as a neg­at­ive appar­atus. How­ever, Agamben’s work is immersed in her­men­eut­ics. By refer­ring to Agamben’s hyper-​hermeneutics this paper intends to con­vey Agamben’s immer­sion within the her­men­eutic tra­di­tion. This also con­veys Agamben’s response to Heidegger’s her­men­eutic circle. Agamben’s paradig­matic method is the response to the per­ceived aporias of her­men­eut­ics. This paradig­matic method aims to render inop­er­at­ive the aporia Agam­ben traces to her­men­eut­ics.[25]

Agamben’s paradig­matic method is referred to as hyper-​hermeneutic here as well due to its aim of deac­tiv­at­ing the her­men­eutic circle. The term ‘hyper’ con­notes Agamben’s attempt to escape the circle. In order to do so, Agam­ben has to use non-​hermeneutic means, namely the paradigm. It is these non-​hermeneutic means that ulti­mately lay the found­a­tion for a new form of polit­ical possibility.

The Her­men­eutic and Paradig­matic Circles

For Agam­ben, the her­men­eutic circle only acquires its true mean­ing from within his paradig­matic meth­od­o­logy. In order to appre­ci­ate the implic­a­tions of this move it is neces­sary to turn back to Heide­g­ger and ques­tion the exact import­ance of the her­men­eutic circle within his philosophy.

The tem­poral struc­ture of Dasein’s being-​in-​the-​world is her­men­eutic. Dasein inter­prets the world through its own under­stand­ing of the world. Under­stand­ing is an exist­en­tiale, a fun­da­mental char­ac­ter of Dasein’s Being.[26] Under­stand­ing for Heide­g­ger is tied up with Dasein’s own poten­ti­al­ity for being. In other words, under­stand­ing guides Dasein to know what it is cap­able of.[27] Dasein under­stands itself through pro­jec­tion, by being thrown before its own pos­sib­il­it­ies.[28] The pro­ject­ing of Dasein’s under­stand­ing has its own pos­sib­il­ity of devel­op­ing itself, which Heide­g­ger terms inter­pret­a­tion.[29]

It is through inter­pret­a­tion that under­stand­ing becomes itself, which allows Dasein to real­ise what its pos­sib­il­it­ies are. Inter­pret­a­tion allows Dasein to work out its own pos­sib­il­it­ies that are pro­jec­ted through under­stand­ing.[30] To under­stand is to give the struc­ture of some­thing ‘as’ some­thing to a phe­nomenon. The ‘as’ of this con­struc­tion relates to the pur­pose of the some­thing in ques­tion, which involves inter­pret­ing the phe­nomenon and mak­ing an asser­tion that char­ac­ter­ises it.[31] The inter­pret­a­tion that leads to a them­atic asser­tion about some­thing as some­thing is itself groun­ded in fore-​having, fore-​sight and fore-​conception. These are known as the ‘fore-​structures’ of inter­pret­a­tion. The inter­pret­a­tion is groun­ded on things Dasein has in advance, sees in advance and grasps in advance respect­ively.[32]

Thus in order to approach the her­men­eutic circle in the right way, the her­men­eutic circle must be under­stood as the struc­ture of Dasein’s under­stand­ing of the world that Dasein has in advance of any inter­pret­a­tion. Heide­g­ger writes of the her­men­eutic circle:

It is not to be reduced to the level of a vicious circle, or even of a circle which is merely tol­er­ated. In the circle is hid­den a pos­it­ive pos­sib­il­ity of the most prim­or­dial kind of know­ing. To be sure, we genu­inely take hold of this pos­sib­il­ity only when, in our inter­pret­a­tion, we have under­stood that our first, last, and con­stant task is never to allow fore-​having, fore-​sight, and fore-​conception to be presen­ted to us by fan­cies and pop­u­lar con­cep­tions, but rather to make the sci­entific theme secure by work­ing out these fore-​structures in terms of the things them­selves.[33]

It is vital to focus upon the fore-​structures that make up the world into which Dasein is thrown. The reason for this is that the circle is the expres­sion of the exist­en­tial fore-​structure of Dasein itself.[34] By approach­ing the circle in the right way Dasein’s own pos­sib­il­it­ies for Being can be under­stood as being struc­tured by the world into which Dasein is thrown. Dasein has a cir­cu­lar struc­ture. Heide­g­ger warns against rest­ing any inter­pret­a­tion on pop­u­lar con­cep­tions without first ques­tion­ing those con­cep­tions them­selves.[35]

It is this pro­cess of under­stand­ing fore-​structures that forms the basis for Agamben’s cri­tique of the her­men­eutic circle. Agam­ben does acknow­ledge Heidegger’s explan­a­tion as an attempt to recon­cile the dif­fi­culties of hermeneutics:

Ground­ing this her­men­eut­ical circle in Being and Time on pre-​understanding as Dasein’s anti­cip­at­ory exist­en­tial struc­ture, Mar­tin Heide­g­ger helped the human sci­ences out of this dif­fi­culty [caused by the her­men­eut­ical circle] and indeed guar­an­teed the “more ori­ginal” char­ac­ter of their know­ledge.[36]

How­ever Agam­ben chal­lenges the very idea that Dasein can come to the circle in the right way. Spe­cific­ally, Agam­ben chal­lenges the idea that these fore-​structures can be worked out:

[Heidegger’s] guar­an­tee was less reas­sur­ing than it at first appeared. If the activ­ity of the inter­preter is always already anti­cip­ated by a pre-​understanding that is elu­sive, what does it mean “to come into [the circle] in the right way?”[37]

Agam­ben sees the pre-​understanding of these fore-​structures as elu­sive. As such, the her­men­eutic circle appears defined by an inef­fable found­a­tion that can never be grasped.

Thus Agam­ben appears to con­nect the found­a­tional neg­at­iv­ity he argues is impli­cit within the con­struc­tion of Dasein to the her­men­eutic circle. The circle trans­mits this neg­at­iv­ity that can­not be escaped from.

It is this view of the circle that col­ours Agamben’s view of her­men­eut­ics. Much like the struc­ture of the excep­tion, Agam­ben sees that any inter­pret­at­ive response to the her­men­eutic circle is futile, as it is not pos­sible to avoid its clutches. It is per­haps under­stand­able that Agam­ben reaches this con­clu­sion, given his attempt to chal­lenge found­a­tional myth­o­lo­gemes. Agam­ben concludes:

This can only mean – and the circle then seems to become even more “vicious” – that the inquirer must be able to recog­nise in phe­nom­ena the sig­na­ture of a pre-​understanding that depends on their own exist­en­tial struc­ture.[38]

An import­ant and vital ambi­gu­ity arises in this state­ment. What does Agam­ben mean by “their”? It is unclear as to whether “their” refers to the exist­en­tial struc­ture of Dasein or the exist­en­tial struc­ture of the phe­nom­ena that form the fore-​structures in question.

It is con­ten­ded here that “their” refers to the exist­en­tial struc­ture of the phe­nom­ena in ques­tion. This implies that any pre-​understanding of those fore-​structures is impossible. The inter­preter can never come to the circle in the right way as the inter­preter will not have the pre-​understanding of the world required to do so. This explains why Agam­ben feels it is neces­sary to move from her­men­eut­ics to paradigms:

The aporia is resolved if we under­stand that the her­men­eutic circle is actu­ally a paradig­matic circle. There is no dual­ity between “single phe­nomenon” and “the whole” … the whole only res­ults from the paradig­matic expos­i­tion of indi­vidual cases. And there is no cir­cu­lar­ity, as in Heide­g­ger, between a “before” and an “after”, between pre-​understanding and inter­pret­a­tion. In the paradigm, intel­li­gib­il­ity does not pre­cede the phe­nomenon; it stands, so to speak, beside it (para).[39]

Agam­ben thus main­tains that the ‘things them­selves’ (such as whatever-​being) can­not be reached through the her­men­eutic circle, or even through a pre-​understanding. Rather, the paradig­matic circle allows for the phenomenon’s intel­li­gib­il­ity to be under­stood through the paradigm itself. A sin­gu­lar paradigm can there­fore allow for an under­stand­ing of a con­stel­la­tion of phe­nom­ena of which the paradigm stands as an example:

The paradig­matic ges­ture moves not from the par­tic­u­lar to the whole and from the whole to the par­tic­u­lar but from the sin­gu­lar to the sin­gu­lar. The phe­nomenon, exposed in the medium of its know­ab­il­ity, shows the whole of which it is the paradigm. With regard to phe­nom­ena, this is not a pre­sup­pos­i­tion (a “hypo­thesis”): as a “non-​presupposed prin­ciple”, it stands neither in the past nor in the present but in their exem­plary con­stel­la­tion.[40]

It is this paradig­matic method that stands as being able to do the work of the her­men­eutic circle. How­ever, it does so not through any pre-​understanding of the world, but rather it makes a phe­nomenon intel­li­gible through the paradigm. It is this move that leads to the char­ac­ter­isa­tion of Agamben’s paradig­matic method as hyper-​hermeneutic.

There­fore there appears no need to under­take a detailed her­men­eutic under­stand­ing of the world, or of the fore-​structures of under­stand­ing. The paradigm does not need a fore, but rather will make those phe­nom­ena intel­li­gible through its own oper­a­tion. The rad­ic­al­isa­tion of Foucault’s paradig­matic method that so per­plexed schol­ars who approached Agam­ben as a Fou­caul­dian thinker can actu­ally be traced to this move­ment away from Heidegger.

The paradigm, the sin­gu­lar ges­ture akin to an example, can there­fore break the circle of oppres­sion Agam­ben sees as tied through her­men­eut­ics to cur­rent forms of polit­ical belonging.

The Her­men­eutic Circle and whatever-​being

Agamben’s inter­pret­a­tion of Heide­g­ger and the shift to paradigms has huge con­sequences for an under­stand­ing of the fig­ure of whatever-​being. Agamben’s form-​of-​life, whatever-​being, is an example of a life lived in pure imman­ence, which gives itself to itself.

Agam­ben con­tends that the thing itself of whatever-​being can be under­stood, but this under­stand­ing can­not be based on a pre­sup­pos­i­tion of her­men­eut­ics. Whatever-​beings must be under­stood paradigmatically.

The paradigm for Agam­ben is akin to an example. It stands neither clearly inside nor clearly out­side of the group or set of phe­nom­ena that it iden­ti­fies. A paradigm is the real par­tic­u­lar case that is set apart from what it is meant to exem­plify.[41] This argu­ment can be seen through­out Agamben’s thought. Agam­ben uses a num­ber of dif­fer­ent paradigms to rep­res­ent whatever-​being, the fig­ure of this form-​of-​life. These paradig­matic fig­ures are var­ied. They include the nude body,[42] an adult por­no­graphic act­ress who remains expres­sion­less in her films,[43] Her­man Melville’s ‘Bar­tleby’,[44] and the pro­test­ers in Tianan­men Square.[45] It is the protest­ors here those paradig­matic ges­tures stood not for any simple polit­ical aim, but rather they rep­res­en­ted a declar­a­tion of polit­ical iden­tity that the State could not accept, based as it was on the exist­ence as-​such of whatever-​being.

Thus all these fig­ures stand as real par­tic­u­lar cases, paradig­matic examples for whatever-​being. Fol­low­ing Agamben’s con­struc­tion of the paradig­matic circle, each paradig­matic example shows the whole of which it is the paradigm. There­fore these fig­ures are not to be under­stood as examples that form the pre­cursor to a detailed study of whatever-being’s exist­ence. Fol­low­ing Agamben’s start, they are the evid­ence for whatever-being’s existence.

It is this paradig­matic ges­ture that also stands as evid­ence for the hyper-​hermeneutic nature of the mes­si­anic fig­ure of whatever-​being. This move reflects Agamben’s con­ten­tion that there is no dual­ity between the whole and the single phe­nomenon. As Paolo Bar­to­loni explains:

Sin­gu­lar­ity is thus freed from the false dilemma that obliges know­ledge to choose between the inef­fabil­ity of the indi­vidual and the intel­li­gib­il­ity of the uni­ver­sal.[46]

How­ever the sup­posedly paradig­matic fig­ure of whatever-​being is itself still reli­ant upon a her­men­eutic inter­pret­a­tion and applic­a­tion in order to be under­stood. Although it is jus­ti­fied paradig­mat­ic­ally, whatever-​being is still beholden to hermeneutics.

Agamben’s thought treats her­men­eut­ics as cru­cial to whatever-​being. Agam­ben ties the sin­gu­lar­ity of whatever-​being to Plato’s erotic anamnesis, which moves the indi­vidual towards their own taking-​place, the now.[47] Whatever-being’s sin­gu­lar­ity refers dir­ectly to the individual’s taking-​place, their con­crete exist­ence within the world. It is this con­crete exist­ence in the world that implies a her­men­eutic influence.

In order to under­stand whatever-being’s tak­ing place, and its con­crete exist­ence in the world, it is neces­sary to under­stand the world in which whatever-​being exists. This in turn sug­gests that the taking-​place of whatever-​being is related to the world in which it exists.

Moreover, this rela­tion would be affected and con­di­tioned by whatever-being’s inter­pret­a­tion and pre-​understanding of the world. Whatever-being’s con­crete exist­ence is depend­ent upon its own under­stand­ing and inter­pret­a­tion of the phe­nom­ena in the world it inter­acts with. There­fore it can be argued that whatever-being’s way of being would be influ­enced by the con­text of its exist­ence in rela­tion to the world. Fol­low­ing Heide­g­ger, this world must also be under­stood as being shared with oth­ers, and being affected by those oth­ers’ actions. Thus it could be argued that her­men­eut­ics and rela­tion­al­ity would be con­stitu­ent of whatever-being’s way of being. Thus, whatever-​being needs no rad­ical revolu­tion. Rather, it requires a subtle shift in the ways polit­ical belong­ing are conceived.

The polit­ical pos­sib­il­it­ies of whatever-​being

From this pos­i­tion, key fea­tures of the fig­ure of whatever-​being can be pos­ited. The paradig­matic ges­ture of whatever-​being, identi­fy­ing a form of polit­ical belong­ing which is not redu­cible to either a uni­ver­sal or a par­tic­u­lar, can thus be inspired by a single act. If Agamben’s paradigm is to be under­stood as a sin­gu­lar example, then by defin­i­tion a single act must be able to form the basis for ren­der­ing the state’s hold over life inoperative.

Thus if whatever-​being is under­stood in this hyper-​hermeneutic con­text the all import­ant moment for whatever-​being becomes the sin­gu­lar paradig­matic ges­ture. The sin­gu­lar­ity of whatever-​being may both be grasped and reflec­ted in the mes­si­anic moment. This mes­si­anic moment would be prop­erly under­stood as paradig­matic, a ges­ture that frac­tures exist­ing forms of polit­ical belong­ing that define polit­ical existence.

Agam­ben shifts her­men­eut­ics towards the sin­gu­lar­ity of whatever-​being. In this man­ner, her­men­eut­ics oper­ate as a means without end, and focus solely on the sin­gu­lar­ity of whatever-​being.

What would such a paradig­matic ges­ture look like? It is con­ten­ded that such an act would always be subtle, rather than revolu­tion­ary. Such a paradig­matic ges­ture can be found in the actions of Tarek al-​Tayyib Muhammed Bou­azizi. Bou­azizi immol­ated him­self on 17^th Decem­ber 2010, in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia. Bouazizi’s act was driven by mul­tiple factors, includ­ing the inab­il­ity to get a job, the pres­sures of hav­ing to sup­port his fam­ily, a cor­rupt town admin­is­tra­tion, hav­ing his wares con­fis­cated by the police and not hav­ing his griev­ances answered by the town’s gov­ernor. How­ever, Bou­azizi became a sym­bol, one which was declared to stand as rep­res­ent­at­ive of griev­ances held by Tunisian youth against the régime. In addi­tion, Bou­azizi sparked a ‘Wer­ther effect’ of copycat sui­cides in other Arab coun­tries such as Algeria, from indi­vidu­als who wanted food prices to be reduced, jobs and houses and who had unsuc­cess­fully approached the author­it­ies to have their case heard.

This should not be under­stood as a ges­ture of sac­ri­fice how­ever, nor as a pro­gram­matic approach to human free­dom. The fig­ure of whatever-​being is not, like homo sacer, based on a sac­ri­fi­cial logic, or a top-​down pro­gram of polit­ical action. Rather, it reflects the very way of being of the sin­gu­lar whatever-​being. What is key about Bouazizi’s act is not that he died, or sac­ri­ficed him­self for a greater good. Even if these claims are accep­ted as true, the real sig­ni­fic­ance of Bouazizi’s action is that it stood as a polit­ical act that could not be reduced into a logic of polit­ical belong­ing the State can under­stand. This polit­ical act then is polit­ical not because it is a means to a revolu­tion­ary end, but because it exposes the way of being, ethos, of whatever-​being. It is this mod­est, and very human polit­ics that the paradig­matic ges­ture uncon­ceals. It prom­ises no more than to rep­res­ent the very exist­ence as such of the human. How­ever, it is this very exist­ence that mod­ern biopol­it­ics can­not com­pre­hend, and which can ulti­mately render its sov­er­eign grip over life inoperative.

Tags: Revolution

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