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Agamben at Ground Zero


A Memorial without Content

Joel McKim

Abstract
Construction has recently begun on Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s
‘Reflecting Absence’ 9/11 memorial in New York. The design, with its
emphasis on traumatic absences and silent contemplation, has moved from
selection to construction with relatively little public debate, an indication of
a problematic creative and critical consensus forming around contemporary
memorial aesthetics. The article seeks to re-open this critical discussion by
turning to the philosophy of aesthetics, poetics and language developed by
Giorgio Agamben. Agamben reminds us of the classical Greek association of
art to poiesis, a passive act of bringing into being, rather than praxis, the
active expression of the artist’s creative will. Taking this distinction as his
starting point, Agamben develops a theory of aesthetics that is neither a
modernist embrace of nihilism nor a conservative call for a return to the
classical pursuit of universal truths. Agamben posits instead an art concerned
not with the transmission of any particular content, but with the task of
transmission itself. For Agamben it is the potentiality of the event of
language, a kind of pure communicability, that is the ground for our
common belonging in the world. Agamben’s theories of poetics and
language may help us imagine a Ground Zero memorial that moves beyond
a strictly didactic or therapeutic role and seeks instead to bring into being
a radical space of communication.

Key words
■ 9/11 ■ aesthetics ■ Agamben ■ architecture ■ memorialization ■ poiesis

O
N 19 NOVEMBER 2003, the Lower Manhattan Development
Committee (LMDC) announced the selection of eight finalists for the
competition to design the memorial at Ground Zero (an open compe-
tition yielded 5201 entries from 63 nations). In comparison to the

■ Theory, Culture & Society 2008 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore),
Vol. 25(5): 83–103
DOI: 10.1177/0263276408095217

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84 Theory, Culture & Society 25(5)

Reflecting Absence, National September 11 Memorial


Source: Courtesy of Handel Architects LLP.

controversy surrounding the site’s master plan, the memorial competition


seemed to pass with relatively little argument. Michael Arad and Peter
Walker’s ‘Reflecting Absence’ design, which turned the footprints of the twin
towers into recessed pools of cascading water, emerged the winner.
Yet the lack of controversy generated by the memorial competition may
represent a failure rather than a success, indicative of the safe approach
followed by the designers rather than the innovation of the responses.
Indeed, some viewed the short-listed proposals as little more than a collec-
tion of clichéd elements brought forward from what has become a familiar
tradition of contemporary memorial aesthetics. Suzanne Stephens, a writer
for Architectural Record, notes that the ‘schemes appeared too similar,
emphasizing waterfalls and reflecting pools, beams of light, long planar walls
with names carved in them’ and criticizes the reliance on heavy-handed
symbolism as justification, ‘water representing tears; beams of light for stars
and victims’ souls’ (2004: 36–7). Architecture critic Philip Nobel claims
that the memorial design was virtually predetermined by the strict guide-
lines of the LMDC brief (including the preservation of the tower footprints
and the inclusion of the name of each victim) and the restrictions of Daniel
Libeskind’s master plan. He suggests that ‘Michael Arad had given back to
the process that which it had already made’ (2005: 252). Perhaps more
troubling than the limitation of any individual design is the development of
what appears to be a creative, institutional and critical consensus concern-
ing the aesthetics of such a memorial site. The recurring tropes and tech-
niques of contemporary memorial aesthetics risk covering over the
assumptions that underpin our conception of what it is a memorial – and

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McKim – A Memorial without Content 85

this memorial in particular – is intended to be and do. What are the


presumed social functions of such a site? What kinds of truths, if any, are
memorials assumed to reveal? When John C. Whitehead, the Chairman of
the LMDC, claims: ‘The memorial will not only recall life, it will reaffirm
life itself’ (LMDC, 2003) and the competition guidelines ask designers to
‘[r]espect and enhance the sacred quality’ (LMDC, 2003) of the site, we must
question both the philosophical and aesthetic assumptions at work within
these statements.
With this context in mind, this article will look primarily towards the
thought of Giorgio Agamben in order to reopen some of the questions that
have been foreclosed by the Ground Zero memorial competition. The
decision to turn to the writing of Giorgio Agamben for an alternative method
of thinking aesthetics is motivated by a number of considerations.
Agamben’s recent political writings, such as Homo Sacer and State of
Exception, have become key reference points for cultural theory’s attempt
to think our contemporary global situation. But Agamben is a philosopher
who developed his system of thought predominantly by contemplating issues
concerning language, aesthetics and poetics. It seems to me that these
writings on aesthetics and language are less often discussed in current
academic debates, yet they provide the foundations for some of Agamben’s
most radical political claims. Considering the inseparable mix of poetics
and politics inherent in the attempt to build a memorial at Ground Zero, it
seems an appropriate moment in which to return to the insights on ques-
tions of aesthetics provided by a writer who has altered the grounds of
political theory.
Occupying a position between the social and the aesthetic, memorials
and monuments hold an uncertain aesthetic position and this article will
begin by attempting to determine what place they occupy within the theory
of art. Alain Badiou’s thoughts on aesthetics help expose a prevalent
assumption that memorials must either serve a didactic or cathartic
function; they must either instruct or initiate a healing process. The fact that
the Ground Zero memorial attempts to perform both of these functions
simultaneously is an indication of the problematic nature of the current
discourse supporting memorial design. The article will then turn to
Agamben’s writings in the hope that they may suggest new paths out of the
deadlock of consensus developing around contemporary memorial aesthet-
ics. Agamben’s philosophical assertions will be explored primarily through
his writing on art, poetry and language contained in books and essay collec-
tions such as The Man without Content (1999a) and Potentialities (1999b).
What emerges from these readings is the possibility of a memorial aesthet-
ics founded not on instruction or catharsis, but on the radical potentiality
of language and the kind of community without predetermination it may be
capable of initiating.

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86 Theory, Culture & Society 25(5)

Three Schemata of Art and Truth


The difficult aesthetic questions that arise around the proposed Ground Zero
memorial are reflective of the uncertain status memorials and monuments
hold generally within art theory. Noël Carroll suggests it is the fact that
memorials are specifically designed to perform social functions, and not
simply to provide a disinterested aesthetic experience, that produces a
reluctance to acknowledge their status as art. He writes that aesthetic theory
holds precious the idea ‘that something is an artwork if and only if it is
designed with the primary intention of affording or having the capacity to
afford experiences valuable for their own sakes’ (2005: 1). Social and politi-
cal demands are viewed as unwelcome intrusions into the realm of artistic
experience. Yet, as Caroll recognizes, works possessing a social and specifi-
cally memorial function (from religious art to political portraiture) are
arguably more the norm than the exception in the history of art. If the
memorial function of art remains an unacknowledged secret within aesthetic
theory, then how may we begin to situate a contemporary memorial at
Ground Zero within this tradition of thought? What currents of art theory
does it draw from and what aesthetic assumptions implicitly justify its social
role? In his meditation on the relationship of art and philosophy, the
Handbook of Inaesthetics (2005), Alain Badiou provides a concise history of
aesthetic thought that, although certainly polemical, offers one starting point
for a consideration of the place of contemporary memorials within this
history.
Badiou’s study opens with an attempt to plot art’s changing relation-
ship to truth in Western thought. He claims that there are essentially three
distinct schemata depicting this relationship that recur throughout Western
thought under different guises. The first is the didactic schema which, begin-
ning with Plato, holds a deep distrust of the persuasive character of art. It
maintains that art, while appearing to provide access to an immediate or
naked truth, is in fact incapable of truth. Within this representation art
becomes a dangerous and seductive simulacrum of truth, capable of divert-
ing us from its actual pursuit in slow and disciplined thought. Badiou
suggests: ‘The heart of the Platonic polemic about mimesis designates art
not so much as an imitation of things, but as the imitation of the effect of
truth’ (2005: 2). Art then must be controlled either through censorship, as
in Plato’s insistence on banishing the poet from the polis, or strict surveil-
lance wherein its persuasive immediacy is placed in the service of ‘a truth
that is prescribed from outside’ (2005: 2). The goal of art becomes education,
but an education that is strictly policed by truths derived not from art itself
but from philosophy. Badiou presents Marxist aesthetics as the 20th-century
exemplar of the didactic schema in which art’s purpose becomes to transfer
to the masses the truth of class struggle, a truth that is not immanent to art
but comes instead from dialectical thinking. For Marxist aesthetics, Badiou
argues, art left unmonitored by this philosophical truth is at risk of descend-
ing into bourgeois hedonism.

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Badiou places in polar opposition to this didactic formation what he


names the romantic schema. ‘Its thesis is that art alone is capable of truth’
(2005: 3). In the romantic schema, art provides a privileged point of access
to a truth that philosophy grasps for, but ultimately fails to attain. Art is
therefore assigned the task of redeeming both an incoherent world and
the inadequate concepts of philosophical thought. From this romantic
perspective, Badiou argues:

. . . it is art itself that educates, because it teaches of the power of the infinity
held within the tormented cohesion of a form. Art delivers us from the
subjective barrenness of the concept. Art is the absolute as subject – it is
incarnation. (2005: 3)

German hermeneutics, with Heidegger being its chief proponent, is, Badiou
claims, the 20th-century’s representative of the romantic tradition. The priv-
ileged relationship between art and the unveiling of truth is certainly in
evidence in Heidegger’s essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1977), where
Heidegger presents art as the opening and preservation of a ‘world’, one in
which the unconcealment of truth may occur. He writes:

The truth that discloses itself in the work can never be proved or derived
from what went before . . . What art founds can therefore never be compen-
sated and made up for by what is already at hand and available. Founding is
an overflow, a bestowal. (1977: 200).

Finally, Badiou adds to the polarity of the didactic and romantic


schemas a position that suggests a relative peace between art and phil-
osophy. He names this the classical schema and attributes its formation to
Aristotle, who eases the discomfort of the Platonic recognition of art as the
dangerous semblance of truth by claiming that the purpose of art is not truth
at all. Aristotle, according to Badiou, maintains that art ‘involves the depo-
sition of the passions in a transference onto semblance’ (2005: 4). Aristotle
therefore consigns art not to the realm of knowledge, but to that of ‘cathar-
sis’. Its purpose, according to Badiou, is neither cognitive nor revelatory,
but therapeutic. For Badiou, this evacuation of truth means that the criterion
for the judgment of art becomes ‘liking’, not in terms of a rule of opinion,
but in terms of its ability to engage the spectator in ‘an identification that
organizes transference and thus in a deposition of the passions’ (2005: 4).
In other words, art must correspond to our imaginary assumptions of reality,
unperturbed by intrusions of the truth of the Real, as what is likely is not
necessarily true. The register of art is therefore shifted from the realm of
truth to that of verisimilitude. According to Badiou, the 20th century’s
upholder of this classical model of art is clearly psychoanalysis. While the
object of desire remains for both Freud and Lacan beyond symbolization,
art provides a threshold in which this object of desire subtractively emerges
as an excessive Real at the limits of the symbolic. Art therefore serves as

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88 Theory, Culture & Society 25(5)

a point of transference in which ‘the work leads to the dissipation of the


unspeakable scintillation of the lost object’ (2005: 7). Badiou suggests that
the price for the classical schema’s removal of truth from the domain of art,
with the psychoanalytic version being no exception, is the reduction of art
to the level of public service measured by its effective utility in treating the
human soul or psyche.
Badiou maintains that all three schemas limit art’s potential to seek
truths that are immanent and unique to art. They do so by relegating art to
a subsidiary role in the promotion of a truth imposed from outside (didactic);
making art a privileged path to a return of the absolute (romantic); or by
reducing art to a conservative mechanism of relief (classical). He claims
that our current aesthetic field is polluted with saturated versions of all three
of these schemas. Yet, despite his dissatisfaction with these dominant
conceptions of the role of art, Badiou’s short history of aesthetics gives us
a framework for beginning to think through the aesthetic position held by
monuments and memorials. Badiou’s categories may in fact provide a ground
for distinguishing between those two, sometimes interchangeable, terms for
sites of remembrance. The art historian Arthur Danto, writing on Maya Lin’s
Vietnam Veterans Memorial, does make a distinction between memorials
and monuments, claiming that the former seek to initiate a process of
healing and reconciliation, while the latter present a triumphalist reference
to past events (in Rowlands, 1999: 130). Carroll (2005) likewise claims that
monuments have historically been celebrations of heroic nationalism,
serving as a mode of transmitting cultural assumptions and preserving social
order. The traditional monument would seem to fall firmly within Badiou’s
didactic tradition, seeking to promote an officially sanctioned version of
historical events.
As Danto notes, contemporary memorials have shied away from this
explicitly didactic role. The subtle form of Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial,
with its minimalist black stone walls, maintains an ambiguous view of the
events to which it refers, certainly refusing an outright characterization of
them as heroic. The aesthetic discourse of the memorial shifts from the
didactic register of the monument to a therapeutic one; the language used to
describe these memorials is increasingly psychoanalytic rather than nation-
alistic. These sites of remembrance become envisioned as locations for
working through the traumatic events of the past and can therefore be said
to participate in the aesthetic schema of classical catharsis. The connection
of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to this therapeutic role is made explicit
by the name given to the half-scale replica of the memorial that travels
throughout the US, ‘The Wall That Heals’. Carroll suggests that this cathar-
tic mode has become the norm for contemporary memorials and writes that
these sites ‘give articulate focus to the unease the loss has caused and allow
for the reassessment of the event in retrospect; this enables mourners to
manage their emotions, to move from shock to healing’ (2005: 9).
Upon first appraisal, the contemporary memorial’s shift from a didactic
to cathartic aesthetic schema would seem an unquestionably productive

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McKim – A Memorial without Content 89

movement. Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, for example, is generally


praised for its ability to accommodate multiple experiences of the war and
for its healing qualities. Carole Blair claims that Lin’s memorial initiates a
rhetoric of enactment that brings to life the events commemorated with their
complexities and contradictions intact (Blair and Michel, 2000; Blair et al.,
1991). Jenny Edkins claims that successful memorials, like Lin’s, arrest the
flow of linear time and initiate a ‘trauma time’, in which ‘the ethical moment,
the moment of decision, the moment of the political’ becomes possible
(2003: 84). Yet Badiou is suspicious of the movement of art into the register
of catharsis and psychoanalysis, where it is no longer concerned with the
production of shared ‘generic truths’ and is limited to the role of assuaging
personal pain or despair. The contemporary memorial’s unquestioned
emphasis on an internalized and individual response to past events would
seem to dampen the collective and political potential of these sites. We must
ask whether contemporary memorials are actually capable of initiating the
moment of the political sought by Edkins, or whether they occupy instead
the position of public and state service, as Badiou fears. Even the much-
praised Vietnam Veterans Memorial appears to encourage an isolated act
of healing rather than more collective processes. Maya Lin writes in her
artist’s statement: ‘death is in the end a personal and private matter, and the
area contained within this memorial is a quiet place, meant for personal
reflection and private reckoning’ (in Edkins, 2003: 79).
The proposals for the Ground Zero site highlight the potential
problems of this cathartic memorial aesthetic in several ways. Most apparent
is the emergence of a series of recurring design tropes whose references to
traumatic absences and healing processes verge on the mechanical.
Commentators have noted Lin’s inclusion in the selection committee and
have remarked on the similarities of these proposals to her acclaimed
memorial designs. The inscription of names on a reflective surface used in
her Vietnam Veterans Memorial is present in nearly all of the design
submissions and the running water featured in her Civil Rights Memorial
in Montgomery, Alabama is also a frequent inclusion. The language of
absences and voids employed in many of the design descriptions borrows
heavily from the recent German tradition of building ‘countermonuments’
in memory of the Holocaust and would certainly be familiar to James E.
Young, who coined the term and who is also a member of the selection
committee. Contemporary memorial design would appear to be a prime
example of the aesthetic saturation identified by Badiou.
Further problems arise from the LMDC’s intention that the memorial
occupy both a didactic and a cathartic position simultaneously. The mission
statement accompanying the submission guidelines makes the didactic
ambitions of the site apparent: ‘May the lives remembered, the deeds recog-
nized, and the spirit reawakened be eternal beacons, which reaffirm respect
for life, strengthen our resolve to preserve freedom, and inspire an end to
hatred, ignorance and intolerance’ (2003). Yet Daniel Libeskind alludes to
the site’s therapeutic function elsewhere in the guidelines: ‘We have to be

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90 Theory, Culture & Society 25(5)

able to enter this ground while creating a quiet, meditative and spiritual
space.’ The decontextualized aesthetics of healing adopted by the propos-
als allows the Ground Zero memorial to sit comfortably beside such blatantly
patriotic symbols as the Freedom Tower. The Ground Zero memorial seems
destined to waver problematically between the performance of nationalistic
instruction and the public service of alleviating grief.
Art without Will
While the didactic and cathartic mix promised by the 9/11 memorial seems
less than satisfying, it is not from Badiou’s thought that we will find a more
convincing amalgam of the aesthetic and the political or the social. Badiou
remains sceptical of attempts to conjoin the fields of aesthetics and politics,
insisting that these dimensions, along with those of love and science,
produce distinct and immanent truths.1 Badiou suggests, for example, that
the avant-garde movements of the 20th century attempted to provide a
mediating schema that joined the didactic and the romantic, but that their
experiments in marrying art and politics ultimately failed to form lasting
alliances. He writes: ‘Just like the fascism of Marinetti and the Futurists,
the communism of Breton and the Surrealists remained merely allegorical’
(2005: 8).
But what of Badiou’s third, romantic schema of aesthetics, in which
art possesses a privileged relationship to truth? There seems to be little
suggestion in either Carroll’s general study of memorial aesthetics or in
specific references to the Ground Zero site that a memorial could or should
aid us in accessing an otherwise unavailable truth. It is here that we may
begin to consider what Agamben’s philosophy of aesthetics brings to this
discussion. Does Agamben offer any alternative to the prevailing assump-
tions about memorial aesthetics? Might his aesthetic theory suggest a new
memorial function that is neither didactic nor therapeutic? Does Agamben’s
thought fall within one of Badiou’s three schemata or does it instead offer a
fourth modality of art?
Beginning with Agamben’s most sustained reflection on the history of
aesthetics, The Man without Content (1999a), we immediately encounter a
significant complication to Badiou’s positing of a classical schema (which,
as we have noted, assigns art a therapeutic function and removes it from the
sphere of knowledge and truth). Agamben brings forward what he views as
a clear distinction in Greek thought between the concepts of praxis and
poiesis. The former signifies an action, a ‘to do’, motivated by the will, while
the latter, according to Agamben, is conceived as an ‘experience of pro-
duction into presence, from concealment into the full light of the work’
(1999a: 68–9). Far from excluding art from the realm of truth, Agamben
claims that the Greeks distinguished poiesis from praxis precisely through
its essential character as ‘a mode of truth understood as unveiling’ (1999a:
69). Agamben further distinguishes these two modes of production by
linking praxis to motion and therefore to man’s condition as living animal.
What is more, praxis is a movement whose end is contained within itself –

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the desired effect or result is present from the beginning but not yet actu-
alized. When I begin to walk across the room to fetch a book, I already have
the wanted outcome in mind. The completion of the act is a fulfilment of
this predetermined desire. The essential characteristic of the work of art,
on the other hand, is that something passes from non-being into being, or,
as Aristotle writes: ‘every art is concerned with giving birth’ (Agamben,
1999a: 73). In the Greek conception, poiesis brings something into being
that is outside itself and also outside the sphere of man as living animal. It
is only in the work of art that universal truths emerge from singular forms.
According to Agamben, this intimate relationship to the unconcealment of
truths elevates poiesis above praxis in the Greek hierarchy of production.2
We can already see that Agamben’s account of classical aesthetics blurs
considerably the conceptual boundaries between Badiou’s classical and
romantic schemas. Agamben clearly establishes a strong line of relation
between classical conceptions of poiesis and Heidegger’s hermeneutic
perspective on art, which emphasizes art’s role as the unconcealment and
preservation of a truth. Absent so far in Agamben’s account are both the
didactic and cathartic conceptions of art discussed by Badiou.
Agamben further elaborates the particular spatial and temporal
workings of poiesis through a deliberation on the Greek concept of rhythm.
It is the dimension of rhythm, Agamben maintains, that opens a space for
the work of art’s particular unveiling of truth. He closely associates this
concept of rhythm to the Greek verbword, èpovǵ, meaning a kind of pause
or suspension. Rhythm introduces into the eternal flow of time and matter
a stop; it is an interruption in the otherwise endless flow of instants.3
Agamben describes the force of rhythm acting when we find ourselves before
a work of art and ‘we perceive a stop in time, as though we were suddenly
thrown into a more original time’ (1999a: 99). Through rhythm the mode of
temporality belonging to praxis, a linear one of causal action and reaction,
is put on hold. Agamben continues:

By opening to man his authentic temporal dimension, the work of art also
opens for him the space of his belonging to the world, only within which he
can take the original measure of his dwelling on earth and find again his
present truth in the unstoppable flow of linear time. (1999a: 101)

Man attains in the poetic act a suspension of the endless movement of time
that allows him to be a historical being (and not simply a living animal) for
whom the past and the future are at stake. Rhythm opens up the space of
the present for man to act and is thus not unlike the ‘now time’ put forward
by Walter Benjamin in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, which over-
comes empty, homogeneous time and succeeds in blasting the past ‘out of
the continuum of history’ (1999: 253).
Crucial for Agamben is that the truth process of rhythm and poiesis is
precisely not the expression of will, but is instead a power of production
into space that is a prerequisite of praxis; it opens a space that allows for

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92 Theory, Culture & Society 25(5)

willed and free activity to occur. Poiesis thus entails a kind of passivity, a
giving oneself over to the original productivity of rhythm that requires a
suspension of will. Modern aesthetics, according to Agamben, forgets this
classical notion of poiesis and the centrality of creative will becomes a
virtually unquestioned assumption in contemporary notions of artistic
production. A large part of the task set forth in The Man without Content is
the interrogation of this assumption. Agamben suggests that modernity
produces a conception of art defined by a fundamental schism. The notion
of art as poiesis, the process of revealing a shared space of living for all
men, is dissolved in the divide between the creation and the reception of
the work of art, each side fostering its own breed of alienation. The modern
artist on one side of this split is characterized by his isolation and removal
from society, while on the other side the spectator is entirely alienated from
the creative act of production. The artist, driven by art’s ‘promesse de
bonheur’, enters into a harrowing encounter with his powers of creation –
his spiritual health and indeed his very life are dependent on the outcome.
For the disinterested spectator, incapable of creative genius, the work of art
is increasingly inoculated and removed from the sphere of life, becoming
simply an opportunity for the exercise of good taste. Agamben sees this split
reflected in Balzac’s tormented painter Frenhofer in the story ‘The Unknown
Masterpiece’. For Frenhofer, his painting is irreconcilably divided: ‘The side
that faces the artist is the living reality in which he reads his promise of
happiness; but the other side, which faces the spectator, is an assemblage
of lifeless elements that can only mirror itself in the aesthetic judgment’s
reflection of it’ (1999a: 11).
The fracture of modern art between the creative genius and the
detached spectator is reflected in the emergence of a different philosophy
for each side of the divide. On the side of the spectator, Kant’s aesthetic
theory of the beautiful as disinterested pleasure finds its distorted materi-
alization in the figure of the man of taste. And in reaction, Nietzsche, firmly
on the side of the artist, presents the production of art as the ultimate vital
human act. Agamben writes that: ‘Art is the name [Nietzsche] gives to the
essential trait of the will to power: the will that recognizes itself everywhere
in the world and feels every event as the fundamental trait of its character’,
and Nietzsche is thus able to say that ‘art is worth more than truth’
(Agamben, 1999a: 92). Agamben traces a lineage from Novalis through
Nietzsche and Marx that equates man’s essential being to the exercise of
this free, vital will expressed as pure creativity. As a consequence of this
freedom, the artist becomes superior to any content. ‘If the artist now seeks
his certainty in a particular content or faith’, writes Agamben, ‘he is lying,
because he knows that pure artistic subjectivity is the essence of everything’
(1999a: 54). The artist emerges in the incarnation of the man without content
who has no other identity than his own powers of creation, the infinite
transcendence of the artistic principle. Having freed himself from the
contingencies of the world, the content of which is unworthy of his focus,
the artist enacts the self-conscious process of reflecting on his own artistic

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McKim – A Memorial without Content 93

subjectivity. The museum, removed from the flow of life and time, emerges
as the only place where the alienation of artist and spectator is artificially
overcome. It is the site in which the aesthetic judgement of the man of taste
and the artistic subjectivity without content of the artist refer back and forth
to each other endlessly. The original time and space opened to man by poetic
rhythm, in which artist and spectator experience a common ground, have
been replaced by the nihilistic space of the museum.

The Event of Language


Thus far we have seen Agamben identify a forgetting of the Greek concep-
tion of poiesis as a bringing into presence, it being replaced to alienating
effect in the modern period by the centrality of the creative will of the artist.
Should we then assume that Agamben’s thoughts on aesthetics amount to a
call for a return to a classical conception of art, one that is not affiliated
with Badiou’s schema of catharsis but instead with a romantic unveiling of
truth? If so, what truths should we expect the process of poiesis to unveil?
Is this a conservative call by Agamben for a re-establishment of the worthy
content of tradition or religion? Agamben’s thought moves in exactly the
opposite direction from any such return to tradition – and here I think a
break with Heidegger is made – calling instead for a direct confrontation
with the implications of a contentless communication. The Man without
Content concludes by describing a modern condition in which the transmis-
sibility of culture guaranteed by tradition, a system of beliefs transferred
directly from past to present without residue, is irrevocably lost. Agamben
claims that without the assuredness of this transmission the past begins to
accumulate and burden the present, a reservoir without meaning or sense
(a condition described by Walter Benjamin [1999] through Klee’s image of
the angel of history). In such a situation, unable to decipher what is mean-
ingful and what is not, ‘man keeps his cultural heritage in its totality, and
in fact the value of this heritage multiplies vertiginously’ (Agamben, 1999a:
108). This accumulation of pure culture, culture alienated from life, is
redeemed only negatively through the act of aesthetic judgement and in the
space of the museum. Agamben makes reference to Kafka’s castle upon the
hill, which houses this accumulated culture and hangs over the villagers
below:

. . . on the one hand, the wealth of the past, in which man can in no way
recognize himself, is accumulated to be offered to the aesthetic enjoyment of
the members of the community, and, on the other, this enjoyment is possible
only through the alienation that deprives it of its immediate meaning and of
its poietic capacity to open its space to man’s action and knowledge. (1999a:
110)

But instead of lamenting the loss of this poetic capacity or perpetuating a


nihilistic aesthetics, Agamben claims that Kafka indicates the potential for
an art that takes as its content the act of transmissibility itself, regardless

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94 Theory, Culture & Society 25(5)

of the content that is to be transmitted. Kafka’s writing, according to


Agamben, intensifies rather than redeems negatively the contentless
transmissibility of art. It therefore points to an art that, ‘[renounces] the
guarantees of truth for love of transmissibility’ and:

. . . succeeds once again in transforming man’s inability to exit his historical


status, perennially suspended in the inter-world between old and new, past
and future, into the very space in which he can take the original measure of
his dwelling in the present and recover each time the meaning of his action.
(1999a: 114)

The recovery of the rhythm and opening of poiesis for modern man
is thus dependent on the relinquishing of its guarantee of truth in favour
of a recognition of the potential of pure transmissibility. It is here that
Agamben’s theory of aesthetics (or anti-aesthetics) links to his overarch-
ing concerns with the pure communicability of language, apart from any
contents of communication.4 In his essay entitled ‘Tradition of the
Immemorial’, Agamben maintains that it is an openness to language itself,
apart from the preservation of any particular truth, that remains the
constant that runs through every specific ritual of memory. He writes: ‘The
tradition of transmissibility is therefore immemorially contained in every
specific tradition, and this immemorial legacy, this transmission of uncon-
cealment, constitutes human language as such’ (1999b: 105). It is this
immemorial foundation of all tradition, rather than any particular tradition,
that Agamben seeks to bring into thought. Again pursuing his interest in
the conditions of this pure transmissibility, in his essay entitled ‘The Idea
of Language’, Agamben considers the meaning of the word ‘revelation’ in
Christian and Jewish religious traditions. He finds that the theological
usage of the term ‘revelation’ always corresponds to an unveiling of not
only something we do not know, but the very possibility of knowledge in
general. This possibility of knowledge is the revelation of the ‘word of God’,
the presupposition of all being, but that which human reason cannot know
on its own. For Agamben, this mystery of the word of God is equivalent
to the concealment of language itself. He writes: ‘The meaning of revela-
tion is that humans can reveal beings through language but cannot reveal
language itself. In other words: humans see the world through language
but do not see language’ (1999b: 40). Language for Agamben is a source
of bringing into presence that which never fully reveals itself in the act of
creation. The pure potentiality of language is always in excess of the
particular speech and knowledge that it brings to light. As Agamben states:
‘The proper sense of revelation is therefore that all human speech and
knowledge has at its root and foundation an openness that infinitely tran-
scends it’ (1999b: 41). The task of philosophy, according to Agamben, is
to think the openness of language without recourse to the meta-language
posited by religion or to the nihilistic claim that Nothingness is the final
revelation. The universal truths sought by the Greeks are thus replaced by

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McKim – A Memorial without Content 95

the potential of the pure event of language conceived as ‘immediate medi-


ation’ (1999b: 47).
Agamben’s concept of pure language and his displacement of the
creative will of nihilism come together precisely in his thinking of the
relationship between potentiality and impotentiality. Here Agamben makes
reference to Aristotle’s somewhat unexpected conclusion that the mode of
existence as potentiality involves the possession of a faculty that is poten-
tial precisely in so far is it is not in use. To possess potential then is to be
in a state of suspension, to posses the faculty to build or to write, for
example, without actualizing this potential. In other words: ‘It is a poten-
tiality that is not simply the potential to do this or that but potential to not-
do, potential not to pass into actuality’ (1999b: 179–80). In a discussion of
Derrida’s philosophy of inscription entitled ‘Pardes: The Writing of
Potentiality’, Agamben makes the related claim that: ‘Between the experi-
ence of something and the experience of nothing there lies the experience
of one’s own passivity’ (1999b: 217). This is not the experience of poten-
tiality passing into actuality, but rather the experience of the writing tablet
prior to form being impressed on its surface. It is the self-affection we
experience when temporarily deprived of our senses, our eyes in darkness
made aware of their incapacity to see. It is through this impotentiality, this
suspended potential, that we enter into the open space of rhythm and experi-
ence the radical potential of pure language. This leads Agamben to the
initially strange assertion that, ‘Other living beings are capable only of their
specific potentiality; they can only do this or that. But human beings are the
animals who are capable of their own impotentiality. The greatness of human
potentiality is measured by the abyss of human impotentiality’ (1999b: 182,
italics in original). Whereas the actualizing of this or that potential is an
expression of will and thus an act of praxis, the impotentiality Agamben
speaks of is the experience of potential itself. Only through this experience,
an experience of poiesis, can something come into being which is not prede-
termined by the will or conditioned by a presupposition: in other words,
something radically new.5
But how does Agamben’s radical passivity and idea of potential
manifest itself? There are several figures in Agamben’s work that point to a
possible manifestation of the potentiality of language. In Herman Melville’s
character Bartleby, the scrivener who has stopped writing, Agamben finds
an example of potentiality recognized as always also a potential ‘not to do’.
Through his unwavering ‘I would prefer not to’ response to any request,
Bartleby the scribe becomes the embodiment of the writing tablet before
any mark has been made. Agamben describes him as ‘the extreme figure
of the Nothing from which all creation derives . . . pure, absolute potential-
ity’ (1999b: 253–4). Barlteby’s act of verbal suspension has its precedent in
the Skeptics’ use of the expression ‘no more than’ as noted by Diogenes, as
when they refute an argument by saying, ‘Scylla exists no more than . . . a
chimera’ (1999b: 256). As Daniel Heller-Roazen notes, ‘this suspension . . .
marks the point at which language retreats from actual predication into a

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96 Theory, Culture & Society 25(5)

mode in which it appears as pure potential, capable of expression precisely


by virtue of actually saying nothing’ (1999: 20).
Bartleby’s enactment of pure potentiality through language finds a
physical counterpoint in the figure of the gesture, a concept that Agamben
returns to frequently in his writing. Agamben suggests that the functioning
of the gesture can neither be understood within the logic of production in
which a means leads to an end (he gives the example of marching seen as
a means to move from point A to point B), nor within the logic of praxis in
which the means is itself the end (he gives the example of dance seen as
an aesthetic dimension). He argues that the gesture ‘breaks with the false
alternative between ends and means that paralyzes morality and presents
instead means that, as such, evade the orbit of mediality without becoming,
for this reasons, ends’ (2000: 57). Dance, then, can be interpreted as gesture
not because it represents an end in itself, but only in so far as it exhibits
the media character of the human body in movement. He stresses: ‘The
gesture is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a means
visible as such’ (2000: 57, italics in original). Ultimately for Agamben the
gesture is ‘a communication of a communicability. It has nothing to say
because what it shows is the being-in-language of human beings as pure
mediality’ (2000: 59). Agamben points to Walter Benjamin’s reading of the
Oklahoma Nature Theatre (a theatre in which ‘everyone is welcome’ and
what is performed is life itself), which appears in the last chapter of Kafka’s
America. Benjamin writes of Kafka:

One of the most significant functions of this theatre is to dissolve happenings


into their gestic components. . . . Kafka’s entire work constitutes a code of
gestures which surely had no definite symbolic meaning for the author from
the outset; rather, the author tried to derive such a meaning from them in
ever-changing contexts and experimental groupings. (in Agamben, 1999b: 80)

In The Coming Community (1993a), Agamben’s concept of potential-


ity emerges in the strange form of the coming ‘whatever being’, which
Agamben states does not simply signify an indifference to any form of
identification, but rather an insistence on being ‘such as it is’ (1993a: 1).
Agamben asks us to think:

What could be the politics of whatever singularity, that is, of a being whose
community is mediated not by any condition of belonging (being red, being
Italian, being Communist) nor by the simple absence of conditions (a negative
community, such as that recently proposed in France by Maurice Blanchot),
but by belonging itself? (1993a: 85)

He finds a potential response in the demonstrations of the Chinese May and


their culmination in the occupation of Tiananmen Square. What was signifi-
cant about these events, Agamben claims, is that despite various attempts
to characterize the protest as a confrontation between communism and an
emerging desire for democracy, the movement refused to identify itself in

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McKim – A Memorial without Content 97

any such terms. He writes: ‘What the state cannot tolerate in any way,
however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an
identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of
belonging (even in the form of a simple presupposition)’ (1993a: 86).
Tiananmen was, then, a manifestation of belonging itself, a kind of passive
willing into existence of a community based on no other grounds than the
common humanity of being-in-language. Tiananmen returns politics to the
logic of the gesture, where what is communicated is not a particular some-
thing, but the fact of communicability.6 He states elsewhere:

There can be no true community on the basis of a presupposition – be it a


nation, a language. . . . What unites human beings among themselves is not
a nature, a voice, or a common imprisonment in signifying language; it is the
vision of language itself. (1999b: 47)

Such a community, Agamben claims, will always meet violent opposition


by the state, which refuses to allow access to the potentiality of language
itself.
A Memorial of Pure Mediality?
At this point it seems appropriate to ask whether Agamben’s thought on
aesthetics and language can truly be brought to bear on the memorial task
at hand at Ground Zero. How might Agamben’s consideration of the pure
potential of language, which after all amounts to a kind of anti-aesthetics,
translate into an actual memorial design? What kind of material form can
a thinking of pure mediality assume? Agamben of course offers no simple
prescription in response to these questions. His theory calls for a consider-
ation of how public spaces might activate the potential of language without

Reflecting Absence, National September 11 Memorial


Source: Courtesy of Handel Architects LLP.

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98 Theory, Culture & Society 25(5)

a prescribed outcome or predetermined role. Agamben’s challenge is for


architects and artists to incorporate a productive passivity into their designs,
one that suspends the willed activity of praxis and allows something new
and unforeseen to come into being. These spaces would rely not on a repre-
sentational aesthetics, but on the prompting of gestural responses with
initially uncertain meanings. The design of such spaces would be necess-
arily risky ventures, envisioning new forms of social relations and allowing
for unpredictable results. Agamben calls for the creation of spaces of
communication that would be unlikely to sit comfortably within the calcu-
lated planning of mayoral offices and city development committees.
Yet the coming aesthetics alluded to by Agamben is arguably not
without precedent amongst recent experiments in memorial design. The
public works of the German artist Jochen Gerz often attempt to replace the
materiality of art objects with immaterial spaces of communication. The
artist’s projects are important examples of what James E. Young labels
‘countermonuments’ due to their self-conscious questioning of the very role
of the memorial within a post-Second World War Germany. The Monument
Against Fascism in the Hamburg suburb of Harburg, completed by Jochen
and Esther Gerz in 1986, is perhaps the most frequently discussed contem-
porary memorial in Germany. The work involved a monumental column that
was to be lowered into the ground as its surface was gradually covered with
the engraved signatures of local inhabitants, a gesture signifying their
commitment against fascism. In reality the memorial was imprinted with
both signatures and unanticipated racist graffiti, becoming a non-verbal
expression of the conflicting memory of the Harburg community
But it is an unrealized proposal by Gerz, one for Berlin’s now
completed Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe designed by Peter
Eisenman, that best represents an attempt to materialize some of the central
tenets of Agamben’s philosophy. The proposed design was entitled ‘Warum?’
German for ‘Why?’ (Young, 2000: 147–51). It called not for a therapeutic
contemplation of traumatic events or a didactic warning against the possi-
bility of recurrence, but instead asked visitors to engage in conversation,
discussion and debate on the topic of why the Shoah could have occurred.
The central focus of the proposal was a building designed by the Iranian
architect Nasrine Seraji, a discussion centre entitled ‘the Ear’, in which
these encounters would take place. Gerz’s proposal does not seek to mate-
rialize an aesthetics of trauma or loss, but instead calls for the formation of
a temporary community, one with no other presupposition than a desire to
engage, through language, a set of historical events and their impact on the
present. Implicit in Gerz’s design is a realization that something must
emerge from the memorial site that goes beyond a willed act of memory or
the acquisition of knowledge about an event. The artist seems to share
Agamben’s conviction that it is only our common belonging-in-language that
presents the grounds for the kind of coming community capable of respond-
ing to an event like the Holocaust. Gerz’s memorial seeks to create a space
that elicits a moment of poiesis, a suspension of the flow of common time,

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McKim – A Memorial without Content 99

that might allow such a community to emerge, if only temporarily. Such a


space would be as much a zone of risk as a place of comfort, and it is perhaps
unsurprising that the Berlin selection committee deemed the memorial
unsuitable, opting instead for a memorial that engenders a safer and more
predictably solitary and meditative experience.
Unfortunately, the building projects at the Ground Zero site seem
equally closed to the kind of communication without predetermination that
Agamben seeks to encourage. Security has won out over openness in the
design of the ‘Freedom Tower’ centrepiece. A 200-foot blast-resistant
concrete pedestal has replaced the glass entrance hall envisioned in Daniel
Libeskind’s original design (Dunlap and Collins, 2005: A1). The recently
unveiled designs (by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Fumihiko Maki)
for three skyscrapers to accompany the ‘Freedom Tower’ fail to compensate
for the armature of their taller neighbour. Described by the New York Times
as ‘conservative and coolly corporate’ (Ouroussoff, 2006), the towers are
models of efficient design, but add little to the site’s potential for non-
instrumental communication.
While the security and commercial emphasis of the Ground Zero
skyscrapers may seem inevitable, even more disturbing are the results of
the mandate for the inclusion of culture at the site. The Drawing Center, an
art gallery currently located in SoHo which was to move to the site, has been
banished due to protests by families of 9/11 victims over formerly exhibited
‘unpatriotic’ artwork (Feiden, 2005: 1). The proposed International Freedom
Center, an educational and cultural centre with the directive to ‘nurture a
global conversation on freedom in our world today’, held some promise to
initiate a form of dialogue, but it too has been removed from construction
plans after victims’ families protested that the centre’s global historical
outlook would take focus away from the ‘sacred ground’ of the site (Fisher,
2005: B4). The potentially innovative methods of remembering, forms of
discussion and types of relations that may have emerged at the Ground Zero
site are quickly being curtailed, channelled and codified.
The possibility for the inclusion of a space of open communication at
the site appears to fall entirely on the memorial itself, yet as was the case
in Berlin, the selection committee has shied away from any proposal that
questions the typical didactic-therapeutic role of the memorial. The selected
‘Reflecting Absence’ design, with its beneath ground walls engraved with
victims’ names and its chamber of contemplation, also encourages solitary
and silent meditation. The sheer enormity of the cascading walls of water
flowing from the reflecting pools that cover the footprints of the collapsed
towers into two central voids seem intent on overwhelming both visually and
aurally any possibility of communication between visitors to the site. With
its references to the impressive scale of destruction, Arad and Walker’s
design attempts to provide the visitor with an experience, however partial,
of the tragic gravity of the 9/11 event itself. The emphasis, therefore, is on
remembering the event as it occurred and ensuring its place within an
official national history. The memorial makes no attempt to generate

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100 Theory, Culture & Society 25(5)

Reflecting Absence, National September 11 Memorial


Source: Courtesy of Handel Architects LLP.

Agamben’s moment of poiesis that would see the event not as a fixed moment
of history, but as the catalyst for the generation of a space of radical partici-
pation and exchange in the present. By enacting the magnitude of the event
it memorializes, the Ground Zero design actually suggests the impossibility
of language in response to such a disaster. The memorial fails to acknowl-
edge the potential of communication itself and as such misses an oppor-
tunity to create a space for the kind of open community Agamben insists is
both possible and necessary.
Agamben’s thought does not fall within the three saturated schemas of
art described by Badiou, but nor does it adopt Badiou’s strategy of severing
the connection between politics and aesthetics. For Agamben, the space of
communication made possible by art is inherently political, but it is
precisely this political potential that the majority of state-sponsored memo-
rials attempt to manage and codify. Agamben encourages us to re-evaluate
the aesthetic assumptions that present memorial sites as locations for either
initiating private healing processes or re-establishing national unity. The

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McKim – A Memorial without Content 101

possibility exists for a memorial that is neither conservative nor cathartic,


but instead permits the radically new to pass into being.
Notes
1. Peter Hallward contrasts Badiou’s isolation of the sphere of art to Adorno’s
investment in a materialist aesthetics. He suggests that Badiou’s conception of art
deliberately invites the Adornian accusation that he ‘capitulates before the problem
of the relationship between art and the social’ (2003: 387–8). In recent public
lectures, Badiou seems to suggest there is the potential for a more productive
relationship between art and politics, claiming that contemporary event-based art
may provide a model for the creation of new subjects – something contemporary
politics no longer seems capable of achieving.
2. Agamben reminds us that, for the Greeks, the sphere of work as required for the
maintenance of life was undertaken by slaves and thus could not even be considered
within the poiesis–praxis hierarchy. He makes a compelling argument that all
production (artistic or otherwise) is now conceived of within this sphere of work and
is therefore connected to the domain of the maintenance of animal life – an
association that would have been unthinkable for the Greeks.
3. For Agamben, rhythm also carries the double sense of the Greek verb èpévx,
meaning both an offering and a holding back. Rhythm thus holds both the promise
of this access to an original time and the possibility of the fall into calculated time.
Whether rhythm’s gift is granted or withheld seems contingent on our method of
approach.
4. Agamben could hardly be more specific about his overall concerns when he
writes in Infancy and History: ‘In both my written and unwritten books, I have stub-
bornly pursued only one train of thought: what is the meaning of “there is language”;
what is the meaning of “I speak”?’ (1993b: 5)
5. Agamben’s return to the Greek distinction between poiesis and praxis, and his
critique of the modern prioritization of will, invite comparisons to the work of
Hannah Arendt, another philosopher poised between the thought of Heidegger and
Benjamin. For Arendt it is not poiesis, but the concept of action (as distinguished
from labour and work – the reproductive and economic modes of praxis) that must
be recovered from Greek thought. Action, closely associated with speech, serves a
similar role for Arendt as the concept of poiesis does for Agamben. Its ‘revelatory
quality’ she writes, ‘comes to the fore where people are with others and neither for
nor against them – that is, in sheer human togetherness’ (1958: 180). But Agamben
ultimately rejects as no longer tenable the clear divisions Arendt maintains between
bare life and political life. Rather than isolating political speech from all other forms
of language, Agamben highlights the political potential inherent in the event of
language itself.
6. Indeed Agamben claims that true politics ‘is the sphere of pure means, that is,
of the absolute and complete gesturality of human beings’ (2000: 60).
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McKim – A Memorial without Content 103

Joel McKim is a lecturer in the Department of Communication Studies,


Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) and a PhD candidate at the Centre
for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, London. He is currently writing
on aesthetics and architecture in post 9/11 New York and has recently
contributed to the collection Informal Architectures (Black Dog Publishing).

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