By RONALDO TADEU DE SOUZA*
Commentary on the book by Giorgio Agamben.
Disruption of identities. Profanation of static grammars. Collapse of institutions. Material-negative critique of (political) representation. Indeed, the objective of this text is to present a very brief reading – just a spark, which lights up, seeks to awaken and goes out – philological of the essay The community that comes by Giorgio Agamben, an Italian philosopher with a strong presence in the field of contemporary human sciences (with works in the areas of literature, law, politics, theology, arts and also philology).
My appropriation takes this essay by Agamben as a document or as a cultural-civilizational expression of a possible community of equals – of a contingent, non-representative community of freedom. Of human beings in their pure equality. I will make an attempt, in particular, to interpret the notion that structures the Agambenian document of a political community that comes: the notion of Qualquer. Thus, and starting with the substantial part of the text, the construction whatever ou the whatever it is fundamental in the glimpse of a (political) community of equals – which wants to express itself as an equal existence and not as formal, normative and substantive devices of equals.
Indeed, the philological structure of the Qualquer it is the contingent possibility that the being that comes has as a political condition – its non-political (and institutional) form, but political co-belonging. That is, that the policy of equality is forged in belonging to a language that abandons itself, launches itself, in the experience of absent mediations. What does Agamben want to draw our attention to in The community that comes it is for the circumstance that when we imagine a form of life in a supposed society of equals – and free – we must pretend that this is not a society as such, but a community in which the language acquires the meaning of the take place in absolute immanence.
To think of a community of equals is to think of language as the materiality that one touches; it is as if in the coming community we were overcoming language as a sacred device that is abstracted from beings by rules and norms of differentiation, towards a language of belonging. In front of which speaking erupts like language like. (This is a requirement of the current political generation...) In this way, in the coming community (of equals...) the whatever agambenian is devoid of singularities. The philology of equals, and now I quote Agamben: “it is the thing with all its properties, none of which [however] constitutes it” (2013, p. 27).
is that the notion whatever as a language of equals expresses the politicity of classless – or any property at all. Here Agamben's political philology acts as a presentified document of the Manifest… from Marx. In which the identities constructed by the capitalist-differentiation make the language-common-being unfeasible. But the Agambenian classless is the common language of (I quote Agamben) “the new planetary humanity […] that communicates only with itself” (Idem, p.64). Like Fanon: Agamben wants to save man – women, black people, gay people, trans people. It is life that must emerge in the unsubmissive-profane deviation of social representations.
To end these brief reflections: I expose the notion of whatever as a figure of out and how the Bloom hypothesis (reference that Agamben takes from Ulysses by James Joyce) thinking of political action as political philology, and at this point I end the communication. the figure of out it is the non-representation of language. If singularity imposes on human and civilized societies a speech of differentiation, and consequently, of inequality, this occurs because here “being” is transiting within the devices in general, the devices of the language limited by the determined concept, in which belonging reveals becomes a confine of the language. It means, therefore, that the outside in the Agambenian philology is the exteriority of the being-such, it is the launch of the being in co-sharing, in the co-belonging of a common language of politics.
Quoting Agamben, again; “The outside is not another space that lies beyond a determined space […] [it] is the passage, the exteriority that […] gives access […] the experience of […] the same” (Idem, p. 64) of the common policy. O Qualquer as a figure of out it is the access to the being's pure exteriorization capacity – in opposition and resistance to the standardized devices that constitute the limited singularity. It opens like this, bloom hypothesis as a possibility proposed by the document written by Agamben as a political philology that structures political action today. I mean the need to be Bloom, that is, to be a man who is foreign to himself and without resistance from his condition in the face of the singular language of state, market and society domination of the spectacle, so that at the same pace we become any blooms and to deny the identity singularities of the devices and reach the being-in-the-common language as a policy of equality.
as if in community that comes we could say, as Bloom does in Ulysses (before that, we cannot fail to remember the poet Augusto de Campos who enunciated “literary Bolshevism”, the extinction of “fascism” – the step from negativity to the contingent and free community) “when walking through and through ourselves, we could say “I. He. Old. Young […] the man [the non-identical-black-gay-black-white-indigenous-woman] […] the language of love” (2004, pp. 279, 352, 357).
*Ronaldo Tadeu de Souza He is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science at USP.
Reference
Giorgio Agamben. The community that comes. Belo Horizonte, Authentic, 104 pages.
