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The chapter explores what laziness has meant for philosophers, especially those few who chose to address it directly, and provides a conceptual frame for the laziness metaphor. Philosophical inquiries into unproductive idling are rare, but in each instance they center around the issues of the body and resistance. That is the case with Martin Heidegger’s notion of Lässigkeit as the basic existential sensibility, Emmanuel Levinas’s paresse as a position of refusal towards life, and Giorgio Agamben’s inoperativity. But it is also the case when Roland Barthes and Theodor Adorno define idleness in terms of insubordination to pedagogical rituals or as a position of ethical neutrality, when Sandor Ferenczi discovers the principle of neocatharsis in relaxation, or when Donald Winnicott dwells on the benefits of laziness as a psychosomatic symptom. When those ideas are juxtaposed against the political models of passive dissent (such as the parrhēsia model of Diogenes the Cynic, or the strike model proposed by Paul Lafargue), laziness emerges as a valuable signifier for the complex haptic-affective mechanism of counter-normativity. The discourse of laziness lays bare and unmasks the hidden conflation of the biological, the symbolic, and the political.

This chapter focuses on Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden as an example of how modernist inoperativity has been wrestled from its embryonic state and given a literary form. Hemingway’s novel captures the tension between creative potency and impotency by dramatizing it as a conflict of two characters Catherine and David Bourne, each haunted by their individual, internal conflict between creative vigor and creative resistance. Hemingway builds his haptic aesthetics around the theme of laziness to speculate about the bodily, sensuous dimension of all creative endeavours. This manipulation of the theme of laziness is a radical attempt at articulating by literary means the sensibility of exhaustion that underlies the modernist love of action. More importantly, however, it is an attempt to comment on the loss of artistic freedoms that the 20th century capitalist biopower has taken away from writers by forcing them to accept and internalize the rules and values of the book market.

This chapter examines glorification choruses in tragédie en musique prologues and divertissements, and asks why they were so ubiquitous in this semi-official opera genre. It builds on Giorgio Agamben’s “archaeology of glory” and adapts his question--“Why does power need glory?”--to this operatic convention. The author finds that contemplative choruses of praise, acclamation, and supplication presented an angelic model of citizenship that corresponded to the genre's theological model of sovereignty. The prologue to Jean-Baptiste Lully's Cadmus et Hermione (1673) is used to illustrate this interaction between a contemplative chorus and Apollo, a divinity who recurs in the genre as an icon of transcendent sovereign government. Contemplative choruses did provide ideological support for the Bourbon monarchy, but their performance also routinely suspended or exceeded this function. The author concludes that contemplative song in this tradition is at basis inoperative, or beyond utility, and that this inoperativity is key to its politics.

This chapter argues against the common image of Agamben as an apocalyptic thinker focused on theoretical transformation rather than political praxis. It provides a concise account of the genealogies of economy and glory in The Kingdom and the Glory before turning to Agamben’s argument that the society of the spectacle as the contemporary form of glorification. Abbott argues that the fundamental stake of the Agamben’s analysis is a theoretical praxis that responds to the political conditions of spectacular capitalism by enacting the inoperativity at the heart of thought. This is not a matter of doing philosophy instead of acting, but, rather, a politics that is simultaneously practical and theoretical.

In the concluding volume of his Homo Sacer project, The Use of Bodies, Giorgio Agamben briefly turns to Marx to distinguish his own account of what he terms ‘inoperativity’ from a Marxist account of production. Accepting Marx’s account of the decisive relationship between production, social relationships and culture, he nonetheless suggests that Marx neglected the forms of inoperativity that exist within every mode of production, opening it to a new use. ‘One-sidedly focused on the analysis of forms of production, Marx neglected the analysis of the forms of inoperativity’, he writes, ‘and this lack is certainly at the bottom of some of the aporias of his thought, in particularly as concerns the definition of human activity in the classless society’ (UB 94). Agamben’s reference to Marx is typically brief and enigmatic, and he neither expands on the claim that Marx, the thinker of the classless society, neglected inoperativity, nor identifies the aporias to which he refers. Nonetheless, in these brief and enigmatic remarks we find the crystallisation of a position developed in works stretching back to Agamben’s first book, The Man Without Content. Marx remains a subterranean influence on Agamben’s thought, and the diverse accounts of his work throughout Agamben’s oeuvre oscillate between critiques of his supposed productivism and praise for his thematisation of a non-substantive, self-negating subject.1 It is in the course of this oscillation that Agamben has clarified his own accounts of both political subjectivity and inoperativity.

Agamben describes his posture as a reader as one of seeking a text’s Entwicklungsfähigkeit, or capacity for elaboration.1 In examining Agamben’s practices of reading, we can attend to the opposite phenomenon: the counter-elaboration that a text, in having being read by the philosopher, performs upon Agamben’s own thought. This reciprocal elaboration might constitute a paradigm for Agamben’s use of reading, according to his own idiosyncratic definition of use as an event in the middle voice, in which (according to a definition of Benveniste) the subject ‘effects an action only in affecting itself (il effectue en s’affectant)’ (UB 28). With this definition in mind, we could say that Agamben effects a text (he writes) only to the extent that he is also affected by another text (he reads). This is why Agamben’s position as a reader proves particularly important to any assessment of his work, quite aside from the problem of influence or intellectual genealogy. For this same reason, however, assessing Agamben’s relation to Antonio Negri – a figure with whom, by most measures, he is at odds – poses an unexpected challenge: how can Agamben’s thought be a use of Negri? Answering this question means not only assessing the critical distance between the two thinkers, but also taking this distance as a measure, in the Spinozan sense, of mutual affection.

This chapter is concerned with the extent to which a theory of language as essentially ungrounded can contribute to a deeper appreciation of the human. In this light, Agamben emphasises Benveniste's distinction between énonciation (act of stating – the existential character of discourse) and énoncé (the completed statement). For Agamben, the human is equivalent to language as always in process – never finally completed. It is thus never a matter of human nature, or its equivalents. The human, constituted through language, is ungrounded. Although so constituted, the human can also remain silent, which evokes Agamben's notion of ‘impotentiality’. Such an approach fundamentally challenges all notions of the human indebted to ‘bare life’. It opens the way to a certain transcendence. Coupled with the notion of inoperativity, the ungroundedness of the human also challenges the notion of the human as essentially wedded in its definition to a political project. The chapter also considers how gesture, the image, violence and poetry might contribute to a more profound conception of the human.

This chapter focuses on the feral or wild child, as Jacques Derrida’s ethical injunction to a certain silence in the context of hospitality in relation to an extreme figure outside the law. It discusses the wild child in a political example of what Giorgio Agamben terms “inoperativity”, encountering crucial questions regarding the operational elements that articulate law and language. Unlike gypsies who are marked as rogues due to secret languages, the wild child is silent and does not speak, occupying a zone of indistinction between human and animal where language is revealed in its capacity to be semantic and asemantic.