No More Beautiful Days:

Situating Agambens Coming Community

JASON KEMP WINFREE
California State University, Stanislaus

Abstract: This paper aims to situate Agambens treatment of the issue of community. It shows how Agamben departs from and supplements the French discourse
on community through a critique of negativity; how the significance of community
is measured against the society of the spectacle; and how the alienation from our
linguistic being, which the spectacle effects, conditions a politics opposed to the
State apparatus. Agambens coming community appropriates the dispossession and
impropriety of contemporary human being in order to reconfigure the relation of
belonging and singularity.

As long as the authentic and the good had a separate place among humans
(they took part), life on earth was certainly infinitely more beautiful1

Beyond Negativity: The Community to Come

or some time now the issue of community has hovered on the periphery
of continental thought as an affirmation and reclamation of the sociality
belonging to human being. While initially a supplement to phenomenological
treatments of intersubjectivity, more recent invocations of community emphasize
the division in sharing, to the extent that sharing is treated at all. In this, a figure
of unemployed negativity resistant to understanding and hermeneutical development replaces the preoccupation with transcendental conditions of possibility,
and this stretches the very word community to its limit. In its original Bataillean
formulation, unemployed negativity functions as the persistence of negativity
outside the value of production, the remainder of life outside the development of

2011. Epoch, Volume 16, Issue 1 (Fall 2011). ISSN 1085-1968.

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history, negativity stripped of its determinate and determining character. Criminality, sacrifice, sexuality, violent emotional life, and death mark the purview of
this negativity, in each instance a figure of expenditure without recuperation. The
invocation of community that occurs along these lines gestures to the value of
intimacy and contact residing in these forms of irrecuperable excess, affirming
their sovereignty in contestation of the social order that renders human existence
servile to systems of production and their goods. Community reconfigures and
revalues sovereignty, refuses servility.
When Jean-Luc Nancy takes up the issue of community in the early 1980s,
he does so motivated by the failure of communism and what is later recognized
as the advent of globalism. But he is also motivated by the insufficiency of intersubjectivity as a category capable of responding to these same failures. Looking
to Bataille for guidance, Nancy draws upon the notion of unemployed negativity,
proposing the inoperative community (la communaut desoeuvre) as a way of
thinking the sociality of human existence betrayed by totalitarianism and disregarded by liberalism. Rejecting Batailles penchant for fusion and ecstasy as
figures of community, rejecting the confusion of community and communion,
Nancy instead locates the idleness and nonproductivity of ngativit sans emploi
precisely in the with-structure of shared existence. The inoperative community
becomes shorthand for the notion that there is no common existence, but rather,
existence itself is what is in common, shared and shared out in the singularities
of our lives.
In conversation with Nancy, Blanchot emphasizes the unavowable dimension
of community, that is, the unaffirmable, the shameful, the clandestine and illicit.
Doing so calls attention to the recalcitrant element of Batailles work, which resists
incorporation and in doing so elicits rebuke. The unavowable community is in
this way more and less than the inoperative community, more and less than the
with- structure, the ontological character of the co-, the singular plural. For the
unavowable community does not indicate a structure of existence itself so much
as a specific configuration of existence, an episode requiring attraction excessive
to the singularity of those involved, a solidarity of non-belonging. And it is not
sustainable. Nothing demonstrates this point more than Blanchots appeal to the
murder of eight demonstrators by Paris police at the Charonne subway station
in 1962 and the silent, unorganized outpouring of witnesses that subsequently
flooded the streets. Community happens anonymously, unorganized, unannounced, and dissipates just as quickly, as though never there. Not an ontological
structure of sharing, then, but an episodic and collective responsiveness that
bears witness to human finitude, to death, and does so in a way that refuses the
requirements of belonging, identification and announcement. Such a community
cannot be affirmed because it has no name, because it does not persist, because
in not persisting it is nowhere, transient, and for all these reasons illegitimate.

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When Giorigo Agamben addresses the issue of community in the 1990s, he

refuses what he takes to be the negative proposals found in Nancy and Blanchot,
and emphasizes instead the need to think belonging beyond the antinomy of
universality and particularity, concept and existent. He asks: What could be
the politics ... 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 [appartenenza stessa]? (CC 85).
Similarly, speaking directly to the theme of desoeuvrement, as found in Bataille,
Blanchot, and Nancy, Agamben writes:
Everything depends on what is meant by inoperativeness. It can be neither
the simple absence of work nor (as in Bataille) a sovereign and useless form
of negativity. The only coherent way to understand inoperativeness is to think
of it as a generic mode of potentiality that is not exhausted ... in a transitus
de potentia ad actum.2

Taking these observations in turn, starting with the last remark, we can say first
that for Agamben everything depends on a relation to negativity that is determined
neither by dialectical opposition nor by an opposition to dialectical totalization.
Situated within the space of dialectical opposition, negativity consists in the work
of determination, names the element of production, bearing and generating meaning. Negativity motivates the actualization of the possible, makes explicit what is
at first only implicit. Alternatively, outside that order of meaning, and so opposed
to it simply by being outside, negativity goes slack, idle, and occupies a place of
nondeployment. With nothing left to do, ngativit sans emploi either becomes a
figure of impossibility for those who invoke it outside the system or at the very
least marks an occlusion of potentiality that is concomitant with the refusal of
project. Thinking desoeuvrement as a kind of potentiality that is not exhausted in
the transition from potential to actual, then, means thinking potentiality outside
the system of actualization, not losing sight of potentiality even when the logic of
production ceases. And this entails returning to potentiality the capacity to not be,
discovering in potentiality itself a kind of negativity that is neither determinate
nor the simple absence of determination (neither the slackness of inactivity nor
the indeterminate activity of consumption and its surfeit). Potentiality is capacity
suspended in relation to its impotentiality.
But, second, with respect to the issue of community this has everything to
do with a recuperation of belonging, an insistence on the importance of belonging for any invocation of community. Like the recuperation of potentiality from
the purview of dialectics, belonging must be liberated from the conceptual and
categorical determinations that define its status within the standard conception
of Western metaphysics. Like the potentiality to not be, which frees potentiality
from the telos of actualization, the kind of belonging Agamben has in mind con-

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cerns what he calls whatever being (lessere qualunque), that is, being such as it
is, being thus, which detaches existence from the antinomy of the individual and
the universal, the ineffable and intelligibility. Outside the schema of intelligibility,
where the particular is submitted to the universal, identified through its belonging to the category or concept, whatever being is exposed, that is, positioned
outside the membership that otherwise grants its identity. That is why Agamben
writes, Whatever is the figure of pure singularity. Whatever singularity has no
identity, it is not determinate with respect to a concept, but neither is it simply
indeterminate. And he adds almost immediately: Whatever adds to singularity
only an emptiness, only a threshold. ... [And] a singularity plus an empty space
can only be a pure exteriority, a pure exposure. Whatever, in this sense, is the
event of the outside (CC 67). Agambens community is a community to come,
then, because whatever singularity, being thus, being such as it is, does not belong
to..., and because not belonging to ... is precisely to be cut off from any real
community, any extant community, defined as it always is by membership (CC
10). Not belonging to..., but exposedthis is the condition that issues in and
answers to the invocation of community.
Envision exposure as the inverse image of a knot. Comprised of interlacing
threads each of which contributes to the whole, the knot is an entanglement
of relations. The knots unity takes shape as overlapping threads pile up, wrap
around. Discreet lines are supposed and caught sight of in fragmentary segments,
taken for granted but untraceable without undoing the relations that comprise
the whole. We have already identified above two of the threads constitutive of
exposure: exposure as potentiality and exposure as being outside. Anticipating
the analyses to come, we can now add a third: exposure as the revealing of what
is (in the double genitive). But the inverse image of a knot is not a simple untying. Rather, it is an untying where the individual threads no longer retain their
individual determination. Potentiality, being outside, and the revealing of what
is coincide, as though each could take the place of the other, each fading into,
occupying, and overtaking the determination of the other. The community to
come transpires in this taking place, exposure bleeding across its determinations.

The Society of the Spectacle and Linguistic Being

The entire discourse concerning communitystarting from Bataille in the 1930s
and running through Agamben in the 1990s and Nancy still todayis motivated
by an awareness of human life divided from itself by the very conditions of
production that sustain it. That distinct historical moments manifest different
configurations of this division or alienation is clear enough, but from the industrial
revolution to neo-liberal globalism the insight articulated by Horkheimer and
Adorno remains sadly consistent: the materially respectable rise in the standard

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of living has had socially deplorable consequences.3 By the time Guy Debord
catches sight of this in 1967, capital assumes the form of a spectacle in the course
of which all community and critical awareness have ceased to be.4 Community
ceases insofar as the spectacle constitutes the social relation solely through the
mediation of images. But this means the spectacle is not so much a set of images
as it is the proliferation of representation replacing what was once directly lived
(SS 1). The sovereignty of the image, which enables the uncontested expansion
of capital, has as its condition and consequence the separation of human beings
from one another. If the earliest stages of industrialization effected a change in
life from being to having, the spectacle institutes the transition from having to
appearing. The social order is condemned to the purview and power of appearance, made to serve the order of production that earlier times presumed to serve
human being. Privileging vision, the weakest of the senses, the spectacle forgoes
touch, forestalls contact, assaults sociality.
Although Debord himself does not make the point in just this way, it is clear
that the society of the spectacle realizes something like the world of Descartes
evil genius, where the condition of total deception has as its correlate a permanent
indifference to speech.5 The uprooting of the image from its ground, what we
could call in this sense the anarchy of the image, is bewitching and menacing, and
truth is transformed into the proliferation of falsehood unanswerable to critique.
The spectacle is by definition immune from human activity, inaccessible to any
projected review or correction, writes Debord. It is the opposite of dialogue
(SS 18). But this is also to say, more fundamentally, that the spectacle not only
alienates human beings from one another, but challenges the very sense of the
human. For is it not the case that Aristotles definitions of human being as zoon
logon echon, the being who possesses speech, and politikon zoon, the political
animal, coincide precisely in the space of dialogue? Is not the human the one who
shapes its world through speech, negotiating the Sache through conversation, the
being who has a world precisely through dialogue, through language? Is not all
speech in just this sense inherently political, and all politics essentially human?
But this supposes that speech has access to the world it shapes, that the world is
amenable to the formative power of language, and that dialogue in turn transpires
between human beings. If in this space one can lie, that is only because speech first
appears as capable of truth, capable of uncovering, shaping, and creating a world.
Absent these conditions, though, the society of the spectacle is not even capable
of lying even though its element is that of deception, which is why it resembles
the world of the evil genius, perpetually adrift, entirely recalcitrant to the human
endeavor for truth. The spectacle realizes the law of anarchy, that anything and
everything can be a principle, that anything and everything is replaceable, and
that any breech in this order of disorder, any rupture that would found something
new, any creative event, is absorbed at once, diffused, given over to aimlessness.

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As the law of anarchic exchange, the spectacle is sheer communicativity, communicativity without communication, exchange that touches no one, language
that never reaches its destination, auto-affection.
All of this is to say, as Agamben puts it, that what we encounter in the spectacle is our very linguistic nature inverted.6 If following Aristotle the human is
distinguished from other animals by virtue of its political life and language, and
this in turn makes possible a good life, life lived with respect to good and evil
rather than simply pleasure and pain, the ability to make promises, life transcending the present through planning and projectif all this is the case, does
the inversion of our linguistic nature entail a return to animality? And what
of good and evil? What of the future? Measured against language as the shaping of a Sache, conversation productive of determination, world, and meaning,
there is a tempting parallel to be drawn between the animals voice, sheer phone,
vocalization, and the ineptness of speech within the purview of the spectacle.
Affirmations of the right to free speech today have obviously lost their effective
force, reduced to the gratification of self-righteous indignation and self-assertion.
Belligerent dissidents confuse the satisfaction of their protest with meaningful
consequences; they are like barking dogs protecting a territory from would-be
intruders who remain forever safe and goading on the other side of the fence.
But outstripping the capacity for speech is different than never possessing it in
the first place, and what is proper to the animal is improper to human being. The
spectacle simultaneously realizes and reveals this impropriety.
We can go a long way to clarifying this point if we situate it further within
Agambens treatment of potentiality, which operates according to the same
distinction between human being and animal. Other living beings are capable
only of their specific potentiality; they can only do this or that, writes Agamben,
commenting on Aristotle. But human beings are the animals who are capable
of their own impotentiality.7 Putting it this way, Agamben emphasizes that the
human is determined not only by its positive capacities and the limitations
facing it, but by virtue of its unique relation to its own privation, non-being, or
impotence. Human being stands in relation to its own lack, and this is definitive
for it. It is the being that can not be, the being capable of its own impotentiality.
And the linguistic nature of human being is the how of this capacity. Language
grants the human transcendence over its now, makes possible a future, which is
constitutive for its projects and ethical life. That is, projects and ethical life, secured
by human beings power over the future, are in every case measured against the
capacity to not be. Hunger and cold as possibilities of practical life, like excess and
deficiency for ethical life, are capacities that call human being forth in the world
issuing in habitat and habit. The proper spaces of economic and ethical life are
conditioned by our linguistic being, which constantly relates to, responds to and
clarifies our potentiality to not be. Language bears within its work the proper as

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relation to impropriety, but the improper held at bay. And this is the meaning of
our epigraph, the point on which everything turns: As long as the authentic and
the good had a separate place among humans (they took part), life on earth was
certainly infinitely more beautiful (CC 15).
If the spectacle constitutes an inversion of our linguistic nature,the uprooting
of all peoples from their vital dwelling in language (CC 83), it is evident why its
force is so destructive. It dissimulates the proper relation to impropriety, alters
the relation to impotentiality. Under the dominance of the spectacle impotentiality no longer remains the excluded part that motivates ethical and practical life,
a capacity to which I respond by establishing boundaries of self and home that
protect by holding non-being at bay.8 By contrast, the exception, the accursed
share, the excluded part here becomes the rule. The spectacle realizes the potentiality to not be, raises non-being to the level of a principle or habitat, and does
so concretely at the very point where communicativity is maintained without
the possibility of communication, language without the capacity to shape. The
inversion of our linguistic being does not amount to being without language, but
rather language being without determination, linguistic power freed of its relation
to the Sache. Communication within the spectacle is like the buzzing of bees in
the hive. But because of this Agamben thinks there opens [here] ... perhaps for
the first time, the possibility of an appropriation of impropriety as such, one that
leaves the residue of Gehenna outside itself (CC 14), and along with it the chance
that human being might for the first time experience language itself (CC 83).
The appeal to language itself and impropriety as such does not aim at a
philosophical purification of language or impotentiality, a kind of conceptual or
meta-conceptual appropriation and clarification. On the contrary, situated within
the concrete conditions of the spectacle, it is linked to the task of using the spectacles possibilities against its tyranny (ME 83). In the material conditions that
suspend the productive and communicative dimension of language, within the
space of accomplished nihilism, we might discover something about ourselves
that liberates us both from the menacing vacuum of spectacular society and from
nostalgia for a proper world that excludes the improper, a world of belonging
and possession that abandons non-belonging and dispossession. Because we
can even say that the spectacle is language itself (insofar as language is stripped
of its productive and formative work)9 and impropriety as such (insofar as the
improper is no longer the excluded part but the entire surface of the system and
its play), we can now add that the appeal to language itself and impropriety as
such articulates the desire to find that imperceptible difference which separates
the spectacle from the community to come. It is a matter of appropriating the
expropriation of the common, discovering in the condition of sheer generality a
singularity defined by neither belonging to ... nor non-belonging, singularity in
excess of individuality and its identity.

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The Language of Community: The Example of Tiananmen

What does an experience of language itself look like? How does the appropriation
of expropriation transpire otherwise than in terms of or despite the spectacle?
And how exactly does this contribute to a sense of community, i.e., how does it
configure a coming community?
The events of May and June 1989 at Tiananmen Square are privileged moments in Agambens treatment of the community to come. As with Nancys
invocation of community, here too a figure of solidarity is measured against
the failure of communism, the betrayal of its promise. And as with Nancy and
Blanchot, the invocation of community here involves a politics that takes place
at the site where singularity is excluded by the State apparatus and its work of
identification. What the State cannot tolerate in any way, writes Agamben, 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) (CC 86). While the language of co-belonging
is undeniably Nancean, the situation described here more precisely reflects the
logic of exclusion articulated by Bataille notion of the accursed share. This is so
not only insofar as Agambens coming community is defined by an unbridgeable
difference between singularity and the State, but insofar as this very disjunction
prefigures State violence as the inevitable response to what does not belong. The
political-material analogue of the concept, the State identifies, grasps, determines,
or condemns to non-beingthose are its only options. Consequently,Wherever
these singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be
a Tiananmen, and, sooner or later, the tanks will appear (CC 87). Measured not
only against the failure of communism, then, but against the logic of the State, the
events of Tiananmen purportedly evidence community recalcitrant to identification, representation, and recognition.
In this, these same events bear striking resemblance to the response to the
Charonne subway massacre, the witness and solidarity valorized by Blanchot in
his treatment of community. Significantly, everything we said above concerning
exposure holds for Tiananmen and Charonne alike, although Agamben himself
fails to recognize this. First, exposure as a relation to impotentiality, impropriety,
non-being: both events are defined by their exposure to violence, determined by
standing in relation to annihilation. This is not a matter of being-towards-death,
where existence is drawn out ahead of itself by a future that grants authenticity
or inauthenticity. Here, by contrast, singularities are collectively situated within
an atmosphere of menace bearing witness to the mortality of others, taking
others deaths upon themselves. Second, exposure as being- outside: Tiananmen
and Charonne take place in their exclusion from the order that defines belonging by membership, and in this exclusion are not so much simply on the other

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side, but at the limit of determination in not belonging to..., what Agamben
calls the experience of being-within an outside (CC 69). Third, exposure as the
revealing of what is: the demands of Tiananmen and the ghostly and anonymous
presence of so many unnamed, unorganized faces at Charonnethese events
are defined by attending their own manifestation, by not absenting themselves
from their presentation, as the image does, bifurcating signification and content.
Being-outside, being exposed, reveals the situation itself, exposes it for what it is.
Anonymous eyes stare down the police, Tank-man confronts the Chinese army.10
But the invocation of Tiananmen means to say more than the example of
Charonne can do, at least if we take seriously Agambens insistence that the coming
community requires more than the simple absence of conditions that dominates
Blanchots affirmation of the unavowable. This is because the simple absence of
conditions is itself sustained and managed by the spectacle, because the form of
the spectacle produces an absence of conditions in such a way as to modify the
relation to State violence. Although Agamben does not emphasize this point, it is
implied in his analyses and everything depends on teasing it out. Doing so is an
important supplement not only to the issue of community in continental thought,
but to Agambens own privileged analyses of the camps. To this end, then, note
that Agamben understands the logic of the State qua law to have its telos in the
camps. The camp marks the extreme point of exclusion, banishment, abandonment, the extreme point of inclusion by exclusion, the permanent realization of the
exception.11 This is what permits Agamben to understand the camp as the nomos
of modernity, linking together situations as different as the British internment
of the Boers at the beginning of the twentieth century, Dachau, Yugoslavia in the
early 90s, and contemporary zones dattente in French international airports. In
each case, the camp maintains a zone of nondistinction that defines those situated
therein by stripping them of definition, stripping them of status and determination. Their exclusion is included, surrounded and limited by barbed wire or the
walls of the waiting room, the definitive marks of State authority. Constituting
power and homo sacer are the alpha and omega of the sovereign exception.
The consequences of this are profound, altering our fundamental possibilities of political liberation. Note, then, how revolutionary endeavor resides in the
confidence that it aims at a particular sovereign figure, a particular system of
law, a particular distribution of exclusion by inclusion, and this in the name of a
new principle, a higher law, a quest for legitimation. That those same efforts are
articulated in terms of the right arrangement of ownership, the right distribution
of property, indicates the extent to which they express an ethics of authenticity,
an unalloyed sense of the proper that is obviously no longer possible. But the
revolutionary challenge to State sovereignty cannot occur from within the camp,
even though its inhabitants can revolt. That is because the demand for ownership, for control over ones labor and the means of production presupposes a

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place from which it issues. The efforts of labor require as a place of recollection
a home, a place of respite and recuperation that enables one to go forth in the
world with renewed energies and strength. While it is true then in a certain sense
that ownership may depend on labor, we must not forget that labor also depends
on ownership, familiarity, and shelter, as Levinas has shown (TI 152ff). To the
extent that the zone of nondistinction constitutive of the camp, the exposure it
entails, its essential homelessness, casts everything in the light of impropriety,
revolutionary endeavor is stripped of the place and conditions from which its
call issues. Life after the camp or in the midst of it belies the anachronism of
traditional revolutionary politics.
But we should not think that human beings belong to the camp and the spectacle in the same way, even though these forms are now complicit with one another
in the expansion of global capital. So contrast the camp with the spectacle, which
expresses the exception as the rule in exactly opposite terms: not inclusion by
exclusion, but exclusion by inclusion. Through the work of exclusion, by virtue
of the ban, the camp renders the interned unrepresentable. More than anything
else, unrepresentability defines their legal status, or lack thereof, as it were. The
camp strips its subjects of determinate speech, leaves them without say. But
through the work of inclusionthe fact that it effects everyonethe spectacle
gives its inhabitants over without remainder to representability, absorbs them
in a representation that no longer serves their interest, no longer connects with
their existence. The spectacle expropriates the possibility of dialogue by giving its
subjects over entirely to a communicativity stripped of all efficacy. The scope of
its exclusion (or suspension, setting out of play) by inclusion is concretized in the
spectacles unfailing capacity for absorption. Impotent and inauthentic alike, then,
the bare life of the hungry, interned orphan and the life of the idiotic, gluttonous
consumer are not equivalent. The torture victim and the bureaucrat, the destitute
and the journalist are exposedthat is, impotent, outside, revealingin markedly different ways. Here we see two forms of the senselessness of existence, two
ways the absence of conditions presents itself. If the camp is the nomos of our
time, the telos of the State qua law,the planetary petty bourgeoisie [populated by
the bureaucrat, the consumer, the journalist] is [nevertheless] probably the form
in which humanity is moving toward its own destruction (CC 65).
Still with an eye toward situating the significance of Tiananmen for Agamben, note that each of these figuresthe camp and the spectaclebears within
itself not a capacity for reversal, that is, revolution, but a form or determination
of status that might itself be appropriated. So by virtue of its abandonment
by the law, bare life might discover a life freed of subjection to the law. For the
man from the country who stands before the law in Kafkas parable, according
to Agamben, the doorkeepers announcement that the door will now close is a
moment of liberation: finally and completely excluded by the law, he is no longer

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answerable to it (HS 49). But it is hard to see how the good fortune of the man
from the country is shared by concrete figures situated in the camp, say, figures
of malnutrition, detainment, or torture. Or, more to the point, it may well be true
that the Musselmann described by Primo Levi manifests a silent resistance to
the guard who used to beat him. And it may be that in this a law that seeks to
transform itself entirely into life finds itself confronted with a life that is absolutely indistinguishable from law, [such that] it is precisely this indiscernibility
that threatens the lex animata of the camp (HS 185). But this is no good for the
Musselmann for whom release from the law no longer matters. And it does little
for us beyond indicating the fundamental nihilism of the law, the tendency of its
predatory violence to destroy its own conditions, the fact that a hangman lurks
behind the hood of every torturer.
What, then, are we to make of Kafkas man from the country? Beyond the
formal insight that exclusion from the law harbors a secret liberation, one that
differs radically from revolutionary endeavor, what would it mean for Kafkas
parable to pass over into contemporary life? What is difficult to see with respect
to the camp is easier with respect to the spectacle. Agamben writes:
Our age does indeed stand in front of language just as the man from the country
in the parable stands in front of the door of the law. What threatens thinking
here [today] is the possibility that thinking might find itself condemned to
infinite negotiations with the doorkeeper or, even worse, that it might end by
itself assuming the role of the doorkeeper who, without really blocking the
entry, shelters the Nothing onto which the door opens. (HS 54)

Now, if language is to law as we are to the man from the country, then the doorkeeper names the problem of access to language itself. Although the context of the
remark makes clear that Agamben has deconstruction in mind when he defines
the threat to thinking today, is not the spectacle itself understood by Debord as
hindering the relation of human beings to one another, an obstacle to meaningful
communication? If deconstructions obsession with deferred origins, impropriety,
undecideability, and nonarrival is a threat to thinking, then an obsession with the
spectacles deferred origins, impropriety, undecideability and nonarrival would
be a threat to language itself. As though to say: in the lament over the alienation
of human being from determinate communication we continue to haggle with
the doorkeeper over access that will never be granted. The man from the country is already alienated from the law to such an extent that it has no content for
himit does not determine his existence in any way whatsoeverjust as we
who live within the spectacle have been situated outside the world-shaping work
of discursive language. Human being has been permanently stripped of its access
to the law, dispossessed of the formative capacity of language, cast outside the
polis into the no mans land of globalism that is not a place, but the nowhere that
is everywhere. To close the door on the law is to close the door on the problem

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of access, to appropriate the condition of lawlessness, to occupy or take over the

suspension of determinate speech.
This is why and how Agamben insists that as sheer communicativity, language
without content, the spectacle defines the conditions in which for the first time
it is possible for humans to experience their own linguistic beingnot this or
that content of language, but language itself, not this or that true proposition,
but the very fact that one speaks (CC 83). And Tiananmen exemplifies this for
Agamben in that
What is most striking about the demonstrations of the Chinese May was the
relative absence of determinate contents in their demands (democracy and
freedom are notions too generic and broadly defined to constitute the real
object of a conflict, and the only concrete demand, the rehabilitation of Hu
Yao-Bang, was immediately granted). (CC 85)

What counts here, in other words, are not determinate positions that could be
negotiated so as to shape a world. With respect to Tiananmen, the demands that
could yield clear determination did not amount to much and certainly could
not account for the magnitude of the conflict that ensued.12 And the demands
that could not be negotiated mattered less as demands, on this reading, than as
attestations of solidarity, or community. Insofar as the demand for democracy
or freedom is in this context so general, without content in the sense of being
insufficient for further development, incapable of contributing to a negotiated
Sacheto this extent Tiananmen is precisely an instance of communicativity
stripped of determinate content. But this condition is now a moment of solidarity,
an instance of being-together in the suspension of language that runs against the
grain of the spectacle (even as these same events are broadcast around the globe
and appropriated by Western media as a confirmation of democratic-spectacular
society). For the demonstrators at Tiananmen do not belong to a class or category
or party, but neither is their condition simply one of nonbelonging. Here the fact
of expropriation, the improper, is itself appropriated. The form of the spectacle
exclusion by inclusion rather than inclusion by exclusionis not contested but
occupied by the demonstrators at Tiananmen otherwise than it is by the planetary
bourgeoisie. What counts is not what it said, but the sheer fact of speaking, which
here occurs with and as a rising up together that faces the State apparatus.
If this differs from Charonne, it is because the silent witness described by Blanchot bears itself as an excluded part, because improper and unrecognizable it leaves
what has been expropriated to expropriation without making that expropriation
its own. This is why Agamben understands Blanchots community primarily in
terms of negativity even though it bears such striking resemblance to Tiananmen.
Clarifying this, it is as though the silent presence of Charonnes witnesses declares:
We know what youve done, our undeniable presence here is synonymous with
the judgment that this knowledge carries. Their presence is the face that accuses

Situating Agambens Coming Community

91

of murder, bestows responsibility, passes judgment. That the accusation answers

to a violence already committed, however, means the condition of being without
conditions which characterizes this community is imposed on it from the outside.
Charonnes community rises up within the space assigned to it by a sovereignty
that kills with impunity. The unavowable community remains negative because it
takes shape as what remains following the ban, an accursed share, an excluded part.
While Charonnes witnesses say something by withdrawing from speech, the
demonstrators at Tiananmen can be said to say nothing while speaking. This is
not a merely formal difference, nor is it meant to trivialize the struggle of those
who marched in May and June of 89 in Tiananmen Square. For where Charonne
responds to and withdraws from murderous State violence, Tiananmen elicits that
violence anew. In this, however, Tiananmen shows itself to exercise a power over
the very State that deems it irrelevant, and this is managed precisely by taking
possession of its alienated, improper condition, although without correction or
restoration. In the vacuous call for democracy and freedom a community of the
dispossessed takes place. That this fact accords Tiananmen a priority over the
State is confirmed by the presence of the tanks. After all, if there is no real chance
that the demands for democracy and freedom will yield either one or the other,
the Chinese army can only be understood as taking aim at those assembled. Its
target is not democracy or freedom, but community.
This, then, is the meaning of Agambens coming community:
That singularity occurs as belonging rather than nonbelonging, belonging
without party membership or class.
That the sheer fact of speaking persists in spite of the spectacles destruction
of language, that solidarity is its own justification.
That exclusion from the State, exposure before its violence, becomes a condition of community rather than its dissipation.
That we are together precisely in belonging to our impropriety.
That our being-outside, our standing in relation to our own non-being, constitutes the fundamental condition of our existence, and that in this condition we
discover ourselves substitutable, anonymous, and responsible for others.
That Wherever these singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be a Tiananmen, and sooner or later, the tanks will appear (CC 87).
That for the coming community there will be no more beautiful days (and
we might rejoice in this).

Notes
1.

Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michel Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 15. Hereafter cited as CC.

92
2.

3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.

9.
10.

11.
12.

Jason Kemp Winfree

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 612. Hereafter cited as
HS.
Paraphrased from Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1999), xv.
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York:
Zone Books, 1995), thesis 25. Hereafter cited as SS.
See Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1969), 902. Hereafter cited as TI.
Giorgio Agamben, Means without End, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 82. Hereafter cited as ME.
Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 182. Hereafter cited as P.
As long as the authentic and the good had a separate place among humans (they
took part), life on earth was certainly infinitely more beautiful (still today we know
people who took part in the authentic); and yet the appropriation of the improper, of
that which does not belong, was in itself impossible, because every affirmation of the
authentic had the effect of pushing the inauthentic to another place, where morality
would once again raise its barriers (CC 134).
It is clear that the spectacle is language, the very communicativity or linguistic being
of humans (CC 80).
Tank Man is the name given by the press to the anonymous man who confronted
the Chinese armys tanks on June 4, 1989, following the armys dispersal of the Tiananmen protesters.
What is excluded in the camp is, according to the etymological sense of the term
exception (ex-capere), taken outside, included through its own exclusion (HS 170).
Of course, those demands meant a great deal for those who made them, and Agambens
neglect of this point may well express a fundamental difference between Europe and
Asia.