Agency and will in Agamben’s coming politics

The coming politics

Agamben’s well-known analysis of the figure of homo sacer is important because it points to a “place” beyond the law that is not quite absent from law and so reveals the fundamental role that the state of exception plays within Western juridical systems. Through the suspension of law inherent to the state of exception, life becomes politicized. This is not because law is applied to life, but because through the suspension of law, life is subject to “Abandonment” (1998: 29). The ban underpinning abandonment has a relational rather than substantial structure, in that it establishes a relation of excluded-inclusion: “what has been banned is delivered over to its own separateness and, at the same time, consigned to the mercy of the one who abandons it—at once excluded and included, removed and at the same time captured” (1998: 110). By claiming that biopolitical sovereignty acts as the nexus point of the juridical and non-juridical, Agamben argues that sovereign violence is both foundational and constitutive of all aspects of Western society. There simply is no way to escape or be strictly other than the biopolitical machine; anything “external” to biopolitical sovereignty is always included in it through its exclusion and so subject to its violence. Any politics of resistance is, then, caught in the machine it seeks to escape from. Nevertheless, Agamben does clearly think that something can be done. After all, he calls for a “completely new politics” (1998: 11) based on the creation of “a happy life,” (2000: 13) which in Means without Ends entails the creation of “a nonstatal and nonjuridical politics and human life—a politics and a life that are yet to be entirely thought,” (2000: 111) premised on the “being of pure potentiality that no identity or vocation can possibly exhaust” (2000: 140). In itself, this is very vague—indeed, Agamben’s comments on the coming politics must be vague so as to prevent him from creating a political program to be realized, one that would reinstantiate the means-end logic to be overcome—but, in what follows, I argue that, although Agamben’s remarks regarding a reconstructive political project are underdeveloped and spread across his works, when read in a certain way, they point to a political program.

For Agamben, the first port of call when departing from biopolitics is to break with the concepts underpinning it. Our political concepts are the ones that support biopolitical sovereignty, meaning that we cannot simply continue with the same significations. Crucially, the link between language and being means that for the former to change so must the latter. There must be a turning away “from political philosophy to first philosophy (or, if one likes, politics is returned to its ontological position)” (1998: 44). Specifically, only through

an entirely new conjunction of possibility and reality, contingency and necessity, and the other pathē tou ontos, will make it possible to cut the knot that binds sovereignty to constituting power. And only if it is possible to think the relation between potentiality and actuality differently—will it be possible to think a constituting power wholly released from the sovereign ban. (1998: 44) ²

This must be accompanied by a rethinking of the distinction between zoē and bios that, Agamben suggests, has long been collapsed in bare life. This collapse has forestalled alternative configurations of life from coming to the fore. By reintroducing this distinction, we will discover that the dominant form of life is not the only possibility. Thus,

every attempt to rethink the political space of the West must begin with the clear awareness that we no longer know anything of the classic distinction between zoē and bios, between private life and political existence, between man as a simple living being at home in the house and man’s political existence in the city. (1998: 187)

Finally, following Walter Benjamin’s (1996: 245) claim that divine violence is based on pure means, Agamben argues that this “new” configuration should aim to affirm a politics of pure means. He breaks from Benjamin by rejecting the notion that these pure means are linked to divine violence external to sovereignty. For Agamben, a politics of pure means can only be realized from “within” biopolitical sovereignty by undermining the instrumental rationality constitutive of it. Rather than developing a politics based on a means-end logic, he demands the development of “action as pure means, which shows only itself, without any relation to an end” (2005: 88). Again following Benjamin, “pure” is understood not in substantive terms, but relational ones: politics must be thought of in relation to means without end, in which the focus is on the process rather than the end result.

This logic of pure becoming is prefigured in The Coming Community, in which Agamben explains that

[t]he novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organization (1993: 84).

There is obviously much more that could be said about the notion of the coming politics, but putting these brief, schematic remarks together reveals that far from having no political program, Agamben offers a remarkably programmatic one. First, we must rethink our ontological categories, before wrenching apart zoē and bios to open up a space to think about alternative biological/life possibilities. Following this, the nature of sovereignty must be reengaged with apart from questions of life, before all are rejoined to offer a radically different conception of sovereignty based on pure means. This does, however, lead to the question of how this process can be instigated, especially given the constraint that it start from a position embedded within biopolitical sovereignty. Responding to this question requires that I outline the specific proposals that Agamben puts forward to overcome biopolitics. In the next section, I start by engaging with his comments on potentiality, impotentiality, and contingency.

Contingency between potentiality and impotentiality

Agamben’s most focused comments on potentiality are found in the essays “On Potentiality” (1999b) and “Bartleby, or On Contingency” (1999d). He starts by noting that “[t]he concept of potentiality has a long history in Western philosophy, in which it has occupied a certain position at least since Aristotle” (1999b: 177). On Agamben’s telling, the key to Aristotle’s analysis is the realization that although potentiality is not simply a thing, neither is it “simply non-Being [or] simple privation” (1999b: 179). Rather, it describes “the existence of non-Being, the presence of an absence” (1999b: 179). It is because potentiality is related to non-Being that alternatives to actuality are possible. To clarify this, he brings forth the distinction between “generic potentiality” (1999b: 179) and “existing potentiality,” (1999b: 179) with the former referring to “what is meant when we say, for example, that a child has the potential to know, or that he or she can potentially become the head of State,” (1999b: 179) and the latter referring

to someone who, for example, has knowledge or an ability. In this sense, we say of the architect that he or she has the potential to build, of the poet that he or she has the potential to write poems. (1999b: 179)

However, if potentiality is always tied to impotentiality, “how is it possible to consider the actuality of the potentiality to not-be?” (1999b: 183). Returning to Aristotle, Agamben responds that potentiality and impotentiality are not opposed nor does the realization of the former exclude or exhaust the latter; rather, “if a potentiality to not-be originally belongs to all potentiality, then there is truly impotentiality only where the potentiality to not-be does not lag behind actuality but passes fully into it as such” (1999b: 183). Agamben warns that “this does not mean that [potentiality] disappears in actuality,” (1999b: 183) but that “it preserves itself as such in actuality” (1999b: 183). Indeed, it is only by preserving itself as impotentiality that potentiality can continue to exist.

In other words, if potentiality was actualized by removing all impotentiality from it, there would be no other option to act; the not-to that is a condition of potentiality would not exist and so neither would potentiality. Because the possibility of acting or not acting is a condition of potentiality, “[w]hat is truly potential is thus what has exhausted all its impotentiality in bringing it wholly into the act as such” (1999b: 183). “Exhausted” here does not mean extinguished, but rather a more technical sense in which potential to act must overcome its impotentiality without destroying the impotentiality that is its condition. As a consequence,

[c]ontrary to the traditional idea of potentiality that is annulled in actuality, here we are confronted with a potentiality that conserves itself and saves itself in actuality. Here potentiality, so to speak, survives actuality and, in this way, gives itself to itself. (1999b: 184)

Agamben engages further with this paradoxical relation in “Bartleby, or On Contingency” (1999d). Starting with a number of remarks regarding the relationship between writing and potentiality, he turns to the one between potentiality and Bartleby’s famous “I would prefer not to” (1999d: 254). Specifically, he employs his previous claim that writing is tied to pure potentiality to argue that, because Bartleby has stopped writing, he not only “is the extreme figure of the Nothing from which all creation derives,” (1999d: 253) but also “the most implacable vindication of this Nothing as pure, absolute potentiality” (1999d: 253–254). For this reason, “[i]t is not surprising…that he dwells so obstinately in the abyss of potentiality and does not seem to have the slightest intention of leaving it” (1999d: 254).

That Bartleby could intend to leave the abyss of potentiality but does not, brings forth the question of how he would leave it and the issue of will: “[o]ur ethical tradition has often sought to avoid the problem of potentiality by reducing it to the terms of will and necessity” (1999d: 254). Rather than focus on “what you can do, [it has focused on] what you want to do or must do” (1999d: 254). Agamben notes that we have become so accustomed to this way of thinking that the tendency is to translate Bartleby’s demurring into the language of will: “I prefer not to” (1999d: 254) becomes “You will not?” (1999d: 254). The problem is that potentiality is not will, and impotentiality is not necessity’ (1999d: 254). Bartleby’s greatest insight is, then, that “[he] calls into question precisely th[e] supremacy of the will over potentiality” (1999d: 254). As a consequence, will does not determine potentiality but is its effect, and Bartleby’s statement is not an act of will but an acceptance of the ambiguity of potentiality that disarms the primacy and privileging of will. Indeed, Agamben claims that

[t]o believe that will has power over potentiality, that the passage to actuality is the result of a decision that puts an end to the ambiguity of potential (which is always potentiality to do and not to do)—this is the perpetual illusion of morality (1999d: 254).

In subsequent sections, I question whether this holds for all forms of will, but Agamben goes on to develop his account of Bartleby by explaining that he depends upon the distinction, introduced by Medieval theologians, between “potentia absoluta” (1999d: 254) and “potentia ordinata” (1999d: 254); the former referring to “an ‘absolute potentiality’ by which God can do anything,’ (1999d: 254) the latter describing ‘an ordered potentiality,’ by which God can only do what is in accord with his will” (1999d: 254). Agamben ties Bartleby to potential absoluta because “if God is capable only of what he wants, Bartleby is capable only without wanting” (1999d: 254). This does not, however, mean that Bartleby’s potential is “unrealized” (1999d: 255) or that it remains “unactualized on account of a lack of will” (1999d: 255). For Agamben, the indeterminacy of Bartleby’s potentiality means that “it exceeds will (his own and that of others) at every point,” (1999d: 255) with the consequence that Bartleby “succeeds in being able (and not being able) absolutely without wanting,” (1999d: 255) with “wanting” implicitly tied here to willing. To not want is, then, according to Agamben, not to will. Bartleby does not want and so does not will.

Agamben uses this to bolster his claim that potential precedes will: after all, if will precedes potential, the “fact” that Bartleby does not want, and so does not will, would destroy potential. However, because Agamben holds that potential is “prior” to will, Bartleby’s abandonment of the latter leaves intact the former as “pure” potentiality, with the consequence that he exists in “a zone of indistinction between yes and no, the preferable and nonpreferable. But also—in the context that interests us—between the potential to be (or do) and the potential not to be (or do)” (1999d: 255). By existing between being and non-Being, action and non-action, Bartleby neither consents nor refuses, he disarms, all the while showing that potentiality is capable of deactivating the logic of the will and, by extension, biopolitics. In its place, “potentiality…creates its own ontology,” (1999d: 259) one of contingency in which a being exists in the indeterminacy between being and not being and in which it “can both be and not be” (1999d: 261).

Agamben goes on to defend contingency against two traditional objections, but the discussions of potentiality and Bartleby are important because they undermine the notion that action is based on a foundational will and posit a “space” between and prior to the active–passive opposition. It is from this “place” that activity or passivity is subsequently affirmed. This does, however, bring forth the issue of how the affirmation of this indeterminate contingency occurs.

Willing and the coming politics

As noted, discussions of the transition to the coming politics tend to tie it to Agamben’s messianism or ontology and so reduce his political thought to a series of pre-personal alterations that occur regardless of whether or not individuals affirm participation in them. There is no doubt that messianism and a rethinking of ontology are part of Agamben’s attempt to create a new politics, but I will argue that Agamben also depends upon individual (political) action. This agential aspect does, however, have to be excavated from his thinking. To do so, I focus on his critical comments on the will, first in Opus Dei, before turning to those in The Man without Content and The Use of Bodies.

In Opus Dei, Agamben ties the question of the will to a particular logic: namely, one defined by “operativity and command” (2013: 126). Following the claim made in The Kingdom and the Glory that “the notion of free will, which is, all things considered, marginal in classical thought, becomes the central category first of Christian theology and then of the ethics and ontology of modernity,” (2011: 54) Agamben appeals to the work of Ernst Benz to suggest that the key difference between the Ancient Greeks and the modern Christian conceptions of will is that the latter tied it to ontology: “the concept of will, which in Greek philosophy of the classical era did not have an ontological meaning, was elaborated…by Neoplatonism and later Christian theology beginning in the fourth century” (2013: 126). This notion of willing is then not ahistoric and universal, but was brought forth at a particular point to respond to a particular problematic: namely, “to explain the process of hypostatization of the One and the trinitary articulation of the Supreme Being” (2013: 126). With this, the concept of will became an ontological concept, insofar as “[w]ill, which is originarily will of self, names the intradivine movement through which the One, unfolding itself toward itself, is constituted as intellect (nous) and gives itself reality and existence in three primary hypostases” (2013: 126).

Importantly, “[w]ill is at once the origin of the movement of the hypostases and the principle that agrees to lead them back to unity” (2013: 127). Indeed, Agamben claims that “[i]t is precisely this ‘voluntarization’…of Greek metaphysics that…will render possible the elaboration of the Christian creationist paradigm’ (2013: 127). There are two aspects to this process that are here important: first, being became intimately tied to the will, in the sense that it is only through an act of will that the unity of the Christian God is maintained; second, gradually, the will–being relation led to a privileging of the former over the latter and, in so doing, gave birth to “the modern metaphysics of the will,” (2013: 127) in which will, rather than being, is understood to be foundational.

Agamben extends this analysis by noting that, for all its merits, it fails to inquire into “the characteristics of the new operative ontology that is here in question” (2013: 127). The claim is that the movement toward the affirmation of the will as the foundational ontological concept is not one that simply takes place “within” a changing ontological understanding, but that ontological understanding is itself tied to a particular mode of operation. In other words, it is not just that being is now understood in terms of movement resulting from will, but that willing is related to a third moment wherein

the movement of being is…not produced in itself and by nature but implies an energeia and an incessant “putting-to-work,” that is to say, that it is thought of as an ergon that refers to the effectuation on the part of the subject that will be, in the first and last instance, identified with the will. (2013: 128)

This is supported by a particular ethics of duty that holds that individuals are responsible for their actions: “[j]ust as duty was introduced into ethics to give a foundation to command, so also the idea of a will was elaborated to explain the passage from potency to effectiveness” (2013: 128). It is here that we get to the crux of Agamben’s argument: “[t]he ontology of command and the ontology of operativity are…closely bound: as a putting-to-work, the command also presupposes a will” (2013: 129). Indeed, “[w]ill is the form that being takes in the ontology of command and operativity” (2013: 129). Will has, then, become synonymous with command, operativity, and a productive process conditioned by a means-end logic. It is precisely this association that Agamben wants to overcome: “[t]he problem of the coming philosophy is that of thinking an ontology beyond operativity and command and an ethics and a politics entirely liberated from the concepts of duty and will” (2013: 129).

Critiquing willing

From this statement, it is tempting to conclude that the will and willing are to play no role in the coming politics. However, I will suggest that this only refers to a form of willing, which I will call “will-as-instrument,” that is based on the impetus to act in accordance with a means-end logic. Another form of willing, which I call “will-as-impetus,” because it simply refers to the impetus to act, will be part of the transition to the coming politics and, indeed, the coming politics itself. The motivation for this distinction emanates from my guiding claim that Agamben offers an affirmative political project. Based on this, he has to permit individual action that contributes to the deactivation of biopolitics and, indeed, its continuing deactivation; they cannot simply happen due to pre-personal changes. This, however, requires that Agamben identify the types of action that deactivate biopolitics and explain what permits the individual to choose that action. Therefore, I first turn to the form of action that deactivates biopolitics, before returning to the distinction between “will-as-instrument” and “will-as-impetus.”

Although Agamben discusses the Aristotlean distinction between action and production in “Notes on Gesture,” (2007: 154) I will focus on the analyses of praxis, work, and poiesis in The Man without Content (1999a) because he explicitly links this discussion to the will. Furthermore, the analysis of poiesis plays an important role in Agamben’s later thinking on the way(s) in which the command-willing of biopolitics is deactivated. Starting with the relationship between poiesis and praxis, which he holds to be the contemporarily dominant conception of productive activity, he explains that praxis is defined by a “manifestation of a will that produces a concrete effect” (1999a: 68). In other words, praxis is defined by a certain movement wherein the individual wills a particular end that is brought into effect by a concrete act. In itself, Agamben has no problem with this form of activity. A problem has only arisen because we have become “so accustomed to…understanding of all man’s ‘doing’ as praxis” (1999a: 68) that we are unable to “recognize that it could be, and in other eras has been, conceived differently” (1999a: 68).

With this, he returns to the Ancient Greeks to claim that they distinguished between “poiesis (poiein, ‘to pro-duce’ in the sense of bringing into being) and praxis (prattein, ‘to do’·in the sense of acting)” (1999a: 68). Importantly,

central to praxis was the idea of the will that finds its immediate expression in an act, while, by contrast, central to poiesis was the experience of pro-duction into presence, the fact that something passed from nonbeing to being, from concealment into the full light of the work. (1999a: 68–69)

He continues, however, that there is an element of activity missing from the discussion of the relations between praxis and poiesis: work. The reason for this omission is quite simple: the Greek philosophers did not work, but rather left “the physical work necessary for life’s needs [to the] slaves” (1999a: 69). They were, of course, aware of work, but tended to associate work with praxis, insofar as “[t]o work meant to submit to necessity, and submission to necessity, which made man the equal of the animal, with its perpetual and forced search for means of sustenance, was thought incompatible with the condition of the free man” (1999a: 69). For this reason, work was held to be distinct from poiesis. Whereas the latter “constructs the space where man finds his certitude and where he ensures the freedom and duration of his action, the presupposition of work is, on the contrary, bare biological existence, the cyclical processes of the human body” (1999a: 69).

With this, Agamben points to three distinct forms and logics of activity: praxis defined in terms of a voluntarist will, work associated with the willed satisfactions of bodily needs, and poiesis based on a process of freedom and unconcealment. The problem is that through a number of conceptual alterations and conflations that took place from and through the Greeks, Romans, and Christians, the distinction collapsed so that,

[m]an’s “doing” [wa]s determined as an activity producing a real effect (the opus of operari, the factum of facere, the actus of agere), whose worth is appreciated with respect to the will that is expressed in it, that is, with respect to its freedom and creativity. (1999a: 70)

From willing to thought

Agamben’s comments on the different forms of activity are important because they clarify the forms of activity that he maintains are possible, while also indicating that it is possible for individuals to engage in types of action—namely poiesis—that are not explicitly associated with the command-willing underpinning biopolitics. In The Use of Bodies, Agamben once more takes up this issue by linking poiesis to thought and both to the unlocking of potential. The discussion takes place in relation to the concept “form-of-life,” (2015: 207) which describes “a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate and keep distinct something like a bare life” (2015: 207). Form-of-life is, then, the concept that Agamben uses to describe the life that precedes a specific form or mode of life; it refers to “all possibilities of life, always and above all potential” (2015: 207) that can be expressed in and as a specific form of life. Importantly, form-of-life does not precede or depend upon a subject:

there is not a subject to which a potential belongs, which he can decide at his will to put into act: form-of-life is a being of potential not only or not so much because it can do or not do, succeed or fail, lose itself or find itself, but above all because it is its potential and coincides with it. (2015: 208)

In response, Agamben turns from a life tied to will to one tied to thought because the latter is understood as

the connection that constitutes forms of life into an inseparable context, into form-of-life. By this we do not understand the individual exercise of an organ or psychic faculty but an experience, an experimentum that has as its object the potential character of life and human intelligence. (2015: 210)

Thought, however, is not privileged over form-of-life, nor does it precede it; rather, thought is intimately tied to the potentiality that defines form-of-life: “there is form-of-life only where there is contemplation of a potential” (2015: 247). The reason for this is rather simple: when thought thinks of the subject, it thinks of the potential that defines the subject and itself; when thought thinks itself, it thinks the potential that defines it. Affirming thought is then, for Agamben, to affirm the potential that subtends but is ignored by a privileging of will: “thought does not define one form of life among others in which life and social production are articulated: it is the unitary potential that constitutes the multiple forms of life into form-of-life” (2015: 213).

Second, because it is explicitly tied to potentiality, thought captures the non-specification that defines form-of-life prior to its differentiation into a form of life:

[t]hought is form-of-life, life unsegregatable from its form, and wherever there appears the intimacy of this inseparable life, in the materiality of the corporeal processes and habitual modes of life not less than in theory, there and there alone is there thought. (2015: 213)

Thought, however, is potential that has not yet expressed itself in determinate life form. It does not, then, simply counter one form of life with another, but thinks potential without affirming anything and so disarms the instrumental logic of biopolitics: “in contemplation, the work is deactivated and rendered inoperative, and in this way, restored to possibility, opened to a new possible use” (2015: 247). Although it might be thought that a reaffirmation of the original meaning of praxis—“manifestation of a will that produces a concrete effect” (1999a: 68)—devoid of its subsequent tie to the instrumentality of work would permit the instrumentality of biopolitics to be de-activated, Agamben seems to think that its long-held conflation with the instrumentality of work means that it is no longer possible—either because we cannot think it or because it is no longer an option—to simply return to that “early” pre-instrumental sense of “praxis.” We need, then, to search for an alternative form of action that renders inoperable the instrumental logic of biopolitics all the while affirming the potential inherent to form-of-life. He claims that this is achieved, not through a return to praxis devoid of work, but by the affirmation of poiesis: “[a] form of life is truly poetic [when], in its own work, [it] contemplates its own potential to do and not do and finds peace in it” (2015: 247). The reason why poiesis is capable of this is because “in it there has been preserved the experience of a relation to something that exceeds work and operation and yet remains inseparable from it” (2015: 247). There is, then, an intimate connection between thought, potential, and poiesis that ensures that thought-as-poiesis deactivates the instrumental logic of biopolitics while also unlocking the potential and, hence, alternatives that are necessary to transition to the coming politics.

Concluding remarks: Willing contemplation?

The preceding discussion shows that Agamben’s affirmation of the coming politics is based on a two-stage movement wherein the logic of biopolitics is deactivated, with this directing thought to the potential associated with “the” form-of-life subtending each particular form of life. This movement is the precursor that permits the actualization of the form of life of the coming politics. Although messianic or ontological readings imply that individuals are passive bystanders to this deactivation, I have argued that Agamben recognizes that this does not simply happen but requires an affirmative act, which brings forth the issue of the type of action that deactivates biopolitics.

When we turn to that issue, it appears that Agamben explicitly rejects the notion that will plays a role in the transition, in favor of poiesis, which is tied to thought, with both thought and poiesis understood to be intimately tied to potential. So, whereas a privileging of will is the preserve of biopolitics, Agamben affirms thought-as-poiesis because he holds that this deactivates the instrumental logic of biopolitics, reveals the form-of-life upon which will depends and, in so doing, opens up alternative potentialities. Agamben’s strategy is, then, to replace a politics based on will with one based on thought-as-poiesis. This gives rise to the question as to whether the division between thought-as-poiesis and will is accurate or sustainable. My argument is that it is not.

This conclusion depends upon two issues: (1) what is meant by “will”; and (2) what thought(-as-poiesis) entails. Regarding the first, when in Opus Dei Agamben highlights the traditional link between will and action, to claim that wilful action is based on a command that takes place within a means-end logic, he is describing what I have called “will-as-instrument,” which describes (a) an impetus through which an intention is actualized by a particular form of action (b) undertaken in accordance with a means-end instrumental logic. This is, however, a very strong, prescriptive, and historically contingent conception of “will” that does not exhaust all options. A weaker sense, which I call “will-as-impetus,” is possible if “will” is simply understood in terms of (a): an impetus through which an intention is actualized by a particular form of action. In other words, “will-as-impetus” simply describes the “mechanism” that takes place to allow an individual “to choose” to engage in activity. This is not to say that the “choice” determines that the activity will be realized, but that it is an aspect of it. If this weaker sense is accurate, then all the forms of activity—praxis, work, and poiesis—mentioned by Agamben entail a form of will. Indeed, Agamben seems to accept this when he claims that when Bartleby demurs he must intend to act in that way, which seems to require a decision, desire, or impetus to do so. When we relate this to the different forms of activity that Agamben describes, the command-orientated willing of praxis-as-work is tied to a model of operation based on a means-end schema, whereas thought-as-poiesis is tied to a will(-as-impetus) to produce the truth that Agamben links to contemplation and the potentiality necessary for the transition to and, indeed, the existence of the coming politics.

Of course, the problem with insisting that thought-as-poiesis is tied to a sense of will is not only that it requires that the distinction between “will-as-instrument” and “will-as-impetus” be accepted, but also that Agamben does not make it. However, the benefit of the distinction and, indeed, of tying thought-as-poiesis to one sense of “will” is that it safeguards and explains the “affirmative” aspect of Agamben’s thought: if thought-as-poiesis is not just a passive consequence of messianic or ontological alterations, there has to be, at least, one mechanism through which an individual “chooses” thought-as-poiesis. Accepting that action is tied to the weak sense of will(-as-impetus) provides this, all the while remaining true to Agamben’s critique of the stronger sense of will-as-instrument.

This is, second, tied to the question of what thought entails. Agamben has a habit of writing as if thought-as-poiesis simply exists in opposition to will and happens without any desire, intention, or will to think. Of course, writing in this passive sense ties into his affirmation of deactivation and messianism, and affirms the distinction between thought(-as-poiesis) and will. It does, however, (1) depend upon a unitary conception of will that I have previously questioned, and (2) conflate the analytic distinction between thought and will with the phenomenological activity of thought. So, if the distinction between “will-as-instrument” and “will-as-impetus” is accepted and we focus on what it takes to engage in the activity of thought, it appears that the hard distinction that Agamben insists on between thought-as-poiesis and will(-as-instrument) does not hold for thought-as-poiesis and will(-as-impetus): to engage in thought-as-poiesis requires a will-as-impetus to act in that manner and not another. By reading the activity of thought through the analytical distinction between will-as-instrument and thought-as-poiesis, Agamben is able to insist on an absolute division between the command-willing(-as-instrument) of biopolitics and the thought(-as-poiesis) of the coming politics. However, if all activity depends, at least in part, upon the intention or affirmation of that activity, it must depend on what I have called “will-as-impetus.” It is, therefore, questionable whether the activities of thought(-as-poiesis) and will(-as-impetus) are as distinct as Agamben's description of the thought-will(-as-instrument) relation seems to insist on, meaning that a form of will-as-impetus will play a role in the deactivation of biopolitics (including the command-willing it entails), the transition to the coming politics and, crucially, because of the relationship between thought-as-poiesis and the coming politics and, indeed, the diachronic nature of the latter, which ensures that it must be continually affirmed to prevent a regression into the logic of biopolitics, the coming politics as well.

This conclusion is supported by Agamben’s claim that:

[a] living being can never be defined by its work but only by its inoperativity, which is to say, by the mode in which it maintains itself in relation with a pure potential in a work and constitutes-itself as form-of-life. (2015: 247)

While this explains how an act of will contributes to the transition to the coming politics, it is important to note that will-as-impetus does not simply disappear once the coming politics has been effected; if, as I have argued, Agamben holds that thought-as-poiesis—as a non-instrumental form of action—is integral to the coming politics and the latter must be diachronically maintained partly through the actions of individuals, then the willing(-as-impetus) that is bound up with thought-as-poiesis will continue to be integral to the coming politics. Although the precise nature of the coming politics is an open one, the transition that brings it forth and, indeed, the coming politics itself will continue to depend upon a form of agential willing and are, therefore, activities that we can and, on Agamben’s telling, should choose to contribute toward.