HeyJ LII (2011), pp.

952961

BEYOND VIOLENCE, BEYOND THE TEXT: THE

ROLE OF GESTURE IN WALTER BENJAMIN
AND GIORGIO AGAMBEN, AND ITS AFFINITY
WITH THE WORK OF RENE GIRARD
COLBY DICKINSON

Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium

Though the work of Rene Girard has highlighted the interrelations between sacrice and sacrality in the
contemporary world, it has yet to engage the work of Walter Benjamin and his heir, Giorgio Agamben,
whose project concerning the Homo Sacer has aroused interest in contemporary political thought. By
focusing on Benjamins early description of mimesis and its relation to language, a position can be
elaborated that steers mimesis clear of its indebtedness to language and towards a purer realm of gesture.
Benjamins formulation of a more proper divine language of gestures could then be said to coalesce with
certain historical-religious proclamations, something that Agambens work challenges us to consider as a
viable, albeit profane, political and ethical option for humanity.

INTRODUCTION

Over the past few decades, the work of Rene Girard has had an impact on the study of
religion, progressing from his literary-critical forays into a scriptural-mythological
debate.1 His discovery lies in a revelation of the violence implicitly at work in any
form of communal self-understanding, as well as how the worlds religions and myths have
tended either to conceal and thus perpetuate this violence (as in the realm of myth, Greek,
Roman, etc) or to reveal and thereby denounce it (as in the Judeo-Christian heritage). That
is, according to Girard, every community is prone to select and exclude its scapegoats (a
choice often resulting in their death or exile); only a revelation of this hidden violence can
possibly bring about a peaceful resolution. Only those acknowledging the truth of
violence, and hence our violent communal origins, can escape from this mimetic (or
imitative) cycle. In general, his theories have widened our understanding of how the
processes of mimetic rivalry and scapegoating go hand-in-hand, though his work remains
peripheral to many.2
Criticisms of his work have viewed his theories as too grand or all-encompassing - too
broad, for example, in their explanation of how all social groupings have tended to
function along the same basic axis of a mimetic desiring which explains all violent conicts,
though there are some who see his work as unveiling the underlying dynamics of society,
though falling short or at least in need of revision in the end.3 Though I would also see a
critical engagement with Girards general theory as productive, what I point to in this
essay is a mimetic afnity between (as well as an accompanying challenge to) Girards
work and that of two other recent cultural theorists, Walter Benjamin and his heir, Giorgio
Agamben. Tracing a movement away from mimesis and its connection to language and
r 2011 The Author. The Heythrop Journal r 2011 Trustees for Roman Catholic Purposes Registered. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600
Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

BEYOND VIOLENCE, BEYOND THE TEXT

953

(textual) religion begun by Benjamin and picked up later by Agamben, I illustrate how
their afnity with Girard both provokes and conrms a Girardian worldview, pushing
beyond its limitations and offering new vistas for thought, both philosophically and in
religious terms.

MIMESIS AND GESTURE

In 1933, Walter Benjamin wrote a short unpublished treatise entitled On the Mimetic
Faculty in which he spoke of humanitys highest capacity for producing similarity as a
basis underlying common understandings.4 From the play of children to the history of
dance, from magic to our core religious sentiments, Benjamin sketched what a cohesive
analysis of mimetic behavior might resemble in light of the fact that, as he put it, [t]here is
perhaps not a single one of his higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play
a decisive role.5 By highlighting the signicance of the mimetic faculty in relation to the
law of similarity that has governed both microcosm and macrocosm for centuries,
Benjamin noted how our propensity for recognizing similarities through the use of our
mimetic faculty had evolved over the years, an evolution that showed also something of its
mutability and fragility. He was able to discern a mimetic component at the heart of
human behavior that was foundational also for human institutions; this appreciation had,
however, unfortunately been lost (or hidden) as time went on. Now . . . the perceptual
world of modern man contains only minimal residues of the magical correspondences and
analogies that were familiar to ancient peoples.6 The once common relations to material
objects that had previously undergirded our (animistic) vision of the world, and which had
transcribed its boundaries, have faded from view.7 Everyday mimetic patterns that had
sustained communal life have now acquired other, apparently more lasting (political) forms.
Through an invocation of astrology - though the whole of ancient (and perhaps
modern) religious practice lies within these same roots - Benjamin steers the discussion
toward the most recognizable form in which nonsensuous similarity is produced today:
the existence of language. Despite references to the rise of language as a form of imitative
onomatopoeia, and as the tie that binds what is said to what is meant (that is, the spoken to
the written), language has not received its proper share of attention with regard to its
mimetic origins.8 This is a lamentable state of affairs that Benjamin was here seeking to
correct. As he describes their relationship: From time immemorial, the mimetic faculty
has been conceded some inuence on language. Yet this was done without foundation
without consideration of a further meaning, still less a history, of the mimetic faculty.9 It is
this foundation, however, that Benjamin begins to conceive. In this way, we are told,
language may be seen as the highest level of mimetic behavior and the most complete
archive of nonsensuous similarity: a medium into which the earlier powers of mimetic
production and comprehension have passed without residue, to the point where they have
liquidated those of magic.10
Increased precision in language has advanced historically in proportion with a decrease
in our dependency on magic. With an expanded vocabulary and an increasingly scientic
outlook, our need to (magically) name the unknown lessens. Benjamin focuses on
language in our modern textual times where myth nds itself on the verge of dissolving
entirely. Though the dissolution of myth was Benjamins stated project, this is not to
suggest that language is the only possible culmination of mimetic processes, but only that
language was its eventual major outcome. Language became the historical outlet for a

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mimetic desiring detached from its everyday uses and grafted onto a vaster social and,
ultimately, political project.11 The decline in myth is consequently what comes about
through the evolution of the ancient attempt to read what was never written in the stars
or in animal entrails, tasks that morphed into todays more normative use of the mimetic
faculty, seemingly equated with the rise and establishment of language itself.
Benjamins proximity to theories on the origin of language is a heavily traversed terrain,
but not often linked to these reections on languages mimetic origins, or the larger
cultural implications of mimetic desiring for that matter. Indeed, his writings on mimesis
and its relation to gesture on the whole have been neglected, as David Michael KleinbergLevin points out in his remarkable synthesis of these themes in Benjamins work.12 This
presents us with a missed opportunity, as Benjamins relating of the two seems to lie at the
base of his philosophical-literary oeuvre.13 Up till now it has been common to focus on his
relating human language to divine language (along with the latters afliation to the
priority of the biblical narrative), as he did in On Language as Such and on the Language
of Man.14 I am pointing out, however, a link between mimetic desire as a quest for
common understanding or cultural similarity, and the rise of language, a connection
underlying the attempt to read what has not been written that Benjamin emphasized in
the notes and sketches gathered in his Theses on History toward the end of his life.15 As
his remarks on divine violence cannot be read apart from his development of a divine
language, so too must these brief comments on mimesis be read in conjunction with other
formulations that point beyond the realm of mimesis (and hence language) altogether; in
short, Benjamin was directing us toward the realm of non-similar gestures.16
One of the intriguing elements of this work on the origins of the mimetic faculty is that it
lies at the base of the connection between language and religion, which returns when
Benjamin is given over to considerations of their hollowing out, or our encounter with the
limits of both, as in his essay on Kafka. In this context the mimetic faculty evolves out of
sight entirely, not yet forming itself into language, but instead yielding to another realm,
one of alienated, non-similar and thus non-mimetic gestures.17 This de-contextualized
experience of the self, as Deborah Levitt called it, is a world freed of the traditional nexus
between mimetic desiring and language, one in which the individual is suspended beyond
the cultural inscriptions which mimesis normally dictates that humanity bear.18 Recalling
Benjamins notion of a divine language beyond what we typically conceive of as language,
and its conjunction with a form of divine violence that he nds analogous to a workers
strike - a suspension of all normal economic relations - we are well placed to identify
gesture as the entrance to a new ethical paradigm, a move toward embracing what a divine
language might resemble.
To understand Benjamin this way is to envision gesture as the non-linguistic (nontextual) outcome of a mimetic faculty that does not necessarily culminate in the
establishment of a human, politically-encased language, that is, as a system of symbols all
more or less appreciated through their ability to (violently) reduce objects to a common
network of labels. This is a paradigm beyond language and toward which writers such as
Kafka often point, with their alienated protagonists lost in a land without context,
bumping into characters devoid of content. What these writers illustrate are pure forms of
life that are encountered more in zones without clear denition or boundary, what Paolo
Bartoloni has referred to as interstital spaces.19
If the mimetic faculty produced a realm of social and cultural similarity in unison with
the earliest forms of religious aspiration (i.e. magic, astrology, animism, etc), then the
move towards the realm of gesture would be a signal given by Kafka and Benjamin (among

BEYOND VIOLENCE, BEYOND THE TEXT

955

others) toward a plane devoid of this religious content, one not merely secularized but
profaned, as Agamben will later call it. My reading of Benjamin at this point runs parallel
with that of Agamben who, in an essay devoted to developing a theory of signatures,
reads Benjamins remarks on the mimetic faculty as the condition for all acts of
signication, including the use of language, something that he himself will attempt to defy
on multiple occasions.20 Though Agambens analysis of Benjamin is brief in this context, it
is his (often unstated) use of these loose strands in Benjamins thought that allows him to
unite the realm of gesture with the coming political task of profanation. This unity between
gesture and profanation is something he deems an essential part of the messianic vocation
of humanity, beyond any traditional religious connotations of the term.21

GIORGIO AGAMBENS TURN TO THE BODY

In a fragment dating from 1936 - a sign that his reections on the mimetic faculty had not
abated some three years after his initial formulations - Benjamin further mused how The
knowledge that the rst material on which the mimetic faculty tested itself was the human
body should be used more fruitfully than hitherto to throw light on the primal history of
the arts.22 In this way Benjamin seemed to be hinting toward the manner in which any
foundational approach to the history of mimetic desiring must approach its subject matter:
through the bodies that display and perpetuate its signicance and force. This was a
movement to comprehend the impact of mimesis on humanity, beyond the latters
dependency on language.
Undoubtedly aware of this fragment, as well as its implications for re-conceiving the
history of humanity (or of humanitys self-constitution) beyond its linguistic or textual
connes,23 Agamben enters our horizon at this point where the body, subject to mimetic
desiring, becomes entwined with its exposure to another (an other), its nudity illuminated
beyond its linguistic inscription. For Agamben this is nowhere more forcefully manifest
than in the gure of the homo sacer, the being stripped to the point of exhibiting nothing
but its bare life, a gure suspended beyond our ability to dene it through language. And,
as he will make clear on more than one occasion, to see a humanity beyond its connement
in language is to re-examine the role of sacrality in our world entirely, as well as its
interaction with what we have come to regard as the human being.24 Hence we are able to
witness the appropriateness of the word sacer in the various formulations of this gure as
well as his reference to the existence of language as a sacrament.25
Already in one of his earliest works, Language and Death, written in 1982, thirteen years
before he was to engage more fully with the gure of the homo sacer (his work bearing this
title wasnt published until 1995), Agamben anticipates the fundamental trajectory behind
this later line of inquiry, illustrating how central these lines of thought are to his work as a
whole. I will explore this relationship briey before linking it to the realms of mimesis and
gesture that are central to any presentation of a possible alternative way to juxtapose the
sacred (accessible via the nexus between mimesis and language) and the profane (brought
about through a gesture beyond linguistic conscription). As Agamben describes this gure
of the homo sacer in relation to the institution of sacrice (and in what could only appear as
very Girardian terms):
However one interprets the sacricial function, the essential thing is that in every case, the action of
the human community is grounded only in another action; or, as etymology shows, that every

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facere is sacrum facere. At the center of sacrice is simply a determinate action that, as such, is
separated and marked by exclusion; in this way it becomes sacer and is invested with a series of
prohibitions and ritual prescriptive. Forbidden action, marked by sacredness, is not, however,
simply excluded; instead, it is now only accessible for certain people and according to determinate
rules. In this way, it furnishes society and its ungrounded legislation with the ction of a beginning:
that which is excluded from the community is, in reality, that on which the entire life of the
community is founded, and it is assumed by the society as an immemorial, and yet memorable,
past. Every beginning is, in truth, an initiation, every conditum is an abs-conditum.26

Remarking on the ambiguity and circularity of the concept of the sacred, Agamben
denes the same geneology of thought that his later studies on the gure of the homo sacer
will develop more extensively in relation to politics. Essentially, the ungroundedness of
the human being, that is simultaneously the platform on which humanity has sought to
establish its distinction from its animality, becomes the source of an exclusive or divisive
action intended to ground humanity in its decisive (and at times, therefore, legal or
categorical) forms, and to remain as that which, remaining unspeakable [. . .] and
intransmissible in every action and in all human language, destines man to community and
to tradition.27 It is the unwritten that one attempts to read that Agamben here seizes
upon, as it was likewise Benjamins foundation for those mimetic operations that
humanity had been all-too-quick to codify (linguistically).
This ction of a beginning is undisclosed on some level (immemorial) and yet
solidied as the foundation of a particular community. It is something that society
attempts to give to itself, an act that it subsequently masks through the institution of a
founding violence, according to Agamben, a point that Girard will also make central to his
theories. Behind the violent nature of communal foundations, as they are often begun with
a seminal murder or sacrice, Agamben discerns the myriad attempts of humanity to posit
itself as humanity, an ontological (or ontotheological) ruse that is inherently violent:
Violence is not something like an originary biological fact that man is forced to assume and regulate
in his own praxis through sacricial institution; rather it is the very ungoundedness of human
action (which the sacricial mythogeme hopes to cure) that constitutes the violent character (that is
contra naturam, according to the Latin meaning of the word) of sacrice. All human action,
inasmuch as it is not naturally grounded but must construct its own foundation, is, according to the
sacricial mythogeme, violent. And it is this sacred violence that sacrice presupposes in order to
repeat it and regulate it within its own structure.28

Violence (as language, even expressing its own grammar) appears in our world as a result of
our separation from our animality (and its seemingly more originary mimesis). Sacrice
therefore for Agamben results from this primary, articial scission of the human from the
animal. Sacrice is seen as what (falsely) promises to grant us our self-denition, our
ability to be human at all. It seems that the mechanisms of this anthropological
machinery, as he will elsewhere label it, dictate specic representations of the human being
that are caught up within a violent logic of sacricial rites as ancient as the origins of what
we have come to call humanity.29 They are the foundation for any of our ontological
claims and are given their legitimation through our (traditional) theological assertions.
This is, in essence, the origin of any ontotheology.30 Agamben thereby concludes that there
is a certain unnaturalness to human violence; yet it is, in another sense, often viewed as a
foundational necessity, the origin of religious desiring (from its magical and astrological
phases to its more contemporary religious forms). He therefore states that The foundation
of violence is the violence of the foundation, an almost inescapable fact that serves to
legitimate many a violent endeavor in our world.31

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957

In this early effort by Agamben to move away from a logic of sacricial violence, he
isolates philosophy rather than revealed religion as capable of absolving human beings
from their indebtedness to a sacricial and cyclical logic. He in fact prepares a philosophy
which, as we will soon see, is dened as a movement into the realm of gestures beyond
language.32 He makes it clear at this point as well that any attempt to think beyond this
logic will most certainly appear as excluded from all of our common (shared, or similar)
articulations precisely because it is beyond the signication of language.33 Yet, how exactly
are we to express our common humanity beyond the unifying force of sacrice, that is,
to renounce the logic of the excluded other (the one sacriced in order to maintain
the foundations of any conceived humanity) and its indebtedness to our political, cultural
and religious signications that take place through language? Despite the apparent
insurmountable obstacle of this condition, it is in no uncertain terms that Agamben
refers to this as the dening political task for the coming community, one that he relates
to its ability to move beyond the logic of the excluded gure, or the homo sacer, for
example.34 To even begin to answer these dilemmas - and as he frames the solution through
yet another question - We must . . . ask why Western politics rst constitutes itself through
an exclusion (which is simultaneously an inclusion) of bare life. What is the relation
between politics and life, if life presents itself as what is included by means of an
exclusion?35
Agamben is preoccupied with understanding how the human being in its full bodiliness
has been constituted by the anthropological machinery of our world, a machinery that
ceaselessly dictates the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion - hence how this machinery
sits precariously, undenably, on the border of the human and the animal, as well as of the
human and the divine.36 This is how one should read his still evolving Homo Sacer project,
as well as the accompanying studies on animality conducted in The Open: Man and
Animal. Yet these studies are also nothing if not rst philosophy for Agamben - they are
caught up in the fundamental transition from potentiality to actuality, a movement
previously formulated in Aristotles work that Agamben reconsiders as the central
problematic of all identity and political construction.37 The zone of indifference where the
anthropological machinery operates is the same zone wherein sovereignty (and its
accompanying political power) is constituted, the zone that links our mimetic desire to
language, though it is also a space where we need not do so, where we might actually reside
within our pure potentiality (the realm of gesture) beyond any acts of signication (such as
those made through language). Not only are we capable of living without a sovereign
politics, enslaved to our mimetic heritage, we are, if we embrace it, capable of living in a
realm of pure gesture beyond language as we have known it. It is a realm perhaps more
closely aligned to what Benjamin conceived of as being divine.
This same thread of gestures that we nd operative in Benjamins work, those utilized to
contrast the linkage of mimesis and language, is further articulated through Agambens
expansion. Gesture becomes, as Levitt again describes it, . . . an exhibition, a process of
making visible, a revelation device, and what it makes visible is the medium, the milieu of
human beings.38 She immediately qualies, however, this expression of our potential
situatedness in the realm of gesture: Such a milieu refers not only to the medium that
human beings are in, but equally to the medium that human being is. It is what survives
after the constructed image of the human being that the anthropological machinery
created has been rendered inoperative. In this manner bare life lives on in pure gesture, as
Agamben puts it, . . . like creatures bathed in the light of the Last Day, surviving the ruin
of their formal garment and their conceptual meaning.39

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As can be heard echoing throughout these suggestively rich thoughts, Agamben is

referring to a realm of gesture beyond its historical-theological guise, to . . . a wholly
profane mystery in which human beings, liberating themselves from all sacredness,
communicate to each other their lack of secrets as their most proper gesture.40 It is a mark
of profanation beyond ontotheology, an experience of mediality as the ethical dimension
of human beings.41 And this is politics in its purest form: a means without ends that
avoids becoming a mimetically scripted attempt at forming some sort of totalitarian
schema, whether that be a political or theological conguration of some sovereign form.
This is so because gesture, in Agambens words, breaks with the false alternative between
ends and means that paralyzes morality and presents instead means that, as such, evade the
orbit of mediality without becoming, for this reason, ends.42 Politics, in this sense, is
capable of becoming a sphere of the full, absolute gesturality of human beings, that is,
philosophy.43

CONCLUSION

Agambens focus arises in a way similar to Girards aim to end our worlds sacricial
machinery, an outcome, we now see, of Agambens reading of Benjamin on mimesis,
language, and violence. For Girard this end comes about through an often textual
(linguistic) revelation. Yet, a textual revelation, though it may be able to expose the
violence of signication, has still to go beyond it and into a realm of gesture that exists as
an unexplored realm of non-violent mimetic desiring. If Agamben is on to something, then
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe was right to point toward the manner in which Girards
formulation of mimetic desire is problematically intertwined with representation, and that
the basis of both religion and language are fundamentally inseparable from their
interplay.44 For this reason his critique of Girard, mimesis and representation might best
be juxtaposed with Agambens attempts to advance gesture in relation to presentation, an
act beyond the connes of both language and religion, beyond the mimetic textual
resonances on which Girards work is so dependent.45 A shift would necessarily be
involved that would move us from (textual, canonical) models of social-sacred behavior
dependent on mimetic desiring, to a realm of absolute gesturality that foresees the coming
of our profane existence. This would provide us with an-other exploration of our mimetic
faculty beyond its connection to language.
There are two theses which Agambens reading of Benjamin seems to be pointing us
towards: rst, that violence arises from our separation from our animality, the
fundamental act that pushes us to form language as an attempt to deal with a mimetic
faculty removed from its original habitus. Second, that we must return to a form of
animality (of a purely immanent life then, devoid of transcendence) that is expressible only
as a realm of pure gesture, a mimetic behavior not brought to its linguistic heights (or
depths) - a realm of habit.46 For Agamben this analysis opens our ethical thinking toward
paradigms of thought that move beyond a logic of exclusion, a movement from
particularity to particularity that escapes the universal/particular dichotomy.47 In short,
we are presented with forms of life that function through examples and not exclusions,
allowing the full range of non-similar gestures to be respected as the absolute singularities
they are, beyond all mimetic cultural (violent) inscriptions.48 If sacrality has been
historically established and justied as a bid to legitimate sovereign power through the

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959

mechanism of sacrice, this is the case because it has been complicit with a mimeticism
drawn to its fulllment through the signifying acts of the sovereign powers that be.49
Agambens project of moving beyond, because before, language and so before religion,
to a realm of pure gesture beyond mimetic articulation, bears a certain afnity to Girrard,
as it is the task of putting an end to the sacrical logic at work in our world, hence a task of
pure profanation as much as of our pure potentiality. Though it may seem as if Agambens
emphasis on language (signication) as a form of violence might serve to trivialize the
harsh realities of violence in our world, I contend that he is instead seeking to reveal the
foundations of our most violent social and political acts, acts which are dependent on the
process of drawing borders and reducing those precious and precarious lives before us to a
system of labels. Agambens efforts can thus be seen as the task of tearing open all the veils
that conceal an otherwise empty space once said to contain the holiest of holies; this is the
case insofar as he reveals the hollow foundations of our (ontotheological) political actions.
It follows that any potential form of divinity must now be accessed and assessed through
the truth of this revelation of the profane nature of our world and not through traditional
notions of a transcendent, sovereign deity, a revelation he considers the essence of the
original proclamation of Christianity.50 In the end, and as close readers of Girards work
will have noticed, Agamben is not as removed from the formers work as might be
suspected.

Notes
1 Cf. Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred (trans. Patrick Gregory, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1979); Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer, Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1987); The Scapegoat (trans. Yvonne Freccero, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1989); and I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (trans. James G. Williams, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001). Some of the
more recent commentaries on his work illustrate the growing signicance of his theories, including: Gil Bailie, Violence
Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads (New York: Crossroad, 1995); Richard Joseph Golsan, Rene Girard and Myth:
An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002); Chris Fleming, Rene Girard: Violence and Mimesis (Oxford: Polity, 2004);
Frederiek Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Philosophy: Gianni Vattimo, Rene Girard, and Slavoj %i&ek (London: T&T
Clark, 2008); and Michael Kirwin, Girard and Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2009).
2 Cf. the elaboration of mimetic desiring, though from a Girardian standpoint, in Jean-Michel Oughourlian, The
Genesis of Desire (trans. Eugene Webb, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2010).
3 Such an analysis lies in Phillippe Lacoue-Labarthes remarks on Girard in his Typology: Mimesis, Philosophy,
Politics (trans. Christopher Fynsk, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 102f, a critique apparently so
incisive that Hent de Vries is condent enough to briey treat Girards theories in a footnote, with merely a reference to
Lacoue-Labarthes study. Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. 204205. See also the manner in which his work has
inspired critical-theological engagements, from Raymund Schwagers Must There Be Scapegoats? (New York: Herder
& Herder, 2000) to S. Mark Heims Saved from Sacrice: A Theology of the Cross (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
2006).
4 Walter Benjamin, On the Mimetic Faculty, in Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, (eds.),
Selected Writings, vol. 2 (trans. Edmund Jephcott, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 7202.
5 Benjamin, On the Mimetic Faculty, p. 720.
6 Benjamin, On the Mimetic Faculty, p. 721.
7 Cf. the theses surrounding Anselm Frankes Much Trouble in the Transportation of Souls, or: The Sudden
Disorganization of Boundaries in Anselm Franke, (ed.), Animism, vol. 1 (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010), where he
draws upon Benjamins mimetic theory in his attempt to re-vitalize (but not restore) the concept of animism, once so
signicant for modern anthropological classications. See also, the discussion of mimesis in relation to animism as
found in Rane Willerslevs Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2007), cited also in Franke, Much Trouble in the Transportation of Souls, pp. 4950.
8 For a discussion of this lack of scholarship on mimesis in relation to Benjamins general theories on language, see
Uwe Steiner, Walter Benjamin: An Introduction to His Work and Thought (trans. Michael Winkler, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2010). pp. 478.
9 Benjamin, On the Mimetic Faculty, p. 721.

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10 Benjamin, On the Mimetic Faculty, p. 722.

11 Cf. the dialectical materialism he espoused as contrary to myth in his celebrated theses On the Concept of
History in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, (eds.), Selected Writings, vol. 4 (trans. Harry Zohn, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 389400.
12 David Michael Kleinberg-Levin, Gestures of Ethical Life: Reading Holderlins Question of Measure After
Heidegger (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 142203.
13 Cf. Kleinberg-Levin, Gestures of Ethical Life, pp. 193197.
14 Walter Benjamin, On Language as Such and on the Language of Man in Marcus Bullock and Michael W.
Jennings, (eds.), Selected Writings, vol. 1 (trans. Edmund Jephcott, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996),
pp. 6274.
15 Cf. Benjamins notes on the Theses on History which also include references to reading things not written. The
consideration here then lies between this suggestion and his earlier remarks on mimesis.
16 Matthias Fritsch, The Promise of Memory: History and Politics in Marx, Benjamin, and Derrida (Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press, 2005).
17 Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death, Selected Writings, vol. 2, pp. 794818.
18 Deborah Levitt, Notes on Media and Biopolitics: Notes on Gesture, in Justin Clemens, Nicholas Heron and
Alex Murray, (eds.), The Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2008), p. 205.
19 Paolo Bartoloni, Interstitial Writing: Calvino, Caproni, Sereni and Svevo (Market Harborough: Troubador,
2003). See also his On the Cultures of Exile, Translation, and Writing (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press,
2008).
20 Agamben, The Signature of All Things: On Method (trans. Luca DIsanto with Kevin Attell, New York: Zone,
2009), pp. 71f. On Agambens relationship to Benjamin, see, among others, Vittoria Borso`, Claas Morgenroth, Karl
Solibakke and Bernd Witte, (eds.), Benjamin-Agamben: Politics, Messianism, Kabbalah (Wurzburg: Konigshausen &
Neumann, 2010).
21 The realm of gesture would appear thus as one wherein the de-activation (inoperability) of the law that the
messianic act works within history, if Benjamins theses on history are to be read in conjunction with these remarks,
becomes manifest as intricately intertwined with the hollowing out of our traditional forms of language and religion.
22 Walter Benjamin, The Knowledge That the First Material on Which the Mimetic Faculty Tested Itself in
Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, (eds.), Selected Works, vol. 3 (trans. Edmund Jephcott, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 253.
23 This opposition to acts of signication (including language) in Agambens work has brought him to contest,
many times over, the work of Jacques Derrida, for whom, famously, there was nothing outside the text. Cf. Giorgio
Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (trans. Karen E. Pinkus and Michael Hardt, Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 39; Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (trans. Ronald L.
Martinez, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 1557; Potentialities: Collected Essays in
Philosophy (trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 171; Homo Sacer: Sovereign
Power and Bare Life (trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 54; The Time that
Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (trans. Patricia Dailey, Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2005), pp. 1023. On the multiple critiques which this contrast has drawn, see, for example, David E. Johnson, As If
the Time Were Now: Deconstructing Agamben, South Atlantic Quarterly 106: 2 (2007), pp. 26590; Simon Morgan
Wortham, Law of Friendship: Agamben and Derrida, New Formations 62 (2007), pp. 89105; Jeffrey S. Librett,
From the Sacrifice of the Letter to the Voice of Testimony: Giorgio Agambens Fulfillment of Metaphysics, Diacritics
37: 23 (2007), pp. 1133.; Vernon Cisney, Categories of Life: The Status of the Camp in Derrida and Agamben, The
Southern Journal of Philosophy 46: (2008) pp. 16179; Catherine Mills, Playing with Law: Agamben and Derrida on
Postjuridical Justice, South Atlantic Quarterly 107: 1 (2008), pp. 1735.; and Kevin Attell, An Esoteric Dossier:
Agamben and Derrida Read Saussure, ELH 76: 4 (2009), pp. 82146. A substantial review of the tensions between
Derrida and Agamben can also be found in Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 18491.
24 Cf. Agambens Homo Sacer project in juxtaposition with his later work on profanation in Profanations (trans.
Jeff Fort, New York: Zone, 2007). On the subject of the production of the human being, see also his work The Open:
Man and Animal (trans. Kevin Attell, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
25 Giorgio Agamben, The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath (trans. Adam Kotsko, Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2010).
26 Agamben, Language and Death, pp. 1045.
27 Agamben, Language and Death, p. 105.
28 Agamben, Language and Death, pp. 105106.
29 Cf. the description of the anthropological machinery which could be said to generate humanity over and against
its animality in Agamben, The Open, pp. 338. This thesis, of course, shares a remarkable similarity with the work of
Rene Girard on the relationship between violence, religion and sacrice, a similarity which Agamben has not yet taken
up directly as such. On the afnities and differences between Girards position and that of Agamben, see also
Christopher A. Fox, Sacricial pasts and messianic futures: Religion as a political prospect in Rene Girard and
Giorgio Agamben, Philosophy and Social Criticism 33:5 (2007), pp. 56395, as well as Rey Chow, Sacrifice, Mimesis,
and the Theorizing of Victimhood, Representations 94 (2006), pp. 13149. Moreover, if Girards thesis can likewise be

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read as an attempt to conceive of the Christian message as one ultimately doing away with the false sacred within our
world, a sort of secularization thesis as found in the work of Gianni Vattimo, for example, then perhaps Agambens
attempt to profane our world can be understood as a similarly-minded gesture. Cf. Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity
(trans. Luca DIsanto, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
30 The term ontotheology, of course, comes from its critique in the work of Martin Heidegger, someone with
whom Agamben once studied, and who remains heavily inuential upon his work. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche:
Vol. IV: Nihilism (ed. David Farell Krell, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, 4 vols., San Francisco, HarperSanFrancisco, 1982),
pp. 209f., as well as Iain Thomson, Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2005).
31 Agamben, Language and Death, p. 106.
32 On the role of gesture in Agambens work, see also Samuel Weber, Going Along for the Ride: Violence and
Gesture: Agamben Reading Benjamin Reading Kafka Reading Cervantes, The Germanic Review 81: 1 (2006), pp. 65
83; Anthony Curtis Adler, The Intermedial Gesture: Agamben and Kommerell, Angelaki 12: 3 (2007), pp. 5764; and
Alastair Morgan, A Figure of Annihilated Human Existence: Agamben and Adorno on Gesture, Law Critique 20
(2009), pp. 299307.
33 Agamben, Language and Death, p. 106.
34 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (trans. Michael Hardt, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 1993).
35 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 7.
36 See the role given to the body in one of Agambens latest collections of essays, entitled Nudites (trad. Martin
Rueff, Paris: Rivages, 2009).
37 See the collection of essay devoted almost exclusively to this topic: Potentialities.
38 Levitt, Notes on Media, p. 202.
39 Giorgio Agamben, Kommerell, or On Gesture, Potentialities, p. 80.
40 Agamben, Kommerell, p. 85.
41 Levitt, Notes on Media, p. 203. Cf. Giorgio Agamben, Means without Ends: Notes on Politics (trans. Vincenzo
Binetti and Cesare Casarino, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 57.
42 Agamben, Means Without Ends, p. 57.
43 Agamben, Kommerell, p. 85.
44 Cf. Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography, pp. 108f.
45 The search for a presentation beyond representation certainly has a religious (revelatory) resonance within it, and
in many ways has shaped the past centurys philosophical endeavors. See, for example, the thesis surrounding Alison
Ross, The Aesthetic Paths of Philosophy: Presentation in Kant, Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2007).
46 Note the manner in which Agambens various remarks on habit, as found in Language and Death, p. 97, The
Coming Community, p. 29 and Potentialities, p. 233, can be read together. For example, his remarks concerning the
movement away from language (and towards its infantile state) from Language and Death: . . . here language . . .
returns to that which never was and to that which it never left, and thus it takes the simple form of a habit (p. 97).
47 The sacricial logic of exclusion is pursued by Agamben in multiple places, though perhaps most pointedly in his
essay on paradigms in The Signature of All Things. Likewise, the tactics of exclusion are studied in their political form in
his book State of Exception, Homo sacer II, 1 (trans. Kevin Attell, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
48 On the centrality of the form of life to Agambens stated project to move away from a logic of exceptionalism,
see What Is a Paradigm? in The Signature of All Things, as well as his interview with Ulrich Raulff entitled An
Interview with Giorgio Agamben, German Law Journal 5:5 (2004), pp. 60913.
49 See the central theses behind his State of Exception, as well as his more recent study Le Re`gne et la gloire. Pour une
genealogie theologique de leconomie et du gouvernement. Homo Sacer II, 2 (trad. Joel Gayraud et Martin Rueff, Paris:
Seuil, 2008).
50 See the general argument of The Time That Remains.