Katja Diefenbach

European University Viadrina

Unemployed positivity. Deleuze and Agamben as readers of Spinoza

28 March 2023, 17h00 (Lisbon Summer Time — GMT+1)

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy)

School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

Abstract

Referring to Bataille’s figure of unemployed negativity, Agamben develops a theory of the autonomy of impotentiality or non-doing. It is based on the idea that the possible is not determined by its actualization, but rather by the capacity of not doing something or of not thinking something, by deactivation or becoming inoperative. By explaining that all potentiality is impotentiality and all capacity essentially passivity, Agamben follows Heidegger’s interpretation of the first sections of the ninth book of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. In a formidable short-circuit, he relates this interpretation to Spinoza’s notion of potentiality in the Ethics understood, in the same uncanonical way, as self-contentment, Sabbath and inaction. The lecture discusses the extent to which Deleuze’s vitalist reading of Spinoza contradicts Agamben’s perspective point by point and arrives at a different notion of politics and resistance.