A Poetic Life of Potentiality: Poetry as a Paradigm of Form-of-Life in Giorgio Agamben

In this essay, I examine how Giorgio Agamben assigns poetry a paradigmatic
status in his “form-of-life”—a positive, inexhaustible potentiality
(potenza) inherent in life that resists the violence of the biopolitical sovereignty.
First, I review how sovereign power (potere) and life are put into play in
Agamben, and expound on his definition of form-of-life as a life of potentiality.
Then, I turn to his conception of paradigm and address how form-oflife
also takes the form of a paradigmatic life. Next, I discuss his critique of
the biopolitical logic implied in Aristotle and explain how he, borrowing
from Dante, constitutes form-of-life as a politics of (im-)potentiality and
(in-)activity, or of an (in-)operativity which both exposes and conserves
potentiality. After that, I move to Agamben’s writings about aesthetics,
poetry, and language in modernity. The purpose is to demonstrate how poetic
language exemplifies a linguistic use that restores human language to its
potential state and thus suggests an access to form-of-life. In the fifth part, I
broach how poetry contributes to a new life beyond the shadow of death and
negativity implied by biopolitics and to a possible poetic community beyond
the logic of sovereign dispositif. The key is: to experience the poetic use of
language is to live a poetic life, a potential form-of-life realized both singularly
and commonly. In the end, I will clarify the “non-non-utopian” stance of
Agamben’s political thinking.