Agamben's Limbos

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“Agamben’s Limbos: Robert Walser and the Refugee”

Journal: Textual Practice

Manuscript ID: RTPR-2011-0071

Manuscript Type: Original Article

Keywords: limbo, sovereignty, play, law, Kafka

URL: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/rtpr Email: [email protected]

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“Agamben’s Limbos: Robert Walser and the Refugee”

“Into a Limbo large and broad, since called

The Paradise of Fools”

Milton, Paradise Lost, Book III, 495-96

The figure of the Swiss writer Robert Walser, as construed and invoked

in the writings of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, illumines and

informs the altered stakes in the latter’s approach to political eschatology. What

is at issue, what inspires Agamben’s critique of the procedures, principles and

occlusions of Western law, its global reach and its religious modelling is a vision

not of utopia, but of limbo. For Agamben, Walser’s fictions are of an innocence

that nonetheless cannot be saved; his characters reinvent the sense of an

“outside” of sovereign power. In The Coming Community (La comunità che viene,

1990) Agamben articulates the promise of their hopelessness:

This nature of limbo is the secret of Robert Walser’s world. His

creatures are irreparably astray, but in a region that is beyond

perdition and salvation: Their nullity, of which they are so proud,

is principally a neutrality with respect to salvation – the most

radical objection that has ever been levied against the very idea of

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redemption. The truly unsavable life is the one in which there is

nothing to save, and against this the powerful theological machine

of Christian oiconomia runs aground. This is what leads to the

curious mixture of rascality and humility, of cartoon-style

thoughtlessness and minute scrupulousness that characterizes

Walser’s characters; this is what leads, also, to their ambiguity, so

that every relationship with them seems always on the verge of

ending up in bed: It is neither pagan hubris nor animal timidity,

but simply the impassibility of limbo with respect to divine justice.

Like the freed convict in Kafka’s Penal Colony, who has

survived the destruction of the machine that was to have executed

him, these beings have left the world of guilt and justice behind

them: The light that rains down on them is that irreparable light of

the dawn following the novissima dies of judgment. But the life

that begins on earth after the last day is simply human life.1

The final sentence, with its appeal to simple human life, effectively positions

Walser’s characters as positive counterfigures of the bare life that Agamben, in a

series of writings from the mid nineties on, has confronted in the homo sacer of

ancient Roman law, the stateless individuals of internment camps, and the

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overcomatose patient on life support.2 The limbo that Agamben discerns in

Walser’s texts he denies to the homo sacer and its modern avatars; indeed, for

Agamben, these incarnations of so-called bare life are misunderstood in their

relevance to the self-conception of power if shunted off to a notional outside. It

is as though Agamben intervenes in the name of the one limbo to rescue it from

being confused with the limbo for which the contemporary imaginary has

discovered a descriptive use. The truly bare life, the life that is simply human,

is not what Agamben’s archaeology of the structure of Western sovereignty will

reveal; it is the life that in his reading of Walser he grapples to express, the

unjudgeable life glimpsed and disavowed by the Church Fathers in the limbo of

unbaptised children.

Without developing the speculation, Anton Schütz asks, “Is Agamben’s

homo sacer his homo Walser?”3 If there is a substitutivity, it can take into account

solely the claim, contested by Agamben in the case of homo sacer and asserted by

him in the case of Walser, to denote a human life that is detached in its relations

with the law. Walser is what survives of a libertarian dream in Agamben after

he exposes the lawless human body at the heart of sovereignty. Walser, who is

not he who can be killed and yet not sacrificed (the definition of homo sacer that

Agamben draws from the second-century Roman grammarian and historian

Pompeius Festus), is also not the natural life that is fancied will affirm itself with

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the voiding of all repressions, be they political, social, sexual or religious. What

distances and differentiates Walser from the law is not easily pinned down, and

Agamben’s remarks on this point are suggestive, if not merely teasing. Without

Walser – more precisely, without what Agamben makes of him – there would

be more of a temptation to view Agamben as an apologist of the law, albeit a

decidedly sombre one.4 If the exteriority of bare life, once it is demonstrated to

be a political and juridical construction, is no longer the unambiguous ratio

cognoscendi of the limits of sovereign power, is reformism alone what can

remain of an opposition to sovereignty? Walser enters here to save the day …

by not saving it. Homo Walser is not the truly natural human being, but rather a

shiftless scatterbrain with an appetite for incongruous speechifying; he is not a

denizen of a recovered Eden, but rather of limbo. That political hopes could be

invested in him at all is at once a joke à la Walser and an exigency of the

confrontation with dialectics. Walser is an unlikely adversary of sovereign

power and, for Agamben, this is as it were what gives him his chance. Where

the bare life of homo sacer and its modern variants is essentially implicated in

sovereign power as the miserable double of its own lawless splendour, between

Walser and sovereignty there exists a morphological asymmetry. The rules

change and in place of an Überwindung (“overcoming”) that, as late Heidegger

contends, leaves the basic organisational principles intact, there is the promise

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of a Verwindung (“deflection”) of these principles themselves and the

biopolitical catastrophe to which Agamben sees them committed (one might

query, by the way, whether Walser is for Agamben what Hölderlin is for

Heidegger, observing not only the comparable heavy investments of these

readings, their wilful obtuseness and the expectations placed on their subjects,

but also the mayhem that ensues for the vision of the age to come when,

satirically but not for that reason facetiously, Walser is pronounced its herald,

rather than Hölderlin).

Were one to object to Agamben’s commentary that he attributes a

theologico-political programme to Walser’s texts that is patently not there, this

would be to miss that what Agamben notes in Walser and tries to expound is

the very evacuation of any such programme. It is the irony of Agamben’s

exegesis that in wanting to take the measure of the oblivion in which Walser’s

universe has sunk the apparatus of divine and earthly justice, and for which he

valorises Walser, Agamben invokes the terms and objectives of sovereign power

even as he would prefer to forget them. The fact of this naïvety, when remade

into an achievement of sentimental consciousness, is enough to draw Walser

and Kafka closer together. The forcibleness of this result is not trivial (whatever

Kafka’s admiration for Walser, Carl Seelig twice documents hitting a brick wall

with Walser on the topic of Kafka, although this could be a matter simply of

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Walser’s general attitude toward his literary contemporaries.)5 Yet if one were

not to read Walser against the grain, professing instead to stick to the letter of

his inconsequentialities, one might easily find oneself in the grips of a similarly

forcible reading wherein the novelty and operation of Walser’s

inconsequentialities are elided: the insignificance at which Walser arrives is not

the insignificance into which another writer tumbles through sententiousness

and unwitting conventionality. That Agamben reads Walser by the light of

Kafka’s star is of course not something that Agamben endeavours to conceal.

His Walser is the Walser that reappears as a vanishing point in Kafka’s

reflections on law and power, as the inscrutable obsequiousness and

daydreaminess of the assistants with whom Blumfeld and K., for instance, are

lumbered. It is the Walser whose outline was solidified in the first wave of his

reception and does not pretend to tally with the gigantic, pointillistic corpus –

drastically enlarged since the 1970s by the transcription and publication of the

so-called micrograms – that defeats any formularisation. What Agamben

proposes is a commentary on the commentary that Kafka performs on Walser,

restoring centrality to the character type marginalised in Kafka while adopting

the juridical and theological framework that Kafka had first given it. From the

vantage ground of the central figures in Kafka’s narratives, the assistants, for

whom Walser had furnished prototypes, are comic persecutors; from the

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vantage ground that they themselves occupy, an altogether different world

opens up. In wanting to seize upon this perspective, in thinking it worth

appropriating, Agamben exhibits also the Benjaminian legacy of his

interpretation. In his brief but influential assessment of Walser from 1929,

Benjamin affirms what he believes distinctive of Walser’s characters: “They are

figures who have left madness behind them, and this is why they are marked by

such a consistently heartrending, inhuman superficiality. If we were to attempt

to sum up in a single phrase the delightful yet also uncanny element in them,

we would have to say: they have all been healed.”6 Reading Kafka and Benjamin

alongside and beyond each other, Agamben ventures to answer that what

Walser’s characters have been healed of is the law.

This might seem a stronger claim than the reference to limbo supports,

but in Agamben’s tendentious paraphrase of Aquinas limbo passes from being a

borderland of Hell to a sovereignless Arcadia of irreligious joy. The passage in

question occurs in The Coming Community immediately before the previously

quoted excerpt:

According to Saint Thomas, the punishment of unbaptized

children who die with no other fault than original sin cannot be an

afflictive punishment, like that of hell, but only a punishment of

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privation that consists in the perpetual lack of the vision of God.

The inhabitants of limbo, in contrast to the damned, do not feel

pain from this lack: Since they have only natural and not

supernatural knowledge, which is implanted in us at baptism,

they do not know that they are deprived of the supreme good, or

if they do know (as others claim) they cannot suffer from it more

than a reasonable person is pained by the fact that he or she

cannot fly. If they were to feel pain they would be suffering from

a penalty for which they could not make amends and thus their

pain would end up leading them into hopelessness, like the

damned. This would not be just. Moreover, their bodies, like

those of the blessed, cannot be affected; they are impassible. But

this is true only with respect to the action of divine justice; in

every other respect they fully enjoy their natural perfection.

The greatest punishment – the lack of the vision of God –

thus turns into a natural joy: Irremediably lost, they persist

without pain in divine abandon. God has not forgotten them, but

rather they have always already forgotten God; and in the face of

their forgetfulness, God’s forgetting is impotent. Like letters with

no addressee, these uprisen beings remain without a destination.

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Neither blessed like the elected, nor hopeless like the damned,

they are infused with a joy with no outlet.7

At this point Agamben introduces Walser, as though by applying sufficient

pressure to Aquinas the latter can be made to give up the name of the Swiss

writer. By challenging the correctness of Agamben’s presentation of Aquinas’s

thought, we are perhaps in a better position to register the novelty and

peculiarity of the theologico-political programme that Agamben ascribes to

Walser. Agamben’s source, for which he does not provide a citation, is almost

certainly the material compiled by Nicolai from Saint Thomas’s commentary on

the Sentences of Peter Lombard and appended to the Summa Theologica.8

Agamben begins a new paragraph when he takes his leave from Aquinas, for

Agamben cannot impute to Aquinas the statement that the unbaptised children

who inhabit limbo have forgotten God. For Aquinas, unbaptised children have

natural, but not supernatural knowledge of God, reasoning from the

cosmological proof of God that is the world rather than from the gift of grace

that is Christ. Where Augustine9, Alexander of Hales10, Albertus Magnus11,

Bonaventure12, Dante13 among others affirm that unbaptised children suffer pain

from the privation of the vision of God, Aquinas controversially denies it: the

sorrow of the damned is the worm of conscience and as the demerit of original

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sin is Adam’s, not theirs, unbaptised children do not grieve. The absence of this

one particular grief is a long way from Agamben’s natural joy in the oblivion of

God.14

Fifteen years after the publication of the above text, Agamben returns to

limbo to overcode the naturalness of the joy that he earlier credited its

inhabitants. In Profanations (Profanazioni, 2005) their joy is at once natural and

parodic:

A reading of the theological treatises on limbo shows, beyond any

doubt, that the Church Fathers conceived of the “first circle” as a

parody of both paradise and hell, of beatitude as well as

damnation. It is a parody of paradise insofar as it contains

creatures who, like the blessed, are innocent and yet carry in

themselves the original stain – children who died before being

baptized or righteous pagans who could not have known. The

most ironically parodic moment, however, concerns hell.

According to the theologians, the punishment an inhabitant of

limbo undergoes cannot be an afflictive one, like that reserved for

the damned, but must be a privative one, consisting in a perpetual

inability to perceive God. This lack, though, which constitutes the

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first of the infernal punishments, does not cause the residents of

limbo pain, as it does the damned. Since they have only natural

consciousness and not the supernatural one that derives from

baptism, the lack of the highest good does not cause them the

slightest regret. Thus the creatures of limbo convert the greatest

punishment into a natural joy, and this joy is certainly an extreme

and special form of parody.15

It is fair to ask in exactly whose eyes limbo is a parody. That, according to

theological tracts from late antiquity and the medieval period, limbo resembles

paradise and hell in certain respects and differs from them in others is, of

course, not enough to establish it as a parody of both paradise and hell. For the

inhabitants of limbo, deprived as they are of the beatific vision, such joy as they

feel cannot be infused with a consciousness of its difference from the joy of the

inhabitants of heaven and thus also cannot easily be claimed for parody. If

Agamben does not rest content with recording the generally conceded

ignorance of the denizens of limbo but proceeds to interpret it as parody, it is

because he wants to array it against the very structure of divine judgement and

its secular palimpsests. This is the moment in his thinking where Agamben

shows himself an heir of the nineteenth-century poètes maudits: like Rimbaud, he

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arms himself against justice. In this respect, Agamben’s extremism is consistent

with his wholesale (and problematic) rejection of sovereignty. The long-

standing practice of appealing to a higher justice in the course of objecting to the

acts and verdicts of a more immediate authority (“if only the King knew what is

being done here in His name”) acknowledges and perpetuates the myth of the

sovereign when, for Agamben, the properly political task is the dismantling of

this myth. Robert Walser is the unlikely combatant – all the more effective in

this particular struggle for being an unlikely combatant – who Agamben sees

entering the lists against justice.

Doubtless it is easier to grant that Walser is playful than that he is a

parodist – the playfulness is far more tangible than anything it could be said to

be playing with in the sense of parodying. For Agamben, Walser’s writings are

of interest as a figure or intervention in a theologico-political field whose

repercussions it falls first to the commentator to chart and to situate rather than

as an autonomous, self-referential work of art. To put it differently, the very

autonomy of Walser’s universe, its playfulness and innocence, attracts

Agamben by virtue of the judgement it appears to hand down on judgement.

Playfulness comes into its own as playfulness when it succeeds in even

forgetting what it is playing with. If extravagant playfulness is to set Walser in

direct confrontation with the law, it should not allow itself to be dampened by

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an awareness of the gravity of this confrontation. For Agamben, the

confrontation with law is an affair of play and not of sheer lawlessness (the

dead-end ordained for anarchist politics is that it strives for the tabula rasa that

the law needs to inscribe itself). Wanting to criticise the law while also

maintaining the dialectical recuperation of lawlessness for the concept of law,

Agamben revives the revolutionary hopes that Schiller, for instance, cherishes

for play in his letters on aesthetic education. It is difficult to know what to make

of this. In State of Exception (Stato di eccezione, 2003), Agamben writes: “One day

humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in

order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good.”16

In Profanations the scope of play is wider still:

[P]lay frees and distracts humanity from the sphere of the sacred,

without simply abolishing it. The use to which the sacred is

returned is a special one that does not coincide with utilitarian

consumption. In fact, the “profanation” of play does not solely

concern the religious sphere. Children, who play with whatever

old thing falls into their hands, make toys out of things that also

belong to the sphere of economics, war, law, and other activities

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that we are used to thinking of as serious. All of a sudden, a car, a

firearm, or a legal contract becomes a toy.17

That play could effect a fundamental transformation of the law seems

unintelligible, not least because the workings of the courts, as Huizinga points

out in Homo Ludens, already find themselves (pre-emptively?), with their

protocols, suspensions and costumes, within a world of play. An ironical

detachment in relation to the law might, besides, manage to persuade itself that

it is playing with the law while, in practical terms, amounting to nothing

beyond acquiescence to its continued operation.

Yet perhaps what is at issue in Agamben’s reading of Walser is a rebirth

not so much of the law through play as of the human beings who live with it.

The goal is to become creatures of such flightiness and levity that the action of

the law encounters nothing substantial on which it might inflict suffering. More

precisely, the goal is to have already become such beings, since as a goal toward

which one makes piecemeal progress, as a result of conscious stratagems and

subterfuges, it is unattainable, an oxymoronic artful ingenuousness. Walser is a

figure of consummate play: he is not the evidence of a path out of the legal and

political impasse that Agamben describes, but rather a postulated exteriority to

it (this is Agamben’s appropriation, as it were, of Kafka’s demoralising words of

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comfort: “There is hope, but not for us”). If one wants to be healed of the law,

one must play with it, but insofar as one’s desire to be healed is in earnest, one

is not playing and therefore will not be healed. Agamben has to abandon

Walser to the joy of play, hollowing him out of all misery and design, if he is to

be capable of fulfilling the function with which Agamben invests him. Both

Benjamin and Agamben interpret Walser as an allegory of carefreeness (when

Mark Harman brings forward in supposed refutation of Benjamin the many

corrections and revisions in Walser’s drafts, he disregards the figurative nature

of Benjamin’s assessment and the citation from Walser on which it is based18).

The allegorical reading is not unmotivated. A crisis, never subsequently

invoked, appears the prehistory of Walser’s texts. Benjamin speaks of Walser’s

characters as having left madness behind them, and Agamben detects parallels

with the “protocol-laden language” that Hölderlin, under the pseudonym

Scardanelli, adopted on occasion after the onset of schizophrenia.19 In the long-

windedness that is abetted rather than cowed by their own depreciation of what

they have to say, Walser’s characters also recall Ippolit from Dostoyevsky’s

Idiot, yet without the linguistic panic being attributable to an impending

calamity.20 A calm has come to reign over this world of tics and foibles. Walser

writes of the eponymous hero of his late novel The Robber: “He resembled the

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product of a watercolour painter.”21 It is as though at the conclusion of the

tragedy of world history Pee-wee Herman were to spring from the ruins.

That Walser constitutes the counterweight in Agamben’s thinking to the

bleakness of his appraisal of “bare life” is easily overlooked, both because

Agamben does not himself discuss the two together and because Walser seems

so little suited to bearing the political and philosophical burdens of this task. In

an article from 2004, Dieter Thomä sketches what he proposes as a contrary of

homo sacer only to arrive at a valorisation of play unwittingly like Agamben’s

own.

Thomä very reasonably objects to the one-sidedness of Agamben’s

account of the rightless individual, denying that the refugee and the homo sacer

of early Roman law are interchangeable as proofs and outcomes of sovereign

power. The explanatory limitations and rhetorical excesses of Agamben’s

position derive, according to Thomä, from a narrow focus on the centripetal

forces of human society to the neglect of its centrifugal forces. Agamben’s

apocalyptic scenario in which “today it is not the city but rather the camp that is

the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West”22 anticipates a future in

which the screws are ever tightened until sovereign power has rendered the

entire population a homo sacer, thereby normalising what was originally an

exception. The proliferation of rightless individuals in the refugee camps of

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modern states is, from Agamben’s perspective, symptomatic of the

consolidation of the ancient biopolitical truth of sovereignty. The centrifugal

dynamic of migration, which attests to the powerlessness of sovereign states to

retain their citizens, goes unacknowledged and the provenance of the refugee,

once suppressed in its historical and geographical contingency, becomes a

matter of the transpolitical constitution of sovereign power: the camp inmate’s

“homeland” is the brutal truth of the machinery of the state. Thomä observes:

“The refugees and internees of today testify not to a structural or even tragic

conflict at the heart of modern society, but rather to the latter’s insufficiency.”23

Their rightlessness does not straightforwardly demonstrate the power of the

state to strip them of rights, since this rightlessness also reveals an incapacity to

integrate newcomers.

Having set out to temper Agamben’s sinister portrait of the modern state

in its dealings with refugees, Thomä presumably does not wish to push simply

for the other extreme, namely the comparably misleading thesis that the legal

and political limbo to which refugees are consigned is the result of nothing

besides a backlog in administrative processing. Of more significance for

Thomä’s polemical undertaking is that he distances the refugee from the

constellation of the homo sacer and the Muselmann of the Nazi death camps. He

allows the refugee another determinacy than the abasement before state power

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– “the masterless man”. This contrasting definition he draws from a 1933

British colonial report on Tanganyika quoted by the ethnologist Richard

Thurnwald:

The Chiefs and Elders are convinced that the reason for the

existence of this undesirable type are twofold: firstly, the fact that

[...] he [...] grows up without having grown accustomed to manual

labour in the field and, what is worse, has grown to despise his

elders as illiterate and ignorant peasants. The second factor

consists in the facilities for easy travel that exist today. When the

planting or reaping season begins the young Mpare is apt to take

the next train to Moshi or Tanga, there to live on his wits until

work is over. As a result we have a generation of men who have

no stake in their country, no houses, no family, no cattle, nor

shamba (field) – an unpleasant reminder of that medieval scourge,

the masterless man.24

Needless to say, as a blanket description of the modern refugee this passage,

flattening and trivialising the many different causes of migration, has little to

recommend it. The context of its defensibility is Thomä’s inversion of

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Agamben’s approach: where Agamben claims to make out a general truth

concerning modern society in the bare life of the refugee, Thomä pretends to

detect in the refugee the mobility and lack of commitment that is definitive for

him of liberal society. Thomä’s masterless man, who is not himself a master,

who in his rootlessness becomes an actor rather than an animal and plays with

his essence, has more in common with Walser’s and Kafka’s assistants.

That Agamben does not make out any Walserian traits in the refugee is

not a matter of simple blindness. Walser, as a conceptual figure, differs from

both the rightless individual of the internment camp and the citizen with his or

her battery of rights. It is by differing, playfully, from both that Walser

constitutes a way out of the dilemma of the haves and have-nots that Agamben,

following Arendt, confronts in the discourse of human rights. In The Origins of

Totalitarianism Arendt debunks the specious cosmopolitanism of the Rights of

Man, but where Agamben will appeal to Walser in the impasse, Arendt cites

Plato that “Not man, but a god, must be the measure of all things”:

From the beginning the paradox involved in the declaration of

inalienable human rights was that it reckoned with an “abstract”

human being who seemed to exist nowhere, for even savages lived

in some kind of a social order. If a tribal or other “backward”

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community did not enjoy human rights, it was obviously because

as a whole it had not yet reached that stage of civilization, the

stage of popular and national sovereignty, but was oppressed by

foreign or native despots. The whole question of human rights,

therefore, was quickly and inextricably blended with the question

of national emancipation; only the emancipated sovereignty of the

people, of one’s own people, seemed to be able to insure them. As

mankind, since the French Revolution, was conceived in the image

of a family of nations, it gradually became self-evident that the

people, and not the individual, was the image of man.

The full implication of this identification of the rights of

man with the rights of peoples in the European nation-state

system came to light only when a growing number of people and

peoples suddenly appeared whose elementary rights were as little

safeguarded by the ordinary functioning of nation-states in the

middle of Europe as they would have been in the heart of Africa.25

It is against this backdrop that the strangeness of Agamben’s Walser as a

political intervention is at its least strange. Walser’s levity is, for Agamben, an

image of a new relationship to law where the possession of human rights does

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not entail, as its calamitous supplement, the possibility and reality of

rightlessness (it is the far-from-innocent fact of the rightless human body that

lends credibility to the fiction of a social contract, for even if one cannot recall

ever signing the contract, one can recognise oneself as a signatory in the

rightlessness of the non-signatory). Playing with the law (generously

understood) shuts down the decision between possession and non-possession

(it is both and neither), between the rightlessness of the displaced person

“stripped of every political status and wholly reduced to bare life”26 and the

citizen whose human rights are secured not by his or her humanity but by

belonging to a determinate and hence always more or less exclusionary body

politic. Play is the prerogative of the inhabitants of limbo. Agamben’s limbo is

decidedly not the Hades that Arendt distinguishes from Purgatory and Hell in

her taxonomy of concentration camps: “To Hades correspond those relatively

mild forms, once popular even in non-totalitarian countries, for getting

undesirable elements of all sorts – refugees, stateless persons, the asocial and

the unemployed – out of the way; as DP camps, which are nothing other than

camps for persons who have become superfluous and bothersome, they have

survived the war.”27 Agamben’s limbo is even less the limbo between life and

death where Wolfgang Sofsky, from whose The Order of Terror: The Concentration

Camp Agamben quotes, situates the Muselmann, the complete and therefore

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speechless witness of Nazi genocide.28 Agamben’s limbo is not in the gift of

sovereign power. It is not a site, but a practice or, more precisely, a gesture.

If it is a stretch to interpret limbo as a parody of heaven and hell, it is

unmistakable that many of Walser’s characters are engaged in caricaturing

submissiveness to authority. They are not descendants of Hegel’s Knecht, who

lives in fear yet whose coming to power the dialectical forces of world history

guarantee. One text, written as a job application, concludes: “so I shall be

waiting, esteemed gentlemen, to see what it will be your pleasure to reply to

your respectful servant, positively drowning in obedience.”29 This is overkill

without being sarcastic rebelliousness. More a popinjay than a Caliban, Walser

explores a new stream of subaltern literature. J. M. Coetzee attributes Walser’s

affectations to the self-suppression supposedly involved in embracing High

German: “Writing in High German – which was, practically speaking, the only

choice open to Walser – entailed, unavoidably, adopting a stance of a person of

learning and of social refinement, a stance with which he was not

comfortable.”30 The foppishness, then, would be a work of mourning and

protest over the earthiness that has been sacrificed with an eye to a larger

readership. This, however, is not how Walser himself construed his position on

the use of Swiss German dialects, as Carl Seelig reports: “I have intentionally

never written in dialect. I always found that an unseemly attempt to curry

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favour with the masses. Artists must keep their distance.”31 When Walser was

a resident in the psychiatric facility in Waldau (1929-33), he was clearly writing

without considering the practicalities of the German book market. Although

the texts are in High German apart from the occasional regionalism, they are

composed in such a minute hand as to foil ready comprehension. Here the act

of writing discards its communicative aspect to become muscle memory, a

dance of microscopic movements. Werner Morlang, who with Bernhard Echte

and Jochen Greven transcribed Walser’s late works, speaks of “the courage that

kept the ‘prose piece business’ going” and that “can best be seen in the texts

Walser wrote in direct defiance of the original contents of the draft-paper”, such

as in his overwriting of a rejection letter from a journal.32 This courage is at

times also the obliviousness for which Agamben prizes Walser. It is the

obliviousness that gives Walser the lightness of touch that many of his Jugendstil

contemporaries could only approximate through resorting to the fantastical.

When Walser himself goes in for imaginative writing, as in the dream of Paris in

The Tanners (Geschwister Tanner, 1907), it is not at all to flout the law of gravity:

All at once a fragrant white cloud bowed down into the street.

[…] The cloud remained lying there on the street as white foam,

resembling a large swan. Many ladies ran up to it and plucked off

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little bits, which they placed, moving their arms with wondrous

grace, upon their hats, or else they threw the bits at one another in

jest, which stuck to their dresses. […] Then the wicked street

urchins of Paris arrived to tickle the cloud with burning matches,

and so it flew back up into the sky again, light and majestic, until

it vanished above the buildings.33

This cloud, which does not suffer the fate of Baudelaire’s albatross, belongs to a

world on which violence, as Agamben perceives, is never allowed to leave a

lasting mark.

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Notes

1 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis,

MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 6-7. Five years earlier, in Idea

Della Prosa (1985), Agamben proceeds from Origen’s wrathful withdrawal of

God to unbaptised children’s supposedly joyous obliviousness to the beatific

vision and, making no mention of Walser, speaks of their limbo nature as the

secret of Melville’s impassive scribe Bartleby. See Agamben, Idea of Prose, trans.

Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt (Albany, NY: State University of New York

Press, 1995), pp. 77-78.

2 An early treatment of homo sacer occurs in the 1982 article “*Se: l’Assoluto e l’

‘Ereignis’”, translated and published as Agamben, “*Se: Hegel’s Absolute and

Heidegger’s Ereignis” in id., Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and

trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp.

136-37.

3 Anton Schütz, “Thinking the Law With and Against Luhmann, Legendre,

Agamben”, Law and Critique, 11 (2000), p. 131.

4 Cf. William E. Connolly, “The Complexities of Sovereignty” in Giorgio

Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, ed. Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli

(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 27: “But nothing else is

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offered to replace it. Agamben thus carries us through the conjunction of

sovereignty, the sacred, and biopolitics to a historical impasse.”

5 See Carl Seelig, Wanderungen mit Robert Walser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990),

pp. 56 and 113.

6 Walter Benjamin, “Robert Walser”, trans. Rodney Livingstone in id., Selected

Writings, Volume 2: 1927-1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and

Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 259.

7 Agamben, The Coming Community, pp. 5-6.

8 Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English

Dominican Province, vol. 21 (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1912-36), pp.

220-23.

9 See, for instance, Augustine, De peccatorum meritis et remissione et de baptismo

parvulorum, 1.16.21.

10 Alexander of Hales, Glossa in quator libros Sententiarum Petri Lombardi, In 4

Sent.

11 Albertus Magnus, De resurrectione.

12 Bonaventure, Commentaria in quator libros Sententiarum, In 2 Sent.

13 Dante, Inferno IV, 28-30.

14 Cf. Aquinas, On Evil, trans. Richard Regan, ed. Brian Davies (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2003), p. 241: “The souls of children who die in original sin

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indeed know happiness in general regarding its common aspect but not in

particular. And so they do not grieve about losing it.”

15 Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007), p. 44.

16 Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: The University of

Chicago Press, 2005), p. 64.

17 Agamben, Profanations, p. 76.

18 Mark Harman, “A Secretive Modernist: Robert Walser and His Microscripts”,

Review of Contemporary Fiction, 12 (1992), p. 114. Benjamin reserves judgement

on the literal truth of the claim – stemming from Walser himself – that the latter

never revised a single line in his writings. See Benjamin, “Robert Walser”, p.

258.

19 Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 59.

20 For a study of Walser’s relationship to Dostoyevsky, see Michel Cadot,

“Robert Walsers Lektüre von Dostojewskij” in »Immer dicht vor dem Sturze«: Zum

Werk Robert Walsers, eds. Paolo Chiarini and Hans Dieter Zimmermann

(Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1987), pp. 222-36.

21 Robert Walser, The Robber, trans. Susan Bernofsky (Lincoln, NE: University of

Nebraska Press, 2000), p. 10.

22 Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-

Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 181.

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23 Dieter Thomä, “Der Herrenlose: Gegenfigur zu Agambens ‘homo sacer’ –

Leitfigur einer anderen Theorie der Moderne”, Deutsche Zeitschrift für

Philosophie, 52 (2004), p. 969.

24 “Report by His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain

and Northern Ireland to the Council of the League of Nations on the

Administration of the Tanganyika Territory for the year 1932, London, 1933

(Colonial no. 18)” quoted in Richard C. Thurnwald, Black and White in East

Africa: The Fabric of a New Civilization (London: George Routledge and Sons,

1935), p. 393 and then in Thomä, p. 972.

25 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: George Allen and

Unwin, 1967), p. 291.

26 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 171.

27 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 445.

28 Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, trans. William

Templer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 294; quoted in

Agamben, The Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel

Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002), p. 48.

29 Walser, “The Job Application”, trans. Christopher Middleton in id., Selected

Stories (New York: New York Review Books, 1982), p. 28.

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30 J. M. Coetzee, “The Genius of Robert Walser”, The New York Review of Books, 47

(2 November 2000), p. 17.

31 Seelig, Wanderungen mit Robert Walser, p. 26.

32 Werner Morlang, “The Singular Bliss of the Pencil Method: On the

Microscripts”, trans. Susan Bernofsky, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 12

(1992), p. 99.

33 Walser, The Tanners, trans. Susan Bernofsky (New York: New Directions,

2009), pp. 237-38.

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Agamben's Limbos

Documents

walsers characters

comrtpr email

impassibility of limbo

nature of limbo

limbo large

bare life

unsavable life

secret of robert walsers