Separation and Reversibility: Agamben on the Image

Abstract

Giorgio Agamben’s thoughts on the image seem to occupy a minor role in his work, confined to occasional essays and remarks. In fact, I argue, his thoughts on the image offer the key to grasping the fundamental political and philosophical coordinates of Agamben’s work as a whole. The image is the site at which Agamben probes the dual operations of separation, by which the state and capital remove life into a neutral space of circulation and equivalency, and the contrary effect of reversibility, in which the separated image is redeemed for a new politics. This inscribes the image into a fundamentally ambivalent space – at once the site of “danger” and “saving”. Contrary to a pessimistic reading of Agamben’s work, I argue that his work on the deactivation of the image suggests possible strategies for a new politics that would return the political to common use.