Agamben at the Gates: Timon of Athens and the Political-Aesthetic Foundations of the Polis

abstract:This article explores what Shakespeare's Timon of Athens can tell us about the foundations of the polis, arguing, against Giorgio Agamben's well-known claims, that such a posited scene of origination must be understood as a political-aesthetic rather than a strictly bio-political event. Exposing the limits of social and economic relations of exchange, aestheticization ultimately bears on the process by which any form of political or subjective ground becomes cognizable. The play suggests the grounds of the political, not as a story of sovereign origination as Agamben would have it, but in relation to a rhetorical mechanism that exceeds even as it determines the possibility of such developmental narratives, revealing the drama's historicity to be inseparable from its ongoing power to inscribe. Approached in political-aesthetic terms and brought to bear on the heightened agonisms of our current political moment, Timon lets us reimagine political subjectivity anew, beyond the familiar, structuring oppositions between friend and enemy, philanthropos and misanthropos, autonomy and relational bonds.