1 Sergei Prozorov Giorgio Agamben and the End of History: Inoperative Praxis and the Interruption of the Dialectic Introduction One of the most influential theoretical responses to the end of the Cold War was the resumption of the Hegelo-Kojèvian discourse on the end of history, forcefully propagated in Francis Fukuyama’s End of History and the Last Man (1992). Even as today Fukuyama’s reading of the demise of Soviet communism as inaugurating the end of history has lost its erstwhile popularity, this should by no means be equated with an implicit refutation of his argument. The post-Cold War proliferation of triumphalist discourses on globalization, ‘transition to democracy’, ‘democratic peace’, etc. is clearly conditioned by the presupposition of the exhaustion of the rivalry between rival teleological projects and the global hegemony of Western liberal capitalism that was so forcefully asserted by Fukuyama. Thus, Fukuyama’s diagnosis of the end of history arguably continues to function as the general presupposition of the post-Cold War mainstream political theory and the current decline of interest in his thesis owes less to its audacity than to its self-evidence, the end of history becomingnothing new (cf. Zizek 2008, 421). Insofar as Fukuyama’s work simply presents Alexandre Kojève’s original argument in the post-Cold War context, the validity of its claims is either guaranteed or undermined a priori by one’s degree of commitment to Kojève’s reconstruction of Hegel’s dialectic in Marxist and existentialist terms (see Grier 1996, Maurer 1996).2 Moreover, we must not forget that to the extent Fukuyama shares Kojève’s thesis (1969), he must take seriously the claim that history ended with the battle of Jena and the publication of thePhenomenology of Spirit (see Kojève 1969, 31-35), which entails that the end of communism was merely an episode in the post-historical process of the rest of humanity acceding to the stage already reached by the post-revolutionary Europe (cf. Fukuyama 1995, 31). The understanding of our present ‘post-historical’ condition as nothing but a continuation of the evolution that the more fortunate have begun two centuries ago paradoxically deprives the contemporary experience of the end of history of any evental status. Ironically, while it was the revolutionary political change in the Soviet Union that motivated Fukuyama’s resumption of the Kojèvian problematic, the consequences of this resumption for the analysis of the postcommunist condition were rather less than revolutionary, effacing the specificity of these events in the ‘normalizing’ gesture of incorporating them as a mere episode in thealready post-historical process and

analyzing them in terms of sterile ‘transition’ theories, whose philosophical poverty stands in marked contrast with the grandeur of Kojève’s idiosyncratic Hegelianism. This normalization clearly contrasts with the radical ambivalence of Fukuyama’s own argument, in which the initial enthusiasm over the end of history quickly gives way to a melancholic mourning for it (see e.g. Fukuyama 1992, 311, 386-387). Since it is conflict and negativity that form the very substance of human existence, the cessation of the struggle for recognition entails that the triumphant post-historical liberalism must also become post-human, leading Fukuyama to his discussion of the Nietzschean figure of the ‘last man’. What began as a complacent celebration of the victory of liberalism thus quickly turned into the anguish over the uncertain fate of liberalism itself in the terrain3 marked by the disappearance of alternative historical projects. Paradoxically, then, the idea of the end of history, which common sense would expect to provide a determinate answer to our present (and, by definition, also our future), itself ushers in a period of anxious indeterminacy that suggests the persistence of the very historical openness that Fukuyama’s thesis sought to delimit and bring to a closure. Perhaps, the end of history is nothing other than this openness itself, whose nature remained occluded by Fukuyama’s commitment to Kojève’s dialectical framework. Any inquiry of the complex relationship of our present to historicity must therefore necessarily engage with this framework itself in the attempt to rethink the very idea of the end of history as formulated in Kojève’s influential and controversial reading of Hegel. This article undertakes such a reinterpretation of the end of history, taking its point of departure from Giorgio Agamben’s sociopolitical philosophy. Agamben is best known for his influential critique of sovereign power that has been the subject of a vibrant debate in political and international relations theory (Norris 2005, Calarco and DeCaroli 2007, Mills 2004, Franchi 2004, Passavant 2007, Deladurantaye 2000). Nonetheless, the popularity of his critical works, e.g. Homo Sacer (1998) or State of Exception (2005a), has resulted in the unfortunately one-sided reception of his philosophy in the English-speaking academia, whereby Agamben’s critique of sovereignty and biopolitics is often approached in isolation from his more affirmative philosophical vision, developed since the early 1970s in a critical dialogue with, among others, Heidegger, Benjamin, Schmitt, Derrida and Foucault. From his early work on aesthetics and the ontology of language (1991, 1995, 1999) to his turn towards more explicitly sociopolitical writings (1993, 1998, 2000, 2005a) Agamben confronts the same4 philosophical problems of thinking human existence as irreducibly potential, thus freeing

it from confinement within any particular identity or historical destiny, which exhausts this potentiality by actualizing it in a determinate form. In the context of this inquiry, Agamben has repeatedly engaged with the Hegelo-Kojèvian problematic of the end of history, Kojève’s work becoming a regular reference in Agamben’s texts from the 1982 book Language and Death onwards (see Agamben 1991, 49-53; 99-101). While Agamben does not offer a full-fledged alternative theory of the end of history, such a theory may arguably be reconstituted through a detailed engagement with the key concepts of his philosophy that frame his more explicit critique of Kojève’s thesis in the later works (2000, 109-111; 1998, 60-62; 2004, 6-12; 2005b, 99-103). In this article we shall undertake a close reading of Kojève’s thesis in the context of Agamben’s non- presuppositional ontology in order to explicate Agamben’s strategy of reconstructing the end of history in non-dialectical terms. Following Agamben’s own practice in his reading of the Benjamin-Schmitt debate in the State of Exception (2005a, 52-64), we shall therefore contextualize the relatively slim ‘exoteric dossier’ of Agamben’s engagement with Kojève in the wider ‘esoteric dossier’ (ibid., 53) of Agamben’s critique of the Western ontopolitical tradition and his affirmation of a profane messianic politics. For Agamben, the problematic status of liberal democracy at the very moment of its alleged triumph indicates that the very concept of the end of history must be developed further, beyond its designation of the triumph of a particular contestant in a competition of teleological visions towards the destruction of the teleological dimension as such (Agamben 2000, 109-118). Thus, as we shall demonstrate below, the idea of the end of history developed on the basis of Agamben’s work has little to do with the5 eschatological reading espoused by Kojève and Fukuyama, in which the end of history is thefinal stage of the unfolding of the historical process that finds its fulfillment in the post-historical totality of the ‘universal homogeneous state’. Instead, Agamben resumes Walter Benjamin’s project of mobilizing the heritage of Judaeo-Christian messianism for a profane revolutionary act ofarresting the development of history rather than bringing it to its fulfillment. In other words, history does not end by fulfilling its immanent logic but is ratherbrought to an end in the social practices that suspend its progress. In order to specify the character of these practices, we must first address the key modifications that Agamben’s thought introduces into Kojève’s thesis of the end of history. Insofar as it is specifically Kojève’s reading of Hegel that Agamben critically engages with in his work, our discussion below is strictly limited to Kojève’s thesis and does not address other readings of Hegel, nor attempts to resolve the controversial

question of Hegel’s own stance on the end of history (see Grier 1996, Maurer 1996, Harris 1996). Our task is rather to reconstitute Agamben’s conception of the end of history on the basis of his critique of Kojève’s thesis. The following section introduces into the well-known scene of the Master-Slave dialectic a figure of theworkless slave that disrupts the dialectical process by a simple cessation of the activity to which he is subjected. We then proceed to the discussion of Agamben’s concept ofinoperosity and its significance for his articulation of a profane mode of political messianism. The third section specifies the difference of the inoperative praxis of the workless slave from Kojève’s notion of negating action with the help of Alain Badiou’s distinction between destructive andsubtractive modes of negation. In the fourth section we shall argue that the non-dialectical interruption of dialectics, affirmed by Agamben, is also at work in6 Kojève’s original argument, where it is embodied in the figure of the intellectual, exemplified by no one other than the figure of Hegel himself, who, as a character of Kojève’s narrative, is a perfect illustration of Agamben’s inoperative praxis. In the conclusion we address the implications of the rethinking of the end of history for understanding the wider project of Agamben’s ‘coming politics’ and its significance for critical social theory. The Workless Slave The historical dialectic, traced from its origin to its fulfillment in Hegel’sPhenomenology of Spirit (1979), derives its movement fromwork, the concept crucial to understanding both Kojève’s original interpretation of Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic and Agamben’s criticism of Kojève. In Kojève’s reading, work, i.e. negating action on the part of the Slave that transforms the natural world into the human, ‘historical’ world, is what ‘realizes and perfects’ (Kojève 1969, 23) the historical progress that is initially put into motion by the fear of death that turns the primal human encounter into a Master-Slave relation: ‘It is only by work that man is a supernatural being that is conscious of its reality; by working, he is ‘incarnated’ Spirit, he is historical ‘World’, he is ‘objectivized’ History.’ (Ibid., 25) By working for the Master, who only enjoys the products of the Slave’s work that he consumes, the Slave represses his desire for the immediate consumption of the fruits of his activity and ‘cultivates and sublimates his instincts’, thus ‘civilizing and educating’ himself (ibid., 24). Unlike the Master, who remains a static, fixed and stable figure throughout the historical process that he initiates, the Slave’s being is entirely contained in transcendence and becoming through negating action:7 [In] transforming the World by this work, the Slave transforms himself too and thus creates the new objective conditions that permit him to take up once more the liberating Fight for recognition that he refused in the beginning for fear of death. Therefore, it is indeed the originally dependent, serving and slavish consciousness that in the end realizes and reveals the ideal of autonomous Self-Consciousness

and is thus its ‘truth’. (Kojève 1969, 29-30) In Kojève’s argument, the historical process is brought into motion by the originary ‘fight to the death for recognition’, in which it is the Master that first negates his natural being by risking his life and overcoming his antagonist, who is thus reduced to the role of the Slave. However, this act of risking death completes the Master’s participation in the historical process, which he subsequently traverses without losing his identity with himself. The entire dialectical process in the aftermath of the originary encounter is driven by the work of the Slave that actively negates given Being and thus creates the human world that he will inherit at the end of history, when his re-engagement in the struggle for recognition will enable him to defeat the Master and attain in the universal homogeneous state the freedom that he is deprived of throughout the historical process. This rigorous distribution of roles in the Master-Slave dialectic certainly makes for a highly elegant translation of the ontological triad ‘identity-negativity-totality’ (ibid., 200-209) into phenomenological terms. Yet, what if we imagine, for a moment, a figure of the Slave who suspends his work without at the same time taking up the fight for recognition? This figure is evidently distinct from the Master who has never worked at all and thus remains the embodiment of the origin of historical progress that survives in the8 present only in order to maintain the forced character of the Slave’s work (ibid., 48). Yet, the ‘workless’ Slave is also distinct from the ‘autonomous Self-Consciousness’ of the Slave that has overcome (aufgehoben) itself through work and mastered history by producing the world in which he can become autonomous. The Slave that has thus transcended his own condition does not work because he no longer has to, given the disappearance of the Master-Slave relationship. In contrast, a Slave that simply suspends his work is a figure that cannot be recuperated by the dialectical scheme, i.e. it is neither identity (by virtue of having worked before), nor negativity (by virtue of no longer working in the present), nortotality (by virtue of suspending work prior to the fulfillment of the dialectical process). To be sure, the cessation of work does end historyqua struggle for recognition but not in the sense of its fulfillment but rather in the sense of a simple termination of the dialectical process, whereby history is not so much brought to an end as stopped in its tracks. While the Kojèvian logic conceives of the end of history in terms of its mastery by the reconciled humanity, the affirmation of the suspension

of work postulates something like the endof the ‘end of history’, asecond end that does not merely end history’s evasion of human mastery but rather brings to an expiry the ideal of this mastery itself. In other words, the second, proper end of history consists in the annulment of any end of history in the teleological sense. History ends only when it is conceived as teleologicallyendless, devoid of any task in terms of which it could be fulfilled. Whereas the Kojèvian end of history is in principle graspable from a historical perspective as an end of historywithin history, the understanding of the end of history as an interruption of the Slave’s work dismantles the terms, in which this ‘first end’ could be9 intelligible – the figure of the workless slave fatally jams the very machine of dialectics that was originally entrusted with bringing history to completion. This image of the ‘second’ end of history is strikingly different from the Kojèvian notion in no longer presupposing anything like a ‘universal homogeneous state’ that is the ‘final term’ of history (Kojève 1969, 9). Instead, this abrupt end carries no finality whatsoever, nor can it be presented in terms of the completion of some intelligible process. The ‘jamming’ of the dialectical machine of history is not governed by the desire for recognition, since the Slave’s very worklessness entails that he no longer either fears the Master or wishes to gain his recognition. Yet, what could possibly be its guiding principle, i.e. what does one abandon workfor? Agamben is singular among modern political thinkers to explicitly posit such a principle in terms ofhappiness (Agamben 2000, 8. See Mills 2004). In his critique of the sovereign-biopolitical paradigm of Western politics, constituted by the inclusive exclusion of bare life as a ‘negative foundation’ of the political order, Agamben conceives of ‘happy life’ as a form-of-life, in which it is no longer possible to isolate and exclude something like a bare life, since it is nothing but its own bare existence, a life that is nothing other than its ownform (1998, 188). ‘[This] ‘happy life’ should be an absolutely profane ‘sufficient life’ that has reached the perfection of its own power and of its own communicability – a life over which sovereignty and right no longer have any hold.’ (2000, 114) In Kojèvian terms, this ‘happy life’ beyond any possibility of distinguishing betweenbios andzoe throws into question the very distinction between the natural and the historical world that grounds the dialectic of the historical process, in which Man negates the thetical identity of his natural existence by overcoming his fear of10

death and thereby enters the historical world as Spirit, the ‘synthetic’ being mediated by negating action (Kojève 1969, 217-219). The Slave, who no longer seeks recognition and has suspended his work, cannot by definition be resigned solely to the natural world – in fact, he has irrevocably left it in his first encounter with the (future) Master, in which he did not risk his life and eventually entered the Master’s service (ibid., 225). Yet, neither does he dwell in the historical world after abandoning his work, by the very definition of historical progress as contained entirely in the Slave’s transformation of his world. Evidently, this figure of the workless Slave is highly problematic for Kojève’s analysis, which results in its hasty dismissal as nothing but a relapse into the animal condition: Ifper impossibile Man stopped negating the given and negating himself as given or innate – that is, stopped creating new things and creating himself as ‘new man’ – and were content to maintain himself in identity to himself and to preserve the place he already occupied in the Cosmos (or in other words, if he stopped living in relation to the future or to the ‘project’ and allowed himself to be dominated exclusively by the past or by ‘memory’), he would cease to be truly human; he would be an animal, perhaps a ‘knowing’ and surely a very ‘complicated’ animal, very different from all other natural beings, but not essentially something other than they. (Ibid., 220) Yet, this can only mean that such a suspension of negating action necessarily throws this ‘newly natural’ being to his purely thetical, self-identical being, in which he must once again replay the encounter that launches the Master-Slave dialectic. In other words, if history stops ‘along the way’, it must afterwards begin all over again from the very start rather than resume at the precise point of its stoppage. But this logically entails11 that with this ‘stopping along the way’ history has in fact ended, albeit not in the Aufhebung but in the pure termination of its dialectical logic. We may therefore conclude that Kojève’s scheme must admit thenon-dialectical end of history as an ever-present possibility within history. What remains problematic in Kojève’s account is his overly hurried reduction of the workless Slave that actualizes this possibility to an animal that diverts attention from the end of history to the necessity of its resumption. The suspension of work does not necessarily entail persisting in one’s identity to oneself or preserving the place ‘already occupied in the Cosmos’. On the contrary, this suspension by definition negates the Slave’s self-identityqua Slave and hence has nothing to do with the affirmation of inert being against becoming. Rather than throw the human being

back towards his animal existence, the termination of work opens the possibility of the appropriation by the workless slave of his present as the time of his freedom. By ceasing to be historical, the workless slave does not become merely natural but rather transforms his thetical essence into existence without in any way negating it. This workless being, whois nothing but his ownexistence (rather than his essence or his work), finds in this very existence the possibility of ‘happy life’ that is not attainable by any future-oriented project. In the following section we shall elaborate this idea of ‘happy life’ in terms of Agamben’s profane messianic politics of inoperative praxis. Agamben’s Inoperative Messianism Embodying a rupture within the dialectical process, the figure of the workless Slave provides us with a glimpse of the human beingas such, neither man (autonomous Self- consciousness) nor animal (tied to his natural environment) but dwelling beyond both of12 these worlds (cf. Agamben 2004, chapters 19, 20). In contrast to Kojève, for whom ‘true Man can exist only where there is a Masterand a Slave’ (1969, 43, emphasis original), this figure of the ‘human as such’ is enabled precisely by the indistinction between the two: as the Slave no longer works, he shares the constitutive characteristic of the Master (1969, 42), while the Master, no longer recognized by the Slave, is becoming indistinct from the latter. The obliteration of the difference between Master and Slave through the synthetic operation of universal recognition is then replaced by their radical indistinction: it is not that Slave and Master have become dialecticallyovercome, but rather that their interaction enters a standstill, in which there opens a space for human praxis that is neither fight nor work (Agamben 2004, 83. Cf. Benjamin 2002, 463, 865). The life of this being, which is neither bios nor zoe, but rather the former contained entirely in the latter, is entirely disengaged from the struggle for recognition and only seeks happiness, which, unlike consumption (which presupposes the prior production of the object) is thinkable from the perspective of the general ‘absence of work’, or, in Agamben’s term that is crucial to our argument, inoperosity (inoperosita). According to Stefano Franchi (2004, 32-35), Agamben’s notion of inoperosity, a term derived from Kojève’sdésoeuvrement, should not be understood in the sense of inactivity orapraxia, but rather as a mode of praxis that is deprived of any telos and can never be incorporated into a determinate project of negating the present into the past to attain a future goal (cf. Kojève 1969, 136, note 24). For Agamben, the event of nihilism, whose political manifestation reached its heights in World War I, discloses the absence of any historical tasks that humanity

must devote itself to. The transvaluation of all values entails the delegitimisation of future-13 oriented sacrificial politics and brings into light the figure of man as argos (workless, inoperative). ‘Because human beings neither are nor have to be any essence, any nature, or any specific destiny, their condition is the most empty and the most insubstantial of all.’ (Agamben 2000, 94-95) Inoperosity therefore refers not to a literal inactivity or idleness on the part of the subject, but to the absence of any telos of human praxis and the consequent abandonment of all tasks of the (self-)transformation of humanity through negating action: rather than the subject, it is these tasks themselves that are ‘let idle’ (Agamben 2007, 91) or deactivated by the suspension of the historical process and it is this deactivation that opens to the subject the possibility of praxis irreducible to a project. Agamben’s affirmation of inoperosity is inspired by his reading of a passage from Aristotle’sNicomachean Ethics (I, 7, 1097b22-1098a18), the confrontation with which might sum up Agamben’s entire philosophical project. While, for Aristotle, human beings may have a task or a function that arises out of the particular activity they are engaged in (e.g. man as sculptor, flute player, shoemaker, etc.), it is difficult to conceive of a task that would apply to humansqua humans, leading to the question of whether man as such is not essentially ‘workless’, without any tasks to achieve. Answering this question affirmatively, Agamben posits inoperosity as the originary feature of the human condition. The notion of inoperosity is thus furthest away from a valorization of inactivity or ‘doing nothing’ but rather consists in the affirmation of the human beings’ ‘having nothing to do’. While this originary worklessness was for centuries veiled by religion or political ideology, the advent of nihilism entails its coming to the foreground of social life: ‘[T]oday, it is clear for anyone who is not in absolutely bad faith that there are no longer14 historical tasks that can be taken on by, or even simply assigned to, men. It was in some ways evident starting with the end of the First World War that the European nation-states were no longer capable of taking on historical tasks and that peoples themselves were bound to disappear.’ (Agamben 2004, 76) And yet, the ‘totalitarian’ experiments of the first half of the 20th century have managed to obscure the worklessness of man by turning life itself into a task of the human being that becomes the object of government. While ‘traditional historical potentialities – poetry, religion, philosophy, which from both the Hegelo-Kojèvian and Heideggerian perspectives kept the historico-political destiny of peoples awake, have long since transformed into cultural spectacles and private

experiences’, ‘the only task that still seems to retain some seriousness is the assumption of the burden of biological life, that is, of the very animality of man.’ (Ibid., 76-77) The biopolitical assumption of bare life as a historical task is not merely a logical incongruity but, in Agamben’s (1998) famous argument on the concentration camp as the fundamental nomos of late modernity, leads directly to the totalitarian violence against the very bare life that functions as the foundation of the politics of nihilism. Agamben’s politico-philosophical project thus seeks to advance an alternative to contemporary biopolitics through a radical affirmation of the inoperosity of man as the originary attribute of social praxis: ‘There is politics because human beings areargos-beings that cannot be defined by any proper operation, that is, beings of pure potentiality that no identity or vocation can possibly exhaust.’ (Agamben 2000, 141-142) This notion of inoperative praxis should be distinguished from the models that, in Agamben’s terms, attempt to supplant the external imposition of historical tasks with freely chosen forms of self-fashioning, e.g. the ‘work on the self’ that is the centrepiece15 of Foucault’s reconstruction of ethics as an aesthetics of existence. The Foucauldian strategy certainly does away with any external teleology to which human activity is subjected but retains the overall work-oriented and teleological vision of human praxis (it is important to recall that one of four dimensions of Foucault’s ethics is preciselytelos) (Foucault 1990, 25-32). In contrast, what is at stake in the ethics of inoperosity is dispensing with the work-oriented vision of human existence as such and rather opening it to the free use of time outside the coordinates of any historical project. In other words, the ethos of inoperosity attunes us to what Agamben calls ‘the one incomparable claim to nobility our own era might legitimately make in regard to the past: that of no longer wanting to be a historical epoch’. (Agamben 1995, 87. Emphasis original.) The renunciation of every claim to epochality in favour of an inoperative ‘happy life’ does not entail the end of social praxis or politics but rather, similarly to Marx’s consignment of all pre-communist history to ‘pre-history’, its proper beginning. While Kojève conceives of political praxis exclusively in terms of the struggle for recognition, which logically entails the end of politics in the post-historical condition under the aegis of the ‘universal homogeneous state’, for Agamben recognition is of little value (1995, 82) and politics is rather thought in terms of the being-in-common of humanity restored to its originary inoperosity, which is only attainable when ‘the pulsation [of history] is brought to a halt’ (ibid., 88). In its emphasis on bringing the dialectic to a standstill,

Agamben’s vision of the end of history resonates with Walter Benjamin’s political messianism, whose logic Agamben has developed in his own idiosyncratic way in a series of studies from the 1980s onwards (see 2007a, 89-106; 1999, 48-61, 243-271). While the discussion of the full extent of Benjamin’s influence on Agamben’s ontology,16 aesthetics and politics is beyond the scope of this article, what is crucial for Agamben’s reconstruction of political messianism is Benjamin’s argument on the relation between the messianic and the profane in the ‘Theologico-Political Fragment’. In Benjamin’s famous expression, ‘from the standpoint of history [the Messianic Kingdom] is not the goal but the end.’ (Benjamin 1986, 312) This means that, to the extent that the end of history can be considered an accomplishment, it is not an accomplishment of history but rather of something extraneous to it. Unlike Kojève, both Benjamin and Agamben consider the advent of the messianic time in terms of a simple termination of historical progress rather than the fulfillment of its internal logic: ‘nothing historical can relate itself on its own account to anything Messianic.’ (Ibid. See also Agamben 1999, 144-145) Despite its utter heterogeneity to the historical dimension, Benjamin’s and Agamben’s messianism has nothing to do with the ambitions of theocracy (instituting the Messianic Kingdom on earth and thus making the profane realm sacred), but is rather irreparably profane, governed by the worldly ideal of happiness, which Benjamin famously conceived of as the ‘rhythm of Messianic nature’: ‘the order of the profane should be erected on the idea of happiness.’ (Benjamin 1986, 312) Insofar as it is absolutely unattainable through work (Agamben 2007b, 19-21), happiness is a profane condition that is unrelated to anything historical and for this reason corresponds in its effects to those of the advent of the Messianic Kingdom: ‘Just as a force can, through acting, increase another that is acting in an opposite direction, so the order of the profane assists, through being profane, the coming of the Messianic Kingdom.’ (Benjamin 1986, 312)17 Interestingly, in his interpretation of Hegel Kojève also mentions the possibility of the messianic stoppage of history but dismisses it all too quickly as a purely ‘theological’, i.e. non-philosophical disposition. For a non-philosopher, absolute wisdom, if it is attainable at all, is realizable only by a ‘being other than man, outside of time’ (Kojeve 1969, 89). ‘The Religious man can attain his absolute knowledge at any historical momentwhatsoever, in any real conditions; for this to take place, it is sufficient that God reveal himself to (or in and by) a man.’ (Ibid., 90-91. Emphasis original.) Thus, as long as

it is not tied to the fulfillment of the dialectical process, ‘religious’ absolute knowledge, i.e. the revelation of the ‘universal and homogeneous’ reality, can take place at any moment, no longer as the accomplishment of history but rather as the suspension of the very process by which it could be accomplished. While in Kojève’s analysis this option is discussed only to be dismissed as hubris, the parallel between the advent of the messianic kingdom and the profane ‘rhythm’ of happiness invites us to consider this option more carefully. If messianic praxis has no connection with the actual arrival of the Messiah but shares its ‘rhythm’ in bringing about a profane, ‘earthly restitution’ (Benjamin 1986, 312), then it is entirely possible that history may be brought to an end ‘at any historical moment whatsoever’ (Agamben 2005b, 99-103). Yet, to the extent that it negates the historical process itself, how does this suspension differ from the negating action of the working Slave? What is the mode of praxis that does not seek liberation within history but rather strives to attain happiness outside it? This question is addressed in the following section. The Negation of the Project: Destruction and Subtraction18 The specificity of inoperative praxis that characterizes Agamben’s messianic politics may be grasped by engaging in detail with Kojève’s definition of historical action. In a footnote to ‘A Note of Eternity, Time and the Concept’ Kojève defines historical action as characterized by ‘the primacy of the future’ (1969, 136, note 25), i.e. the primacy of a certain project of desire that negates the existing reality (thus transforming it into the past) and in this manner actualizes itself in the present. [We] say that a moment is ‘historical’ when an action that is performed in it is performed in terms of the idea that the agent has of the future (that is, in terms of aProject): one decides on afuture war, and so on; therefore, one acts in terms of thefuture. But if the moment is to be truly ‘historical’ there must be change; in other words, the decision must benegative with respect to the given: in deciding for the future war, one decides against the prevailing peace. And, through the decision for the future war, the peace is transformed into the past. (Ibid., 136, note 24. Emphasis original.) Every historical action must therefore be oriented towards the fulfillment of some future-oriented Project through the negation of the present reality into the past (ibid., 136). On the contrary, the messianic suspension of history in the inoperative praxis of the workless slave frees human action from the very horizon of the Project to which existence is subjected. Thus, the second end of history is only thinkable as thenegation of the Project as such rather than its fulfillment. How does this mode of praxis, which negates negating action itself, differ from the revolutionary negation of the World of

the master that is required of the slave in Kojève’s logic? In Kojève’s argument, negation must necessarily take the form of thedestruction of the World of the Master: ‘This idea19 can be transformed into truth only by negating action, which will destroy the World that does not correspond to the idea and will create by this very destruction the World in conformity with the ideal.’ (Ibid., 98) The Slave’s non-acceptance of the world, in which he is resigned to working in the service of the Master, necessarily leads him to a revolutionary destruction of this world, whereby he overcomes his initial fear of death and becomes a ‘free Worker who fights and risks his life’ (ibid., 57). The paradoxical formula ‘free worker’, which occurs very rarely in Kojève’s text (see also ibid., 230, note 25), attunes us to the key problem with Kojève’s logic of destructive negation. If the Slave overcomes his fear of death and confronts the Master, his freedom is indeed realized in the destructive struggle, but in what sense can he then remain a ‘worker’ and, moreover, what is the meaning of this syntagm as such, given Kojève’s insistence that it is only forced, slavish work that matters in the historical process? The figure of the ‘free worker’ is immediately vanishing in Kojève’s text, as at the very moment the ‘worker’ frees himself from the forced nature of his work, he immediately becomes a fighter on a quest to destroy the world that subjected him to work. In the context of Kojève’s reading of the Master-Slave dialectic destruction is to be taken quite literally (see ibid., 29). While on the ontological level the dialectic is fulfilled through the Aufhebung of identity and negativity that constitutes totality, on the phenomenological level of the existential dialectic, we find no parallel synthetic operation: ‘In truth, only the Slave ‘overcomes’ his ‘nature’ and finally becomes Citizen. The Master does not change: he dies rather than cease to be Master. The final fight, which transforms the Slave into Citizen, overcomes Mastery in anondialectical fashion:20 the Master is simply killed and he dies as Master.’ (Ibid., 225, note 22. Emphasis original.) Thus, on the phenomenological level the dialectic is necessarily fulfilled ‘in a nondialectical fashion’ through the annihilation of the Master, whereby Slave negates his own being (identity) through negating action that is no longer work but rather fighting, i.e. the activity proper to the Master himself. By murdering the Master, the Slavealone achieves the Aufhebung of Mastery and Slavery, insofar as his re-engagement in the struggle for recognition entails that he is no longer a Slave and the murder of the Master (as opposed to his enslavement) entails that there is no longer anyone to become the Master of (ibid., 231). Nonetheless, this non-dialectical destruction in Kojève’s

scheme continues to take the form of the project and thus remains within the historical horizon of negating action. To what extent does Agamben’s inoperative praxis succeed in negating the historical world of Mastery and Slavery without assuming the form of a project of destruction? In order to grasp the specificity of inoperosity as a mode of negation we shall make use of Alain Badiou’s distinction between destruction and subtraction. InBeing and Event (2005, 407-408), Badiou introduces this distinction in the context of his theory of the truth procedure in order to emphasise the irreducibility of novelty to the destruction of the existent: ‘[E]mpirically, novelty is accompanied by destruction. But it must be clear that this accompaniment is not linked to intrinsic novelty. Destruction is the ancient effect of the new supplementation amidst the ancient. Killing somebody is always a matter of the (ancient) state of things; it cannot be a prerequisite for novelty.’ (Ibid., 408) In contrast to destruction, thesubtractive procedure, presented by Badiou as the true source21 of novelty and thus the ‘affirmative’ element in every negation, consists in the production of something that is indiscernible within the negated situation, that cannot be rendered positive in its terms and thusavoids any engagement or incorporation in this situation instead of destroying it (Badiou 2005, 371). The logic of subtraction, which Agamben draws on and develops in his theory of the coming community (1993, 75, 85-87), establishes something new that escapes the regime that governs the situation and thus remains impervious to its grasp, being in a strict sense non-existent in its terms (Badiou 2007, 56). While destruction does nothing but perpetuate the dialectical process of negating action, subtraction suppresses the movement of the dialectic by virtue of its avoidance of any engagement with what it negates. It is evident that while the fighting ‘free worker’ represents the logic of destruction, which Badiou explicitly links to Hegel’s account of revolutionary Terror (ibid., 53-54), the slave that simply suspends his work, without thereby opting for the Master’s activity of struggle and destruction, embodies the ethos of subtraction. By subtracting himself from the very relationship that sets the dialectic into motion, this figure that is neither Slave nor Master, a non-Slave that does not thereby become Master or a non-Master that does not thereby become Slave, embodies the kind of novelty that could never be recuperated by the dialectic – hence Kojève’s insistence on every ‘stoppage’ of history ‘along the way’ as nothing but a relapse into purely animal existence. In this manner, an entirely novel figure of the human being emerges in the absence of any destruction and brings the dialectical process of ending history to a standstill, thus achieving the second, proper end of history in the sense of the negation

of every future-oriented project. Subtraction is thus a paradoxical act that consists entirely in22 its own withdrawal from the Master-Slave relation: in contrast to Kojève’s pathos of destruction, the Master is here negated solely by virtue of the inoperosity of the Slave. The Intellectual Who is Agamben’s workless slave? How can we concretize this subtractive figure that terminates the dialectical process without engaging in the destructive negation of the existing world? Agamben’s writings offer numerous examples of inoperative subjects, from Melville’s Bartleby to Tiananmen protesters, from the unbaptised children in limbo to the figures of ‘assistants’ in Kafka (see respectively 1999, 243-274; 1993, 85-88; 1993, 5-8; 2007, 29-36). However, we need not go further than Kojève’s own reading of the Master-Slave dialectic to identify this figure, since Kojève provides us with a perfect example of the inoperative slave in the figure of the intellectual. Our brief analysis of this figure will both clarify the operation of the subtractive logic in the Agambenian conception of the end of history and demonstrate that this conception is not simply extrinsic to and incommensurable with the Kojèvian dialectic but is rather graspable as a deconstruction of its logic that foregrounds the possibilities of a non-dialectical suspension of the dialectic that are inherent but disavowed in Kojève’s text. In Kojève’s account the intellectual does not fight (and is therefore not a Master) but also does not work, which places him precisely in the zone of indistinction between mastery and slavery, in which the progress of history is suspended. Nonetheless, this figure does not seem to pose any threat to the continuous unfolding of history precisely due to its evasion of the two activities that make history possible:23 [B]eing neither Master nor Slave, he is able - in thisnothingness, in this absence of all givendetermination – to ‘realize’ in some way the desired synthesis of Mastery and Slavery: he canconceive it. However, being neither Master nor Slave – that is, abstaining from all Work and from all Fighting – he cannot truly realize the synthesis that he discovers: without Fighting and without Work, this synthesis conceived by the Intellectual remains purelyverbal. (Kojève 1969, 68. Emphasis original.) In his dismissal of the figure of the intellectual Kojève conjures the spectre of inoperative praxis that is central to Agamben’s messianism: ‘[A] society that spends its time listening to the radically ‘nonconformist’ Intellectual, who amuses himself by (verbally!) negating any given at all solely because it is a given, ends up sinking into inactive anarchy and disappears.’ (Ibid., 233, note 27) However, it is not at all evident why the society that takes the form of ‘inactive anarchy’ (the closest Kojève comes to Agamben’s concept of inoperosity) must disappear or perish. To be sure, such a society subtracts itself from the dialectical process and loses all hope of ever finding itself in a

universal homogeneous state, which also means that its philosophers must renounce the ambition of absolute wisdom. Yet, if we no longer seek to fulfill history but rather to suspend it, perhaps the ‘verbal’ activity of the intellectual should not be dismissed so quickly. This is especially so because the image of the inoperative intellectual continues to haunt Kojève’s text, curiously with reference to none other than Hegel himself who serves as an epitome of the very same intellectual that Kojève derided. In his 1934-1935 course ‘The Dialectic of the Real and the Phenomenological Method in Hegel’ Kojève ventures to correct the conventional understanding of Hegel’s24 dialectic as amethod, arguing that the dialectic is an attribute of Being rather than a methodological artefact: ‘thought is dialectical only to the extent that it correctly reveals the dialectic of Being that is and of the Real that exists.’ (Kojève 1969, 171) Thus, in contrast to the pre-Hegelian ‘vulgar’ science and philosophy, which oppose the knowing subject to the object to be known as something exterior to it, the Hegelian ‘scientific knowledge gives itself or abandons itself without reserve, without preconstituted ideas or afterthoughts, to the ‘life’ and the ‘dialectical movement’ of the Real’ (ibid., 172). However, this position evidently reduces the Hegelian scientist to a figure of purely passive contemplation who, ‘[entrusting] himself without reserve to Being’, ‘has nothing to do, for he modifies nothing, adds nothing and takes nothing away’ (ibid., 175. Emphasis original.). Thus, in Kojève’s argument, Hegel ‘was the first to abandon Dialectic as a philosophicmethod’ for a phenomenological description of the Real, which is itself dialectical, and, in this description, no longer has anything ‘to do’ with regard to its object (ibid., 179. Emphasis original. See also ibid., 190-191). As Kojève argues, the entire history of philosophy up to Hegel was marked by the predominance of the dialectical method in the sense of discussion between opposed theses and their Aufhebung in a more comprehensive synthesis. Kojève’s Hegel is the first (and, of course, also the last) philosopher who no longer needs to perform this dialectical procedure since it has already been fulfilled before him: ‘he only has to have the ‘experience’ of it and to describe its synthetical final result in a coherent discourse: the expression of the absolute truth is nothing but the adequate verbal description of the dialectic that engendered it.’ (Ibid., 184) We must recall, however, that the fulfillment of the dialectic is not the achievement of philosophy but rather the result of the work of the25 Slave and the fight of the Master, i.e. it is the fulfillment of the dialectic of the Real itself (its ownmethods being fight and work) rather than of the philosophical discourse,

which, as a ‘superstructure’ (ibid., 190) simply ‘reflects’ its own situation in the movement of this dialectic (ibid, 184-85). Thus, the progress of the philosophical dialectic cannot bring history to an end, but rather itself comes to an end, when the dialectic of the Real that it reflects finds its fulfillment. Thus, Hegel is once again left without work, as both the philosophical discourse that precedes him and the dialectic of the Real that the latter reflects have come to an end: ‘real History is what does it [the integral synthesis of absolute knowledge], at the end of its own dialectical movement; and Hegel is content to record it without having todo anything whatsoever, and consequently without resorting to a specific mode of operation or amethod of his own.’ (Ibid., 185. Emphasis original.) Besides not participating in the fulfillment of history in any manner (much as the intellectual, who, as we recall, neither fights nor works), Hegel is also spared even the tasks of the Philosopher: ‘he does not need to hold dialogues with ‘the men in the city’ or even to have a ‘discussion’ with himself or meditatea la Descartes.’ (Ibid., 186. Emphasis original.) Thus, while the method of the Master is fight, the method of the Slave is work and the method of the philosopher is dialectic, there is no method that is proper to Hegel: ‘[If], having nothing moreto do, he has no method of his own, it is because he profits from all the actions effected throughout history.’ (Ibid. Emphasis original.) For the third time we encounter in Kojève’s text the syntagm ‘nothing to do’, the verb itself italicized in all three cases. Thus, inoperosity, which Kojève attempted to denigrate as the pathway to the self-destruction of the human society, makes a stunning26 comeback, embodied in no other figure that Hegel himself. It is notable that while history is fulfilled in the activities of Masters and Slaves, the possibility of rendering it inoperative, i.e. ending it, is only revealed to (and by) Hegel himself. As Kojève remarks elsewhere, Hegel is ‘Napoleon’s Self-Consciousness’ (1969, 70). It is not sufficient to bring about the end of history through one’s negating action, which must always be complemented by its revelation in discourse: ‘It is Napoleon’s existence as revealed to all men in and by thePhenomenology that is the realized ideal of human existence.’ (Ibid.) In other words, it is only Hegel, rather than Napoleon, who enjoys the benefits of inoperosity, of having ‘nothing to do’ and ‘no method of one’s own’, precisely insofar as his discourse announces the end of history and phenomenologically describes the fulfilled dialectic as the ‘absolute knowledge’ of the Wise Man. The reality of the Battle of Jena is

insufficient to make the claim about the end of history true, as truth ‘is more than a reality, it is a revealed reality; it is the reality plus the revelation of the reality through discourse’ (ibid., 188). Thus, although it is the real dialectic that fulfils history, its end can only be revealed in the discourse of the philosopher-become-Wise-Man (i.e. Hegel rather than Napoleon), which alone can raise Being to the status of Truth. However, this very revelation cannot be arrived at by the dialectical method, since there logically cannot be such a thing as a post-historical dialectic. Just as it was impossible to fulfill the dialectic in the dialectical fashion on the phenomenological level since the Master necessarily had to die, it is impossible to do so on the ‘superstructural’ level of philosophical discourse. There is no way ofknowing the end of history prior to Hegel’s suspension of work, i.e. the abandonment of the dialectical method in favour of the passive description of the27 fulfilled dialectic of the Real. Indeed, just like the intellectual, whose ‘synthesis’ was, as we recall, ‘purely verbal’, Hegel ‘looks at everything that is and verbally describes everything that he sees’ (ibid., 175. Emphasis original.), doing nothing other than ‘reflecting the Real’ and indeed having nothing more to do. It is thus only Hegel’s own suspension of the dialectic that actually makes the end of history (i.e. thefulfillment of the dialectic) intelligible. This suspension is strictly correlative to what we have described as the subtractive negation of the Master’s existence by the inoperative praxis of the (former) Slave, the only thing missing from our description above being Hegel’s claim to absolute knowledge, which is in turn conditioned by the establishment of the universal homogeneous state. Yet, if we momentarily suspend our belief in the fulfillment of the historical process in the Napoleonic and, later, the Prussian state, which should not be too difficult, then the Wise Man and the intellectual are revealed as absolutely indistinct. Kojève’s Hegel is then simply the philosopher who has renounced his work by declaring with unprecedented audacity the fulfillment of the dialectic in the Real itself, or, in other words, ended history by ceasing his own participation in it. Just as Kojève’s Hegel must havedecided that the dialectical process of history is accomplished and no more tasks of negating action could be posited, so a contemporary philosopher like Agamben may decide that the historical process is devoid of any tasks for humanity to accomplish and is running on empty, which means that it can easily be stopped by the subject that dissociates itself from its operation. Once we renounce the claim to absolute wisdom and its political precondition of the universal homogeneous state, the fulfillment and the termination of the dialectic of the Real become absolutely indistinct. The figure of the28

intellectual, hurriedly dismissed by Kojève but in fact personified by his description of Hegel’s own praxis, becomes the model for the social praxis that ends history not by fulfilling its dialectic but by interrupting its operation. The intellectual or rather ‘intellectuality’ as such in its irreducibly collective existence is a privileged subject of Agamben’s ‘coming politics’. As opposed to Kojève’s Hegel, a solitary philosopher par excellence, for Agamben thought is always an experience of common power, an experience that is only accessibleas that of power insofar as it implies the common capacity for the use of intellectual faculties: ‘After all, if there existed one and only one being, it would be absolutely impotent.’ (Agamben 2000, 10) In his discussion of Dante in ‘The Work of Man’ (2007c: 8-10), Agamben points out that common intellect is only conceivable as potential, since, unlike individual acts of thought, it can never fully pass into actuality but rather exists as potential in any individual act. The restoration of this potentiality cannot be achieved through work, in which the potentiality of existence is always exhausted in the actuality of its product. Instead, thought restores its potentiality by means of the subtraction of the human being from the dialectical process, which, as we have seen, is precisely the strategy of the intellectual, including the intellectual who pretends to be a Wise Man. We must emphasise that Agamben’s affirmation of ‘general intellectuality’ has nothing to do with the valorization of thought as itself a form of labour, a strategy observable e.g. in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004). In contrast, Agamben insists on ‘[d]istinguishing between the massive inscription of social knowledge into the productive processes (an inscription that characterizes the contemporary phase of capitalism, the society of the spectacle) and intellectuality as antagonistic power and form of life’29 (Agamben 2000, 11). The ‘immaterial’ or ‘intellectual’ character of labour changes nothing in the Master-Slave relationship, as long as thought remains mobilized for the slavish work, exhausting its power in the actuality of the product, consumed by the Master. It is therefore only the demobilization of thought from every future-oriented project that restores to it its own power. Conclusion It is evident that Agamben’s conception of the end of history is utterly heterogeneous to the triumphalist liberal interpretation of Kojève by Fukuyama. In Agamben’s own description, his approach simultaneously targets two dominant readings of contemporary global politics, namely the Kojèvian ‘end of history’ theory, in which it is the liberal state that fulfills the historical dialectic, and the diverse field of globalization theory, in which it is precisely the eclipse of the state by the globalizing logic of capitalism that testifies to our present still being eminently historical and indeed constituting an ‘epoch’. In

contrast, Agamben insists that we should think ‘the end of the state and the end of historyat one and the same time [and] mobilize one against the other’ (Agamben 2000, 111. Emphasis original.). For Agamben the end of history, understood in terms of the non-dialectical termination of the dialectical process, must necessarily presuppose a radical crisis of the state or any other form of constituted order. The search for a post-historical ethos of humanity becomes entirely heterogeneous to any statist project, but rather probes the possibilities of the human reappropriation of historicity, whereby time becomes available for free use in social praxis. ‘[T]his appropriation, must open the field to anonstatal and30 nonjuridical politics and human life – a politics and a life that are yet to be entirely thought.’ (Ibid., 112. Emphasis original.) While a detailed consideration of Agamben’s ‘coming politics’ is beyond the scope of this article, our analysis of his rethinking of the end of history from the standpoint of inoperosity permits us to isolate the key contribution of Agamben’s politics to the critical discourse in contemporary social theory. While Agamben’s political thought is frequently criticized as overly vague in its affirmative aspect (Passavant 2007, Laclau 2007), this criticism ignores the original mode of affirmation that Agamben’s discourse employs, which asserts the possibility of attaining a radically different form of life through at first glance purely negative, unproductive gestures of subtraction, withdrawal and disengagement. As Agamben insists in a number of works, in the post- messianic condition ‘everything will be as is now, just a little different’ (Agamben 1993, 57), no momentous transformation will take place aside from a ‘small displacement’ (Agamben 1999, 164) of the kind undertaken by the subtractive praxis of the workless slave, whose unproductive negativity could never be recuperated in the universal homogeneous state and its correlate figure of absolute wisdom. In its emphasis on subtraction, demobilization and inoperosity as positive conditions of post-historical praxis Agamben’s vision of the end of history resonates with a wider tendency in current critical theory, which conceives of ‘passive politics’ as the appropriate response to contemporary global capitalism (Franchi 2004). For example, Slavoj Zizek (2006, 375-385) has proposed a “Bartleby-politics’ of passive aggression and ‘impassive refusal’, a ‘gesture of pure withdrawal’, as a corrective to the vacuous practices of ‘resistance’ that are immediately recuperated by dominant governmental31 rationalities and therefore only serve, in their very frantic activity, to make things stay the same. Similarly, Alain Badiou, otherwise a champion of militant political action, proclaims in Thesis 15 of his ‘Theses on Contemporary Art’ that ‘it is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which

Empire already recognizes as existent’ (Badiou 2004, 121). By the same token, Jean-Luc Nancy’s innovative theorization of community proceeds from an explicit renunciation of any approach to community as ‘objectifiable’ or ‘producible’, insisting rather that it should be grasped as ‘inoperative’, ‘not a work to be done or produced’ (Nancy 1991, 35). Agamben’s work over the last thirty years has arguably been the most sophisticated attempt at overturning the ontopolitical constellation of Western politics through practices of subtractive negation. The contemporary significance of an Agambenian rethinking of the end of history thus consists in its reinscription of the problematic, originally deployed to attain a strict delimitation of the possibilities of political praxis, as an affirmation of radical openness and contingency at the heart of political life, whereby the end of history no longer functions as an oppressive horizon of necessity but rather as an ever-present potentiality inherent in social praxis. BIBLIOGRAPHY Agamben, Giorgio (1991) Language and Death: The Place of Negativity. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.32 Agamben, Giorgio (1993) The Coming Community. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Agamben, Giorgio (1995)The Idea of Prose. New York: SUNY Press. Agamben, Giorgio (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio (1999) Potentialities: Selected Essays in Philosophy. Stanford, Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio (2000) Means without End: Notes on Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Agamben, Giorgio (2004) The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben,Giorgio (2005a)State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Agamben, Giorgio (2005b) The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio (2007a) Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience. London: Verso. Agamben, Giorgio (2007b)Profanations. New York: Zone Books. Agamben, Giorgio (2007c) ‘The Work of Man’, in Matthew Calarco and Stephen DeCaroli (eds)On Agamben: Sovereignty and Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Badiou, Alain (2004) ‘Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art’,Lacanian Ink 23: 100-119. Badiou, Alain (2005)Being and Event. London: Continuum. Badiou, Alain (2007)TheCentury. London: Polity Press.33 Benjamin, Walter (1986) ‘Theologico-Political Fragment’, in Peter Demetz (ed.)

Reflections. New York: Shocken Books. Benjamin, Walter (2002)The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Calarco, Matthew and DeCaroli, Steven (eds) (2007)Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Deladurantaye, Leland (2000) ‘Agamben’s Potential’,Diacritics 30 (2): 2-24. Foucault, Michel (1990) History of Sexuality. Volume Two: The Use of Pleasure. New York: Random House. Franchi, Stefano (2004) ‘Passive Politics’,Contretemps 5: 30-41. Fukuyama, Francis (1992)The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press. Fukuyama, Francis (1995) ‘Reflections on theEnd of History Five Years Later’, History and Theory34 (2): 27-43. Grier, Philip T. (1996) ‘The End of History and the Return of History’, in Jon Stewart (ed.)The Hegel Myths and Legends. Chicago: The Northwestern University Press. Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio (2004)Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin. Harris, H.S. (1996), ‘The End of History in Hegel’in Jon Stewart (ed.)The Hegel Myths and Legends. Chicago: The Northwestern University Press. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1979) The Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laclau, Ernesto (2007) ‘Bare Life or Social Indeterminacy’ in Matthew Calarco and Stephen DeCaroli (eds) On Agamben: Sovereignty and Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press.34 Maurer, Reinhart Klemens (1996) ‘Hegel and the End of History’in Jon Stewart (ed.) The Hegel Myths and Legends. Chicago: The Northwestern University Press. Mills, Catherine (2004) ‘Agamben’s Messianic Politics: Biopolitics, Abandonment and Happy Life’, Contretemps5: 42-62. Nancy, Jean-Luc (1991) The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. Norris, Andrew (ed.) (2005) Politics, Metaphysics and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’sHomo Sacer. Durham: Duke University Press. Passavant, Paul A. (2007) ‘The Contradictory State of Giorgio Agamben’, Political Theory 35 (2), 147-174. Zizek, Slavoj (2006)The Parallax View. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Zizek, Slavoj (2008)In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso.