The will to act manifests in micro-fascist impulses towards sovereign capture end exertion of regimes of dominance

Given the preceding sketch Agamben gives of power and possibilities (the law's being in force without significance, the subtle reverse found in Kafka's work of this situation, Againben's praise of creatures without work), the questions arise: what ought we to do now? What form of resistance is possible for us? How should we act? What can we do? This is actually one of the major criti- cisms on Agamben's work, that in it, at least when read superficially, Agamben nowhere seems to formulate any explicit answer to the question of resistance. The Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri, also one of Agamben's close friends, points out that Agamben was never directly involved in political struggles and he sees this as a great lack in his philosophy.' Agamben's work is often described as a radical passivity.1 This passivity can be seen both as a strength and a weakness of his work. Agamben's passivity is not a regular powerlessness, but seems to come close to (Mahayana) Buddhism, an exercise in doing nothing.4 This passivity also shows evidence of a radical paradigm shift in thinking about power and resistance, a movement that is often attributed to Foucault and whose traces can be found in Kafka avant la leltre. As is evident from the above, Agamben is fundamentally opposed to the tendency of metaphysical politics to attribute an identity to the human being, to allocate to him [or her] a work of his [or her] own. If the human being has no identity of his [or her] own and no activity of his [or her] own, then this also has consequences for our traditional view of actions as being fundamentally embedded within end-means relationships, as goal oriented in essence. Our views of activities and activism must therefore be thoroughly revised in line with our revision of the possibility of a transcendent work of man. Kafka's opera singing executioners or questioners Deleuze once defined power as the act in which the human being is cut off from its potentiality. But, Agamben states, 'There is, nevertheless, another and more insidious operation of power that does not immediately affect what humans can do - their potentiality - but rather their "impotentiality", that is, what they cannot do, or better, can nor do' (N, 13). Given that flexibility is the primary quality the market requires from us, the contemporary human, yielding to every demand by society, is cut off from his [or her] impotentiality, from his ability to do nothing. Just as we saw previously, politics is a politics of the act, of the human individual being at work. The irresponsible motto of the contemporary individual, 'No problem, I can do it', comes precisely at the moment 'when he [or she] should instead realize that he [or she] has been consigned in unheard of measure to forces and processes over which he [or she] has lost all control' (N, 44). This flexibility also leads to a confusion of professions and callings, of professional identities and social roles, because people are no longer in touch with their inability. Agamben sees an example of this in Kafka's Vie Trial. In the last chapter, just before his death, two men enter through Joseph K.'s door. They are his questioners/executioners, but Joseph K. does not recognize them as such and thinks that they are *[o)ld second-rate actors or opera singers?'5 Agamben argues that, in Katka's world, evil is presented as an inadequate reaction to impotentiality (CC, 31). Instead of making use of our possibility of 'not being', we fail it, we flee from our lack of power, 'our fearful retreat from it in order to exercise ... some power of being' (CC, 32). But this power we try to exercise turns into a malevolent power that oppresses the persons who show us their weakness. In Kafka's world, evil does not have the form of the demonic but that of being separated from our lack of power. Nothing makes us more impoverished and less free than this estrangement from impotentiality. Those who are separated from what they can do, can, however, still resist; they can still not do. Those who are separated from their own impotentiality lose, on the other hand, first of all the capacity to resist. (X, 15) And it is evident, according to Agamben, from the example of Hichmann how right Kafka was in this (CC, 32). Eichmann was not so much separated from his power as from his lack of power, tempted to evil precisely by the powers of right and law (CC, 32). What should one do? A clash with activists At the end of 2009, Agamben gave a lecture in honour of the presentation of a collection of texts written by the T'iqqun collective. This French collective has written several political manifestoes and in 200S their compound was raided by the anti terrorist brigades. The charges were quite vague: belonging to an ultra left and the anarcho-autonomous milieu; using a radical discourse; having links with foreign groups; participating regularly in political demonstrations. The evidence that was found was not weapons, but documents, for example a train schedule. Although Agamben calls these charges a tragicomedy and accuses French politics of barbarism6, in his lecture he emphasizes another important political value of the T'iqqun collective. This collective embodies Foucaults idea of the non subject. One of the latter's greatest merits is that he thought of power no longer as an attribute that a certain group had over another, but as a relation that was constantly shifting. A second merit of Foucaults thinking was the idea of non authorship. The subject itself, its identity, is always formed within a power relation, a process that Foucault termed 'subjectivization techniques' In Foucault, the state attempts to form the subject via disciplinary techniques and the subject responds via subjectivization techniques: it internalizes the expectations of the state in the formation of its own identity. That is why Foucault rejects the idea of a subject and the idea of actorship, of attributing an act to a subject. Hence, as long as we continue to think in terms of a subject resisting oppressive power via deliberate action, we cannot liberate ourselves from power relations. The gesture Tiqqun instead is making is, according to Agamben, not one of looking for a subject that can assume the role of saviour or revolutionary. Rather, they begin with investigating the force fields that are operative in our society (instead of focusing on the subject). In describing these fields of force and the moment they become diffuse, new possibilities can arise that are not dependent on a subject. The discussion that followed this lecture provides a very clear picture of Agamben's position. Many activists present at the lecture asked what his theory entailed concretely with respect to the direction in which they should go. Agamben's constant reply was that anyone who poses this question has not understood the problem at all. I always find it out of place to go and ask someone what to do, what is there to be done? ... If someone asks me what action, it shows they missed the point because they still want me to say: go out in the streets and do this? It has nothing to do with that. (OT) Inactivity as active resistance to the state was hardly conceivable for many of the left wing activists present at Agamben's lecture at Tiqqun. Although the state acknowledges the anti-law tendencies in the writings of the Tiqqun collective, the activists present at Agamben's lecture failed to recognize this specific form of resistance. What Agamben attempted to show was that the power of the T'iqqun collective lay precisely in the fact that they did not prescribe any concrete actions but sought unexpected possibilities in 'being thus'. In that same sense, Agamben's analysis of Kafka's work should not be seen as a manual for activist freedom but as a description of small opportunities, of examples in which the power relation is diffuse and that we must attempt to recognize, create and use. Agamben shows us different possibilities and means for resistance, but these are not regular acts with a goal; rather, they are means without end. As Kishik pointed out, Agamben's work is an attempt to "*make means meet" (not with their ends, but with each other)'.7 One way to achieve this is through gestures. The gestures of the people in the Oklahoma theatre and elsewhere in Kafka's work, the shame of Joseph K. and the 'as not' in Kafka's 'On Parables' show us that there are other strategies, aside from active resistance, to reverse political situations.