On Property and the Philosophy of Poverty: Agamben and Anarchism

This chapter discusses Agamben’s work in the context of the split between the anarchist and cmmunist strands of the revolutionary tradition. One of the few points at which anarchism explicitly appears in Agamben’s work is The Time That Remains where, in the context of a discussion of klesis (calling), class, and the role of the proletariat in Marxist thought, he identifies in Max Stirner an ‘ethical-anarchic interpretation of the Pauline as not’. Bignall draws on Marx’s ridiculing of Stirner’s ‘ethical-anarchism’ and his critique of Proudhoun, to argue that Agamben’s recent work on poverty and use bring him closer to the communitarian anarchist tradition than to Marx’s governmental communism. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Agamben’s thought extends anarchist critiques of property to the level of social ontology and so should be read as a restoration of anarchism to its potential for use in the present.