Old Notes on The Coming Community

27 Mar, 2025

Agamben talks of a singularity that neither belongs to a class or to a nothing but belongs rather to itself in will and says this type of singularity is analogous to love where the loved is loved in their wholeness without regard to a universality or a reduction to components.

II Agamben analogizes the singularity of the last chapter to the joy of limbo where those abandoned by God are allowed their own perfection of human life and nature due to their ignorance of supernatural judgment which creates the hellish experience of being deprived of God that those ignorant of God lack. He likens this to being unsaveable due to the lack of a need of saving.

III Agamben talks of a universality of being that originates in language which also translates to the paradoxes of being such as those in set theory. Agamben speaks of a difference between an identity with a property and belonging to a property through language with the latter characterizing the type of belonging of the naming of a singularity. (At least that’s what I think he’s saying.

IV Agamben talks of various theological and philosophical conceptions of evil concluding that the good rests in a thing’s belonging to itself in its unique singularity and the evil being the encompassing of a singularity beyond its transcendent self belonging that must be known as a potentiality in order for self belonging as such to take place… (I may be mushing some points he made together here though.)

V Agamben talks of various medieval theories of the singular ultimately preferring a model of a nonlinear oscillation of the singularity between its particularity and its universality (or its potentiality and actuality) that perpetuates the process of individuation as the two interpenetrate each other.

VI Agamben talks of a common space of ease that allows movement and for different singularities to belong to each other in a type of hospitality.

VII Agamben speaks of a medieval word for the most generic being with a controversial definition that he argues would ultimately express being as a “rising fourth” of an inessential “manner”, “ethic”, or “habit” of a singularity and that this rising fourth of our singular habitual ethic is what Agamben sees as true human happiness.

VIII Agamben talks of the devil being the non-being or weakness inside of being that is to be restored to its strength or possibility of being through love, and practically this manifests as our inner weakness to the temptation toward evil.

IX Agamben talks not just of a potentiality of what a thing can be but also the potentiality of what a thing cannot be, describing the latter as analogous to the blank canvas of a tabula rasa that is carried on alongside each actualization.

X Agamben talks of a theological notion that at the end of times nature will be rewarded in its very being as it already is in a state that collapses the dichotomy between contingency and necessity.

XI Agamben asserts that ethics is where humanity must embrace their full potentiality without repentance as opposed to morality which is burdened by the past.

XII Agamben talks of how the image of the body has been captured from destiny and history by capitalism as a pure image but this pure image has led to the further commodification and technologization of the body image itself and the task of humanity is to rescue the image of the body from capitalism.

XIII Agamben uses Aquinas’s talk of the halo as an accidental perfection to talk of an individuating excess that is not an essence to things and that goes beyond the dichotomy of potentiality and actuality as a unique excessive possibility to the already perfect as suchness of beings.

XIV Agamben speaks of a way using language that does not undermine the manner of the singular by being the space which extends its manner of being without assimilating it into linguistic universality.

XV Agamben talks of a universal class of petty bourgeoisie that is washing over humanity that has no manner of expressing itself but rather hides in insipid generality, but later says the death this class threatens can reawaken the coming community of whatever singularities to well their singularity.

XVI Agamben talks of the universality that exists beyond the singular being an absolute space of potentiality rather than a determinate actuality.

XVII Agamben talks of language where a name of class in not reducible to its members but actual homonym of them, and that the name on its own independent of its instantiation is the being in language of that which cannot be universalized in language as it is a word’s pure presentation of itself.

XVIII Agamben talks of capitalism being the era in which language becomes the predominant way of being in the human era estranged from any singular referent, but that this may be overcome by language coming to its manner of being through humans realizing their linguistic being.

XIX Agamben talks of the essence of the state being the universal delimited category, and of the non-state being a community based on a singularity not reducible to an identity but rather the manner of the community’s being thus.

Appendix Profanity for Agamben is the world’s very being thus and this is the source of all authentic joy and sorrow, and that this exposure is not without relation to its properties nor subordinated to them but their pure interpenetrating exposure that transcends itself in its expression as a manner of itselfness. This itselfness is the limit that can be breached by potentiality that occurs rather than the potentiality to not be as the manner of its being thus. Agamben concludes by equating this thusness of things with love.