or zoon technicon and the technical ghosts of the future
(In Epidemic Subjects. Radical Ontology, Edited by Elisabeth von Samsonow, diaphanes, Zürich- Berlin, 2017.)
Was Pandora, the motherless first woman, made immediately as woman? And what if her immediate creation by the divine blacksmith Hephaestus and the motherless goddess-virgin, the head-born warrior Athena, made her – the future mediator between gods and humans – the paradigmatic figure of immediacy, in other words, of the child?
Pandora, sent to the humans, to the newly established world of finitude, and therefore of labour, economy and order, had to transgress interdictions in order to fulfil her immediate desires. She needed her toys, which the jealous husband-father has locked in the jar. The all-gifted ones always need more gifts. Pandora wants her toys.
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Let me enter the context of this discussion by shortly outlining the critical context at stake. In History of Sexuality Foucault, parallel to Simondon, performs the radical operation of final denaturalization of the human. Unlike Simondon, Foucault attacks the understanding of sexuality as new and perhaps last transformation of the 18th century’s idea of human nature. Foucault apparently sees in the Freudian idea of libido the last stronghold of nature understood as profound substratum, which the supernature of the Superego must subdue, purify and master in a Hegelian way. Thus Foucault “liberates” sexuality by historicising it, by finally submitting it to the subject to history, i.e. revealing it as historical, cultural and political construct. But Foucault’s intention is far from Wilhelm Reich’s one, and it is not a critical accident if he mocks Reich in The Will to Knowledge; what is at stake with the attack on the Freudian Trojan horse of nature, the idea of sexuality as nature, is nature itself. As he states in his famous debate with Chomsky on the human nature in 1971 where he attacks through his opponent, justifiably or not, the heritage of 18th century, there is no human nature.
But even this conclusive attack, this coup de grâce on nature, performed by Foucault, which also propelled the upsurge of the queer studies, couldn’t cope with the eternal return of nature through the figure of procreation, of biological reproduction. On the contrary, in the following seminars of Foucault, introducing the critical concept of biopolitics, the mastery of reproduction and reproductive forces will be still seen as plastic substance of power, understood precisely as biopower. The critical analysis of modern biopolitics thus systematically reveals the agencies of ‘colonization’ of the biological, reduced to productive and reproductive potency in the line of Marx, systematically put in parentheses in Foucault. Thus after Foucault – trying to exceed the problem faced by Foucault, but again according to the logic and the conceptual and ideological dimensions of the horizon established by Foucault, the radical feminism and queer studiesface the paradox of reproduction: as if the last and unconquerable stronghold of nature. Along the same lines, in this essay I will attempt to go further in this radical critique, without concessions with any late naturalist sentimentalism.
PANDORA’S MYTH
Although philosophers would oppose logos to mиthos, the myth has its own logic. The mythical logic is complex logic. Its understanding or at least its conceptual mobilization in direction of semantically transparent and narratively coherent and articulated meaning, is object of our own conceptual and interpretative decisions. And yet the mythical logic has powerful symptomatic and heuristic potential; that is why, if the value of this reading method is to radicalize the perspective of historical anthropology in the direction of a figurological hermeneutics or more generally, of fantastic philosophy, then its “surplus” value would be the enlightening of the “unconscious”, dark side of cultural dependencies and structures, persisting up to the modern times. However, this enlightening operates not that much through the optical might of a radiant mythical logos, but through re-composition of the visible field of the understandable through the laid by the radiance of unsuspected mythical celestial bodies fantastic cartography.
Let me generalize few structural features of Pandora’s figure, which could be used for our study of the fundamental, at least in my research, perspective, dealing with the relation between technique and creation of new body. Pandora is the first artificial creature: she is inanimate doll, statue that becomes alive. However, she is not one of a kind, as Hephaestus produces other “robots”, the automata described in the Iliad. Pandora though is the first artificial creature in which the gender difference functions as distinctive characteristic (and that would mean also the first creature that reveals gender as artefact). Pandora is not divine creature, neither human being, because she is in between gods and people. And she is between, because she is artificial: on the one side she is result of divine technical action, but in the same time, one pro-jected from the gods, she is projected – thrown away, excreted, like Arachne’s thread, thus becoming automaton, i.e. autonomous entity. In this sense the figure of Pandora would be the matrix of the anthropotechnical hypothesis, according to which the human appears from the interval between human and its artificial counterpart[i]. But if we read closely the mythical logic, it will turn out that thisartificial counterpart is in fact model of what later humanism will recognize as “human”. That is why the age of humanism and later number of classical authors would think Pandora positively as allegory of “all-giving”, of the retroutopian origin of the human being[ii].
THE AUTONOMIZED AUTOMATA
The idea of the autonomous automata, technical beings, who do not replace slaves, but make them obsolete, is not unfamiliar to the mythical thought. It logically relates those purely technical beings with the time of the Golden age, which we conventionally describe through the prism of the humanist and Enlightenment myths like return to the bosom of nature, as far as the Golden age is in fact the time of direct satisfaction of desires without the mediation of labor, of work. (From this perspective it is worth remembering the etymology of the invented and established by Karel Capek in 1920 in the play R.U.R. word robot, connected with the etymology of the word work, in Czech robota,’labor’.) Such creatures appear both in the Ancient Greek comedy, where everyday objects and tools become self-propelled automata[iii], and in the Homer epos in situation which obviously amaze, but also have comic potential, as if anticipating Bergson’s theses on the comic, inseparable from those of Jentsch and Freud on das Unheimliche. Hephaestus creates several artificial creatures, from the supporting virgins to the three-legged “robots” (tripods), which will travel by themselves to Olympus and back and will be tied to prevent them from escaping[iv]. Aristotle also uses the figure of automata, which functions as an (in)famous politeconomical allegory. In the famous paragraph of the Politics he states that even though slavery is not a good praxis, until instruments who propel themselves are invented, the slaves will be needed as autopoïetic instruments: “for if every tool could perform its own work when ordered, or by seeing what to do in advance, like the statues of Daedalus in the story, or the tripods of Hephaestus which the poet says ‘enter self-moved the company divine,’—if thus shuttles wove and quills played harps of themselves, master-craftsmen would have no need of assistants and masters no need of slaves.”[v] Aristotle’s reflection, which of course sounds revolting from modern perspective, in the same time is extremely modern and also mythically-archaic, thinking the necessity for autonomous machines or even autopoïetic machines, of robots. The fantastic world of poïetic machines would be overcoming of Pandora’s legacy through creating other forms of life, which are self-animating, which are automata, just like the Monster of doctor Frankenstein. Here it is, at the end, the Creature of Frankenstein itself, the autonomized automaton – he too was seduced by the demon of the free choice like the robots of Hephaestus.
THE ANTHROPOTECHNICAL CAESURA
Let’s return to the (critical) mythical reconstruction of Hesiod.
Hephaestus and Athena’s deed is done under Zeus guidance, gods have all given seductive gifts, magic crafts and charms to Pandora,thauma idesthai, and she is sent to the humans. This moment represents a radical caesura in the history of human kind, which in fact sets the beginning of its history strictu sensu. Therefore the divine gift of Pandora to the humans is historiogenic moment. Why? Because, of course, paradoxically, this artificial creature is the first mortal woman. Therefore, until this moment the humankind, the humankind of the Golden age, consisted solely from men. Being immortal, humankind didn’t need reproduction. Hence Pandora, the first mortal woman, is not only the first mother, she is also the mother of reproduction. She will be not only the mother of the first born and mortal child[vi]; something more, she, the artificial creature, comes to introduce and establish the perceived as the most natural quality of human as biological creature, the reproduction (which, therefore, is not such at all for the archaic thought: in the reproduction there wouldn’t be nothing “natural”!). Coming from technical origin, gifted with the gift of self-exceeding through miraculous divine technique of the born from the head goddess-virgin Athens, she, Pandora, is also gifted with the gift of the new technique: she is the first (before-/after-)human being, which enters in-, or more precisely produces the model of reproduction.
At first glance Pandora, the All-gifted, doesn’t have technique, doesn’t have the techno-poïetic mastery and ontological potency of Hephaestus to produce things and beings. But we could suppose the following deep structural dependence: the ability of Pandora to re-produce, to give birth to other moral beings is her “gifted” technical ability, that in the same time distances her, but also puts her in structural vicinity, if not in symmetrical position to the gods. Because she is artificial creature, coming from the divine order, she is in fact gifted with this ability, as far as it is namely supernatural. Pandora is the mother of the reproduction as technique.
From this moment on, in the interval of Pandora a rupture opens. Between the continent of gods and the continent of humans unfolds an uncrossable ocean: gods and humans are divided – humans are enslaved by the form, colonized by it, while gods keep for themselves the potential for constant transformation of the form. The result of this technique of reproduction is the repetitive model which is reproduction not only of the species, but also of the model. This ontotechnical operation fixates the human kind. Therefore, if we follow the logic of the myth, the first consequence of those structural features of the fabula and Pandora’s figure will be: the reproduction, at least in this standardized human form, is produced: it is technique.
But if an artificial creature is at the origin of reproduction, we will have to face the consequences of such radical claim. On the one hand, standardized reproduction would appear as secondary technique in relation to creation of artificial being through technical mastery; therefore reproduction itself would appear as technique, it is a technique, it is a tekhné. On the other hand, and this is even more important, in relation to the theses of entire line of political theory, which bases the hole pattern of production on the pattern of reproduction, we have to claim that, on the contrary, reproduction is produced.
The archaic intelligence of the myth of Pandora affirms something completely surreal from the point of view of the modern acceptance of the phenomenon of production: production is not based on the pattern of reproduction, and this could shed completely different light on what value is. No matter how paradoxical it sounds, this means nothing less than that: reproduction appears in the human world after the technical creation, and even more surprisingly, after the creation of the human being with technical means. Obviously according to that archaic logic, that is supermodern logic, only a technical being can produce this technique, this new form of production, which produces boundaries, therefore finitude, therefore form. And yet, this new technical invention is anthropogenic caesura: it is the division that enables the gods to remain alone in their eternal potential for changing forms. In this sense the invention of the reproductive technique appears as limit of metamorphosis. Because, let us not forget, there is another production technique that is more archaic than the technique of reproduction, and this is exactly the technique of metamorphosis. Before being a process of transformation of form, metamorphosis is process of production of form, which is production of body.
In this perspective, it is important to make clear distinction between the established by Pandora “standardized” form of reproduction and the divine forms of reproduction, which are far from the standard biological matrix. Thus the warrior goddess Athens is born from the head of her father Zeus. Dionysus, child of Zeus, is carried half by Semele and half by Zeus himself, who puts him in his own thigh. The archaic logic of the myth is obviously suffering neither from phallocracy, nor from matrico-centrism. The male divinities bear and give birth as well as the female. Obviously the divine body is vessel of organs that doesn’t have human form and in which holes open and placentas grow, in order to give birth to new organs, to new miraculous techniques and new creatures. In this context the myth of Pandora takes central place. It reveals other form of archaic production which is neither metamorphosis, nor reproduction, but production of artificial body.
TRANS BEFORE HUMANISM, OR THE PLUS-OF-THE-SUBSTANCE
Thus, long before humanism was born and Erasmus reduced Pandora’s pythos to mere “box”, the transhumanism already happened: it is premise and possibility for humanism, as far as it describes the very origin of the humankind. Pandora, the technical being, establishing the matrix of reproduction, has technical matrix: womb that before being jar or box is in fact vessel, containter – a pan.
In contrast to the Tertullianian tradition which will be adopted centuries later by the humanism, an amateur-hellenist scholar interprets Pandora’s figure as figure of bitterness, due to symptomatic error (leading to changing Pandora’s gender to “Pandorus”!): instead of “omnium munus”, the gift of everyone, the name Pandora/us will be based on “pan, quod est totum, et doris, quod est amaritudo” (“pan, meaning all, and doris, meaning bitterness”). Furthermore, this strange etymology is accompanied by symptomatic error, as revealing the unconscious of the not so successful hermeneutic operation: “omnium munus” appears as “omnium minus”, deprived of everything[vii]. The amateur-hellenist irritant-of-the-symptom in question is nobody else but Giovanni Boccaccio; the text – Genealogy of Gods, Genealogia deorum gentilium.
In contrast to this symptomatic reading, announcing a technophobic line in the coming modernity, the proposed here reading states the following: the technical being Pandora, combining in her body the plastic element of the earth, the clay, and the dynamic element of the fire, as well as the technical gifts of the gods – all those elements, leading towards the transformative dynamics of its origin – will acquire not only the potential of automaton, but also the dynamic potentiality for change, for transformation – on one side, through invention of new technique, on the other – through the poïetic potential of labor. Labor, incarnated in her through the gene of Hephaestus not only as work, enslaving slaves and robots, but also as the poïetic potentiality of exceeding oneself: the human poïesis, begun from the compulsion of deprivation, from penia and the inflicted by it ponos, the enduring labour, in order to achieve the techno-cracy of the “daughter” figures of Hephaestus, from Pandora to Arachne and Pygmalion.
So, Pandora, the all-gifted by the gods creature, is not figure of the minus, of the absence (the absence of substance, of spirit, of phallos, of nature, of culture: the Lacanian-Freudian ontologization of absence, predicted, as we have seen, by Boccaccio’s symptomatic error), but of the more-than-substance: the excess of nature, excess of origin, or the excess as sole origin; in other words, technique or des-organization.
Thus, through the means of the figurological hermeneutics of the figure of Pandora we reach a possibility to approach the phenomenon of procreation, representing in modern world main pattern of the bio-political organization of human society, a ‘natural’ pattern of organization of society, as completely artificial, if not secondary in the universe of the mythical relations. In that way we could shed new critical light to the attempts for radical reevaluation of the modern theses on ‘human nature’.
THE ALL-GIVING
We should be still attentive to the meaning of the name ‘Pandora’, the ‘all-gifted’ (Πανδώρα, from πᾶν, pān, i.e. “all” and δῶρον, dōron, i.e. “gift”, thus “the all-gifted” or “the all-endowed”), provided in Works and Days. However, in classical philology there is a long lasting tendency to read the meaning of the name in the opposite sense, i.e. as the “all-giving”. This epithet would be connected to the archaic provenance of Pandora’s figure, structurally close to Gaea and Demeter, the all-giving goddesses of the Earth. That hypothesis was connected to anthropological and even early feminist ideas, accounting for the possible anthropological dynamics affecting the figure of Pandora, and more particularly its radical counter-interpretation by Hesiod himself.
I will propose here instead a complex understanding of the name: a bidirectional possibility of reading of the syntagm Pan-Dora (‘all-gifts’): Hesiod’s Pandora, Pandora the all-gifted is nonetheless all-giving, the one giving gifts to everybody (all humans? or maybe, even, all gods?). But the gifts that she gives to both humans and gods are far from the archaic gifts of Gaea. To the humans Pandora is giving form through the possibility of repetition and production of goods, of autonomous products not given by the gods. Her gift opens possibility to exceed the archaic economy of gift. At the same time, she is giving back to the gods their technical gift in the form of nature. She is giving back the technique of reproduction – this technique that only a technical creature could produce; this new form of production that produces boundaries, therefore finitude, therefore form. If gods have produced the agency of finitude, the motherless mother of reproduction, she, Pandora, produces technique, which makes gods irreversibly immortal, since she opens the time of finitude and thus forces gods to return to their eternal and infinite changeability of pleasure and truth. Thus, by growing the technique of procreational reproduction, Pandora, in a way, also gives birth to the gods themselves.
PANDORA’S TOYS
However, why this onto-technical agency, this technopoietic producer – the producer of reproduction, is described by the poet to whom we owe the possibility for this analysis, as a ‘bitch’ (according to Hesiod the first woman, the plague for men, had “the mind of a bitch and a thievish nature”)?
Of course we could and should be outraged by the fact that this pejorative metaphor is as ancient as the description of the first woman. But it is not an accident in Hesiod’s discourse. Yet, it would be somehow inadequate to blame Hesiod for being misogynous, taking into account his completely different and incompatible with ours cultural logic. What is at stake with this offence is first of all not the traditional content, ‘a woman with promiscuous behaviour’, but the fact that she, Pandora, was inactive, she was non-functioning, désoeuvrée. She is lazy, or inactive, she only wants to satisfy her desires, and immediately so: she doesn’t want to labor for them. But before describing Hesiod as the Father of misogyny or the tribune of raising patriarchal ideologies, we should make a step back and say that, in fact, and paradoxically so, precisely the bitchy character of Pandora is significant for her divine substance; she has this insatiable, immediately expressed desire in common with the gods (Hesiod relates that Pandora was full of “the cruelty of desire and longings that wear out the body”). Therefore the unflatteringly described by Hesiod voracious and insatiable appetite of Pandora, her anthropogenic substrate, comes from the gods. Being unable to become herself metamorphic being, lacking access to the first technique, which guarantees the immediate satisfaction of the desire, or in other words, the overcoming of finitude, she has to cope with the ontological interval opened with finitude by other means: she “invents” the technique of pro-creation as its substitute; however, only through the contact with the first technique she could acquire this technopoïetic capacity. Thus the first mother is not only a “bitch”. Or, if she was a bitch, this was because she seemed to be in an infantile state of unproductivity and necessity to satisfy immediately her desires. But she was so because she was made by divine hands and therefore close to the gods as well as she was the child of everybody, therefore the total child, the pan-paidos; precisely for that reason she was the perfect mother as well.
Following his teacher Imre Hermann, Nicolas Abraham claims in L’écorce et le noyau:“The mother is creation of the child. The child is mother of all mothers”. The infantile is the meeting point of Hesiod and Hermann-Abraham. In Hesiod it is conceived as the infantile state of unproductivity and immediacy of desire of the motherless creature, the total child Pandora, whereas in Hermann-Abraham it is the reabsorption of the potential of the big ‘natural’ figure of the origin, the Mother[viii]. However, following Hesiod’s critical version of the myth in Hermann-Abraham’s perspective, we have to claim that the child is the perfect mother not because of the proximity to the natural figure of the origin: it is not such as paradigmatic figure of the natural state of ‘inoperosità’ but as the (coming from the future) Master of counter-productive techniques.
The child is not the paradigmatic figure of nature. It is a technical creature as well. The child is a monster. Therefore, if Pandora is the perfect mother, it is because she is the perfect child.
QUEER TEMPORALITY. AN EPILOG TO THE FUTURE
In order to return at the end to our opening problem, the reproduction of the figure of nature, and therefore of reproduction as natural pattern of human, I will tackle here Lee Edelman’s recent provocative and debated thesis, appearing as one of the last attacks on reproduction and nature in an almost quasi-antinatalist stance. Outlined in a clear and programmatic way in the article The Future Is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and the Death Drive (1998) and elaborated further in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), Edelman’s thesis opposes the future as horizon of the child and therefore of the teleology of reproductive order. Being “outside the cycles of reproduction (…) there are no queers in that future as there can be no future for queers. The future itself is kid stuff (…) Instead we choose not to choose the child, as image of the imaginary past or as identificatory link to the symbolic future (…); thus what is queerest about us, queerest within us, and queerest despite us, is our willingness to insist intransitively: to insist that the future stops here. ”[ix]
If we go further in the critical perspective opened by Edelman, we should contest precisely the last relicts of the idea of human nature which I outlined in the beginning as the critical target of this essay. Edelman’s statement, although it is historically and critically valid, could expose us to the risk of negative re-affirmation of the quasi-ontological character of this situation, although it is socially and culturally constructed. In a first phase we can reaffirm this statement unconditionally: yes, if we critically and politically operate according the logic of the teleological axis of biological time, which is socially constructed as normative, there is no future for queers and there couldn’t be. However, in a second moment such thesis is hard to accept from effective utopian perspective, because it risks reducing by extension the possibility for queering time itself. The claim that there is no future because future is to the child would also imply reaffirmation of a teleological axis of time, which is precisely corresponding to and being the result of the social convention of the reproduction, of certain historical dialectics of family organisation and society, etc.
Here we could refer to another crucial moment in Hesiod’s text, the description of the five ages of humankind in Works and Days. The first among them is the celebrated by poets and humanists Golden Age when men were immortal and therefore there was no reproduction. The decay of the last and the worst one, the Iron Age, to which the poet himself belongs, and because of which he deplores his fate, will begin when children start to be born with grey hairs, when the worm of finitude affects even the colours and the taste of the origin, polluting the innocence of the child. I will designate this last phase of the last generation as the Unheimlich generation, the uncanny generation. For there the prosthesis of temporality is inverted: if men are born old, one could assume that while ‘aging’, they progressively become children (Works and Days, v. 175-200). This implies that in the fifth generation the patterns of reproduction would be turned upside down as well (fathers don’t resemble their children any longer: the mimetic thread of affiliation is interrupted), or, to put it that way, these patterns are out of joints. Do children mate to give birth to elderly people? In any case this uncanny confusion is revealing the unbelievable, paradoxical truth that there is no natural origin; that even death could be an origin, and, what is more, a technical origin. The uncanny reversal of time reveals the inorganic counter-dynamics of organic itself.
In Nicolas Abraham and Mária Török’s theory of the crypt the phantoms of the past are coming to possess us; we cannot help but adjust it here: in fact, the crypt is to be found in the future. The future is the space of the crypt, but the crypt is not the space of the revenants or of the leaving dead; it is the space of technical phantoms, of technical ghosts. That is why, precisely, the child is not the horizon of future. It is a technical creature as well. The child is a monster. This is the only reason for which the future, the space of the technical phantoms, belongs to it.
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Yes, we are given a possibility of queering time with the very emergence of techniques. Techniques appear first as agencies of reversibility, which are not superimposed on the vector of biological time, but which are intervening in its own agency, in its own articulation, and therefore they can shift and transform from inside the dispositive of temporality.
Therefore the archaic techniques of metamorphosis are techniques of production of time, of temporality, or production of structures through which the vector, or the arrow of time is determined. In fact, metamorphosis appears as the paradigmatic example of technique of production of time: a chronogenic technique. Thus, the paradoxical and complex, non-teleological and counter-final temporality of metamorphosis offers the dynamic model or at least a possibility to think this queer temporality, which not only precedes reproduction, but reduces it to one of the forms of producing temporality. Therefore the time of metamorphosis, its technique of producing temporality, could be perceived as the proof that queer temporality exists.
Hence, we could formulate a counter-question to Edelman’s: and what if the future belongs to the robots, instead to the children? And what if children are themselves robots? Uncontrolable, inspiring and potentially devastating counter-techniques? That is why, to Edelman’s melancholic reenactment of punk’s slogan No future, we answer: Yes to future, because chaos and contingency, as well as the force of techniques – of bodies-subjects exceeding themselves – will never be reduced to an ultimate and all-consuming telos, mirroring the fading fiction of the origin.
[i] We could refer here to the thesis of the Bulgarian theorist and literary historian Miglena Nikolchina: “Thus, the human emerges not through the painful separation of man from animal but through the entre-deux, the in-between of man and his own artificial semblance.” (Miglena Nikolchina, Lost Unicorns of the Velvet Revolutions, Fordham University Press: 2012, Chapter 4: An Unfinished Project: Man as Comedy, p. 107). Part of the material of this text is forthcoming also in extended essay in a collective volume, dedicated to Nikolchina’s 60th anniversary (Sofia: 2015).
[ii] See Dora et Erwin Panofsky, La boîte de Pandore. Les métamorphoses d’un symbole mythique, Paris, Editions Hazan, 2014 [1962], Chap. VI : “Pandore, le “don de tous” : les élisabéthains et Jacques Callot”.
[iii] In The Deipnosophists Athenaeus quotes Crates’ Theria (“Wild Beasts”, 5 century b.c.): “Each piece of furniture will come when called: “Come here, table! Set yourself!”” The table will be followed by the knife, the cups etc. (Athenaeus. The Deipnosophists. Or Banquet Of The Learned Of Athenaeus. London. Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden. 1854.) More on this topic in Alexandre Marcinkowski et Jérôme Wilgaux, “Automates et créatures artificielles d’Héphaïstos : entre science et fiction”, in Techniques & Culture, 43-44: Mythes. L’origine des manières de faire (2004).
[iv]“Meanwhile Thetis came to the house of Hephaistos, imperishable [aphthitos], star-bespangled, fairest of the abodes in heaven, a house of bronze wrought by the lame god’s own hands. She found him busy with his bellows, sweating and hard at work, for he was making twenty tripods that were to stand by the wall of his house, and he set wheels of gold under them all that they might go of their own selves to the assemblies [agôn] of the gods, and come back again – marvels indeed to see.” (Homer. The Iliad of Homer. Rendered into English prose for the use of those who cannot read the original. Samuel Butler. Longmans, Green and Co. 39 Paternoster Row, London. New York and Bombay. 1898, Scroll 18, v. 373-377).
[v] Aristotle, Politics, 1, 4, 1253b33-1254a. Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vol. 21, translated by H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1944.
[vi] Symptomatically, the daughter of Pandora is Pyrrha, the only woman who survived the flood – woman with titanic gene, of course – who together with her husband, the son of Prometheus Deucalion, reproduces again through magical or quasi-technical operation – through miraculous technique – the kind of the women : throwing rocks behind her shoulders that become women.
[vii] See Dora et Erwin Panofsky, La boîte de Pandore. Les métamorphoses d’un symbole mythique, Paris, Hazan, 2014 [1962], p. 14-15.
[viii] This state of infantile unproductivity, discussed also by Bataille in Literature and Evil in relation to Kafka and by Kojève in relation to the end of history, influences, through the mediation of Blanchot and Nancy’s concept of ‘désoeuvrement’, Girogio Agamben’s crypto-substantialist use of the notion, on one hand, as original state of humankind, and as messianic state, mirroring the origin, on the other (where, according to Agamben’s words, children will play the law as with toys). “One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born after it.” (Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005, p.64). Although Agamben insists on the fact that what is at issue is not ‘a more proper and original use value’ (or ‘a lost original state’, as Agamben puts it more strongly in the last sentence of his book), the figure of children playing inevitably functions as a retro-utopian figure. A brief paragraph in Agamben’s Means Without End: Notes on Politics which, in commenting upon Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, takes up a thesis already formulated in Language and Death, suggests the answer to this question, taking it in an unexpected direction: “Politics is that which corresponds to the essential inoperability [inoperosità]of humankind, to the radical being-without-work of human communities. There is politics because human beings are argōs-beings that cannot be defined by any proper operation – that is, beings of pure potentiality that no identity or vocation can possibly exhaust.” (Giorgio Agamben, “In This Exile (Italian Diary, 1992-94)”, In: Agamben, G. Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p.140) It turns out that the post-juridico-political or strictly-political state described in State of Exception is ultimately conceivable as restoration of the (lost) essence, of the idea of an anthropological substratum, that is to say, of a figure of human nature (even though it is inverted in a paradoxical way as ‘inoperative humankind’). For more details of this critical controversy, see Boyan Manchev, Logic of the Political, Sofia: Iztok-Zapad, 2012.
[ix] Lee Edelman, “The Future Is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and the Death Drive”, in Narrative, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Jan., 1998), pp. 29-30.