Beyond Presupposing Structure: On Agamben's Onto-logy

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's thought on biopolitics has been influential, but ontological problems in his work, which are important from his first publications to his most recent writings, have been relatively neglected. Agamben characterizes Western ontology as having always considered the problem of being and that of language together: by inserting a hyphen into the word ontology, Agamben calls attention to the relationship between these two elements. This essay addresses presupposing structure, a central concept in Agamben's ontological thinking and the thing he criticizes most. Certain researchers, such as Oliva (2014) and Luzi (2017), have emphasized its importance for understanding Agamben's thought, although scholars in Japan have neglected it. This presupposition is, in his thought, the fundamental operation of Western philosophy, beginning with Aristotle's ontology. Here, we first reconstruct Agamben's analysis of presupposing structure in his reading of Aristotle in Use of Bodies (2014), and argue that this consists of two processes. First, something (being, substance) is divided into two terms, and one (particular existence, primary substance) is extracted from the other (general essence, secondary substance). I call this separation. Second, the excluded is then brought into the opposite term as its presupposition. I call this aspect articulation. This dual operation opens the possibility of language. That is, in Aristotle, the primary substance is identified with the subject (hypokeimenon), which makes all predication possible but is not sayable as such; therefore, the separation of being corresponds to the separation between the linguistic and the non-linguistic. Second, we focus on Agamben's proposal for overcoming presupposing structure. He introduces an important concept in The Signature of All Things (2008), that of the paradigm. Analyzing this concept in two aspects (neutralization of dichotomy, self-referentiality), we clarify Agamben's own ontology, which is not founded in the separation of being. In short, paradigm works as a tertium quid with respect to the general and the particular, suspending that dichotomy. If the thought of being bears a close relationship with the thought of language in Western philosophy, and Agamben is able to do without that relationship, Agamben's view of language must be investigated. This essay, finally, sketches out that view, as expressed in his recent writing, in which he gives a singular interpretation of Plato's Seventh Letter. This paper indicates the importance of ontological issues in Agamben's thought through a focus on the concept of presupposing structure