An Architecture Exposed to the Facticity of its Being (as something amidst Nothing), Subtracted from Identity or Function
"Thus potentiality without relation to the law is nothing other than inoperative praxis that neither sustains nor institutes a form of order but rather deactivates it, dissolving the relation between law and life, norm and fact, established in the state of exception. In his ‘Critique of Violence’ Benjamin terms this mode of action that is neither law preserving nor law-establishing ‘divine violence’. While this esoteric concept has given rise to numerous divergent interpretations, Agamben understands divine violence as a ‘pure means’ that has lost every relationship to any end and merely manifests its own pure mediality. Similarly to the already familiar concepts of ‘whatever being’ and ‘being-thus’ a pure means is a being wholly exposed in the facticity of its being, subtracted from an identity or function and for this reason available for new forms of use. Divine violence is pure not in the sense of its transcendent or unearthly origin but in the same sense that Benjamin’s ‘universal language’ was pure in being devoid of any signifying content, saying nothing but its own communicability: ‘To a word that does not bind, that neither commands nor prohibits anything, but says only itself, would correspond an action as pure means, which shows only itself, without any relation to an end’."
Sergei Prozorov, Agamben and Politics
"Thus potentiality without relation to the law is nothing other than inoperative praxis that neither sustains nor institutes a form of order but rather deactivates it, dissolving the relation between law and life, norm and fact, established in the state of exception. In his ‘Critique of Violence’ Benjamin terms this mode of action that is neither law preserving nor law-establishing ‘divine violence’. While this esoteric concept has given rise to numerous divergent interpretations, Agamben understands divine violence as a ‘pure means’ that has lost every relationship to any end and merely manifests its own pure mediality. Similarly to the already familiar concepts of ‘whatever being’ and ‘being-thus’ a pure means is a being wholly exposed in the facticity of its being, subtracted from an identity or function and for this reason available for new forms of use. Divine violence is pure not in the sense of its transcendent or unearthly origin but in the same sense that Benjamin’s ‘universal language’ was pure in being devoid of any signifying content, saying nothing but its own communicability: ‘To a word that does not bind, that neither commands nor prohibits anything, but says only itself, would correspond an action as pure means, which shows only itself, without any relation to an end’."
Sergei Prozorov, Agamben and Politics
