In this article, I go deeper into the educational meaning of tiredness. Over and against the mainstream view that tiredness is an impediment for education, I show that this phenomenon is intrinsically meaningful. My arguments are based, first, on a detailed phenomenological analysis of tiredness, as proposed by Buytendijk. Tiredness can be defined as the point where lack of willpower and lack of ability become utterly indistinguishable. Second, I turn to Agamben’s genealogy of the will, which shows that willpower was (...) invented in order to control a more original, but also more arcane sense of what it means to be able to do something: potentiality. I argue that tiredness, as analysed by Buytendijk, is a state of potentiality. As such it has the power to interrupt the contemporary ordering of society and of the realm of education, which is fully predicated upon individual wilful self-commandment. More positively speaking, tiredness has an important educational value in that it grants the opportunity of beginning anew with the world. This article is also an attempt to show how phenomenological work and genealogical approaches can inform one another. (shrink)

This article explores the uses of Agamben’s philosophy for understanding the educational meaning of practices that typically take/took place at school, such as the collective rehearsal of the alphabet or the multiplication tables. More precisely, I propose that these forms of ‘practising’ show what schooling, as a particular and historically contingent institution, is all about. Instead of immediately assessing the ‘practice of practising’ in terms of learning outcomes, I turn to Bollnow’s attempt to analyze this phenomenon in a substantially educational (...) way, which for him essentially consists in opposing practising and learning. I show that his analysis is superficial and that we need Agamben’s notion of ‘potentiality’ in order to come to grips with the sense of this phenomenon. This will allow to see that practising concerns an uncommon way to relate to a subject matter that makes possible a transformation of individual and collective existence. The main objective of this investigation is not to hold a plea for reintroducing obsolete pedagogical methods, but to rethink the very meaning of education. (shrink)

The present article investigates the rhythm of study as described by Giorgio Agamben in ‘The idea of study’, present in Idea of prose. In this short treatise, Agamben presents Melville’s scrivener Bartleby as the exemplary embodiment of study. Bartleby’s paradigmatic status, according to Agamben’s interpretation, does, however, exclude him from belonging to the ‘class of study’. Bartleby’s exclusion leads to the discovery of an unmentioned member of the ‘class of study’: Eros. The surprising absence of Eros dissolves, however, once he (...) is recuperated as the image of ‘The idea of the work’. Bartleby’s exclusion and Eros’s absent inclusion and presence as the ‘The idea of the work’ not only demonstrate the close relation between study and work, but also explain Agamben’s considerations on the connection between study and the nature of his own work. The article concludes with a call for the remaining importance of Agamben’s festina lente, the rhythm of study, within the broader context of our contemporary university institutions. Once the incessant shuttling between passion and action has been called to a halt—in favour of one of the two extremities—study becomes impossible. (shrink)

Las tecnologías de la inteligencia artificial (IA) hacen emerger con mayor fuerza una pregunta central para la filosofía contemporánea: ¿cómo se generan los desplazamientos éticos a través de la producción de nuevas formas de convivencia tecnológica? Saber en qué consisten estos desplazamientos y si contribuyen, o no, a determinados tipos de convivencia es más urgente que precipitarse a una producción de normativa que no se enfrenta a los cambios inherentes al nuevo entorno. Pero una de las consecuencias que apuntan en (...) este enfoque es que la programación, sometida a las lógicas de la anticipación, no puede resolver el problema simplemente. La programación tiende a la formación de nichos o esferas en los que los individuos se desenvuelven perdiendo visión de la complejidad; la delegación de los cálculos a las máquinas hace que disminuya no sólo la capacidad del cálculo aritmético sino la imaginación matemática, creando nichos epistémicos crecientemente reservados a las máquinas; la minería de datos borra las diferencias entre lo público y lo privado, afianzando modos de comportamiento que esquivan la autorreflexión y el escrutinio de nuestras acciones en relación al bien común. Pero ¿pueden los programas desenvolverse en un sentido contrario, fortaleciendo las destrezas epistémicas, haciendo visible la complejidad, la participación política y la diversificación de bienes comunes en un mundo tecnológicamente denso? O en otros términos, ¿podemos encontrar en ellos claves para una ética robusta de la convivencia tecnológica? Las contribuciones de este número desgranan las transformaciones en las nociones de autonomía, creatividad y precariedad en el contexto de la IA. (shrink)

Political theorists continue to be provoked by Giorgio Agamben’s disturbing diagnosis that ‘bare life’ – human life that is excluded from politics yet exposed to sovereign violence – is not a sign of the malfunction of modern politics but rather a revelation of how it actually functions. However, despite the enormous amount of attention this diagnosis has received, there has been relatively little discussion of Agamben’s proposed ‘cure’ for the problem that he diagnoses. In this article, I analyze the three (...) main concepts of Agamben’s positive philosophical program – ‘infancy,’ ‘potentiality,’ and ‘form-of-life’ – in order to show how he attempts to subvert the sovereignty of law over life with his idea of a life of habit in which life is sovereign over law. In addition to analyzing these concepts, I engage in an immanent critique of Agamben’s philosophy and contrast his vision of politics with those of other influential contemporary political theorists. I find that while Agamben’s philosophical program is almost undone by internal difficulties, it still radically challenges current theories of subjectivity, humanity, and community. (shrink)

The interest of this paper is to discover the precondition of experience. It is suggested that Walter Benjamin's meditations on Proust, as well as on the origin of the novel, lead to the verge of that discovery. A la recherche du temps perdu is less a monumental work of fiction in this view than the limit of experience – the intransmissible fact of the transience of the present – made manifest in writing. While in Proust transience gives way to its (...) recuperation as image, Thomas Bernhard's post-Proustian masterpiece Extinction mobilizes the present's destructive potential with compelling effect, and turns it upon the work of historical experience itself. (shrink)

The central strength of the Hegelian dialectical tradition is that reason is not divorced from its own internal limits in the name of a reason free from ideological mediation and constraint. This article holds onto this insight in the examination of the recent returns to religious categories in political philosophy and political theory. In this it follows a twofold logic. In the spirit of Hegel and Marx it seeks to recover what is ‘rational in religion’; at the same time, it (...) examines the continuing entanglements of politics with religious categories. That this is an atheistic and materialist project is not in a sense strange or anomalous. On the contrary, it is precisely the ‘secularisation’ of Judeo-Christian categories in Kant, Hegel and Marx's respective theorisations of history that provides the dialectical ground for the atheistic recovery and invocation of Judeo-Christian thought in recent political philosophy. Consequently, this discussion of religion, or ‘religion beyond religion’, has very little to do with the spread of obscurantism and anti-rationalism in the global upsurge of reactionary Christian and Islamic fundamentalisms, neo-pagan mysticisms, and other retreats from the real, or with the left-liberal denunciation of religion in the recent writings of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Rather, ‘religion’ here, in its Judeo-Christian legacy, is that which embodies the memory or prospect of a universal emancipatory politics. (shrink)

Those commentators who accept that Agamben offers an affirmative political project tend to hold that its realization depends upon pre-personal messianic or ontological alterations. I argue that there is another option based around the notion of individual agency that has received relatively little attention, but which clarifies whether or not Agamben holds that the transition is one that agents can participate in. By engaging with the texts “On Potentiality,” “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” and Opus Dei, I first show that he (...) develops a notion of potentiality that he claims not only underpins willing, but is also defined by an indeterminate contingency between action and non-action that undermines the binary opposition between willed action and non-action that sustains biopolitics. I then turn to the discussions of praxis, work, and poiesis in The Man without Content to determine whether Agamben thinks that other non-will-based forms of activity can contribute to the deactivation of biopolitics and, indeed,... (shrink)

The article addresses the ongoing debate about the origins of biopolitics. While Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics approached it as a modern rationality of government, Agamben’s Homo Sacer series presented biopolitics as having a longer provenance, dating back to the antiquity. These polar positions are not mutually exclusive but coexist in these and other theories of biopolitics, which approach its object as both modern and ancient, having its chronological origin in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries yet also possessing a prehistory of (...) precursors. The article interprets this dual origin in terms of Paolo Virno’s theory of historical temporality, which distinguishes between the chronological past of historical events and their potential past, which accompanies and is negated in them. Coexisting with its own unrealized potential, every historical event remains incomplete and extends itself both backwards and forwards, positing its precursors and prefiguring its future outcomes. While modern in the chronological sense, biopolitics is retrospectively inscribed in a longer historical lineage, its antecedents easily identifiable in the history of political thought. Finally, we apply this approach to Virno’s own account of the history of biopolitics, questioning his identification of past potential with labour-power. (shrink)

The article critically engages with Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Rousseau in order to explore the affinities between the two authors’ subtractive approach to political subjectivation. In The Kingdom and the Glory. Agamben argues that Rousseau’s Social Contract reproduces, in a secularized manner, the providential paradigm of government, whose origins Agamben finds in early Christianity. This paradigm establishes a fictitious articulation between transcendent sovereignty and immanent government, presenting particular acts of government as emanating from general divine laws. We shall demonstrate that (...) Rousseau was neither unaware of the problematic character of this paradigm nor did he venture to conceal its problems, but, on the contrary, he highlighted them throughout the Social Contract, whose key motif was the danger of the contamination of general will by particular acts, identities or interests. The same wariness of particularism characterizes Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker, often read as entirely heterogeneous to the political project of the Social Contract. By reading these two works together as the affirmation of generic existence against all forms of particularism, we bring Rousseau’s analysis closer to Agamben’s own attempts to rethink politics as subtracted from all identity predicates and contained in the affirmation of ‘whatever being’. The elucidation of affinities between Rousseau and Agamben will permit us to identify the limits of this subtractive approach to politics and outline an alternative to it. (shrink)

The paper addresses Giorgio Agamben’s affirmation of post-sovereign politics by analyzing his critical engagement with the Hobbesian problematic of the state of nature. Radicalizing Carl Schmitt’s criticism of Hobbes, Agamben deconstructs the distinction between the state of nature and the civil order of the Commonwealth by demonstrating the ‘inclusive exclusion’ of the former within the latter in the manner of the state of exception, which functions as a negative foundation of any positive order. Since the state of nature is no (...) longer cast as spatially external and temporally antecedent to the former, it cannot be escaped by the perfection of the legal order, nor can it itself be posited in an essentialist manner as a pre-political site uncontaminated by sovereign violence. While denying any way out of the state of exception, Agamben nonetheless argues for the possibility of its appropriation in the way that dissociates anomie from the locus of sovereignty and reclaims it as an attribute of free social praxis. The paper analyzes three central features of this ‘post-sovereign’ politics and concludes with a discussion of the differences between Schmitt and Agamben with regard to the fate of Hobbes ’s Leviathan in late modern politics. (shrink)

Agamben’s philosophy of education can be arrived at by focusing on the nexus of philology, philosophy and poetry that is prominent in his work. By exploring the functional and semantic reciprocity between these fields, one can identify diverse pedagogies: of language and the poetic voice, of infancy and history, of history redeemed (in the Benjaminian sense), of the cultural image, and of potentiality. These overlapping areas of research share the common trait of Agamben’s personalism, which embraces the view that education (...) expands the affective and spiritual wholeness of the person. (shrink)

Agamben’s notion of the ‘paradigm’ has far-reaching implications for educational thinking, curriculum design and pedagogical conduct. In his approach, examples—or paradigms—deeply engage our powers of analogy, enabling us to discern previously unseen affinities among singular objects by stepping outside established systems of classification. In this way we come to envision novel groupings, new patterns of connection—that nonetheless do not simply reassemble those singular objects into yet another rigidly fixed set or class. Agamben sees this sort of ‘paradigmatic understanding’ as our (...) richest source of intelligibility. For Agamben the paradigm is ultimately about learning to see again, starting not with already perfectly known and categorized objects (or ideas), but rather with a fresh experience of one individual object and the analogical relations it may have to others, and to novel groupings that may arise. The paradigm is a method, a way in which educators might respond to a wide range of educational challenges. For a paradigmatic relation suspends while exposing, deactivates while revealing, complicates while clarifying. But articulating the enigmatic paradigmatic relation between example and class is far more than a method. It is epistemological (a way of knowing and conception of knowledge), ethical (a fostering of freedom from presupposed categories and reified principles) and ontological (a type of being that exposes the potential of knowing and communicating—their intelligibility and communicability). In these qualities, paradigms exhibit to educators a free, a new use of singularities. (shrink)

In the ways that they currently link images and bodies, online computer games are not just a new form of commodity. As toys, they also materialise a collective, historical temporality. Disjunctions in the timing and spacing of action in computer game play suggest a different kind of temporality might be involved in the formation of contemporary collectives. These games highlight the role of ‘realtime’ in the constitution of an experience of speed. Through Giorgio Agamben's notion of the whatever body, and (...) a particular realtime game, this paper argues that computer games can help locate certain rhythms and times associated with globalised informatic collectives. The whatever body provides a way of negotiating the globalised yet inessential commonality of information, in terms of a temporality which wavers between a‐historical synchronisation and singular events. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the importance of Giorgio Agamben’s theory of potentiality for rethinking education. While potentiality has been a long-standing concern for educational practitioners and theorists, Agamben’s work is unique in that it emphasizes how potentiality can only be thought of in relation to impotentiality. This moment of indistinction—what I refer to as im-potential—has important implications. First, I argue that if potentiality and impotentiality are separated from one another, the result is a stratified educational system where some students (...) are commanded to actualize their potentiality in the form of standardized tests while others are abandoned by the system. Second, thinking im-potentiality enables us to move beyond problematic formulations of learning and rediscover the uniqueness of studying. Here, I offer a brief example of study through an analysis of ‘Tinkering Schools’, an alternative program founded by Gever Tulley in San Francisco. And finally, without a concept of im-potentiality, the discourse of the ‘child genius’ becomes commodified as a power to be harnessed and actualized in the name of neoliberal entrepreneurialism. Only through a return to im-potentiality can we reclaim Genius and its relationship to the question of educational freedom. (shrink)

In response to the growing emphasis on learning outcomes, life-long learning, and what could be called the learning society, scholars are turning to alternative educational logics that problematize the reduction of education to learning. In this article, we draw on these critics but also extend their thinking in two ways. First, we use Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze to posit two educational logics—tinkering and hacking, respectively—that suspend and render inoperative learning logics, expectations, and evaluative metrics. Second, we argue that contemporary (...) artists and designers such as Katerina Kamprani and Grupo de Arte Callejero have much to offer educational philosophers and theorists interested in practices of suspension. In conclusion, we suggest ways in which educators can tinker with and hack into the curriculum by playing with the quintessential embodiment of learning: the test. (shrink)

The distinction between toys and games is built into grammar itself: one plays games but plays with toys. Although some thinkers have recognized the importance of the distinction, their insights are often contradictory and vague, and the word toy is used unsystematically to refer to a wide range of objects and associated play-activities. To remedy this problem a phenomenological approach to play could be helpful, but those that exist rarely discuss the difference between forms of play, instead using playfulness as (...) ambiguous shorthand for freedom from rules. Beginning with Charles Baudelaire’s 1853 essay, “The Philosophy of Toys,” the author surveys and synthesizes various theories of toys to produce a detailed account of those objects that conduce to toy-play, focusing on insignificance as the defining phenomenological quality of toys. He then uses speech act theory to offer a definition of a toy—an invitation to play with its identity—and explores how the existence of such an invitation depends not only on the intrinsic qualities of the object of play, but also its context and the identity of the player. (shrink)

This essay offers an exegesis and critique of the moment of community formation in Agamben’s Homo Sacer Project. In The Sacrament of Language, Agamben searches for the site of a non-sovereign community founded upon the oath [horkos, sacramentum]: an ancient institution of language that produces and guarantees the connection between speech and the order of things by calling the god as a witness to the speaker’s fidelity. I argue that Agamben’s account ultimately falls short of subverting sovereignty, however, because the (...) sacramentum derives its power, at a fundamental level, from the ‘monothetic’ structure of truth—what Agamben calls ‘the name of God’ [il nome di Dio]. I propose we may yet salvage the oath as a means of subverting sovereignty, however, if we reconsider it in the context of polytheism, where the names of the gods [i nomi degli dei] can be many, while remaining powerful. First, through a reading of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, I argue that the Greeks understood the oath to function even where truth and falsity were inherently undecidable. Second, I argue that if we separate the truth and power functions interwoven in the sacramentum, we find a second formula, the decisory oath, which can be taken in order to produce a community even in the absence of one sovereign truth. As a kind of magical speech, the decisory oath provides the limit conditions for the possibility of distinguishing true from false in the sacramentum, and thus founds it. (shrink)

This text is based on a staged dialogue conceived by Alice Lagaay and Juliane Schiffers, which closed the conference ‘How not to speak’ at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin on 22 April. Critical comments and questions emerging from the discussion that took place on that day are reflected in ‘Voice Off’.

This is a paper about the way language meshes with life. It focuses on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later work, and compares it with Leo Tolstoy and Saint Augustine’s confessions. My aim is to better understand in this way what it means to have meaning in language, as well as meaning in life.

In this paper, I argue that potentialism is uniquely able to articulate the value of educational practices that lack the kind of directionality commonly associated with educational activities. It does so by operating with radically different assumptions about the nature and value of education – assumptions that can be derived from the basic premise of progressive education that education needs to be rooted in experience. I follow here a line of thought that leads from Dewey’s notion of experience aimed at (...) new and better experiences, to Ivan Illich’s emphasis on the experience of the new, to Gert Biesta’s idea that education needs to allow students to bring something new into the world, to Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons’ emphasis on the experience of the possibility of the new. Finally, drawing from the work of Giorgio Agamben and Tyson E. Lewis, I show how a potentialist notion of experience operates with a different temporality, enabling us to think of the experience of the potentiality of the new as such as what accounts for the educational value of non-directional practices – not only in spite of, but because of their lack of directionality. (shrink)

This response to Tomba’sMarx’s Temporalitieshomes in on its critical interrogation of linear conceptions of development which have distorted Marxism’s capacity to seize the present. The article foregrounds the resources on which Tomba draws, from Walter Benjamin’s theses on history to Marx’s account of the struggles over the working day, and enlists them in an encounter with the questions of unevenness, archaism and pre-capitalism in Postcolonial theory, as well as in the attempts to ‘overcome modernity’ that marked the thought and practice (...) of interwar fascism in Europe and Japan. (shrink)

The article argues that the contentious and complex concept of ‘authenticity’, which Agamben develops from Heidegger, forms a central continuity between Agamben’s earlier work, which focuses more on language and art, and his later work, which focuses more on politics. Moreover, I suggest that although this concept is often unquestioned and elided in his work, it plays a crucial role in the deep structures of his thought. Moreover, the ‘unthought concept’ of ‘authenticity’ is of concern because, while authenticity might possibly (...) have a role to play in the sphere of how we come to understand and relate to artworks, there are reasons to be suspicious of this concept in the political realm if, indeed, these two ‘realms’ can be understood separately. If these two spheres cannot be clearly separated, as seems more likely, then it is even more important to explore and question the terms and cluster of concepts around ‘authenticity’. (shrink)

This essay seeks to articulate the many implications which Giorgio Agamben's work holds for theology. It aims, therefore, to examine his conceptualizations of language in light of particular historical glosses on the “name of God” and the nature of the “mystical,” as well as to highlight the political task of profanation, one of his most central concepts, in relation to the logos said to embody humanity's “religious” quest to find its Voice. As such, we see how he challenges those standard (...) notions of transcendence which have been consistently aligned with various historical forms of sovereignty. In addition, I intend to present his redefinition of revelation as solely the unveiling of the “name of God” as the fact of our linguistic being, a movement from the transcendent divine realm to the merely human world before us. By proceeding in this manner, this essay tries to close in on one of the largest theological implications contained within Agamben's work: the establishment of an ontology that could only be described as a form of “absolute” immanence, an espousal of some form of pantheism yet to be more fully pronounced within his writings. (shrink)

This article seeks to lay out an analysis of Giorgio Agamben’s central claims with regard to the formation of a theory of citationality. By juxtaposing Walter Benjamin’s theory of citations alongside his more recent, critical engagements with the Western theological tradition, Agamben sets himself the goal of redefining ethics along Levinasian lines in order to arrive at a respect for the face of ‘whatever’ being before us, the true source towards which all citations point.

Breath is a perceptual practice, a form of listening, of attending. These words begin to mark out the unique space of this thesis. It is ‘written from the breath’, a stance that breaks free of the silencing of breath in contemporary language theory. Importantly, the thesis makes the large claim that the closing down of conceptual breathing spaces in the twentieth century parallels the asphyxiation of a spiritual connection with the world. This is seen by Helen Sharp, the author of (...) this posthumous thesis, as ‘the loss of the profane halo’. Sharp acknowledges a debt to Georgio Agamben’s notion of the ‘Halo’ in The Coming Community as composed of a ‘tiny displacement’. She identifies such displacements as breath movement. ‘Each breath event develops as a potentiality of relationship where self is re-conceived and born anew in tiny little flutters…’ of each inhalation and exhalation. Here lies the core of her thinking where the movement of life surges forth in the ‘imperceptible trembling of the finite’. This, she writes, is equivalent to ‘the illuminated field of the breath as halo’. Moving into the realm of the artistic-poetic, the thesis itself comes to take on the character of a work of art. Its three edges are written dialogues, performance prologues, and breath practice including breath dialogue. (shrink)

The Depression Era collective started as several photographers and video artists joined forces in March of 2011 to create an archive of photographic images about the Greek economic crisis, amidst the social and political upheaval provoked by ongoing austerity impositions of the EU on the Greek economy. In this essay, I examine selected images from Depression Era, including images from Marinos Tsagkarakis’s series Non-Places of Transition, Yannis Hadjiaslanis’s series After Dark, Pavlos Fisakis’s series Nea Elvetia, and Georges Salameh’s series Spleen. (...) Bringing together Marxist philosophical approaches to aesthetics, via Walter Benjamin and Jean Luc-Nancy, I argue that these photographers’ work is a performative undoing of capitalist understandings of linear time that capture and foster desires for alternative radical temporalities, for non-capitalist senses of time. I discuss how these works disrupt linear notions of time as progress, and as measure of productivity and economic growth, which are intrinsic to modernity, and the creation of financial debt. Against capitalist linear temporality, these Depression Era photographs enable a performative encounter, a realm of visual experimentation in which the spectator is invited to feel time differently, to imagine different alternative temporalities that emerge from the collapse of capitalism. (shrink)

This article argues that Giorgio Agamben’s conceptions of kairos and messianic time are essentially to be understood in terms of experience. This becomes clear when we identify the methodological similarities between Agamben’s reading of Paulus in The Time That Remains and Heidegger’s lectures on Paulus from 1920-21: the doctrine of kairology is different from any eschatology, insofar as it involves an instantaneous modulation of our factical conditions, rather than a removal of them to come. In this way, I argue that (...) Agamben echoes Heidegger’s conception of formal indication and enactment-sense. But whereas Heidegger understood this modulation as an anticipatory resoluteness, in which Dasein identifies itself with its calling, Agamben emphasizes the very impossibility of such an identification. This is indeed a decisive difference between Agamben and Heidegger. I show, however, that Agamben phrases this difference in a language that recalls Heidegger’s thought, thus implicitly suggesting that the emancipatory potential of his philosophy is to be understood as the experiential enactment of an impotentiality that undermines any factical condition and any social identity. (shrink)

In the context of the blurring of boundaries between club and theatre, game and theatre, and party and theatre, experiential spectatorship is spilling into the mainstream. This article starts from the recognition of the rapid rise of the experience economy as a turning point in consumer culture towards a specific appeal to the sensory body. The definition of experience in this analysis is key and a distinction is made between experience as it passes moment by moment, erlebnis, and experience as (...) something that is cumulatively built up over time, erfahrung. This paper asks, in a society defined by the crisis of experience, does this rise of the experiential in theatre simply reflect the reduction of experience to a series of consumable sensory moments or is there a mode of experience modelled through performance interaction which moves both beyond this established mode of experience and also beyond the notion of experience as cumulatively formed wisdom? Drawing a parallel between established popular cultural practices of the body and those of the spectator in spectacular promenade performance, Fuerzabruta is used as an illustrative example of popular experiential performance and Hwang’s The Road as an example of experiential performance in which a transformative aesthetic is made possible. (shrink)

Na sledi Badioujeve »metafizike realne sreče« razprava raziskuje psihoanalitične in filozofske razlage melanholije, z namenom razviti komplementarno metafiziko žalosti. Trdimo namreč, da melanholije ne moremo zvesti na trpljenje posameznika, obsojenega na svojo končnost, temveč je tudi sama, podobno kot Badioujeva realna sreča, povezana z neskončnostjo, subjektivnostjo in resnico. Do te teze pridemo tako, da pokažemo, kako osrednja značilnost melanholičnega objekta ni njegova izgubljenost, temveč njegova nedoločenost in monadična struktura. Melanholija proizvaja takšne objekte, ki se po eni strani zdijo realnosti tuji, (...) po drugi pa omogočajo subjektivno in fikcijsko razvitje drugih možnih svetov. (shrink)