Abstract

In The Man Without Content (1970), his first published book, Giorgio Agamben calls for a “destruction of aesthetics.” According to Agamben, aesthetics has to be overcome since it prevents the experience of art as the original and privileged space of our “doing” by splitting art into the passivity of the recipient and the purposeful artistic productivity. This article aims to show that Agamben develops, discussing Nietzsche’s concepts of the artist and Heidegger’s exegesis of Nietzsche, the anthropological paradigm of an interested man who transcends the opposition artist versus recipient and draws the sense of his “doing” from presentification (poie¯sis) and the intensity of the experience of a “being-for-itself” rather than from deliberate production (praxis) and consumption. Currently, however, this paradigm is graspable only negatively by means of the paradox conception of the “potentiality not to” that does not end up in materiality but expresses itself in reflexivity that obtains its force by the creative-formal interruption of the logic of producing.