Kierkegaard and the Figure of Form-of-Life

Much attention has been paid to the influence that Carl Schmitt and his writings on the exception have had on the thought of Giorgio Agamben. Yet much less attention has been paid to how Søren Kierkegaard’s existentialist writings can inform Agamben’s philosophy, and specifically his figure of form-of-life. Agamben’s work is driven by a desire to explore a politics exemplified by the figure of form-of-life. If bare life is the result of biopolitical operations of sovereign power, then form-of-life is the figure of the coming politics which seeks to deactivate those modes of power that create and sustain bare life. I argue that form-of-life needs to be read as an existentialist figure, and that Kierkegaard’s own writings can shed light on this elusive concept. Form-of-life is a life lived in a non-relational ethical existence, not lived through identity politics or relationality. Rather, through ‘contact’ with other forms-of-life (contact refers to Agamben’s own form of proposed relation with others), and in living a life of contemplative use, it deactivates the appropriative biopolitics that constantly divides and separates life. I argue that form-of-life should instead be read as a new interpretation of Kierkegaard’s claim that the self results from the fact that the human being is a synthesis through which its existence is defined. In an existentialist reading of form-of-life, I illustrate how form-of-life is subject to a continual process of repetition, an existential process that is always already happening.