The Biographical Imaginary: Giorgio Agamben and the Salvation of the Real

Abstract

This article examines Giorgio Agamben’s attempt to invent a way of escaping the real as something that is based on an economization of life that believes life to be a set of counted facts. As an alternative, Agamben proposes to understand life as uncounted. To do so, he turns to the case of Ettore Majorana’s disappearance, presenting this case not as the escape of an
eccentric genius, but as the only possible gesture of the manifestation of the real. In his later work, Agamben develops his approach, supplementing it with the concept of the unlived, whose mask becomes Pulcinella, who does not simply escape from the economization of life, but becomes the carrier of a different, parodic economy.