1989). The introduction to the first has been translated into English as “The Genesis of the Individual" and appears in Incorporations, eds. J. Crary and S. Kwinter.
xxxviii. Indeed, Simondon's analysis of individuation parallels Agamben's understanding of potentiality as the potentiality not to be: in both cases, it is the domain of the nonactual—of the nonactual in principle, as what need never be actualized—that provides the margin of indetermination necessary for the subject to remain in continual genesis.
xxxix. It thus puts to work the very conception of the human advanced by Agamben: "There is in effect something that humans are and have to be, but this something is not an essence or properly a thing: It is the simple fact of one's own existence as possibility or potentiality." (1993, 43).
xxxx. Muriel Combes and Bernard Aspe make a similar point with regard to Agamben's analysis of"bare life" in Homo Sacer. According to them, Agamben's intuition that politics is already contained within bare life requires a displacement of the couple zoē/bios as the basis for political thinking. Rather, the task is to “understand on which basis a collective subjectivation is constructed, to understand, for example, in what way affective life, already in itself something entirely other than mere life in the biological sense, is through and through [d'emblée] political, in what way the collective as such finds itself always already engaged" ("Retour sur le 'camp' comme paradigme biopolitique," 19). In a sense, Agamben's invocation of Simondon can be understood as responding to this injunction because it replaces the motif of Homo Sacer—namely, the search for an occulted indistinction between zoe and bios—with the concept of an internal relationality.
CHAPTER 4
Although the media component of the project as described here was scrapped due to financial constraints, the uncertain status of all of Diller + Scofidio's work on the cusp between art/architecture and theory emboldens me to treat it as an unrealized yet essential conceptual dimension of the Blur project. Put another way, in addition to being a temporary built project in the world, the Blur Building exists as work of embodied conceptual art preserved in the archive of traces that document its making and that include—as a central core of its drama—the media components.
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