Developing a notion ofered by Giorgio Agamben, Dominic Pettman considers the problem of the interchangeable yet irreplaceable in terms of “whatever being.” For Pettman, as for Agamben, whatever being points to new modes of community and new forms of personality anticipated by the dissolution of inscriptions of identity through citizenship, ethnicity, and other modern markers of belonging. Describing the character actor as exemplary of whatever being, Pettman glosses the concept as “an enactment of existence without qualities, or at least qualities so interchangeable and obvious that they erase all identity.” In positive terms, whatever being is a tag for the “sheer generic potentiality of being.”<sup>6</sup>
Agamben emphasizes that the “whatever” in whatever being relates not to singularity as indiference to a common property, “but only in its being such that it is.” He writes:
In this conception, such-and-such being is reclaimed from its having this or that property, which identifies it as belonging to this or that set, to this or that class (the reds, the French, the Muslims)—and it is reclaimed not for another class nor for the simple generic absence of any belonging, but for its being-such, for belonging itself. Thus being-such, which remains constantly hidden in the condition of belonging (“there is an x such that it belongs to y”) and which is in no way a real predicate, comes to light itself: The singularity exposed as such is whatever you want, that is lovable.<sup>7</sup>
There is belonging, but not to anything in particular. Something in particular is, insofar as it belongs. Asking “to what?” Pettman and Agamben suggest, mistakenly prioritizes the set over the very condition of belonging. What matters is belonging, not that to which one belongs.
At the same time, mattering triggers an intervention into what could seem little more than another way of designating indiference. Mattering matters. It’s the interjection or scission of love and desire, of wanting. What matters stands out from the mass or multiple because it matters. As Pettman suggests, that I love it, desire it, separates it from the endless, open, uncountable set of indistinguishable members.
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