Having closely followed Giorgio Agamben’s writings for some years, I welcomed the chance to critically evaluate his Creation and Anarchy for this journal. For art historians and others concerned with visual and material culture today this work seemed an irresistible challenge. So it is with some regret that I must report, after closely reading these essays, that I find the author’s perspectives on the history and theory of the visual arts in these essays embarrassingly parochial and ill-informed (see Emerling, 2019). The five texts published in Creation and Anarchy reproduce, with minor variations, lectures presented between 2012 and 2013 at the Mendrisio Academy of Architecture in the Italian-speaking Swiss canton of Ticino. The texts are ‘Archaeology of the Work of Art’, ‘What Is the Act of Creation?’, ‘The Inappropriable’, ‘What Is a Command?’, and ‘Capitalism as a Religion’. My disappointment with Agamben’s thoughts on art, philosophy, and Walter Benjamin’s insight about ‘capitalism as religion’ is best conveyed by Agamben’s own coy absence of a conclusion about these pressing issues: ‘interrupting my brief archaeology of the capitalist religion. There will not be a conclusion. I think, in fact, that in philosophy as in art, we cannot “conclude” a work: we can only abandon it, as Giacometti said of his canvases’ (p. 77).

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评论：乔治·阿甘本，创作与无政府状态：艺术作品与资本主义的宗教

在密切关注乔治·阿甘本 (Giorgio Agamben) 的著作多年后，我很高兴有机会为这本期刊批判性地评估他的创作和无政府状态。对于当今关注视觉和物质文化的艺术史学家和其他人来说，这项工作似乎是一个不可抗拒的挑战。因此，在仔细阅读这些文章后，我必须遗憾地报告，我发现作者在这些文章中对视觉艺术的历史和理论的看法非常狭隘且信息不足（参见 Emerling，2019）。在 Creation and Anarchy 上发表的五篇文章复制了 2012 年至 2013 年在讲意大利语的瑞士提契诺州门德里西奥建筑学院的讲座，但略有不同。这些文本是“艺术作品考古学”、“什么是创作行为？”、“不可挪用”、“什么是命令？”、和“作为宗教的资本主义”。我对阿甘本关于艺术、哲学的思想以及沃尔特·本雅明关于“作为宗教的资本主义”的见解的失望最好通过阿甘本自己对这些紧迫问题的腼腆缺乏结论来表达：“打断了我对资本主义宗教的简短考古学。不会有结论。我认为，事实上，在哲学和艺术中，我们不能“总结”一部作品：我们只能放弃它，正如贾科梅蒂谈到他的画布时所说的那样（第 77 页）。