Skepticism is often understood in terms of its epistemological implications alone, namely that we cannot have any certain knowledge. Throughout the history of philosophy, skepticism has been an important partner in conversation for exactly its epistemological position – if only to reject what many consider its unwanted outcomes. In the work of Giorgio Agamben, however, we find another way of retrieving some of the basic terms and concerns of ancient skepticism for ontology. Agamben shows that the skeptic's philosophical vocabulary allows us to articulate an alternative to both the affirmation of being characteristic of ontotheology, as well as the negation of being that characterizes contemporary forms of nihilism.

In this essay, I explore how Agamben retrieves ancient skepticism and how this skepticism informs some of his basic concepts. While Agamben sometimes explicitly refers to the influence of skepticism, at other occasions, his arguments and thoughts are merely marked by several skeptical traces which need to be brought out in a reading of his texts; it is worthwhile to consider both. To examine the skeptical heritage of Agamben's work and its implication for, especially, his accounts of contingency and potentiality which form the heart of his ontological concerns, in this contribution I discuss three different elements: (1) the skeptic formulae, and in particular Agamben's account of ἐποχή and οὐ μᾶƛƛον; (2) the skeptic passage that may be traced in his usage of the word ϵὐπορία, which requires some contextualization to understand its meaning and its skeptic kinship; (3) the skeptic overtones in Agamben's reading of the Pauline notion of καταργϵῖν, deactivation or suspension.

THE SKEPTIC FORMULA

One of the most important references to skepticism can be found in Agamben's essay “Bartleby, or on Contingency.” This complicated essay offers a reading of Herman Melville's story Bartleby, the Scrivener in which this story becomes a special kind of experiment, an experiment in ontology. As Agamben explains: