Style and Manner in the Work of Giorgio Agamben

In the proposed paper I engage with the concepts of style and manner in Giorgio Agamben’s thought. In artistic creation, Agamben defines style as the general and trans-individual element in art, such as a genre, technique or a recognizable way of doing art. Manner, on the other hand, denotes the idiosyncrasy and originality of an individual artist. It is the continuous tension between the two – mastery of a given style and a simultaneous suspension of it in the form of the artist’s unique mannerism – that Agamben argues to be present in every authentic form of artistic creation. In this sense, manner can be approached as a profanatory gesture that allows the artist to play and experiment with a style, this way opening it to a new use. Apart from being restricted to discussions of aesthetic practices, the focus on manners may be argued to form a specific line of development in the later work of Agamben. In this paper I attempt to demonstrate how mannerism may be applied to analyses of established forms of political praxis. In Western discourses of politics, at least three conventional conceptions of political action may be discerned: the politics of voluntary public action (praxis), the politics of production and governmental ruling (poiesis) and the politics of expression (identity politics). Inspired by Agamben’s concepts of style and manner, we will approach these conceptions as political styles formed within apparatuses of the Western (bio)political tradition and explore how the idea of manner may illuminate aspects of them that usually escape the eye.