Nietzsche’s Agamben and his critics of politics as physiology

Abstract

In this article, we analyze some peculiarities of Agamben’s reading of Nietzsche: his use of the German thinker’s ideas to constitute his political philosophy. Thus, we reflect on the tension and polyphony between the will to
power in its physiopsychological configuration and great politics based on the transvaluation of values. We indicate this tension and polyphony given the other type of potency to which Agamben subscribes, the Aristotelian one, to think about the political openings revealed by the Nietzschean critique of politics and liberal democracy. It is worth paying attention to Piazzesi’s argument that the will to power synthesizes the mechanistic and evaluative scopes, which explain the will to power in an agonistic relationship. The Homo Sacer project begins and ends
with a critique of biopolitics that Agamben understands as Nietzschean. This is a tension between the realization of the transvaluation of values as a possibility of overcoming nihilism and creating the ballast for great politics, as it inserts a political issue in physiology, the paradigm of autonomy. With their divergent conceptions of potency, Nietzsche and Agamben point to the possibilities of
politics and the limits of liberal democracy.