Colilli, P., 2015, Agamben and the Signature of Astrology: Spheres of Potentiality, 10-11
Astrology is a potentiality precisely because it contains data that is (im)potential and void until it comes into contact with something that activates the content into a communicable entity, while still conserving its impotentiality. Along with being a potentiality, astrology is also a signature that gives rise to an unprecedented ontological epistemology: “Only because astrology . . . had conjoined heaven and earth, the divine and the human, in a single subject of fate (in the work of Creation)” writes Agamben in Infancy and History, “was science able to unify within a new ego both science and experience, which hitherto had designated two distinct subjects.” In a subsequent chapter we will explore the extent to which this intuition offered by Agamben opens up the potential for an “astrological” reading of his theories. Astrology’s contribution was to have created a link between the stars’ pneumatology and the experiences lived by the human body, thus creating a sort of bio-pneumatology. This is consistent with the astrological tradition where there is the contamination of the celestial body with the human body, eternity with the transitory nature of historical time, as in the specific case of melothesia, that is, the assigning of various parts of the body to the influence of the various signs of the zodiac. One of Agamben’s writings that particularly lends itself to an astrological reading of his thought is, as lready intimated, The Open, whose purpose was to continue the line of investigation found in the previous works such as Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), and Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (1998), but with an eidetic orientation.
Colilli, P., 2015, Agamben and the Signature of Astrology: Spheres of Potentiality. Lanham/ Boulder/ Nova Iorque/ Londres: Lexington Books.
