Abstract

The article conceptualizes Agamben’s inoperativity from a historicized perspective, discussing how inoperative or “falling” works of art can reveal the limits of neoliberal capitalism. It discusses contemporary works by Guy Ben-Ner and Ragnar Kjartansson as paradigmatic examples of the ways art reveals the limits and exhaustion or falling of late neoliberalism, particularly in relation to its fusion of work, affective labour, and performance. Relying on Sianne Ngai’s aesthetic categories of the zany and the interesting and Alenka Zupančič’s notions of the comic, the article examines how said categories, as they function in a comic manner in the artists’ works, suspend (rather than negate) the neoliberal order. The essay has two purposes: first, they illustrate the waning ideological influence of neoliberalism, signalling its “passing away,” and discuss how art can “tell time” and engage with historicity. Second, this essay demonstrates how art can encapsulate a frozen-dialectical process of “falling down” or Giorgio Agamben’s Inoperativity – representing its own arrival at its formal limit, its exhaustion albeit without its negation. However, unlike Agamben’s accepted use of the concept, here Inoperativity and the potential it opens is historicized – and appears as a response to late neoliberalism, suspending its forms without negating them.