47
* Morrisey College of Arts and Sciences, Boston College
Filozofski vestnik  |  Volume XXXIX  |  Number 3  |  2018  |  47–70
Frances L. Restuccia*
The Glorious Body: 
Agambenian Non-Unveilable Nudity in Art
1
“In fact, the Messiah involves the deactivation of the veil.”
1
Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory
2
How does art figure into Agamben’s philosophy? This essay will explore Agam-
ben’s conception of art in general—excavating within it his notions of the mes-
sianic and nudity in order to infer his idea of the nude. What does nudity in art 
signify from an Agambenian standpoint? 
The answer has nothing to do with aesthetics. In The Use of Bodies, Agamben 
states unequivocally that “artistic practice ... belongs above all to ethics and 
not to aesthetics”
3
. He regards the split in art history between poiesis and praxis 
as unfortunate especially since it enabled the rise of aesthetics, transforming 
art into non-art. How we might extricate art from the “swamp of aesthetics and 
technics” is one of Agamben’s major challenges
4
. Especially given that we can 
discern his sense of the messianic in his descriptions of pre- and non-aestheti-
cized art and that his concept of the messianic is imbricated with his notion of 
nudity, this essay proposes that Agamben’s philosophy of nudity, or his “ontol-
ogy of nudity,” as I call it, is a way of healing the fracture between poiesis and 
praxis that paved the way to aesthetics.
But what then is the role, in this process of defeating aesthetics, of the nude fig-
ure in art? Perhaps art has maintained itself all along, even during the reign of 
1
 This article is a small part of my book Agamben's Political Ontology of Nudity in Literature 
and Art, forthcoming from Routledge in 2019.
2
 Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy 
and Government (Homo Sacer II, 2), trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (with Matteo Mandarini), Stan-
ford: Stanford UP , 2011.
3
 Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies, trans. Adam Kotsko, Stanford: Stanford UP, 2015,  
p. 247.
4
 Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans. Giorgia Albert, Stanford: Stanford UP , 
1994, p. 67.

48
frances l. restuccia
aesthetics that seemed to turn it into non-art, and nudity in art is the persistent 
symptom of that survival?
This essay will zero in on Agamben’s view of art through his concepts of the 
messianic and nudity and deduce from it the significance of “the nude” in art 
history. If nudity is a way of closing the gap between poiesis and praxis and 
thereby combatting aesthetics (as aesthetics was enabled by that split), it seems 
possible that the persistent nude figure in art, for Agamben, serves as a contin-
uous and forceful reminder that art conveys the medieval notion of “haecce! 
there is nothing other than this”
5
 along with a “special trembling”—such are 
the messianic coordinates of nudity, as I shall explain—and that therefore art 
never quite collapsed into “non-art,” after all. Moreover, insofar as art may be 
rediscovered through “nudity,” as it folds together poiesis and praxis, art can 
awaken us to the intimate contact of poiesis and praxis in life itself, allowing us 
to reclaim our poetic status in the world, thus configuring our lives as “form-of-
life.” For Agamben writes that the “place where one is made to feel most force-
fully the urgency and, at the same time, the difficulty of the constitution of a 
form-of-life” is art
6
. To Agamben, painters, poets, and thinkers, or anyone “who 
practices a poiesis and an activity,” render “inoperative the works of language, 
of vision, of bodies” as they “constitute their life as form-of-life,” thereby mod-
eling such a life for their viewers and readers.
7
 
Art’s Wedding of Poiesis and Praxis
In The Man Without Content, Agamben notes a split, as early as antiquity, in 
Greek philosophy between poiesis and praxis that unfortunately facilitated the 
rise of aesthetics that to him has sucked the life blood out of art. The Greeks, 
Agamben points out, “made a clear distinction between poiesis (poiein, ‘to pro-
duce’ in the sense of bringing into being) and praxis (prattein, ‘to do’ in the 
sense of acting)”
8
. Praxis involved the will expressing itself immediately in the 
act, whereas poiesis signified “pro-duction into presence, the fact that some-
thing passed from nonbeing to being.” Poiesis to the Greeks was an involun-
5
 Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatell, Stanford: Stanford 
UP , 2011, p. 90. 
6
 Agamben, The Use of Bodies, p. 247.
7
 Ibid.
8
 Agamben, The Man Without Content, p. 70. 

49
the glorious body: agambenian non-unveilable nudity in art
tary “mode of truth understood as unveiling,” and because of such unveiling’s 
“essential proximity to truth,” Aristotle assigned “a higher position to poiesis 
than to praxis”
9
. Now, today it is “work” that has ascended to the highest level, 
while poiesis has undergone an eclipse. In The Man Without Content, Agamben 
laments the resulting demise of art that serves as a measure of man’s experi-
ence—an art in which, for him, poiesis and praxis are wrapped together.
However, Plato at least feared the poet for being dangerous to the soul and hav-
ing the potential to shake the foundations of the city. Agamben would like to 
see art regain “its original stature,” to possess the power to be divinely terri-
fying as it was to the Greeks
10
. This would be far preferable to the vanilla sense 
we have today that art is merely “interesting”
11
. Chiming with Heidegger in this 
early work, Agamben prefers the Greek view of art as carving out a space of 
truth and building a world for man’s dwelling on earth to the modern emphasis 
on “the question of the ‘how,’ that is, of the process through which the object 
has been produced”
12
. In raising the possibility that there might be a “primally 
granted revealing that could bring the saving power into its first shining-forth 
in the midst of the danger” posed by technology, Heidegger refers to the “mag-
nificent age” of Greece when works of art were “not enjoyed aesthetically” nor 
was art “a sector of cultural activity” but was “a revealing that brought forth 
and made present” and thus “belonged within poiēsis”
13
. Agamben overlaps 
with Heidegger in praising the Greeks’ non-aesthetic relation to art, although 
he later develops a notion of the coming to presence in art that cancels any idea 
of unveiling and insists on the interweaving of poiesis and praxis.
9
 Ibid., pp. 68–69. In The Use of Bodies, however, Agamben appears to have changed his 
mind about Aristotle’s preference. He explains that Aristotle preferred acting and using 
(praxis) to poiesis in that praxis leaves energeia in the doer or user’s body, whereas the 
energeia of an artisan or artist who makes a product is transferred to that product. “For 
this reason,” Agamben writes, the artisan’s or artist’s “activity, constitutively submitted 
to an external end, is presented as inferior to praxis” (Agamben, The Use of Bodies, p. 19). 
Still, despite the shift in Agamben’s sense of Aristotle’s preference (now for praxis), the 
split remains. 
10
 Ibid., p. 6.
11
 Ibid., p. 4.
12
 Ibid., p. 70.
13
 Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Martin Heidegger Ba-
sic Writings, trans. William Lovitt, ed. David Ferrell Krell, London: HarperPerennial, 
2008/1977, p. 339. 

50
frances l. restuccia
In the medieval world too, art was not an object to be observed but instead 
enabled man to measure “the borders of his world,” as it embodied the grace 
that “put man’s activity in tune with the divine world of creation, and thus kept 
alive the echo of what art had been in its Greek beginnings: the wonderful and 
uncanny power of making being and the world appear, of producing them in the 
work”
14
. It would not have occurred to the medieval viewer to admire, far less 
judge, “art.” But, as poiesis and praxis fell further apart, man shed his poetic 
status in the world, and work became the “central value and common denomi-
nator of every human activity”
15
.
 
Agamben of course construes poetry very broadly. It does not designate one 
“art among others, but is the very name of man’s doing, of that productive ac-
tion of which artistic doing is only a privileged example”
16
. Agamben’s idea of 
poetry definitely bears an intimate relation to praxis. Praxis is poiesis and poie-
sis praxis. Agamben conceives of man’s (now lost) poetic status on earth as the 
interweaving of poiesis and praxis
17
 in all types of production/doing and all 
realms of life. Nonetheless, it is art that has the capacity to awaken us to such 
a poetic status, to transform our “delay before truth into a poetic process”
18
. 
Here too, in privileging art, Agamben overlaps with Heidegger, who turns to 
“the fine arts” to “foster the growth of the saving power” that will enable us 
to confront technology. Van Gogh’s famous painting of the peasant shoes, for 
example, informs us of what these “shoes are in truth”
19
. In Heideggerian par-
lance, artistic creation is a “happening of truth”
20
.
 
Agamben conceives of and believes in art’s capacity to demonstrate the poiesis of 
all praxis–which it is able to do essentially through its manifestation of messian-
ic time (a causation that Agamben has not made explicit). That the trajectory of 
Agamben’s work is headed for an emphasis on messianic time is hinted at in The 
Man Without Content especially when he engages the topic of rhythm. Agamben 
14
 Agamben, The Man Without Content, p. 34.
15
 Ibid., p. 70. 
16
 Ibid., p. 59.
17
 Ibid.
18
 Ibid., p. 114.
19
 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” in Martin Heidegger Basic Writings, 
trans. William Lovitt, ed. David Ferrell Krell. London: HarperPerennial, 2008/1977, p. 161. 
20
 Ibid., p. 185.

51
the glorious body: agambenian non-unveilable nudity in art
is inspired by Hölderlin’s statement that “Everything is rhythm, the entire des-
tiny of man is one heavenly rhythm, just as every work of art is one rhythm, and 
everything swings from the poetizing lips of the god” to think about the meaning 
of rhythm as an “original characteristic” of a work of art
21
. Agamben then teases 
out the idea of rhythm as “the principle of presence that opens and maintains 
the work of art in its original space,” as what “causes the work of art to be what 
it is”
22
. Agamben describes rhythm as what introduces something that escapes 
incessant flow into flow, thereby implanting within fluidity “an atemporal di-
mension”
23
. He connects this paradox of atemporality within temporality to our 
experience before artworks when we feel abruptly hurled into “a more original 
time”
24
. Agamben’s conception of rhythm as granting an “ecstatic dwelling in a 
more original dimension” as well as “the fall into the flight of measurable time” 
prefigures his later rendering of messianic time, the “time of the now”
25
: a con-
tracted time conjoining chronos and the apocalyptic eschaton. To Agamben, it 
is this messianic aspect (or dual temporality) of a work of art that opens “the 
space of [man’s] dwelling on earth,” allowing him to take its “original measure” 
and “find again his present truth” within “the unstoppable flow of linear time”
26
.
It cannot be overstressed that, to Agamben, poiesis is not confined to art, even 
as it is art that has the power to reveal our poetic status on earth, the poiesis in-
herent in all doing/activity/praxis. This idea attributes to art a supreme power, 
for it is only when we experience our “being-in-the-world as [our] essential con-
dition,” which experience art can grant, that “a world” can “open up for [our] 
action and ... existence.” To Agamben, it is because man is capable of experi-
encing the power of pro-duction into presence that he is capable of praxis, free 
activity, and it is art that can offer such an experience and thereby bring him to 
this realization. Rather than being a “cultural ‘value,’” a “privileged object for 
the [aesthesis or sense] of the spectators,” or “the absolute creative power of the 
formal principle,” art is situated in a “more essential dimension,” as it enables 
man to “attain his original status in history and time in his encounter with it”
27
. 
21
 Agamben, The Man Without Content, p. 94.
22
 Ibid., p. 98.
23
 Ibid., p. 99.
24
 Ibid.
25
 Ibid., p. 100.
26
 Ibid., p. 101.
27 
Ibid.

52
frances l. restuccia
Art breaks into linear time so that man can recover “between past and future, 
his present state”
28
. Art thrusts us into “a more original time” and thus allows 
artists and spectators to regain their “essential solidarity”
29
. And so, while art 
is by no means the sole locus of poiesis, it gives the experience of a coalescing 
of poiesis and praxis so that we can discover such a wedding in all activities. 
That is, in presenting chronological time or “flow” impregnated by apocalyptic 
time or an atemporal dimension, art in effect marries praxis (movement, doing, 
“going through to the limit” of an action) with poiesis (“the original principle ... 
of something other than itself”)
30
. Here we have linear time/praxis traversed by 
another time outside of that time/poiesis—all captured at once in a work of art, 
reflecting Agamben’s sense of the poetic/pro-ductive status of man on earth. 
Against Unveiling
Disentangling Agamben’s agreement from his disagreement with the Greeks 
on the topic of art in The Man Without Content can be a hairsplitting task. He 
applauds the intensity that Plato attributes to art as well as Aristotle’s notion of 
its Form. However, Agamben also locates the start of the fissure between poie-
sis and praxis, which has caused so much trouble, in the Greeks. While he does 
pick up on positive aspects of poiesis as the Greeks conceptualized it (especially 
its bringing a certain excess into presence), Agamben also comes to reject their 
emphasis on unveiling. The overlapping of poiesis and praxis that Agamben 
privileges in art precludes the uncovering of something that is assumed to be 
prior to what gets italicized through poiesis. For the conjoining of a time that 
flows, a chronological time, with another time that lays atemporality into that 
flow has nothing to do with the revelation of something hidden. The kind of 
presencing that Agamben privileges does not depend on an unveiling to come 
forth but arises through a seizing of what already exists. 
Here we have a different kind of presencing from that of Heidegger as well, who 
also features unveiling or, in Heideggerian terminology, the disconcealment of 
the concealed. In his “Letter on Humanism,” to mention one example among 
hundreds, Heidegger writes that “ek-sistence—and through it the relation of the 
28
 Ibid., p. 102.
29
 Ibid.
30
 Ibid., pp. 75–76.

53
the glorious body: agambenian non-unveilable nudity in art
truth of Being to man—remains veiled in the humanitas of homo animalis”
31
 and 
that, as the “destiny that sends truth, Being remains concealed”
32
. But if we 
think of poiesis as a contraction of what already exists that brings it to an atem-
poral state of fulfillment, exceeding the limit of itself and praxis as the move-
ment of activity that reaches its own limit as it enacts chronological time, then 
perhaps we can grasp that the pouring of poiesis into praxis presents something 
that is illuminated in all its originality without an uncovering. Messianic time 
heals the laceration between poiesis and praxis. 
Agamben derives his sense of the messianic—tantamount to messianic time—in 
The Time That Remains from the Apostle Paul. He concentrates on the first ten 
words of Paul’s Letter to the Romans to establish that messianic time is neither 
chronological nor apocalyptic but is both—simultaneously. It is a kind of end or 
consummation of time within each moment that does not halt the movement of 
time. The messianic is “the present as the exigency of fulfillment, which gives 
itself ‘as an end’”
33
. Messianic time seizes hold of an instant, bringing it forward 
to completion, thus making it graspable, while not being external to chrono-
logical time. It is a segment of secular time that is transformed as it contracts, 
a “caesura” that surpasses the division of these two heterogenous temporali-
ties
34
. Chronos and kairos are co-extensive, so that “each instant may be, to use 
Benjamin’s words, the ‘small door through which the Messiah enters’”
35
. 
Agamben invokes Paul’s notion of typos to illustrate the relation of kairos to the 
arc of time that extends from the Creation to the Resurrection. He explains that 
for Paul events in the Old Testament as they serve as figures of events in the 
New Testament (for example, Adam prefigures Christ) indicate a transformation 
of time—past and future are clasped together “in an inseparable constellation.” 
Typos and antitypos “contract into each other without coinciding.” It is not a 
matter of a third time located between the two times but of a time that traverses 
those two times, dividing their division and thereby introducing a “zone of un-
31
 Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” in Martin Heidegger Basic Writings, trans. Wil-
liam Lovitt, ed. David Ferrell Krell, London: HarperPerennial, 2008/1977, p. 236. 
32
 Ibid., p. 242.
33
 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains, trans. Patricia Dailey. Stanford: Stanford UP, 
2005, p. 77.
34
 Ibid., p. 64.
35
 Quoted in The Time that Remains, p. 71. 

54
frances l. restuccia
decidability, in which the past is dislocated into the present and the present is 
extended into the past”
36
. I invoke typology here as an illustration of messianic 
time especially since it leads to a major Pauline notion pertinent to artwork I 
will eventually point to as epitomizing messianic time: “Love ... is the pleroma 
of the law”
37
 and thus has the capacity to render the law inoperative. Agamben 
in fact again turns to Paul at the end of The Use of Bodies, as he articulates 
perhaps his most significant concept—destituent potential—to highlight this 
coinciding of “inoperativity and fulfillment”
38
. In Paul, messianic faith renders 
the law “destitute of its power to command”
39
; and the messiah brings about 
“a destituent potential” that deposes all social conditions to enable their use
40
. 
Messianic Nudity Versus Nothing
Agamben’s messianic time celebrates the nuptials of kairos and chronos, forms 
of time that both align with and operate within the conjuncture of poiesis and 
praxis. But how does such an overlapping of kairos and chronos pertain to nu-
dity, which is also a way of asking how nudity might be said to bring poiesis 
together with praxis? Agamben has offered the faintest hints of an answer to 
these questions. By looking at certain sections of Agamben’s collection of es-
says titled Nudities, we can discern that messianic time gives rise to “nudity.” 
Although only one chapter in Agamben’s work Nudità has a title that refers di-
rectly to this topic (chapter seven, also titled Nudità), the book title covers the 
entire text, implying that chapters other than seven also convey the concept of 
nudity—as they fold together kairos and chronos and shut down lack.
41
 
We can glean a great deal about “nudity” as it is comprised of messianic time 
indirectly from chapter one, which presents an interweaving of salvation (kai-
ros) and creation (chronos). In “Creation and Salvation,” Agamben initially en-
tertains the startling idea that salvation precedes creation. He also proposes 
that “it is almost as if the only legitimization for doing and producing were the 
36
 Ibid., p. 75.
37
 Ibid., p. 76.
38
 Agamben, The Use of Bodies, p. 273.
39
 Ibid.
40
 Ibid., p. 274.
41
 Although words in Italian ending in à, such as città, can be either singular or plural, 
Agamben’s Nudità connotes a concept rather than a plurality of nudities.

55
the glorious body: agambenian non-unveilable nudity in art
capacity to redeem that which has been done and produced”
42
: redemption (in 
other words) is intrinsic to creation. Agamben’s sense of the inextricable rela-
tion between these two poles of divine/human action becomes especially com-
pelling as he links them via transience, a linkage that serves as a variation on 
Paul’s sense of the revocation in every vocation. The “ultimate figure of human 
and divine action,” Agamben theorizes, “appears where creation and salvation 
coincide in the unsavable.” That is, the coinciding of the work of creation with 
that of salvation occurs as salvation renders inoperative every “gesture” and 
“word,” “color” and “timbre,” “desire” and “gaze” in its “amorous struggle” 
with creation
43
. 
In this first chapter, “Creation and Salvation,” one line in particular clinches 
the point that messianic temporality inheres in Agamben’s conception of sal-
vation/creation. After asserting that what is “truly singular in every human 
existence is the silent and impervious intertwining of the two works, ... of the 
power of the angel (with which we never cease producing and looking ahead) 
and the power of the prophet (that just as tirelessly retrieves, undoes, and 
arrests the progress of creation and in this way completes and redeems it),” 
Agamben refers directly to time. Equally “singular” is “the time that ties the 
two works together.” Kairos and chronos bind salvation and creation. Agamben 
even harks back here to the topic of rhythm, which is the element that reflects 
most of all, in The Man Without Content, the notion of messianic time in art. It 
is according to rhythm, he writes, that “creation precedes redemption but in 
reality follows it, as redemption follows creation but in truth precedes it”
44
. We 
recall that rhythm introduces atemporality into temporal flow, which parallels 
salvation’s penetration of creation. And so we are able to apprehend not only 
the interconnectedness of Agamben’s thought (as the topic of rhythm sews to-
gether The Man Without Content and Nudities, as well as The Use of Bodies) but 
also that the salvation/creation caesura, comprising rhythm, is bound together 
by kairos and chronos. And, insofar as “Creation and Salvation” serves as the 
introductory chapter of a text titled Nudità, we can in turn deduce that nudity 
partakes of messianic time. Nudity is the penetration of creation/chronos by 
salvation/kairos that happens every moment, all the time. 
42
 Agamben, Nudities, p. 4.
43
 Ibid., p. 8.
44
 Ibid., p. 4.

56
frances l. restuccia
Our sense of what Agamben means by nudity expands exponentially once we 
are patiently open to reading chapters in Nudità that may seem removed from 
the concept as in fact defining it. Over and over Agamben works against the 
notion of the privative, setting up his conception of nudity as a thing in itself 
rather than a lack (of clothing). In “What is the Contemporary?” (chapter two), 
Agamben claims that the contemporary has the ability to hold his gaze not on 
the light of his time but on its darkness. The contemporary can envision the 
obscurity of his time. To explain, Agamben turns to the neurophysiology of 
vision: when we are in darkness, cells in the retina known as “off-cells” are 
activated, effecting the sort of vision that allows us to see darkness. The salient 
point here is that darkness is not “privative.” Envisioning darkness is not pas-
sive but rather an activity, even “a singular ability”
45
. Whereas conventional 
theological thinking assumes that salvation is missing in creation but emerges 
at the end of time (in need of revelation or a kind of unveiling), and darkness 
is commonly considered to be an absence or lack of light, Agamben shows that 
creation/chronos is woven together with salvation/kairos just as light is insep-
arable from darkness. He urges us to discover the obscurity of our epoch, “its 
special darkness, which is not, however, separable from those lights”
46
.
In “On What We Can Not Do” (chapter five), Agamben makes a case for being able 
to not do something. Quibbling with Deleuze, he argues that power insidiously 
keeps us not from what we can do (Deleuze’s view) but from what we can not do. 
Agamben’s position here is basically a defense of impotentiality. He derives from 
Aristotle the idea that an “adynamia ... belongs to all dynamis: the potentiality 
to not-be”
47
. He stresses that humans have a capacity to embrace such impoten-
tiality and that it is critical that we not allow the market to dictate to us all the 
various things we can do by holding out for our freedom to not do. For, Agamben 
adds curiously, “it is only the lucid vision of what we cannot, or can not, do that 
gives consistency to our actions”
48
. Whereas conventional logic would assume 
that creation/chronos and salvation/kairos are separated, that darkness is an 
absence of light, that impotentiality is the inferior, empty opposite of potenti-
ality, and that praxis is distinct from poiesis (or even that they are antitheses), 
45
 Ibid., p. 13.
46
 Ibid., p. 14.
47
 Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller- 
Roazen, Stanford: Stanford UP , 1999, p. 183.
48
 Agamben, Nudities, p. 45.

57
the glorious body: agambenian non-unveilable nudity in art
Agamben is at pains to show the positive status of these “negatives.” As Nudities 
unfolds, it cancels the possibility of a void, an abyss, a realm of Nothingness 
external to the present reality in which we live. Nudity is such a foreclosure. It 
is therefore Agamben’s answer to problem of the negative basis of metaphysics 
and in particular to the Heideggerian idea that Nothing is the veil of Being. As 
he writes in “The Messiah and the Sovereign,” Agamben finds “redemption in 
the overturning of the Nothing”
49
. And nudity—a way of thinking, experiencing, 
and being that does not lie on an unspeakable foundation but celebrates “the 
ungroundedness of all human praxis”—enacts just such an overturning
50
. 
In “The Glorious Body” (chapter eight), Agamben makes a similar case for inop-
erativity, which one might consider to be “inert.” Not at all, argues Agamben, 
since inoperativity frees the potentiality that has “manifested itself in the act to 
appear” so that a new use can be brought into being
51
. Inoperativity “belongs to 
creation; it is a work of God”—very “special work”
52
. And, interestingly, toward 
the end of “Hunger of an Ox,” we find a direct reference to “praxis.” Making his 
case that the inoperativity of the festa does not negate or abolish activity but 
suspends it in order to exhibit festiveness, Agamben notes that such an exhibi-
tion happens within “a dimension of praxis,” thus indicating that the atempo-
rality of inoperativity locates itself in “simple, quotidian human activities” or 
that the bringing forth of something more—for example, festiveness—happens 
within the simple things we do or within praxis
53
. Such is nude (rather than bare) 
life, life “generated by the very act of living”
54
, in which “essence and existence, 
potential and act, living and life interpenetrate” to the extent that they are 
indistinguishable”
55
, as they “contract into one another and fall together”
56
— 
the life or form-of-life to which art has the potential to awaken us (thus ruling 
out “anything like a bare life”
57
, the despicable product of sovereignty). 
49
 Agamben, Potentialities, p. 171.
50
 Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. Karen E. Pinkus 
with Michael Hardt, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1991, p. 105. 
51
 Agamben, Nudities, p. 102.
52
 Ibid., p. 110.
53
 Ibid., p. 112.
54
 Agamben, The Use of Bodies, p. 221.
55
 Ibid., p. 222.
56
 Ibid., p. 223.
57
 Ibid., p. 228.

58
frances l. restuccia
In “The Last Chapter in the History of the World,” on the last page of Nudities, 
Agamben highlights what I consider to be the central concern of this text by 
underscoring that the zone of nonknowledge does not indicate a simple not 
knowing. It is much more than a “question of lack”: it means instead “maintain-
ing oneself in the right relationship with ignorance.” The very “art of living,” 
Agamben avers, is the capacity to remain in a relation of harmony with what 
escapes us
58
. Agamben cancels the idea of a space of Nothingness. He closes the 
gap between something and its opposite (non-something) by showing that they 
participate in a kind of interplay or dance that precludes lack. 
Nudity in relation to clothing (like nature in relation to grace) works the same 
way. That is, rather than being a lack of clothing, nudity has its own status/
ontology. In the case of each of the above ostensible binarisms, Agamben is 
dedicated to showing that one is not the lack of the other, that what we might 
conceive of as an absence thrust out of the world of presence is its own form 
of presence. Lack of lack too, then, governs Agamben’s take on literal nudi-
ty, which he arrives at after condemning our impoverished modern sense of 
it. Agamben’s complaint about nudity, as he elaborates in “Nudity,” is that 
what we now have is merely baring, an interminable peeling off of clothing. 
Or, where denudation is no longer possible since there is nothing left to take 
off, nothing at all happens. In both Vanessa Beecroft’s performance at Berlin’s 
Neue Nationalgalerie, in 2005, which featured one-hundred (for the most part) 
nude women, and Helmut Newton’s 1981 diptych in Vogue , which shows on one 
side four naked (except for their shoes) women and on the other the same wom-
en now clothed in elegant outfits, “simple nudity” does not take place. 
It is due to the theological signature stamped on nudity in our culture that nudi-
ty has become a mere lack of clothing. Agamben points out that Adam and Eve 
actually wore a garment of grace before eating the forbidden apple and that sin 
was instrumental in bringing about their corrupt naked corporeality through 
an uncovering of that garment of grace. Thus Agamben considers Adam and 
Eve’s “nudity” to exist “only negatively, so to speak: as a privation of the cloth-
ing of grace and as a presaging of the resplendent garment of glory that the 
blessed will receive in heaven”
59
. The theological apparatus is, to Agamben, 
58
 Agamben, Nudities, p. 114.
59
 Ibid., p. 57.

59
the glorious body: agambenian non-unveilable nudity in art
responsible for nudity being a mere presupposition of clothing, just as nature is 
a presupposition of grace. Such nakedness has no status of its own. Striptease, 
which makes nudity impossible, is therefore “the paradigm for our relationship 
with nudity,” as it is “an event that never reaches its completed form, ... a form 
that does not allow itself to be entirely seized as it occurs”
60
. Agamben wants 
to open our eyes—to a nudity that assumes its own form and may be seized and 
thus “satiate the gaze”
61
, although he is keenly aware that extricating nudity 
from “the patterns of thought that permit us to conceive of it solely in a privative 
and instantaneous manner is a task that requires uncommon lucidity”
62
. 
Instead of being a lack of clothing, Agamben’s simple nudity is “pure visibility 
and presence.” Envisioning a naked body is to “perceive its pure knowability 
beyond every secret”
63
. Nudity is without veils—and therefore non-unveilable—
being presentation per se. Human nudity is “what remains when you remove 
the veil [altogether] from beauty”
64
. Agamben’s aim is to liberate nudity from 
its theological signature by calling for dwelling-in-motion. That is, in referring 
to dwelling at this point, Agamben counterintuitively invokes the dimension 
of nudity that corresponds with chronos or movement, given that to him nu-
dity’s “dwelling of appearance in the absence of secrets” is “its special trem-
bling”
65
. Nudity lies at the crossroads of an atemporal seizing of the apparent 
(or inapparent, as Agamben calls it, since nothing comes forth out from under 
a concealment) and movement (trembling). Works of art that embody nudity 
in the form of this non-lacking messianic temporality that seizes time within 
time therefore have the capacity to offer the viewer an experience of poiesis as 
it informs or is poured into praxis. Epitomizing what Agamben calls in The Use 
of Bodies an “ontology of style,” art thus models the form-of-life with which 
Agamben urges us to constitute ourselves. As the “guiding concept and the 
unitary center of coming politics,” form-of-life is a political life that has, how-
ever, absolutely nothing to do with being a “man” or a “citizen,” both of which 
60
 Ibid., p. 65.
61
 Ibid., p. 66.
62
 Ibid., p. 65.
63
 Ibid., p. 81.
64
 Ibid., p. 85.
65
 Ibid., p. 90.

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frances l. restuccia
Agamben regards as “clothing” covering over bare life, thus precluding an in-
separable— or nude—life
66
. 
Fulfillment: Challenging Sovereignty
Although Kenneth Clark in his exhaustive work The Nude: A Study in Ideal 
Form does not directly engage the issue of poiesis in relation to praxis, he of-
fers striking corroboration of several of Agamben’s assumptions about Western 
art—whose “central subject” is to Clark the naked human body. It is “the nude 
alone,” Clark points out, that has “survived” as our “chief link with the classic 
disciplines”
67
. Moreover, the distinction for which Kenneth Clark is famous be-
tween “nude” and “naked” defines the naked privatively as “to be deprived of 
clothes”
68
, which correlates with Agamben’s false nudity—“nudity” that springs 
from the removal of clothing and that therefore neglects the body altogether, a 
practice that, to Agamben, as mentioned, evolved from the Christian theology 
of clothing. Clark likewise confirms Agamben’s sense that Christianity did its 
best to stamp out nudity, which, perhaps unintentionally, produced a naked-
ness that possessed the supposed secret of desire, as opposed to a nudity that 
grants fulfillment. Drapery presupposes nakedness and in the process elicits 
the desire to uncover the drapery, so that “nudity” becomes a question of mere 
baring, an event that disallows the body to be seized or the gaze to be satiated. 
Through its use of clothing in art, Christianity gives rise to a provocative naked-
ness generally unknown in the classical era.
69
66
 Agamben, The Use of Bodies, p. 213.
67
 Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, New York: MJF Books, 1956, p. 3.
68
 Ibid.
69
 It is noteworthy that Agamben holds high—for joining poiesis and praxis—the very era 
(the Middle Ages) dominated by a religion that strongly suppressed naked bodies in art. 
But perhaps this apparent contradiction makes sense, after all, in that literal nudity in 
art was unnecessary during the Medieval Period as a sign of Agamben’s conceptual nu-
dity. Its absence would then fortify my contention that literal nudity comes forward ag-
gressively in art during those epochs in which the meaning of art as nudity falls behind, 
for example, when aesthetics reigns. Our current-day frenzied preoccupation with naked 
images as well as public (literal) nakedness might be seen as a failed hysterical groping 
for the kind of experience of poiesis within praxis that Agamben’s nudity involves. How-
ever, a tension does seem to exist between Agamben’s sense of the Middle Ages as the 
time of the co-existence of poiesis and praxis and Medieval Christian art’s adherence 
to Christianity’s theology of clothing that produces a sinful nakedness/corrupt nature 
beneath clothing/grace.

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the glorious body: agambenian non-unveilable nudity in art
Clark’s sense that Greek nudes were meant to impart a feeling of fulfillment dove-
tails with Agamben’s idea of the inoperativity of nudity. Clark reminds us that 
Aristotle believed that art “completes what nature cannot bring to a finish”
70
. And 
Clark’s own descriptions of Western nudes are laden with terms of completion 
and fulfillment. In the middle of the “whirlpool of carnality” in Ingres’s Bain 
turc (1862), Clark writes, is his “old symbol of peaceful fulfillment, the back of 
the Baigneuse de Valpinçon”
71
 In this stunning Ingres painting, we have “relaxed 
sensuality,” “languor and satiety” that offer an “intellectual satisfaction”
72
. 
It is in referring to Venus of Urbino that Clark makes his most Agambenian  
formulation: “We seize upon the mass of Titian’s Venus immediately and 
abruptly”
73
.
Does Clark not pay tribute to Agamben’s messianic in testifying to this paint-
ing’s power to provoke an atemporal seizing of Venus’s unavoidable mass as he 
apprehends her “immediately” and “abruptly”? Titian’s Venus is presented in 
all her splendid fullness, satiating the “gaze” through a blatant unmediated ex-
posure. Here we have a potent assertion of literal nudity—announcing “haecce! 
there is nothing other than this”
74
. Nothing is lacking, nor is anything unveila-
ble or even unveiled/disconcealed.
75
 Venus in fact lies atop a potential veil, as 
if to insist that no veil even preceded her nudity, as if to stamp out the veil. She 
faces us with a piercing glance, head-on, in a state of non-unveilability. The 
numinous painting celebrates its liberation from a theology of clothing, invit-
ing us to engage in simple nudity independent of all veils. Yet, Venus of Urbino 
yields more than a static dwelling, fulfilling Agamben’s criterion that nudity’s 
70
 Clark, The Nude, p. 12, my emphasis.
71
 Ibid., p. 159, my emphasis. 
72
 Ibid., p. 160, my emphases.
73
 Ibid., p. 131.
74
 Agamben, Nudities, p. 90.
75
 While it is the case that Titian’s Venus hides with her hand some of her pubic area, to (mis)
read her hand as a cover meant seductively to veil this private part would be to neglect the 
work’s blatant message of exposure and to turn what is clearly a “nude” (painting) into a 
striptease. But the painting, as Clark’s outburst testifies (he seizes her “mass” “immedi-
ately” and “abruptly”), cries out for acknowledgment of its haecceity. Perhaps, then, in-
stead, it is appropriate to regard the placement of Venus’s hand as suggesting self-induced 
jouissance that underscores the painting’s message of fulfillment through its numinous 
display of Venus’s massive flesh.

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frances l. restuccia
“dwelling of appearance in the absence of secrets” is “its special trembling”
76
. 
For the surrounding sheets, which seem deliberately arranged so as not to cover 
Venus, undulate. Clark himself discusses the Greek use of drapery to produce 
the effect of movement: “by suggesting lines of force,” drapery “indicates for 
each action a past and a future”
77
. To Clark, drapery can create “a pool of move-
ment,” in which a body may seem “to swim”
78
, even a hypnotic motion, having 
the effect of waves. The arrested presentation of literal nudity in this painting 
sits side by side a flow of drapery: kairos and chronos are conjoined to offer the 
spectator an experience of poiesis cradled in praxis. 
In The Open, Agamben turns to a Titian painting to illustrate the inoperativity 
at the heart of his concept of nudity. A late work, Titian’s Nymph and Shepherd 
presents fulfilled lovers who have “lost their mystery,” although they have not 
76
 Ibid.
77
 Clark, The Nude, p. 184. 
78
 Ibid., p. 274.
Venus of Urbino by Titian (1488–1576). 
Creative Commons license.

63
the glorious body: agambenian non-unveilable nudity in art
become “less impenetrable.” Agamben perceives their “mutual disenchant-
ment from their secret,” which allows them to enter “a new and more blessed 
life” because they are beyond (Heideggerian) “concealment and disconceal-
ment.” Being neither concealed nor disconcealed, these lovers are “inappar-
ent,” “workless,” inhabiting “a human nature rendered perfectly inoperative—
the inactivity {inoperasitá} and [désoeuvrement] of the human and of the ani-
mal as the supreme and unsavable figure of life”
79
. Herein lies nudity, a blissful 
condition of lack of lack. Nymph and Shepherd reflects Agamben’s concept of 
nudity at the same time as it features a nude figure—a rather imposing nymph. 
Why does Agamben select a painting that includes literal nudity to illustrate 
the inoperativity at the core of his concept of nudity? The matheme of nudity 
(“haecce! there is nothing other than this”
80
) might just as easily be proclaimed 
by paintings without literally nude figures. What it is about the conspicuous 
nude in art that conveys nudity perhaps better than any other image? When the 
literally nude figure is foregrounded, does she not appear festively suspended 
in a way that grants a new use to the body—perhaps to announce the philosoph-
ical concept of nudity? Does she not emphatically, through her radiance, em-
blematize the point of a poietic emergence into presence of a glorious mundane 
body beneath which one cannot seek something more, bringing (nevertheless) 
gratification instead of disappointment? In “The Glorious Body” in Nudities, 
Agamben appropriates the inoperativity of glorious bodies that the Church rel-
egates to heaven in order to identify the truly glorious body: “The glorious body 
is not some other body, more agile and beautiful, more luminous and spiritual; 
it is the body itself, at the moment when inoperativity removes the spell from it 
and opens it up to a new possible common use”
81
. Does this late Titian painting 
not go even further in presenting an overlapping of poiesis and praxis through 
its intimate juxtaposition of this messianic dwelling with a trembling sensation 
given off by surrounding rippling layers of bedclothes and of the shepherd’s 
clothing as well as curled dabs of paint encircling the nymph throughout the 
work? We have here a visual pun—on nudity as the shimmering time of the end.
 
79
 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attel, Stanford: Stanford UP, 
2004, p. 87.
80
 Agamben, Nudities, p. 90.
81
 Ibid., p. 103.

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frances l. restuccia
Perhaps surprisingly, it is a sculptor whose work epitomizes Agamben’s nudi-
ty in art again often through literally nude figures. Especially (Gian Lorenzo) 
Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne may be apprehended as combining kairos and 
chronos and thus as another superb instance of art that presents and offers an 
experience of poiesis held in praxis. Perhaps in here we have Bernini’s sculp-
tural rendition of Apollo’s necessarily thwarted pursuit of the nymph Daphne 
in Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Thanks to Cupid’s piercing of Apollo’s vitals with his 
arrow, the god is compelled forever to chase after Daphne, and since another of 
Cupid’s arrows has pierced Daphne, she is doomed always to flee from that pur-
suit. Movement has become mandatory, and the sculpture manages to capture 
the relentless chase, even though, up until Bernini, sculpture for the most part 
represented accomplished actions. Instead, Bernini presents the metamorphosis 
of a nymph into a tree. In Apollo and Daphne, we observe the transition of flesh 
Nymph and Shepherd by Titian (1488–1576). 
Creative Commons license.

65
the glorious body: agambenian non-unveilable nudity in art
Apollo and Daphne by Gian Lorenzo Bernini 
(1598–1680). Creative Commons license.

66
frances l. restuccia
to bark and hair to leaves; we apprehend motion as Daphne’s body parts turn 
dramatically into stalks, blades, and laurel leaves, all conveyed through marble.
One therefore might assume, since everything here is in flux, that inoperativity is 
not the point and that the sculpture is not a reflection of Agambenian nudity, af-
ter all. However, just the opposite would seem to be epitomized. Bernini’s Apollo 
and Daphne brings Agamben’s messianic time/nudity to an artistic culmination 
in extensively seizing the very moment of passage. Culmination and caducity co-
alesce in this sculpture, italicizing the collapse/movement inherent in all seizing. 
The apex of decline is featured as this poignant work of art includes the time it 
takes to bring time to an end (Agamben’s operational time). It is as though we are 
watching in slow motion the making/fading of this sculptural crystallization of 
Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne. Bernini stretches out the very instant of loss, which 
is the essence of messianic time or salvation in the unsavable. Apollo and Daphne 
embodies these paradoxes, captures them beautifully and brilliantly in achieving 
loss, that is, in italicizing the capturing of loss itself, therefore coming closer than 
any other work to marrying kairos and chronos and thus perfectly emblematizing 
Agambenian nudity and in turn folding together poiesis and praxis. 
Apollo and Daphne by Gian Lorenzo Bernini 
(1598–1680). Photo by Frances L. Restuccia.

67
the glorious body: agambenian non-unveilable nudity in art
While Apollo and Daphne features a contraction of the loss of the object, 
Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa shows a contraction of the lost subject. Here we 
have Bernini’s sculpted version of Saint Teresa of Avila’s vision and experience 
of Divine Love in the guise of a short angel wielding a golden spear. While in 
this sculpture vibrates with activity produced by: golden sunrays stabbing the 
scene from above, a cloud below that lifts up the levitating Saint, the swirling 
robe of the angel, the angel’s spear poised to plunge anew, as well as by Teresa 
herself as she experiences jouissance. As Jacques Lacan unsubtly pronounces 
in Encore, “she’s coming. There’s no doubt about it”
82
. And, in her gargantuan 
novel Teresa, My Love, Julia Kristeva describes the “boiling of marble folds” in 
this sculpture of Teresa whose love of God “quivered” with an intensity that 
produced “ecstatic convulsions” that turned her into “a sumptuous icon of the 
Counter-Reformation”
83
. If nudity is as dwelling within trembling, it is mani-
fested here vividly through an ek-static orgasmic seizure set within tumultuous 
waves of heavy cloth.
While the sculpture does not contain literal nudity, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa 
nonetheless makes Agamben’s most mind-boggling point about nudity and the 
veil. Toward the end of “Nudity,” he refers to a certain “limit beyond which 
exists neither an essence that cannot be further unveiled nor a natura lapsa.” 
At this limit, Agamben writes, “one encounters only the veil itself, appearance 
itself, which is no longer the appearance of anything. This indelible residue 
of appearance where nothing appears ... —this is human nudity”
84
. Agamben 
conveys the experience of non-unveilability here paradoxically by calling it an 
encounter with the veil itself, an engagement with merely the veil—which, I am 
claiming, is what Bernini presents in The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa by replacing 
his typically nude figures with a figure saturated in clothing, rolling veils that 
make emphatic the point of “nudity” by stressing the veil alone with nothing 
underneath to be uncovered.
Agamben as we know supports the rendering inoperative of objects directed 
toward a goal especially insofar as such deactivation makes them available for 
82
 Jacques Lacan, Encore: On Feminine Sexuality/The Limits of Love and Knowledge 1972–
1973, trans. Bruce Fink, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998/1975. 
83
 Julia Kristeva, Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila, trans. Lorna Scott 
Fox, New York: Columbia UP , 2008, p. 3. 
84
 Agamben, Nudities, p. 85, my emphasis.

68
frances l. restuccia
The Ecstasy of Teresa by Gian Lorenzo Bernini 
(1598–1680). Creative Commons license.

69
the glorious body: agambenian non-unveilable nudity in art
a new use. He gives “amorous desire and so-called perversion” as examples 
of new uses of “the organs of the nutritive and reproductive functions” since 
these activities turn our organs “away from their physiological meaning, to-
ward a new and more human operation”
85
. Bernini’s Teresa in ecstasy certainly 
deflects attention away from physiology to the amorous. Beyond this, in depict-
ing Love in particular, Teresa in Ecstasy not only renders Teresa inoperative 
(she is ek-static, lost to herself) but the Law as well. This sublime work of art 
announces the messianic marriages of kairos and chronos and poiesis and prax-
is and thus shuts down lack through fulfillment: the sculpture sets in motion 
pure satisfaction/jouissance. And given that the very constitution of the Law or 
sovereignty depends on its ability to produce an exception—Agamben accepts 
Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty in his Political Theology as “he who decides 
on the exception”
86
—this model of Love embodied by The Ecstasy of Teresa, 
where nothing is left out, effects sovereignty’s collapse. Law is deactivated, in 
other words, through the sculpture’s fulfillment of Love. Paul’s assertion that 
“Love ... is the pleroma of the law,” as stated in Romans 13:9-10, is itself, in 
turn, fulfilled. 
Art that demonstrates the marriage of poiesis and praxis, that gives the expe-
rience of their intimacy (without exclusion) challenges sovereignty insofar as 
sovereignty subsists on an exception or bare life. This is the invaluable political 
consequence of Agamben’s concept of nudity. Agamben’s “bare life,” a function 
of sovereignty as well as its necessary downgraded foundation, must not be 
confused with nudity—as it is capable of collapsing the very sovereignty/bare 
life structure by virtue of its brilliant non-unveilability, its insistence that noth-
ing be excluded, not even Nothing. The nude in art makes such inclusivity even 
more emphatic, and Bernini’s sculpture of Teresa brings it to an extreme by in-
tertwining poiesis with praxis specifically through a depiction of the Love that, 
according to Paul, has the power to fulfill the Law and thus disarm it. In re-
turning to us our poetic status in the world, then, art does even more than give 
us that tremendous gift. Art is in tandem with politics. They are, as Agamben 
states on the penultimate page of The Use of Bodies,
85
 Ibid., p. 102.
86
 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George 
Schwab, Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1985/1922, p. 5.

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frances l. restuccia
not tasks [or] simply ‘works’: rather, they name the dimension in which works—
linguistic and bodily, material and immaterial, biological and social—are de-
activated and contemplated as such in order to liberate the inoperativity that 
has remained imprisoned in them. And in this consists the greatest good that, 
according to the philosopher, the human can hope for: ‘a joy born from this, 
that human beings contemplate themselves and their own potential for acting’ 
(Spinoza 2, III, prop. 53).
87
 
     
Art’s messianic vision precludes the exception of precarious lives, which points 
to the high political stakes of realizing that poiesis inhabits praxis. Agamben’s 
concept of nudity, such “nudity” especially as it operates in art, and the nude 
that reflects it, in healing the myriad lacerations mentioned in this essay, work 
against power’s production of vulnerable lives. To think against lack—lack of 
lack being the condition of a poetic status in the world, where life and living 
are inseparable and come or fall together as “form-of-life”—is, for Agamben, to 
ruin the Law’s ability to exclude, which, given that such an ability constitutes 
the Law, renders it impotent.  
Veiling (one might go so far as to suggest) is politically dangerous, while non-un-
veilability is politically subversive—powerful. Agamben’s messianic nudity ef-
fects the undoing of sovereignty by precluding presupposition—that which a 
veil relies on—by simply italicizing what already exists. Sovereignty is disem-
powered, as it depends on the presupposition of an exception that brings it into 
existence and that Agamben’s messianic vision held within nudity rules out.
87
 Agamben, The Use of Bodies, p. 278.