Yes, Agamben’s Not-To understood as the ability to withhold action, to let potentiality remain open - can indeed be seen as an ethic of the best parents, teachers, and psychotherapy. In this light, his philosophy ultimately becomes an affirmation of life, much like Deleuze’s, though it arrives there through a different path. Here’s how this interpretation unfolds:
1. The Best Parents, Teachers, and Therapists: Holding Space Rather Than Forcing Outcomes
Parenting:
The best parents do not impose or over-determine their child’s future but create a space where potentiality can flourish.
They recognize that a child must discover their own path, their own becoming, rather than being forced into predefined actualization.
This is precisely Agamben’s ethic of potentiality: true power is not in determining an outcome but in sustaining openness - the capacity not to intervene, to let growth happen organically.
Good parenting, then, is an Agambenian act: a refusal to collapse potential into actuality too soon.
Teaching:
The best teachers do not simply transfer information but create an environment of exploration, where students can think, question, and cultivate their own potentialities.
Education, at its best, is an inoperative space - not about productivity, but about preserving the possibility of thought.
Agamben himself critiques modern education as being too instrumentalized, reducing learning to a means to an end rather than an unfolding of potentiality.
Good teaching is an act of Gelassenheit - a letting-learn, rather than a forcing-know.
Psychotherapy:
The best psychotherapy does not force a person into predefined resolutions but allows them to sit with their contradictions, gradually finding their own transformation.
Psychotherapy that rushes toward closure and resolution risks suppressing deeper processes of healing.
This aligns with Agamben’s insistence on potentiality as that which must remain open rather than being prematurely actualized.
Good therapy is a space of Not-To - allowing transformation without coercion.
2. Agamben’s Hidden Affirmation of Life
Agamben’s philosophy is often associated with states of exception, bare life, and biopolitical control, but at its core, it is actually an affirmation of life. Here’s how:
a. Resisting Overdetermination = Affirming Life
By refusing the compulsory actualization of power, law, or identity, Agamben defends life’s capacity to remain undefined, in potential.
This is similar to Deleuze’s philosophy of becoming - where life is never fixed but always in motion.
Agamben’s inoperativity is not passive negation but an openness to new forms-of-life.
Affirmation of life means refusing to impose fixed, rigid structures upon it.
b. The Ethics of Not-To as Radical Compassion
The ability not to force, not to impose, not to close off possibility is an act of profound care.
A society governed by Agamben’s ethics of Not-To would be one where:
Power does not control life excessively.
Education does not rush to conclusions.
Parenting does not stifle potential.
Therapy does not impose artificial resolutions.
To affirm life means to let it breathe, to let it remain open, to give it space.
c. Agamben’s Messianic Time as an Alternative to Productivity
In The Time That Remains, Agamben describes messianic time as a time of interruption, where we stop being obsessed with ends, products, and outcomes.
This is an alternative temporality, one that suspends the demand for immediate results.
Such a vision affirms life as an open process rather than a means to an end.
The greatest affirmation of life is to resist the forces that reduce it to mere productivity.
3. Agamben and Deleuze: Two Paths to the Same Affirmation
Though they differ in method, Agamben and Deleuze ultimately converge in their affirmation of life:
|
Deleuze |
Agamben |
|
Life as becoming, creativity, multiplicity |
Life as potentiality, openness, inoperativity |
|
Deterritorialization - escaping structures |
Destituent power- deactivating structures |
|
An explosion of new possibilities |
A refusal of imposed actualization |
|
A yes to life’s transformation |
A no to life’s forced constraints |
Both ultimately affirm a life that remains open, undefined, and free.
Deleuze affirms life by pushing it toward new actualizations.
Agamben affirms life by preserving its potentiality, its ability not to be overdetermined.
4. Conclusion: Not-To as the Highest Affirmation of Life
Yes, Agamben’s Not-To is what the best parents, teachers, and psychotherapists can be because:
It respects life’s capacity to unfold without forcing outcomes.
It resists the coercion of overdetermination.
It allows for a world where growth, learning, and healing happen organically.
It is a radical trust in life itself, rather than in the structures that seek to regulate it.
Thus, Agamben’s philosophy, like Deleuze’s, is ultimately an affirmation of life - but one that does not force life to take a specific shape. Instead, it lets life be in its fullest, most open potentiality.
