I wonder how these perspectives might combine with the immediately preceding discussion?

ChatGPT said:

That’s a compelling question—how do Agamben’s and Jensen’s perspectives interact with the critique of binary thinking, the role of vital fictions, and the ethical responsibility of storytelling?

1. Ethics Beyond the Binary: Between Witness and Resistance

Agamben and Jensen both trouble the idea of a clear ethical subject—the kind of sovereign, autonomous moral agent that Cartesian thinking assumes.

• Agamben, through the Muselmann, reveals a figure at the threshold of life and death, speech and silence, subjectivity and objecthood. His work forces us to reconsider who can bear witness, and whether ethics can function when language itself collapses.
• Jensen, in his critique of civilization, similarly refuses the idea that we can separate ourselves from systemic violence. There is no clean, morally neutral ground. If civilization itself is a structure of harm, then ethical action can only take the form of resistance or refusal.

Both complicate the binary between ethical and unethical action, suggesting instead that ethics emerges from being-with, from reckoning with one’s embeddedness in history and violence rather than imagining oneself outside of it. This aligns with the earlier critique of binary thinking—ethics is not a matter of choosing between fixed categories but of navigating the contradictions and entanglements of reality.

2. The Ethics of Vital Fictions: Narratives as Both Survival and Complicity

The idea that vital fictions are necessary yet dangerous resonates strongly with both thinkers.

• For Agamben, the narratives that sustain modern ethical thought—human rights, legal frameworks, and even testimony itself—fail in the face of the concentration camp. The Muselmann exists outside of these fictions, revealing their limits. His work suggests that certain narratives, though vital, also obscure the full scope of suffering and complicity.
• Jensen, too, sees many cultural fictions—such as the belief in perpetual progress or the inevitability of civilization—as tools of denial that enable ongoing harm. Yet, his own writing relies on counter-fictions—on storytelling as a means of resistance and awakening.

This ties into our previous discussion: vital fictions are neither simply good nor bad. They structure our world, but they must also be interrogated, resisted, or rewritten. The ethical challenge is not to discard them entirely but to remain critically aware of how they function.

3. The Responsibility of Storytelling: Who Speaks, and to Whom?

If both thinkers trouble the idea of a clear ethical subject, they also trouble the act of speaking itself.

• Agamben examines the failure of testimony—how extreme violence creates conditions where words fail, where those who might testify (Muselmänner) are those least able to speak.
• Jensen writes from the opposite angle, emphasizing the necessity of speech, of breaking silence against systems of destruction. If Agamben points to the limits of storytelling, Jensen insists on its urgency.

Bringing this into conversation with our previous discussion, storytelling remains ethically fraught. If some fictions enable harm, then the storyteller carries a responsibility—not to simply create narratives, but to recognize when and how they participate in power. Ethics here is not just about what is said, but about what is unsayable, what is left out, and who is allowed to speak.

4. Ethical Practice as an Unfinished Process

All of this returns us to the idea that ethics is not a fixed system but an ongoing process.

• Instead of seeking an ethical framework that "solves" the problem of violence or complicity, Agamben, Jensen, and process-relational thought all gesture toward an ethics of engagement—one that remains unfinished, open to revision, attuned to history, and aware of its own limitations.
• Ethics, then, is not about resolving contradictions but inhabiting them: being willing to hold space for both witness and resistance, both the necessity and danger of narratives, both the need to speak and the limits of speech.

Bringing it all together, the ethical shift we discussed earlier becomes even more urgent:

• Moving beyond binary moralism
• Acknowledging the fictions that shape us without taking them as final
• Taking responsibility for how stories are told and received
• Remaining engaged in an ongoing, relational practice of ethical reflection

Does this synthesis align with how you see these ideas coming together? Are there specific tensions or nuances you’d want to explore further?

I'm interested in point 3, the insistence on speaking and the inability to speak etc.

The tension between the insistence on speaking (Jensen’s urgency) and the inability to speak (Agamben’s witnessing of silence) is a deeply charged ethical and existential problem.

1. The Inability to Speak: Agamben and the Limits of Testimony

Agamben, in Remnants of Auschwitz, describes how extreme violence produces a kind of speechlessness, a rupture in language itself. The Muselmann—a figure from the concentration camps who existed at the threshold of life and death—represents this limit.

• The Muselmann is someone who has lost all individuality, agency, and even the capacity to bear witness to their own suffering.
• The paradox: The Muselmann is the one who most truly embodies the reality of the camp, yet they are also the one least able to testify.
• This creates what Agamben calls an "aporia"—a contradiction with no resolution. Testimony, then, is never complete. It is always partial, haunted by what cannot be said.

This speaks to a broader crisis in ethics and history:

• How do we bear witness to suffering that resists articulation?
• What happens when language itself fails in the face of atrocity?
• If speech is always incomplete, does that mean it is futile, or does its very failure become part of its ethical weight?

2. The Insistence on Speaking: Jensen and the Refusal of Silence

Jensen takes the opposite stance: silence, for him, is complicity. His critique of civilization is bound up with the idea that dominant systems rely on people not speaking out, not resisting.

• If institutions of power silence dissent, then breaking that silence becomes an ethical act in itself.
• Jensen is uninterested in whether speech is “complete” or “adequate”—what matters is action, naming the structures of harm and refusing to be complicit in them.
• For him, the real aporia is not the failure of speech but the refusal to speak at all in the face of destruction.

This creates a different set of questions:

• Is speaking, even if incomplete or flawed, always better than silence?
• Does speech have an obligation beyond mere testimony—to intervene, to disrupt?
• Can a refusal to speak ever be ethical, or is it always a kind of surrender?

3. The Space Between: When Speech Fails, What Then?

These two perspectives seem opposed, yet they reveal something crucial:

• If Agamben shows us the fragility of language, Jensen shows us its necessity.
• If Agamben reminds us that testimony is never whole, Jensen insists that this incompleteness does not absolve us from speaking.

Perhaps the real question is: How do we speak while acknowledging the limits of speech?

• Can testimony be both urgent and unfinished, both a demand and an impossibility?
• Can we speak not as sovereign subjects but as fragments, recognizing that ethical speech is always incomplete?
• If some voices are systemically silenced (whether through violence, historical erasure, or social structures), how do we listen to those absences, those gaps where speech should be but isn’t?

This brings us back to the ethics of storytelling:

• Speaking is an obligation, but so is listening to silence.
• Testimony matters, even when it falters.
• Speech is not just an act of communication but a form of resistance, even when it acknowledges its own insufficiency.