“Means without ends” is Agamben’s very Agamben-y way of saying: what if political life could be organized around pure means (actions, practices, ways of being) that are not subordinated to an external goal or “end”?

Normally, politics gets justified teleologically: you use means (laws, institutions, force) to achieve an end (security, freedom, the good life, whatever your philosopher-king prefers). Agamben flips this and says: what if the point isn’t the end at all, but inhabiting the means themselves?

He borrows from Benjamin’s idea of “pure means”—forms of action that don’t aim at a utilitarian outcome, but express themselves as politics in their very practice. For Agamben, this opens the door to imagining a politics outside the endless cycle of sovereign power, state control, and violence.

In Means Without End (the actual collection of essays), he riffs on this in different registers:

• Refugees as figures who disrupt the neat state categories of “citizen” vs “non-citizen.”

• Gestures as bodily means that express without aiming at an external result.

• Forms of life where life and its modes of expression can’t be neatly separated.

So “means without end” = politics as activity that doesn’t serve some distant goal (progress, utopia, the state’s survival), but exists in and as the doing itself—living, speaking, acting in ways that aren’t captured by sovereign power.