Qualunque

When Giorgio Agamben speaks of a being of “whatever kind” (qualunque), he does not invoke the casual indifference of “it doesn’t matter which.” Rather, he gestures toward a radical affirmation: it always matters—but not by virtue of classification, identity, or typological belonging. The “qualunque” being is not one that escapes significance, but one whose significance is unmoored from the apparatus of recognition. It matters as such, in its singularity, without needing to be subsumed under a genus, a label, or a norm.

Ordinarily, our descriptions of persons and things are tethered to nominative regimes: “She is a refugee,” “He is a citizen,” “That is a criminal,” “That is a saint.” These designations do more than describe—they delimit. Agamben identifies this taxonomic impulse as a foundational mechanism of biopolitical control. To be intelligible within society is, under this regime, to be legible through a name, a role, a function. One matters only insofar as one is locatable within a grid of identities. The concept of the qualunque being resists this logic. It proposes a mode of attention that does not predicate worth on recognizability. It is a way of seeing that refuses to ask: “To what category does this belong?” and instead affirms: “This, here, matters.”

From this ontological shift emerges a different vision of community. Not one founded on shared predicates—religion, nationality, class, ideology—but one constituted by co-presence without identification. A community of irreducible existences, of unmarked and unsorted individuals, is not held together by sameness, but by the refusal to demand it. It is a form of being-with that does not require a common denominator. In this sense, it is radically inclusive—not because it expands the circle of belonging, but because it abolishes the circle itself.

Politically, this vision subverts the sovereign logic through which modern states determine who counts as human, citizen, subject. These determinations are always mediated by categories—legal, racial, economic—that function as filters of protection and exclusion. To imagine a world structured around qualunque being is to imagine a world in which life is not contingent upon qualification. It is to dismantle the machinery that sorts, ranks, and abandons.

The phrase “it always matters” thus names a quiet insurrection. It is not a call to erase difference, but to unbind mattering from the tyranny of identity. It envisions a world beyond the violence of categorization—a world where being, of any kind, is enough.

Form-of-Life

In Means Without End and later texts, Agamben defines form-of-life as a life inseparable from its form—a way of living that cannot be abstracted into “bare life” or reduced to biological survival. It’s a mode of existence that resists separation between what one is and how one lives. This marks a departure from the earlier ontological framing of “qualunque” which emphasized resistance to classification. Form-of-life instead foregrounds a kind of ethical inhabitation—a life lived without appropriation, without being captured by law, identity, or utility.

He abandons the language of “community” and “singularity” in favor of form-of-life. This concept emphasizes a life inseparable from its form—a way of living that cannot be abstracted into “bare life” or reduced to juridical identity. Form-of-life is not a collective noun; it’s an ethical mode of existence. It resists being grouped, counted, or named. In this shift, Agamben moves from imagining a community of singularities to envisioning singular lives lived in messianic suspension. Inoperativity becomes another key term: the capacity to deactivate functions, roles, and apparatuses without destroying them. It is a way of living that suspends the machinery of productivity and identity, it is the potentiality of life when it’s not subordinated to function.

Agamben’s reflections on Shabbat further illustrate this turn. Shabbat is not just rest—it’s a suspension of the machinery that binds life to labor and obligation. In this rhythm, the idea of community—especially as a structured, bounded entity—becomes irrelevant. What matters is not who belongs, but how one lives. Shabbat exemplifies form-of-life: a life lived without the need for communal identity.

Agamben’s reflections on Shabbat, especially in The Highest Poverty and The Use of Bodies, draw from Jewish and Franciscan traditions to imagine a life beyond work, law, and property. Shabbat becomes a figure of messianic time—a suspension of the machinery of production and obligation. It’s not just rest, but a radical interruption of the logic that binds life to labor, ownership, and juridical identity. In this sense, Shabbat exemplifies form-of-life: a life lived in use, presence, and messianic interruption not possession; in relation, not rule. The Highest Poverty investigates a radical way of living that merges law and life, preserving autonomy through poverty and hospitality and offering a critical perspective on how law shapes—and might be transcended by—life. The medieval monastic attempts, especially by Franciscans, to live poverty as form-of-life challenge modern assumptions about law, property, and life itself.

This later vocabulary is less about resisting classification and more about inhabiting a world differently. Agamben moves from ontological critique to ethical and liturgical imagination. Qualunque resists being named; the form-of-life reclaims how one lives. Shabbat, then, is not just a metaphor—it’s a practice of deactivation, a way of living that interrupts the sovereign logic of inclusion/exclusion, work/non-work, sacred/profane. When he speaks of inoperativity, form-of-life, Shabbat or the Franciscan tradition he’s not offering escape or comfort. He’s staging interruptions—moments where the machinery falters. Inoperativity is not mere inactivity but the revelation of potentiality once stripped of its utilitarian telos.

Seeing Like a State or Like a Friar

Attempt to merge with the machine, with the shape sorting toy taken to be the real thing, and kill or be killed, kill if you merge successfully. Or see the toy for what it is: the shape-sorter is not the child’s game; it is the state’s toy, the biopolitical apparatus that sorts life into qualified zones (citizen/bare life, worker/unemployed, sacred/profane). To merge is to become the square peg that fits perfectly into the square hole—docile, lethal, indistinguishable from the mold. To “kill or be killed” is the same obedience, only inverted: the peg now wields the sorter as weapon. Either way, the child (sovereign, capital, law) applauds the fit.

Agamben's path is neither fusion nor destruction. It is Shabbat: a collective cessation, the players walk away from the sorter mid-game. The toy does not vanish; it simply loses its grip on the possible. Agamben’s qualunque is the name for what ever life emerges in that suspension—singular yet unclassifiable, open to use by anyone because it belongs to no one. The possible returns to use, rather than being organized by function. Not a new identity but a how, a liturgy without telos. Not a tactic but a habitual desubjectivation. The toy is left holding a category with no instance.

The friars’ conventus is not a pre-political community that then decides to resist; it is a liturgical ensemble whose very gathering suspends the count of who is inside or outside, it is not a performance about something but as something.

The shape matching toy needs the spectacle of its own violence to confirm its grip. The martyr, the saboteur, the whistle-blower—all are legible roles that feed the archive. The machine will try to restart. It always does. The generation of “bare life” that can be killed but not sacrificed, excommunication, inquisition, welfare reform, eugenic modernity, poverty pimping, platform governance—each is an attempt to reinsert the gear, to destroy, or to make executioners.

A Few Brief Counterpoints

Agamben's “inoperativity” or the abandonment of that which abandons is often accused of leading to political quietism—a withdrawal that offers no tools for active, collective resistance against the state's violence. It fails to confront the material violence that holds the shape-sorter in place.

Inoperativity fails to address how state power would be resisted by those unable to “walk away”. The monastic order was a very specific and privileged form of withdrawal. Applying it as a universal model for political life ignores the vast power imbalances and material precarity of “bare life,” for whom withdrawal is not a choice.

The universal concept of “bare life” can obscure the specific historical and social oppressions based, for example, on race, gender, ability, wellbeing, and socio-economic status. 

This view underplays or ignores the genuine intentions of officials and others to improve conditions which are, in some instances, implemented successfully.

By claiming that all humans are potentially reducible to bare life, the theory risks flattening the experiences of the marginalized who are internally diverse not a monolith, and who have always been treated as disposable by state power.

It fails to fully explain how the friar-like quietism, or any other alternative, can resist the state's relentless impulse to flatten, abandon, co-opt, manage, or crush variation.

LLM