If there is any problem I have with claiming Hirschhorn for “critical theory,” as many critics have done productively and which much of the contemporary art world resists for its own reasons, it is that he is a devotional artist; an artist devoted to divine presence through a highly unique, and recent, form of materialism. This devoted materialism – a materialism as much after Mondrian, Malevitch and other Abstractionists as it is the philosophers Hannah Arendt, Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze and Baruch Spinoza – would maintain the radical freedom of the artist as a noble actor within collective cultural struggle (“The decision to be an artist is the decision to be free. Freedom is the condition of responsibility”), while simultaneously realizing the suspension of this very freedom in the depersonalization of Abstraction for itself.

By a chiasmus of these two positions: radical agency and transcendental depersonalization, I wonder if we can not locate a radical position towards violence, one that has been opened up by the recent publications of Giorgio Agamben, in which the philosopher discusses what he calls “states of exception.” Particularly relevant to Hirschhorn’s recent work is Agamben’s reading of the debates between Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin concerning the “state of exception” in Germany during the first World War. If, as Agamben shows after Benjamin, states of exception are exceptions that historically ground the rule of democratic and totalitarian states alike then one should look elsewhere, in states beyond states of exception, to recover that which remains beyond the rule of both natural and cultural law: beyond “bare life” (Agamben) and “mere life” (Benjamin): the reduction of bodies to biological states of subsistence in the suspension of legal conventions grounded by constitutional law and international agreements regarding human rights.