On the road: Academic Ananya Vajpeyi recalls tracking down an ‘off the grid’ philosopher in Venice

For weeks I asked colleagues at the University of Venice and friends who are scholars of political philosophy around the world, how one might contact Agamben. He is listed as being on the faculty of the European Graduate School in Switzerland, but without any contact information. I was told that it was impossible to get an email address for him, that he was “off the grid”.

“You might see him at a café or bookshop in Venice,” said my friend, Federico Squarcini, a left-wing professor of Indology, a philologist and Marxist in the best Italian way, “in which case you should go up to him and say hello.”

I had seen some photographs of Agamben online, but this piece of advice carelessly tossed off by my friend left me anxious and frustrated. I walked around Venice every day looking for anyone I felt even vaguely resembled the elusive philosopher. I was afraid I would spot him, but that he would cross one of the city’s innumerable bridges or vanish down one of its narrow alleys before I could be sure it was him, or that I would accost the wrong person entirely and make a fool of myself. I scarcely noticed anything about Venice, except the ubiquitous absence of Giorgio Agamben.

Another friend, Shaul Bassi, a Shakespeare scholar and professor of postcolonial literature, recalled that Agamben used to be with the Architecture Institute in Venice – not a particularly happy stint, I gathered. But this position had ended some years ago.

“It’s possible to have a macchiato or a spritz with him if you should run into him,” Shaul said, helpfully, but with a grin that gave him away. In fact, Shaul knows everybody, from Vikram Seth to Salman Rushdie, from Amitav Ghosh to Jhumpa Lahiri, so this dead end was particularly galling. Finally, I mentioned the problem to my friend, the intellectual historian, Noga Arikha, whose father, Avigdor Arikha (1929–2010), had been a well-known painter in Paris. Avigdor Arikha and his wife, Noga’s mother – Anne Atik (1932–2021), the poet – were close friends of Beckett, and their house in Paris which had Arikha’s studio was full of paintings, photographs, writings, and memories of him. Atik wrote a memoir about their friendship with Beckett, titled How It Was (2005). Noga immediately closed the circle for me.

It turned out Agamben knew Noga’s father quite well and had written a moving obituary for him in Le Monde. What Noga told me was that Agamben has co-written a book with the contemporary artist, Monica Ferrando, titled The Unspeakable Girl. Ferrando was an admirer and acolyte of Arikha’s in the 1990s. This little piece of information did the trick. I wrote to Ferrando and Agamben together; I got back an email from Agamben with his telephone number. I rang him. I was so flustered that we spoke in an inelegant mixture of English, French, and Italian; he asked me to meet him at his residence near the Frari church on May 6, 3 pm.

The day I was to meet Agamben, I first went to Fondazione Querini Stampalia to look at the Giovanni Bellini paintings, most famously, “The Presentation of Jesus at the Temple” (1469). The tiny museum contains a number of jewel-like works by Venetian masters of the 15th and 16th centuries. The walled garden, designed by the modern architect Carlo Scarpa, is quasi-Japanese in its minimalist style, its precise yet restful arrangement of water, stone, and plants. There were no other visitors for which I was grateful: as summer approached, Venice was becoming overrun with tourists. I had visited the Peggy Guggenheim Collection just a few days earlier, and it had been rushed and crowded to the point of being unpleasant.

I lingered for a long time in the Stampalia palazzo, looking at so many glowing, beating tableaux of Jesus and Mary, thinking about the relationship between religion and art, and religion and political theory. (Later, I would learn that Agamben played a bit part in the 1964 film, The Gospel According to St Matthew, directed by his friend Pier Paolo Pasolini. Even later, I learned that Pasolini was murdered in 1975.) In Agamben and Ferrando’s book, The Unspeakable Girl – which is about the mythical and mysterious figure of Kore or Persephone, a daughter of the Greek god Zeus from Demeter (his sister) – I would eventually come across a description of Renaissance painting in which “thought and vision coincide”. They write: “The ‘image of thought’, like Renaissance allegory, is a mystery wherein that which cannot be discursively presented shines for a moment out of the ruins of language.” I stood transfixed before image after image of Christ and his virgin mother, luminous with unutterable significance.

Suddenly I realised I had barely 20 minutes left to race from Castello to San Polo, and naturally I didn’t know the way because in Venice it is impossible to know the way. After running in a panic through mazes and warrens of streets with an arrow-like sense of direction that I had never suspected myself of possessing, I arrived, hot and out of breath, but on time. The square was deserted; the sottoportego he had directed me to led to an alleyway that admitted little sunlight even at three in the afternoon. Two brass plates affixed to the wooden door had four surnames on them, one was “Agamben”. The buzzer rang me in and I went up two flights of stairs, wondering if wearing my favourite cherry-red buttoned boots bought in New York had been the best plan in the circumstances. It was too late.

It turned out, as these things do, that contrary to his daunting reputation, Agamben was as cordial and relaxed as any eminent intellectual of global renown, whom one might try to meet in person, could be. He ushered me up the stairs and into his book-lined study. My French quickly broke down; my Italian evaporated entirely. We talked in English for nearly two hours. I wanted very much to record our conversation, to make notes and take pictures, but politeness held me back. The sofa and the rug, the bookshelves, the knick-knacks, everything was worn and lived-in, of a bluish hue (perhaps). I decided it was best to settle in and enjoy this opportunity to actually converse with someone whose work I had read, admired, and thought about for years; someone who, to my mind, exemplifies the power of philology not just to read arcane texts of philosophy, but also to decipher the structure of political reality in the world around us.

He had as many questions for me as I for him. In January 2007, he had travelled around India – Delhi, Calcutta, Hyderabad, and Kerala – delivering a series of lectures, but I had been overseas at the time. (He had spoken at CSDS, I learnt much later.) He told me how he was struck by the vivid colours and diversity of India and asked me if it had changed in the past few years, if it now looked like every other place on earth. He asked about the part-Italian Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and its future prospects in politics; about how the fraças over the Italian marines, arrested in Delhi for shooting and killing Indian fishermen in international waters, affected India’s perception of Italy; how corruption was creating a political crisis in India and hollowing out the polity, exactly as had happened in Italy. In Delhi, he remembered staying in a lovely “residence for scholars, quite far from the Nehru University campus” (I suspect he meant the India International Centre), next to a very large park “with beautiful trees and Mughal monuments” (which must have been the Lodi Gardens).

Excerpted with permission from Place: Intimate Encounters with Cities, Ananya Vajpeyi, Women Unlimited Ink.