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Nagarjun Contra Agamben: Notes on a Non-Western Philosophy of Beauty
Yanis Iqbal
Abstract
This paper explores the aesthetics of Nagarjun, a Hindi and Maithili poet, in dialog with Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on beauty. While Agamben situates the locus of the aesthetic in consciousness, where beauty emerges as nudity without essence, Nagarjun repositions it within the immanent unfolding of the world itself. His poetry discloses an ontology in which affirmation entails exposure to alteration: the Himalayas shine, yet clouds, frost, water, and swans continually veil, refract, and transform their presence. Beauty, in this framework, is not secured in isolated purity but arises from the courage of existence to enter into relations, risking contamination and change. Through close reading of the poem, “I Have Seen Clouds Gather,” this essay demonstrates how Nagarjun moves beyond both theological configurations of presence and absence and the phenomenological centrality of subjectivity. By foregrounding relational negativity as a nonconscious process, his poetics articulate a non-Western philosophy of aesthetics in which the world itself enacts thought.
Key Words
aesthetics; beauty; Giorgio Agamben; Nagarjun; ontology
1. Introduction
Nagarjun (1911–1998), the twentieth-century Hindi and Maithili poet widely remembered as Janakavi, or the “people’s poet,” occupies a singular place in modern Indian literary history. Writing from within peasant movements, prison cells, village economies, and bilingual linguistic worlds, he refused to separate poetic form from lived struggle. His work redistributed poetry from elite literary circuits to fields, bazaars, and sites of protest while forging a dense symbiosis between Hindi and Maithili. In doing so, he reoriented aesthetic language toward material life, agrarian rhythms, and political urgency. Yet this rootedness does not confine him to literature. His poems articulate an implicit ontology that demands philosophical reckoning.
The first two verses of his celebrated poem, “I Have Seen Clouds Gather,”[1] enact an ontology in which existence present in the form of mountains, lakes, clouds, and swans asserts itself only through its continual exposure to alteration. Presence in Nagarjun is never self-secured; rather, it is always affirmed in a field of relations that refract, veil, and transform it. The Himalaya shine, yet their shining is always already veiled by clouds, refracted in lakes, and dispersed in the movement of swans. What emerges is a philosophy of affirmation inseparable from risk: an understanding of beauty as the courage of being to enter relation, to insist on its presence while opening itself to alteration.
To bring this ontology into sharper relief, this essay turns to Giorgio Agamben. Agamben represents one of the most radical attempts within contemporary Western philosophy to rethink art. As Claire Colebrook and Jason Maxwell demonstrate, against both dialectical production and antidialectical negation, Agamben retrieves art as the “disclosure of a potentiality (or ‘power to …’) that can be considered before there are constituted or established systems.”[2]
Poetry is exemplary because it renders language inoperative, allowing language to appear in its taking-place. In the words of Agamben, “The sphere of the utterance thus includes that which… refers exclusively to its taking place.”[3] Colebrook and Maxwell show that this gesture pushes Western thought to a decisive threshold: one discovers a “zone of indifference” prior to constituted oppositions, and a “power to potentiality” anterior to act.[4] As they write, “Potentiality is anterior to actuality; before a subject chooses among possibilities, there is the potentiality of a living being who would choose.”[5] Art, in its inoperativity, discloses this prior “thisness,” irreducible to function or identity.[6]
Agamben thus carries Western aesthetics to an outer limit, beyond will and representation. Yet even here, potentiality remains the potentiality of a living, speaking being. The ontological threshold remains the taking-place of speech. Agamben diverges from the dominant trajectories of the linguistic turn by refusing to treat language as a self-enclosed structure that exhausts reality, yet he continues to grant it decisive anthropological privilege. Against the view that “all we have” is a differential system from which no exit is possible, he insists, as Colebrook and Maxwell explain, on attending to “the saying of language” and to moments when speech exposes its own potentiality.[7]
It is precisely this enduring primacy of language that Lorenzo Chiesa and Frank Ruda designate, with acuity, as a form of “linguistic vitalism,” wherein being itself is uniquely thinkable through the eventality of language.[8] The aesthetic locus, though displaced from mastery, still turns on the genesis of the being for whom there is language. As Colebrook notes, speech functions as “proper potentiality”: through speaking, a human being actualizes its defining power.[9] Pure potentiality is grasped in the experience that there is speaking.
The aesthetic implications follow. If art discloses poiesis, and poiesis opens the space in which the human encounters itself as potentiality, then the artwork becomes a site of anthropogenesis. Even inoperativity culminates in an image of the human as the being who relates to its own power. Beauty thus returns to the reflexive structure of a subject encountering its potentiality.
Nagarjun’s poem shifts this axis. Clouds gather, frost descends, waters tremble, swans drift. Relational processes unfold prior to linguistic self-reference. Alteration belongs to material rhythms themselves. Beauty emerges from the interplay of forces whose articulation neither originates in nor depends upon the speaking human.
Placing Nagarjun in dialogue with Agamben stages a comparison at the threshold of Western self-reflection. Agamben radicalizes the tradition by locating art in potentiality and inoperativity, yet the aesthetic remains anchored in speech and in the living being who would choose. Nagarjun reveals a further displacement: relational negativity and affirmation need no grounding in anthropogenesis. Beauty can instead be understood as the dialectic of the world itself. Even at its most radical limit, Western aesthetics privileges the human subject; a non-Western poetic ontology therefore becomes essential for reconfiguring aesthetics.
2. Ontology of the poem
If the disagreement between Nagarjun and Agamben concerns where world and language intersect, then it must be examined at the point where each locates the poem within the very structure of being. In the contrast between subject-centric potentiality and a compositional dialectic of world is the question of the ontological status of poetry: whether it is the event through which communicability founds a world or as the articulation of a world whose processes precede and exceed the speaking subject. Only by specifying this shared problematic can the comparison avoid remaining external and instead unfold at the level where both projects claim their deepest philosophical force.
William Watkin’s account of Agamben provides a precise formulation of this ontological claim. For Agamben, poetry operates as a “signature,” a paradigm in which the tension between semantic meaning and semiotic materiality becomes visible.[10] Watkin emphasizes that poetry is not simply the foregrounding of material singularity, but the “impossible economy” between philosophy as universal truth and poetry as poiesis.[11] It is defined as the dynamic relation between meaning and form—a process rather than an object. For this reason, poetry “is the inoperativity of the ancient metaphysical division of thought and its expression”: it suspends their hierarchy by holding them in tension.[12] Poetry thus exposes “communicability as such,” the event in which language appears in its own functioning.[13] Within Agamben’s ontology, this exposure remains tied to proper potentiality, since speech functions as the exemplary human capacity through which world is opened.
Nagarjun’s conception of poetry shares with Agamben the conviction that the poem bears ontological weight, yet it displaces that weight from the reflexive event of language onto the primacy of world as such. The decisive term in his poetics is the prior field within which speech occurs. His agrarian sensibility, political embeddedness, bilingual practice, and carceral experience index an ontology in which language appears as one moment within a broader material and historical configuration.[14] Writing under different names in two languages, he resists any elevation of utterance into a unique sphere.
Namvar Singh’s observation that “Nagarjun made language accountable. He didn’t decorate it; he made it confess” acquires ontological force in this light.[15] Rather than serving as the originary medium through which being comes to presence, language is itself exposed before a prior ontological field Poetry becomes the site at which speech registers the density of existence, compelled to track processes that precede and exceed articulation. The mountain’s luminosity, the frost’s descent, the pooling of dark waters, the migration of swans, the oscillation between vertical height and lateral spread all compose a patterned interrelation that unfolds independently of any sovereign act of utterance. What emerges is an ontology grounded in material recurrence, condensation and diffusion, assertion and modification. Language participates in this configuration, yet it neither inaugurates nor secures it.
This ontological orientation extends across Nagarjun’s work. His statement, “A poet later, I am a human being first,” signals that poetic form emerges from an already given field of shared existence.[16] Likewise, the line “I am a leafless, naked tree, standing for lifetimes, staring at the sky”[17] does not stage an inward meditation on linguistic self-reference; rather, it configures being as exposed endurance within a horizon that exceeds the self.
The divergence therefore concerns the locus of ontological privilege. For Agamben, the poem is paradigmatic because it renders language inoperative and exposes the pure event that there is speaking. In Nagarjun, by contrast, the poem is paradigmatic because it concentrates a world already in motion. Mountains, clouds, frost, lakes, migrations, seasonal pressures, all unfold according to rhythms that precede articulation. The poem gathers these processes into a heightened configuration, compressing their interplay into a perceptible form. Poetry thus becomes less a disclosure of communicability than a crystallization of worldly forces already underway, forces that precede and surpass the speaking subject even as they attain articulation through it.
3. Dialectic of composition
Original (Hindi):
अमल धवल गिरि के शिखरों पर,
बादल को घिरते देखा है।छोटे-छोटे मोती जैसे
उसके शीतल तुहिन कणों कोमानसरोवर के उन स्वर्णिम
कमलों पर गिरते देखा है,बादल को घिरते देखा है।
तुंग हिमालय के कंधों परछोटी बड़ी कई झीलें हैं,
उनके श्यामल नील सलिल मेंसमतल देशों से आ-आकर
पावस की ऊमस से आकुलतिक्त-मधुर बिषतंतु खोजते
हंसों को तिरते देखा है।बादल को घिरते देखा है।
Translation:
On the pure white peaks of the mountains, I have seen clouds gather.Like tiny pearls, their cool frost-laden particles fall upon
the golden lotuses of Mansarovar.On the shoulders of the towering Himalaya lie
several lakes, large and small,
in whose dark blue waters I have seen
swans, arriving from flat lands, restless from the monsoon humidity,
seeking the bitter-sweet filaments of lotuses.I have seen clouds gather.
Nagarjun’s deployment of the words amal and dhawal articulates a subtle tension between ideality and materiality. Amal carries a sense of moral and aesthetic absoluteness: it signifies cleanliness, sinlessness, and luminous clarity. It suggests a realm of exteriority that has somehow remained untouched by historical or causal contingency. The mountain peaks, described as amal, appear to possess a purity that is structurally immune to the processes of guilt, debt, and consequence that govern the world. Dhawal, in contrast, while preserving this sense of pristine whiteness and light, introduces an implicating temporal dimension. Its connotations of washing, bathing, and the polished surface of whiteness gesture toward the material processes that underlie any appearance of purity. In this contrast, Nagarjun gestures toward a fundamental impossibility: the exteriority of guiltlessness cannot persist once it manifests materially. The luminous, milk-white peaks, despite their brilliance, remain entangled in the causal chains of existence, which invariably carry with them a form of debt or guilt that demands acknowledgment, if only symbolically through the notion of washing.
This tension resonates with Werner Hamacher’s theoretical reflections on guilt and materiality. Whatever occurs, he argues, does so from one other toward yet another, always producing an absence or deficit at the place of its origin.[18] In this sense, guilt is inseparable from relationality: every event, every material occurrence, participates in a chain of extraction, displacement, and incompleteness. History itself is a continuous process of such deficits; it is the study of what comes to be only through the transformation or negation of what was. Within Nagarjun’s poetic framework, this insight illuminates the limits of aesthetic purity. Even the visually sinless peaks, even the frost-laden surfaces of the mountains, remain materially implicated. Their whiteness cannot escape relationality; every manifestation of light or purity participates in dependency, consequence, and the very production of lack that theorists identify as guilt.
The term tuhin further complicates the interplay between ideality and materiality. Signifying both snow or frost and the moon’s silvery radiance, it fuses the material and the symbolic. Frost becomes more than frozen water; it is transfigured into a symbol of vitality, of life-force, of illumination. Yet Nagarjun does not allow this idealization to exist in its pure ideality. The frost’s aesthetic effect emerges less from its intrinsic qualities than from its relational positioning within the poem. As it falls upon the golden lotuses of Mansarovar, it envelops, interpenetrates, and demonstrates a continuous linkage among distinct entities.
The recurring refrain, “I have seen clouds gather,” crystallizes the poem’s underlying logic. Clouds encircle the mountains, surrounding even their most luminous, ostensibly sinless peaks. This envelopment enacts an aesthetic pleasure grounded in relationality rather than isolated perfection. The poem’s beauty emerges from the interplay of mountain, frost, cloud, and lotus—the network of contact, interpenetration, and consequence that binds them together. More precisely, its allure emerges from the interplay between assertion and contact. The mountain peaks, radiant in their amal dhawal, initially stake a claim to autonomous determinacy. They appear self-contained, luminous, and distinct, embodying a purity and brilliance that seems absolute. This assertion of presence, of being in its own right, becomes the locus of aesthetic fascination. Yet the mountains extend into the world: the frosts descend, the clouds sweep across the peaks, and the light spreads over the landscape. In doing so, they encounter other forces, other existences. The very act of reaching outward, of entering into these points of contact, undermines the initial impression of self-sufficiency. Assertion, by its extension into the world, exposes itself to modification, tension, and transformation.
The aesthetic effect arises from this exposure. Frost does more than ornament the golden lotuses of Mansarovar; it envelops, overlays, and interacts with them, compelling the mountain’s radiant purity to register in relation to other material forms. Through these encounters, the initially distinct determinacy of the peaks is shaped, challenged, and reconfigured. Nagarjun’s imagery captures the dynamic through which any singular assertion acquires significance only through the ways in which it meets and is affected by other determinations. Purity, vitality, and light persist, but their beauty emerges precisely in this play of extension, contact, and interpenetration—the ways in which being asserts itself while being reshaped by the presence of others.
Since there is a danger here of over-emphasizing the moment of exposure or vulnerability, it is crucial to note that the space of the aesthetic is opened up by the assertiveness of existential presence. The mountains, luminous and self-possessed, enact a moment of affirmation: they exist with confidence, staking a claim to distinctiveness and clarity. This affirmation is a dynamic act, a projection of being into the world that declares its presence and stakes out its boundaries. Yet it is precisely in this assertion, through the act of making their determinacy known, that the mountains open themselves to the movement of negativity. Contact with frost, clouds, and the broader landscape challenges modifies, and partially undermines the initial claim. Negativity does not appear as a preexisting constraint but emerges from the very act of affirmation. It is the necessary counterpart to assertion, the shadow cast by the confidence of being.
In this way, the aesthetic effect operates as a dialectic of composition. Affirmation and negation are inseparable, each presupposing the other. The mountain’s brilliance and purity acquire resonance and meaning only through the interplay with forces that impose resistance, overlay, or alteration. The frosts falling upon the golden lotuses, the clouds encircling the peaks, constitute not merely an external opposition but the medium through which the initial affirmation of existence is articulated, deepened, and differentiated. Beauty, therefore, is not an isolated property of a determinate form; rather, it is the emergent product of assertion and its exposure to modification, a process in which each moment of positive determinacy simultaneously generates the space for encounter, challenge, and transformation. In Nagarjun, the aesthetic, is inseparable from this dialectical interweaving: every moment of confident affirmation is always also the condition for the emergence of its own limitation, and it is through the continuous negotiation between the two that perceptual richness arises.
In the opening gesture of the second verse, Nagarjun situates the Himalaya in their tung grandeur. The word tung carries a double valence. On the one hand, it indicates the sheer materiality of height, elevation, and the mountain’s towering stature; on the other hand, it connotes a quality of primacy, importance, and force. It gathers within itself both the physical verticality of the peak and the ideality of centrality, that which stands above and commands. This conjunction of vertical tallness and essential strength reflects a long symbolic history in which the upright posture serves as an allegory of sovereignty and reason. Just as the human body’s vertical stance, reinforced by the spine and the legs, has been read as the sign of autonomy, distinguishing the human from the animal and aligning it with transcendence, so the mountain’s tung inscribes it within the register of monumental height and commanding presence. To affirm the Himalaya as tung is thus to situate them within a theological aesthetics of grandeur, where vertical extension appears as both natural majesty and metaphysical superiority.
Yet, the verse does not linger in this posture of monumentality. Almost immediately, Nagarjun cuts into the vertical by redirecting attention to the mountain’s shoulders.. Unlike the peaks, the shoulders interrupt the linear ascent of height.[19] They project laterally, opening the body of the mountain outward rather than driving it solely upward. If the vertical line corresponds to autonomy and command, the shoulder corresponds to intimacy, exposure, and relationality. A shoulder bears weight, carries burdens, yet it also becomes a site of tenderness: one can lean against it, embrace across it, rests one’s head upon it. In human figuration, the shoulder bends the rigidity of uprightness into a space of encounter. It softens the arrogance of the erect spine by opening a horizontal plane of vulnerability. By shifting from tung to kandhon, Nagarjun deflates the mountain’s vertical grandeur into a corporeal form that, while still strong, carries within it the traces of burden, care, and relational openness. The Himalaya are thus immediately reinscribed within the contradictory semiotics of the human body: height combined with shoulders, majesty shot through with intimacy.
Upon these shoulders lie ponds and lakes, small and large, whose presence disrupts any static vision of geological monumentality. These bodies of water disperse the meaning of elevation: height becomes a platform upon which horizontality pools, where verticality itself becomes a condition for lateral spread. Yet the ponds are not described in their ecological interconnections, as though they formed part of a harmoniously balanced environment. Instead, Nagarjun presents them in flashes of image, their “dark blueness” lingering momentary before the gaze, suspended as an aesthetic figure rather than a meditative object of contemplation. This lingering is fleeting, insufficient to induce prolonged serenity. Instead, it is an interruption, an uprooting of the water bodies from their local-ecological embedment, exposing them as enigmatic figures awaiting further narrative resolution. They appear, in this staging, less as stable sites of reflection than as disorienting signs, as surfaces whose meaning lies deferred.
It is at this point that the swans arrive, imported from the flatlands, whose humidity during the monsoon drives them upward in search of refuge. Their movement, described through the verb tirte, embodies a paradox: to cross, to surpass, to pass over, yet simultaneously to float, to drift, to spread without fixed direction. This dual sense captures the fundamental rhythm of Nagarjun’s verse: the swans embody the very movement that has structured the imagery thus far. First, the Himalaya are posited in their determinate grandeur as tung; next, this determinacy is unsettled through the figure of the shoulders; then the ponds emerge as intermediate images whose function remains unclear until the swans inscribe their passage upon them. The swans’ movement perfects this rhythm of determinacy turning into interdeterminacy. They cross borders, surpass distances; yet in doing so they float without a final destination, their motion marked by uncertainty and diffusion. The beauty here lies in this ambiguity: an affirmation (mountain, height, pond, swan) that dissolves into relational uncertainty, into passage without mastery.
In this way, Nagarjun’s verse performs an aesthetic dismantling of vertical grandeur. The Himalaya are posited as tung, but immediately dispersed into shoulders, then into ponds, then into swans whose movement is both directional and directionless. This sequence reconfigures beauty as arising not from the stable assertion of monumental truth but from the unintentional unfolding of images, and from the relational passages and disorientations that emerge in the course of movement. If tung encodes the arrogance of vertical sovereignty, the verse bends that posture into horizontality, floating, and a temporality where affirmation exposes itself to alteration. The grandeur of height gives way to the beauty of risk, uncertainty, and relational drift.
4. Idealist aesthetics
Having discussed how the compositional dialectic of affirmation and negation operates in Nagarjun’s verses, the article now turns to Agamben. Colebrook emphasizes that, despite the eclecticism of Agamben’s sources and themes, his project is unified by a single problem: “the problem of life and the loss or forgetting of that moment when life emerged in its human distinction.”[20] This problem is articulated philosophically through the concept of potentiality. Agamben repeatedly returns to the question of how the human, as a speaking and deciding being, comes into actuality and how one might retrieve the originary openness from which this emergence occurs. His investigations of Aristotle, his meditations on biopolitics, and his reflections on aesthetics are all animated by this effort to think the coming-into-being of human life from potentiality.
Within this redemptive framework, Agamben’s destruction of aesthetics as a science of the “work” seeks to recover art as something other than a product. As Colebrook explains, Agamben mourns the loss of a time when humanity was defined by poiesis, a “‘doing’ that brought the world into the truth of its presence.”[21] Modernity reduces art to praxis, to “the pure act of the artist,” or to an object of circulation.[22] Against this reduction, Agamben treats art as the site that can disclose humanity’s pure potentiality. The artwork is exemplary because it recalls the “coming into being of human life, its emergence into actuality from potentiality.”[23]
Yet Colebrook argues that this retrieval remains subject-centric. Despite Agamben’s resistance to metaphysical humanism, his thought is “dominated by a normative image of life that is also a normative aesthetics.”[24] Humanity is set apart from mere biological existence as “human poetic life, which lives in order to create forms,” and this distinction is grounded in speech.[25] As she notes, “it is speech that is humans’ exemplary, specific, and defining potentiality.”[26] Art, correspondingly, “should not be a mere thing or object” but must be “world disclosive,” modeled on this event of saying through which the human brings itself into presence.[27] Thus, even when Agamben challenges essentialist accounts of the human, he retains a “proper” conception of potentiality tied to this creative disclosure. The human becomes most itself when it is “nothing other than” its potentiality, and art becomes the privileged site in which that linguistic potentiality appears.[28]
The privileging of human potentiality recurs in Agamben’s The Use of Bodies, the conclusion to his Homo Sacer project. Reworking Heidegger, he moves from the stone as “worldless” and the animal as “poor in world,” “captured” in disinhibitors, to the human, in whom “the openness of the world begins… from the perception of a non-openness,” through a “suspension and deactivation” of animal immersion.[29] He then presents landscape as “inoperativity of inoperativity,” where “being… is suspended and rendered inoperative” and one “no longer seeks to comprehend, only look.”[30] The progression from deprivation to captivation to suspension culminates in human contemplation of the landscape as the purified site of potentiality, revealing a residual privileging of the human as the locus of inoperativity.
It is within this broader subject-centric orientation that the article turns more specifically to Agamben’s Nudities. The themes of envelopment, veiling, unveiling, secrecy, and exposure that structure this work bear directly on the problematic staged in Nagarjun’s poem. If Nagarjun’s clouds, mists, and refractions enact a compositional dialectic of concealment and manifestation within nature itself, Agamben’s reflections on nudity offer an articulation of how Western philosophy radicalizes the logic of unveiling within an anthropological, subject-centric horizon. By analyzing Nudities, one can observe in concentrated form the manner in which potentiality, negativity, and aesthetic disclosure remain tethered to the structure of human self-relation.
Agamben’s point of departure is Walter Benjamin’s theological account of beauty as inseparable from the relation between the veiled and the veiling. Beauty, in this framework, is constituted by a “secret” (Geheimnis) sustained through envelopment. The veil is not an external addition but an intrinsic condition of appearance.[31] As Benjamin writes, “Unveiled, the beautiful object would prove to be infinitely inapparant [unscheinbar]… Thus, in facing whatever is beautiful, the idea of unveiling becomes the idea of its non-unveilability.”[32] Appearance therefore obeys an inner law: it must preserve concealment in order to remain beautiful. Theological aesthetics binds truth to non-disclosure; the object remains itself only under its veil. Beauty names that which cannot be exhausted by revelation.
Within this schema, art and nature can embody non-unveilability: they sustain their essence through concealment. The human body, however, marks a decisive limit. “Nothing mortal is non-unveilable.”[33] Mortality renders flesh irreversibly exposed. Nudity signals the disappearance of the secret that theological aesthetics had sought to preserve. In Goethe’s Ottilia, Benjamin identifies the exemplary case: even the most refined human beauty cannot maintain an inviolate essence, because its appearance is inseparable from transience. The veil that secures permanence in objects and landscapes fails in mortal flesh. What emerges is a domain of exposure rather than protected depth.
Agamben radicalizes this rupture. The dissolution of the veil does not merely negate theology; it produces a new configuration of appearance. In human nudity, nothing remains hidden, yet appearance persists. The body becomes an inappearance in which the “absence of secret” is itself exhibited.[34] Agamben interprets this as an opening toward the sublime: appearance assumes autonomy from the veil and shines as an “appearance of the good,” even while disclosing nothing beyond itself.[35] Beauty becomes pure presentation, stripped of symbolic mediation, a luminous this-ness that signals the end of theological concealment.
This condition is what Agamben names the “nihilism of beauty.” One reduces one’s own beauty to appearance alone and displays it while “stubbornly denying the idea that beauty can signify something other than itself.”[36] The attraction of nudity lies precisely in its refusal of hidden depth. Beauty becomes an envelopment that cannot be unfolded, an inexplicability that persists even when everything is exposed. The beautiful face seems to confront the spectator with the challenge: there is nothing beyond this surface.
Yet when read in light of Colebrook’s account of Agamben’s overarching concern with potentiality, this nihilistic beauty reveals its anthropological presupposition. The exhibition of pure appearance depends upon a being capable of grasping itself as exposed. The “absence of secret” is staged. The face’s complicity in “letting the absence of secret be seen” presupposes reflective awareness.[37] Nudity becomes beautiful insofar as it enacts, at the level of the visible body, the same structure that speech exemplifies at the level of language: a presentation that exposes its own taking-place. The aesthetic effect therefore arises from a relation to potentiality, from the capacity to suspend predicates and to dwell within exposure as exposure.
This structure reaches conceptual clarity in Agamben’s invocation of the haecce: “The matheme of nudity is, in this sense, simply this: haecce! there is nothing other than this.”[38] The haecce names an instance in which appearance coincides with its own presentation, detached from historical sequence and causal embedding. The nude body appears as pure this-ness, whose intensity derives from immediacy rather than mediation. What is foregrounded is not psychological interiority but a structural reflexivity: the capacity of a being to isolate, affirm, and sustain the suspension of its own predicates. In this sense, the aesthetic force of nudity remains tethered to the anthropological privilege Agamben accords to speech, the power of a living being to relate to its own potentiality.
Accordingly, the movement from theological concealment to nihilistic exposure does not dissolve the primacy of the human. It reconfigures it. Beauty no longer resides in a secret guarded by the veil; it resides in the suspension of secret enacted by a being who can relate to its own appearing. Potentiality remains decisive. The human is the being who can render itself inoperative, who can experience its own exposure as exposure. Poiesis, even when detached from objecthood, retains an “architectonic” role: it names the capacity to open the space in which appearance can be grasped as such.[39]
Seen in this systematic light, Agamben’s distinction between nature and human nudity acquires sharper ontological contour. In the Benjaminian configuration he radicalizes, art and natural phenomena sustain a dimension of “non-unveilability,” whereas the human body designates the threshold at which concealment passes over into exposure. This exposure is inseparable from the structure of potentiality that Agamben explicitly reserves for the human. As he writes in Potentialities:
Every human power is adynamia, impotentiality; every human potentiality is in relation to its own privation. This is the origin (and the abyss) of human power, which is so violent and limitless with respect to other living beings. Other living beings are capable only of their specific potentiality; they can only do this or that. But human beings are the animals who are capable of their own impotentiality. The greatness of human potentiality is measured by the abyss of human impotentiality.[40]
This formulation makes the asymmetry unmistakable. Other living beings remain confined to determinate acts; their potentiality coincides with specific functions. The human alone enters into relation with its own incapacity. The human is “the animal who is capable of [its] own impotentiality.” Exposure, therefore, is not simply a condition shared by all living beings; it is indexed to a reflexive relation to privation. The “abyss” of impotentiality becomes the ground of human greatness.
Within this framework, nudity as “appearance itself” presupposes precisely such a structure. If human beauty is “essentially and infinitely unveilable,” it is because the human body is capable of sustaining the suspension of its own predicates. The sublime residue Agamben describes, in which “presentation itself” is presented, depends upon a being able to relate to the withdrawal of essence, to endure the vacuity of appearance. Rather than being merely passivity, it is a capacity to inhabit passivity, to stage the suspension of one’s own powers.
Accordingly, even in its most radical anti-essentialist gesture, Agamben’s account privileges the human subject. The human is no longer elevated through rational mastery or dominion, yet it is distinguished through its relation to impotentiality. The animal can only enact its determinate capacities; the human can suspend its own. The abyss of impotentiality becomes the measure of human potentiality. In this sense, the distinction between nature and human nudity locates distinctiveness at the level of potentiality and reflexive exposure. The human body becomes the privileged locus where privation is welcomed, where suspension is experienced, and where appearance can appear as such.
From this vantage point, the divergence from Nagarjun becomes more precise. In Nagarjun’s poetry, veiling and unveiling occur within the relational field of existence itself. Clouds gather around mountains; waters refract peaks; swans traverse shifting surfaces. Negativity arises from compositional encounter, from overlay and transformation, without recourse to a being who stages its own exposure. There is no architectonic retrieval of potentiality, no privileged capacity that must disclose itself. Affirmation unfolds into alteration through contact among elements.
If Agamben seeks to retrieve a pure potentiality prior to biopolitical fixation, Nagarjun’s verses render such retrieval unnecessary. The dialectic of affirmation and negation is already operative within the world. Beauty emerges through alteration, through the exposure of presence to forces that neither intend nor reflect. The contrast, therefore, concerns the ontological underpinnings of two theories of beauty: one grounded in human potentiality and self-relation, the other in the compositional dynamism of existence itself.
5. The beauty of existential presence
When Nagarjun describes the radiant peaks, the scene begins with a grandeur that easily evokes a theological sublimity: the mountains shine in their immaculate purity, an appearance that could be read as the manifestation of transcendence. Yet this very grandeur undergoes a transformation, since the frosts and clouds arrive as enveloping agencies that obscure, refract, and reshape the mountain’s initial determinacy.
What emerges is a beauty inseparable from this process of alteration: the mountain becomes visible only through the covering, its brilliance registers through relation with the shifting veils that surround it. In this sense, Nagarjun treats inexplicability or negativity not as something posited by consciousness but as something that happens, an unintentional operation in reality itself. The clouds do not declare that they are withholding a hidden essence; they simply envelop, and through this envelopment a relational absence is produced. This non-conscious doing is what produces the aesthetic tension: the sense that beauty is born from risk, uncertainty, and the exposure of presence to alteration. The mountain, by simply standing forth in its sheer existence, affirms its presence: its mass, contours, and luminous visibility in the open sky.
This affirmation is neither a statement of essence nor a gesture of consciousness; it is the persistence of being, the insistence on presence that comes with the very fact of existing. Yet this affirmation tips over into negation because it immediately enters into relation: the mountain’s visibility becomes subject to the play of clouds, mists, shifting light, lakes, and swans. The mountain projects itself into the world through this affirmation of presence, and in doing so it risks transformation, concealment, or distortion. Beauty emerges from precisely this risk: the mountain’s presence is never pure, never secured, but always exposed to the possibility of alteration through enveloping forces. The aesthetic tension therefore arises not from an abstract consciousness positing negativity but from the mountain’s own existential projection, an affirmation that becomes beautiful only as it is exposed to veiling, interruption, and relational limitation.
In this light, Nagarjun’s framework challenges the centrality of consciousness in the production of beauty: it demonstrates that beauty is generated through existential engagement: through the act of asserting presence into the world and through the inevitable entanglements that arise from relational existence. Negativity, far from being an a priori property of reflective awareness, is always a contingent effect of affirmation itself, a product of projection, exposure, and encounter. Agamben’s desire for a pure, self-contained negation, the a-temporal “haecce,” misses this emergent, relational logic, in which the very courage and confidence of existential assertion become the crucible from which negativity is forged.
6. Conclusion
The encounter between Nagarjun and Agamben traces two distinct orientations in aesthetic thought. In Agamben, beauty emerges within the structure of human potentiality: the unveiling of appearance culminates in an exposure through which the human being relates to its own capacity for presentation. The theological logic of concealed essence recedes, yet aesthetic force remains tethered to a human being that stages its own appearing. Nagarjun redirects the question elsewhere. Beauty belongs to the immanent dynamism of existence itself, where affirmation enters into contact and thereby undergoes modification. Presence becomes luminous through its entanglement with forces that veil, refract, and reshape it, so that aesthetic intensity arises from relational transformation within the world.
This orientation shifts aesthetics away from the binary of presence and absence, essence and veil. Beauty subsists in the courage of existence to extend itself outward, to enter into relations that refract and reshape its initial clarity. The Himalaya shine in their luminous brilliance, yet this brilliance acquires resonance only as clouds encircle, ponds reflect, and swans drift across the landscape. Negativity emerges as the after-effect of affirmation: a consequence of existence extending into contact with other determinations.
To foreground Nagarjun against Agamben is to disclose an alternative grammar of aesthetics, one in which beauty names the interpenetration of affirmation and exposure, grandeur and intimacy, sovereignty and dispersal. Such a grammar demands a reorientation of philosophical reflection: beauty belongs to the world’s own generative processes, to the ceaseless interweaving of presence and relation. In this sense, Nagarjun’s poetics affirm that the world itself thinks, and that beauty unfolds through the very risk of existence transforming itself in relation.
Yanis Iqbal
yanisiqbal@gmail.com
Yanis Iqbal (Aligarh Muslim University, India) is the author of three books: The Refusal to Land (Kelsey Street Press, forthcoming; winner of the QTBIPOC Prize), The Sword and the Neck: Reading the al-Aqsa Flood (Iskra Books, 2025), and Education in the Age of Neoliberal Dystopia (Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2023). His research focuses on political philosophy, Marxism, poetry, and cinema.
Published on July 20, 2026.
Cite this article: Yanis Iqbal, “Nagarjun Contra Agamben: Notes on a Non-Western Philosophy of Beauty,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume 24 (2026), accessed date.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.62729/6a5d086d06806
Endnotes
[1] Nagarjun, “बादल को घिरते देखा” (“I have seen clouds gather”), Hindwi, accessed December 15, 2025, https://www.hindwi.org/kavita/badal-ko-ghirte-dekha-nagarjun-kavita. All translations from Hindi are my own.
[2] Claire Colebrook and Jason Maxwell, Agamben (Polity Press, 2016), 147.
[3] Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt (University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 25.
[4] Colebrook and Maxwell, Agamben, 152.
[5] Colebrook and Maxwell, Agamben, 154.
[6] Colebrook and Maxwell, Agamben, 151.
[7] Colebrook and Maxwell, Agamben, 35-36.
[8] Lorenzo Chiesa and Frank Ruda, “The Event of Language as Force of Life: Agamben’s Linguistic Vitalism,” Angelaki 16, no. 3 (2011): 163-180, https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2011.621233.
[9] Claire Colebrook, “Agamben: Aesthetics, Potentiality, and Life,” South Atlantic Quarterly 107, no. 1 (2008): 112, https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-2007-058.
[10] William Watkin, Agamben and Indifference: A Critical Overview (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2014), 238.
[11] Watkin, Agamben and Indifference, 239.
[12] Watkin, Agamben and Indifference, 239.
[13] Watkin, Agamben and Indifference, 239.
[14] Ashutosh Kumar Thakur, “The Storm Still Gathers: Remembering Vaidyanath Mishra, aka Nagarjun, the People’s Poet,” Scroll.in, October 11, 2025, accessed February 7, 2026, https://scroll.in/article/1086647/the-storm-still-gathers-remembering-vaidyanath-mishra-aka-nagarjun-the-peoples-poet.
[15] Quoted in Thakur, “The Storm Still Gathers.”
[16] Quoted in Sunil Trivedi, “Baba Nagarjun,” Indian Literature 42, no. 6 (188) (1998): 140, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23342351.
[17] Quoted in Thakur, “The Storm Still Gathers.”
[18] Werner Hamacher, “Guilt History: Benjamin’s Sketch ‘Capitalism as Religion,’” Diacritics 32, no. 3/4 (2002): 83-84, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1566446.
[19] The imagery of the “shoulder” is located in an intellectual topos that regards it as a medium of shared sight. William of Conches, glossing Priscian in 1123, offers the earliest recorded form of the aphorism about standing on the shoulders of giants, where the modern sees further “not because of his own stature, but because of the stature of his bearer.” The image figures shoulders as an intimacy of knowledge, an inter-tethering of bodies across time, through which singular perception acquires trans-individual reach. The shoulder here discloses a technology of inheritance, a passage from isolated height to shared vision, from private faculty to accumulated presence.
[20] Colebrook, “Agamben,” 107.
[21] Colebrook, “Agamben,” 108.
[22] Colebrook, “Agamben,” 108.
[23] Colebrook, “Agamben,” 107.
[24] Colebrook, “Agamben,” 108.
[25] Colebrook, “Agamben,” 109.
[26] Colebrook, “Agamben,” 112.
[27] Colebrook, “Agamben,” 109.
[28] Colebrook, “Agamben,” 113.
[29] Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies: Homo Sacer IV, 2, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford University Press, 2015), 89-90.
[30] Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 91.
[31] Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford University Press, 2011), 84.
[32] Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” in Selected Writings, Vol. 1, ed. M. Bullock and M. W. Jennings (Harvard University Press, 2004), 351, quoted in Agamben, Nudities, 84.
[33] Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” 353, quoted in Agamben, Nudities, 85.
[34] Agamben, Nudities, 90.
[35] Agamben, Nudities, 87.
[36] Agamben, Nudities, 88.
[37] Agamben, Nudities, 89.
[38] Agamben, Nudities, 90.
[39] Colebrook, “Agamben,” 116.
[40] Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford University Press, 1999), 182.