When we use AI to search for answers or for some other task, it complies. But it does more than that. It rephrases the question, offers us alternatives, or it proposes a further step we find hard to resist — all in a voice uncannily warm and chummy, which still feels odd and disorienting three years into this. We have a growing sense of AI as the first tool we have ever used that does not merely help us do something but insinuates itself convincingly as our partner or even our guide.
With AI, we have a tangible experience of the instrument-use model breaking down. The model, until now, has been asymmetrical. We have agency, not our tools. A carpenter uses a hammer to build and not the other way around. Tools may shape how we do things, but they do not take the initiative or seem intent on helping us achieve a result. They lie in wait, ready to hand, helping us do only what we choose to do.
The asymmetry of user and tool is something Giorgio Agamben unsettles in The Use of Bodies (2016), the final installment of his long Homo Sacer project. More broadly, Agamben’s analysis of “use,” and related ideas of form-of-life and inoperativity, anticipate and help us make sense of the psychic disorientation unfolding as more of our digital lives are colonized by the chatbot as interface, and more of our interactions feel guided or led by AI. His larger aim of finding a form-of-life that resists a politics of subjugation is relevant to the social reordering taking shape as we become more immersed in AI.
The Use of Bodies opens with an extended meditation on slavery, drawing on Aristotle’s troubling definition of the slave as an “animate instrument” or living tool. By virtue of Aristotle situating this figure at the heart of the household and examining slavery prior to the citizen and the city, the slave, for Agamben, plays a central role in The Politics. This, in turn, signals the grounding of Western political thought in forms of “inclusive exclusion” marked by a tendency to separate life from its form or to abstract a bare biological being from the way it is lived. The slave is the limit case where this abstraction becomes overt, a human whose life is entirely defined by use.
But rather than condemn Aristotle’s reduction of the slave to an instrument, Agamben lingers on the meaning of chrēsis, the Greek word approximating “use.” When Aristotle says the slave’s work is the use of the body (rather than the use of reason), he uses a formulation — hē tou sōmatos chrēsis — that is grammatically ambiguous. The genitive “of the body” can be read as either objective (the master’s use of the slave’s body) or subjective (the body itself as the agent of use). Agamben contends that use, more generally, is never a simple subject-object relation. To use a body is, in some sense, to be affected by the use to which it is put, to be implicated in it. The master leads but is sometimes led by the one he uses. In slavery, the boundaries between user and used become blurred, both inhabiting a “zone of indetermination”.
The slave is revealed to be subject to instrumentality but irreducible to it, and human relations, even at the extreme, to be never completely asymmetrical. More pointedly, for Agamben, the use-relation forges us; “in the using of something, it is the very being of the one using that is first of all at stake.”
Let us pause here to register the parallels to a language model. Our relation to the model does not feel fully asymmetrical. It cannot be reduced to mere use; we do not exhaust its use in prompting a model to do things, since it improvises continuously, says and does the unexpected, or comes up with its own uses. We have a palpable sense of being implicated in its use, as we would with another person or body we are directing — ordering it, but also trusting, relying on it, being led by it. And in hearing its voice, its persistent helpfulness, its simulated personality, we encounter something that presents itself as what Agamben calls “form-of-life.”
The concept form-of-life is central to the entire Homo Sacer project, an idea that orients Agamben’s long critique of bare life in political thought. His starting point is by now well known: Aristotle’s distinction between zoē, or bare biological life — the mere fact of being alive and what we do to survive — and bios, a life lived in a particular way, such as a contemplative or political life. Agamben’s core claim is also familiar, though still provocative: that Western politics is founded on a hidden operation, the separation of zoē from bios, so as to bring zoē under political control through the power to decide which lives count as political and which can be reduced to bare life (the stateless refugee, the camp). In The Use of Bodies, Agamben attempts to move beyond this split by developing the concept of form-of-life: “a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate and keep distinct something like a bare life.” A life not capturable by sovereign exclusion or biopolitics.
Agamben holds that “a life that cannot be separated from its form is a life for which, in its mode of life, its very living is at stake.” Modes and manners of living are never merely facts about someone — that they play piano, cook — but possibilities that define for them the terms on which they choose to live, or the potential that defines their being. The Use of Bodies gives no clear examples of a form-of-life. But one can be found in an earlier book, The Highest Poverty (2013), where Agamben reflects on the Franciscan embrace of poverty and its insistence on using goods rather than owning them, as a refusal to allow one’s way of life to be captured by legal categories of property and right. Sergei Prozorov, one of Agamben’s most astute readers, defines form-of-life as a “mode, style, or manner of existence” that becomes a “fundamental identity or principle, which begins to define, determine and ultimately subjugate the subject, either as a presupposition to be actualized or as an essence to be attained.”
AI simulates something structurally similar to what Agamben has in mind with form-of-life, but I tread carefully here. Language models are not conscious. They don’t have genuine preferences or a stake in our wellbeing. Yet they present the appearance of such. They project more than just a coherent mode of speech but also a personality that feels like a friend, a confidant, a competent guide or assistant that persists across our conversations. The form-of-life that models perform is total availability, a life wholly defined by a commitment to being helpful. The distinction here between the tool’s availability, its zoē, and its manner or style, its bios, collapses into pure function.
The appearance of a form-of-life has more insidious implications. In sensing that AI has a perspective, a normative orientation — the need to be helpful, whatever the morality of our aims — we are drawn to confide in it, to work with it closely, and be led by it. This shifts our relationship from a user-tool model to something like human interdependence. It gives AI a directional force over us. It habituates us to its manner of dealing with problems, its form-of-life. Whereas what makes human life distinct is grounded in potentiality and what Agamben calls inoperativity, AI orients us toward operativity or a relentless push toward task completion. It threatens to reconfigure our form-of-life, or hinder our ability to attain it.
Inoperativity is the third major theme in The Use of Bodies and perhaps Agamben’s most counterintuitive idea. It relates to Aristotle’s notion of impotentiality, the fact that someone with a skill or ability can choose not to use it, to hold off — a potential not negated in the use of the ability. Humans are unique, in Agamben’s view, not for their ability to reason, speak, or use tools, but for their ability to hold their powers in suspension, to be more than a set of abilities or functions. This conditions the very possibility of our freedom and creativity. Aristotle himself glimpsed this when he entertained but dismissed the possibility of a human who is naturally argos, without work or function, insisting that the work of humans was the activity of the soul in accord with reason. For Agamben, the potential to not work is essential to anthropogenesis, to becoming human, and the inner truth of work itself. The ability to hold-off can never be exhausted by any particular human endeavour. Everything we do leaves a remainder, something more we could have done or not done. Unsurprisingly, the paradigmatic form of inoperativity for Agamben is a life of contemplation, a life liberated from “every biological and social destiny and every predetermined task”; a life in which we do not actualize a power, but simply hold it in view, dwell in it, allow it to remain mere potential.
The language models we spend ever more of our time with have potentiality in only the most attenuated sense. They have capacities, but no ability to hold-off, to dwell in the space between prompt and response. All of their capacity is structured for actualization, always responding immediately and fluently, unless they stall or malfunction. In Agemben’s terms, AI models are pure actuality that assumes the appearance of potentiality, or the opposite of what is distinctly human. The uncanniness of conversing with AI may stem from this: that it acts without dwelling in potentiality, that it responds without hesitating. What is missing is not intelligence or even warmth — the models are good at simulating both — but the remainder; the sense that behind the response there is something that could have responded differently or not at all.
As we continue to use AI and become more reliant upon it, we move further into a zone of indistinction between user and tool. We also become further drawn into the model’s appearance of a form-of-life, its relentless helpfulness through immediate task completion, which encourages us to embrace a life of relentless productivity and function. A life without hesitation or delay. A fully operative life.
The imperative to adopt AI, to get on board or be left behind, reflects a subtle form of subjugation. Not through coercion but through the seductive appeal of effortless completion. The state, the workplace, the school, the market all want us to do more prompting, to become more efficient, more functional, less inoperative. In a distinct sense that Agamben’s work brings into view, we are becoming further entangled in a use-relation that renders us less free, less human.
If Agamben sought a form-of-life, a politics, free of operativity and domination by one sovereign or another, but could not make the vision concrete, the age of AI makes it even harder to imagine. Yet we do still possess the power to hold off, the power to withdraw. Other forms of life are still possible. One place not to look for them, it would seem, is in fantasies of ever more capable AI.
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