Agamben’s study. A room of one’s own (with Wi-Fi)

What do the things we choose to surround ourselves with say about us? One is reminded of the young Woody Allen in “Provaci ancora, Sam”, who arranges copies of *The New Yorker* around his home to seduce female patrons, hoping to appear more intellectual than he actually is. One thinks of the sixth-formers in American films, with their academic and sporting medals pinned to the noticeboard. One thinks of the wealthy who buy books by the metre – preferably leather-bound – to furnish their study or library. Compensations in the form of decoration. But let us move beyond what we want to show others, to seduce, to improve ourselves in their eyes in a game of mirrors. Let us consider our most private spaces, the ones where no one ever enters. These, as well as being reflections of our taste, cannot help but become true archives of our past, reliquaries of what has shaped us, repositories of fragments of our identity. They once existed – before houses became too expensive and were reduced by property developers and rentiers to cramped flats for forced cohabitation – the studies. They were spaces where writers would shut themselves away with their own neuroses and ambitions to create, to think and, indeed, to study.

Published by Einaudi, one of the finest possible tributes to this room – "Autoritratto nello studio" by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, aged 84, born under the sign of Taurus and thus linked to materiality and the home as a refuge – is back on the shelves. Much like Gertrude Stein (in her silliest book – and, due to its incomprehensibility and the annoyance it caused, her best-known one) spoke of herself whilst pretending that her partner Alice B. Toklas was recounting her life, Agamben, too, tells of himself by taking us on a tour of the space where he writes and studies (or spaces, given that there are at least two rooms at the centre of the narrative: one in Venice and one in central Rome). These encounters, more than anything else, appear to have been the true lifeblood. Heidegger, Giorgio Colli, Elsa Morante and Patrizia Cavalli join a pantheon of postcards propped up against the bookcase, alongside Spinoza, Simone Weil and, of course, Walter Benjamin. This method of referring to influences offers an elegant means of recounting one’s own life, as if it did not exist without the collision with other souls. ‘I am,’ says the philosopher, ‘a being who comes into being solely through others and never denies this dependence’.

Perhaps today, the study as a self-portrait – and even more so the princely study filled with cherished works – cannot be physically recreated in a room due to the costs involved; for millennial and Gen Z creatives, it is re-created in the tool with which everything is done: the laptop. Deprived of a room of their own, digital nomads – as the newspapers call them – or those who frequent co-working spaces and cafés have one question on their minds: ‘Excuse me, do you have Wi-Fi?’. They believe the internet contains a library. And the MacBook becomes the sole repository of stationery for scholarly work, the desktop is called a desk (just as Benjamin, during his years of hardship, was forced to write on the backs of letters he received, unable to afford paper; today, the penniless young person who cannot afford the Office suite writes in a notes app, downloads Word illegally, or asks their dad or cousin with a steady job to share their Microsoft account). The device becomes the sole tool; the study is mobile; objects are condensed. Postcards and artefacts are transformed into mobile form as stickers stuck to the back of Macs – or, at a push, on the metal water bottle that’s always in the tote bag. Holy cards are transformed into stickers, and, facing outwards, lose their private nature, becoming political statements too: in the form of anti-capitalist Pimpa or ‘antifa mycologists’, ‘Not One Less’ stickers or – as seen in Venice, where she taught – those of the Giorgio Agamben Brigade, or those where a frowning Carlo Ginzburg says: ‘Read Bloch, you idiot’.