Use as a Form-of-Life. Agamben and the Stoics

The paper analyzes Agamben’s reading of the Stoics’ theory of appropriation, so as to outline the specific notion of use as form-of-life developed in The Use of Bodies.The paper claims that the Stoics enable Agamben to rethink the meaning of life beyond the biopolitical paradigm, thereby offering an account of life in which the latter coincides with its modes of being lived, and is inseparable from its form.The paper argues that this notion of life involves the coincidence of modal ontology and ethics and embodies a way of living, whereby one becomes ‘actively affected’ by its form-of-life, in consonance with the medial form of the Greek verb chresthai (to use).