Fragility as political power: Poiesis and imagination from Benjamin and Agamben

Abstract

This essay proposes a reinterpretation of human fragility, not as weakness, but as ethical, aesthetic, and political power. Imagination is presented as an expression of this power—a category that articulates sensitivity, creativity, and freedom. Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, and Castor Bartolomé Ruiz, the notion of the "force of fragility" is developed, linking it to the poetic gesture and profanation as micropolitical strategies capable of undermining neoliberal and biopolitical regimes of control. The analysis is structured along three axes: I. exploring fragility as a constitutive fracture of subjectivity and ethical openness; II. understanding fragility as a condition of imagination and resistance, showing how human sensitivity becomes a privileged space for escaping the logic of capture and imagining other possible worlds; III. examining the poetic gesture and profanation as micropolitics that, through their ineffectiveness, engender forms of life that resist instrumental rationality. Based on Ruiz's (2003, 2008) interpretation of the human as a fractured being and imagination as a symbolic power for creating meaning, the text expands the dimension of fragility as a constitutive opening—the fracture through which the human becomes capable of language, aesthetics, and ethics. By articulating the imaginary and fragility as central categories, it proposes a politics of the sensitive based on the power and poetic capacity to reinvent the common.