representational fields derived almost wholly from austere models of already existing worlds. Richter would seem to have circled the problem and returned to the beginning and end point of the cycle. Having pinpointed an "aesthetic-moral" nexus in assaulting the picture plane, he has also returned to a point more primitive than the Alpha and Omega of painting itself. Yet this remains bracketed, as it is the temptation to "real presence" he has resisted all along. (Badiou, in Being and Event, and elsewhere, requires of the artist/poet that s/he resist all "temptations" to presence.) In a sense he has come face to face, as did Ruskin, with the absolute mystery of worlds, and this confrontation has produced the "aesthetic-moral" dimension of his later works. In obstructing that distance inUniversity Press, 2005). Also see note 19, below for Badiou‟s objections to Agamben. Agamben‟s The Time That Remains was published in 2000 in Italian and in 2005 in English. Negri‟s lectures at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, collected in The Porcelain Workshop, occurred between 2004 and 2005. This difference of opinion is, in one respect, the difference of attitude between a Marxist and a post-Marxist approach to the postmodern condition Negri notes as a "caesura" (what Félix Guattari called elsewhere an "impasse"), or when capital has begun its last conquest through the agency of the biopolitical and, in Agamben‟s words, the "anthropological machine" is idling. See also Félix Guattari, "The Postmodern Impasse," in A Guattari Reader, ed. Gary Genosko (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996). 7 Candida Höfer: