DeCaroli

Everything hinges upon how life is divided, not upon how life is defined as such. Division is not, how-ever, merely a question of sorting pre-existing types. Rather, division is the original act of politics in which what is divided comes into being as a consequence of division. Life, therefore, is defined in terms of politics, not the other way around, and this definition is never given absolutely but appears only as the relative relationship between groups that have been separated. It is not surprising, then, that the state frequently directs its violence toward those who, through division, are excluded or disenfranchised from the proper domain of politics, for they are not the ones the state was designed to protect. Aristotle is quite clear on this point, for as we have seen, the entire first book of the Politics is devoted to establishing and then setting aside the inferior status of women and the existence of natural slaves. Likewise, Aristotle is unambiguous in stating that only a slim fraction of the community can be included in the polis, and for the rest life in the oikos is by definition their natural condition. This is why so much of the first book of the Politics is devoted to spelling out in no uncertain terms that there are human beings whose lives form a zone external to the polis. In characterizing these lives in terms of an inferior ontology, the work of legitimating their exclusion is taken care of in advance, and so, it is evident that these excluded forms of life, which are said to be excluded because of the types of being they are, are in fact fabrications of the logic of the political order itself. This is why, for Agamben, life is a thoroughly political concept having nothing at all to do with biology. 

The creation of political life, which for Aristotle is the uniquely human form of life, has always had the shadow effect of creating a distinct notion of biological life in contrast to which the political order is defined and made viable. The state was never designed to protect those whose lives remain bound to the oikos, and while societies have over time, and particularly during the last two hundred years, extended the state’s protection to more and more forms of life, the structural problem of division that characterizes the Western political order remains in place. Not only is the political order that which excludes the necessities of life from the sphere of human activity, it also divides life from within, putting life in relation with itself according to a necessity that arises from within political existence. But as Agamben sees it, it is the act of separation—an original political act—that produces the idea of a natural life in the first place, and it is on this point that Agamben parts ways with both Aristotle and Arendt, because for him zoē, or natural life, is not a pre-existing natural substrate but the product of a historical separation. From this perspective, natural life (zoē) is politicized by its being excluded, and thus, as Agamben observes, it “has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusion founds the city of men [the polis].”13 When Agamben writes, early in the pages of Homo Sacer, that his present inquiry concerns the point of intersection between political life and bio-political life, it is the production of this politicized life that he has in mind. “It can even be said,” he writes, “that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power.”14 Those who are excluded by the political order, those who reside exclusively in the oikos rather than in the polis, therefore suffer a double threat. On the one hand, there are of course the requirements of nature—“necessity’s grim law”15—which all must satisfy or perish. But to be excluded from the political order is not the same as simply existing in a pre-political environment. Rather, to be excluded from the political is, as Agamben proposes with such conviction, to be politicized through one’s exclusion. The life that exists in this condition is what Agamben famously calls “bare life,” which must not be equated with simple biological life, because the survival of bare life is conditioned not only by the elemental needs of biological existence but by the juridical needs of political existence as well. In other words, the daily struggles for survival for those who remain outside the polis entail not only periodic encounters with the caprice of nature’s fury but continual encounters with the violence of the state stemming from the fact that the state, and the political life it sustains, ruthlessly pursues a survival of its own.

    Steven DeCaroli