3. Politics
The most influential dimension of Agamben’s work in recent years has been his contributions to political theory, a contribution that springs directly from his engagements in metaphysics and the philosophy of language. Undoubtedly, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is Agamben’s best-known work, and probably also the most controversial. It is in this book that Agamben develops his analysis of the condition of biopolitics, first identified by Michel Foucault in the first volume of his History of Sexuality series and associated texts. In this volume, Foucault argued that modern power was characterized by a fundamentally different rationality than that of sovereign power. Whereas sovereign power was characterized by a right over life and death, summarized by Foucault in the dictum of “killing or letting live,” modern power is characterized by a productive relation to life, encapsulated in the dictum of “fostering life or disallowing it.” For Foucault, the “threshold of modernity” was reached with the transition from sovereign power to biopower, in which the “new political subject” of the population became the target of a regime of power that operates through governance of the vicissitudes of biological life itself. Thus, in his critical revision of Aristotle, Foucault writes that “for millennia, man remained… a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question” (HS1 143).
Agamben is explicitly engaged with Foucault’s thesis on biopower in Homo Sacer, claiming that he aims to “correct or at least complete” it, though in fact he rejects a number of Foucault’s historico-philosophical commitments and claims. Suggesting that Foucault has failed to elucidate the points at which sovereign power and modern techniques of power coincide, Agamben rejects the thesis that the historical rise of biopower marked the threshold of modernity. Instead, he claims that biopower and sovereignty are fundamentally integrated, to the extent that “it can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power.” (HS 6) What distinguishes modern democracy from the Ancient polis then, is not so much the integration of biological life into the sphere of politics, but rather, the fact that modern State power brings the nexus between sovereignty and the biopolitical body to light in an unprecedented way. This is because in modern democracies, that which was originally excluded from politics as the exception that stands outside but nevertheless founds the law has now become the norm: As Agamben writes, “In Western politics, bare life has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusions found the city of men.” (HS 7)
Several theoretical innovations inform this thesis, two of which are especially important. The first is a re-conception of political power, developed through a complex reflection upon Aristotelian metaphysics and especially the concept of potentiality, alongside a critical engagement with the theory of sovereignty posited by Carl Schmitt, which is developed through Walter Benjamin’s own engagement with Schmitt. The second innovation introduced by Agamben is his provocative theorization of “bare life” as the central protagonist of contemporary politics.
Of the first of these, it might be argued that the key motivation within Homo Sacer is not so much an attempt to correct or complete Foucault’s account of biopolitics, as an attempt to complete Benjamin’s critique of Schmitt. In Political Theology, Carl Schmitt—the German jurist infamous for joining the Nazi party and becoming one of its strongest intellectual supporters—summarizes his strongly decisionistic account of sovereignty by claiming that the sovereign is the one that decides on the exception. For Schmitt, it is precisely in the capacity to decide on whether a situation is normal or exceptional, and thus whether the law applies or not—since the law requires a normal situation for its application—that sovereignty is manifest. Against this formulation of sovereignty, Benjamin posits in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” that the state of emergency has in fact become the rule. Further, what is required is the inauguration of a real state of exception in order to combat the rise of Fascism, here understood as a nihilistic emergency that suspends the law while leaving it in force.
In addressing this conflict between Schmitt and Benjamin, Agamben argues that in contemporary politics, the state of exception identified by Schmitt in which the law is suspended by the sovereign, has in fact become the rule. This is a condition that he identifies as one of abandonment, in which the law is in force but has no content or substantive meaning—it is “in force without significance.” The structure of the exception, he suggests, is directly analogous to the structure of the ban identified by Jean-Luc Nancy in his essay “Abandoned Being, in which Nancy claims that in the ban the law only applies in no longer applying. The subject of the law is simultaneously turned over to the law and left bereft by it. The figure that Agamben draws on to elaborate this condition is that of homo sacer, which is taken from Roman law and indicates one who ‘“can be killed but not sacrificed.” According to Agamben, the sacredness of homo sacer does not so much indicate a conceptual ambiguity internal to the sacred, as many have argued, as the abandoned status of sacred man in relation to the law. The sacred man is “taken outside” both divine and profane law as the exception and is thus abandoned by them. Importantly, for Agamben, the fact that the exception has become the norm or rule of contemporary politics means that it is not the case that only some subjects are abandoned by the law; rather, he states that in our age, “we are all virtually homines sacri.” (HS 115).
As provocative as it is, understanding this claim also requires an appreciation of the notion of “bare life” that Agamben develops from the Ancient Greek distinction between natural life—zoe—and a particular form of life—bios, especially as it is articulated in Aristotle’s account of the origins of the polis. The importance of this distinction in Aristotle is that it allows for the relegation of natural life to the domain of the household (oikos), while also allowing for the specificity of the good life characteristic of participation in the polis—bios politikos. More importantly though, for Agamben, this indicates the fact that Western politics is founded upon that which it excludes from politics—the natural life that is simultaneously set outside the domain of the political but nevertheless implicated in bios politicos. The question arises, then, of how life itself or natural life is politicized. The answer to this question is through abandonment to an unconditional power of death, that is, the power of sovereignty. It is in this abandonment of natural life to sovereign violence—and Agamben sees the relation of abandonment that obtains between life and the law as “originary”—that “bare life” makes its appearance. For bare life is not natural life per se—though it is often confused with it in critical readings of Agamben, partly as a consequence of Agamben’s own inconsistency—but rather, it is the politicized form of natural life. Being neither bios nor zoe, then, bare life emerges from within this distinction and can be defined as “life exposed to death,” especially in the form of sovereign violence. (compare HS 88)
The empirical point of conjuncture of these two theses on the exception and on the production of bare life is the historical rise of the concentration camp, which, Agamben argues, constitutes the state of exception par excellence. As such though, it is not an extraordinary situation in the sense of entailing a fundamental break with the political rationality of modernity, but in fact reveals the ‘“nomos of the modern’” and the increasing convergence of democracy and totalitarianism. According to Agamben, the camp is the space opened when the exception becomes the rule or the normal situation, as was the case in Germany in the period immediately before and throughout World War 2. Further, what is characteristic of the camp is the indistinguishability of law and life, in which bare life becomes the “threshold in which law constantly passes over into fact and fact into law” (HS 171). This indiscernability of life and law effectively contributes to a normative crisis, for here it is no longer the case that the rule of law bears upon or applies to the living body, but rather, the living body has become “the rule and criterion of its own application” (HS 173) thereby undercutting recourse to the transcendence or independence of the law as its source of legitimacy. What is especially controversial about this claim is that if the camps are in fact the “nomos” or “hidden matrix” of modern politics, then the normative crisis evident in them is not specifically limited to them, but is actually characteristic of our present condition, a condition that Agamben describes as one of “imperfect nihilism.”
Importantly, in addition to this, Agamben argues that the logic of the “inclusive exclusion” that structures the relation of natural life to the polis, the implications of which are made most evident in the camps, is perfectly analogous to the relation of the transition from voice to speech that constitutes the political nature of “man” in Aristotle’s account. For Aristotle, the transition from voice to language is a founding condition of political community, since speech makes possible a distinction between the just and the unjust. Agamben writes that the question of how natural bare life dwells in the polis corresponds exactly with the question of how a living being has language, since in the latter question “the living being has logos by taking away and conserving its own voice in it, even as it dwells in the polis by letting its own bare life be excluded, as an exception, within it” (HS 8). Hence, for Agamben, the rift or caesura introduced into the human by the definition of man as the living animal who has language and therefore politics is foundational for biopolitics; it is this disjuncture that allows the human to be reduced to bare life in biopolitical capture. In this way then, metaphysics and politics are fundamentally entwined, and it is only by overcoming the central dogmas of Western metaphysics that a new form of politics will be possible.
This damning diagnosis of contemporary politics does not, however, lead Agamben to a position of political despair. Rather, it is exactly in the crisis of contemporary politics that the means for overcoming the present dangers also appear. Agamben’s theorization of the “coming politics”—which in its present formulation is under-developed in a number of significant ways—relies upon a logic of “euphoric” resolution to the aporias that characterise modern democracy, including the aporia of bare life (P 217). In Means without End, he argues for a politics of pure means that is not altogether dissimilar to that projected by Walter Benjamin, writing that “politics is the sphere neither of an end in itself nor of means subordinated to an end; rather, it is the sphere of a pure mediality without end intended as the field of human action and of human thought” (ME 117). In developing this claim, Agamben claims that the coming politics must reckon with the dual problem of the post-Hegelian theme of the end of history and with the Heideggerian theme of Ereignis, in order to formulate a new life and politics in which both history and the state come to an end simultaneously. This “experiment” of a new politics without reference to sovereignty and associated concepts such as nation, the people and democracy, requires the formulation of a new “happy life,” in which bare life is never separable as a political subject and in which what is at stake is the experience of communicability itself.
4. Ethics
Given this critique of the camps and the status of the law that is revealed in, but by no means limited to, the exceptional space of them, it is no surprise that Agamben takes the most extreme manifestation of the condition of the camps as a starting point for an elaboration of an ethics without reference to the law, a term that is taken to encompass normative discourse in its entirety. In Remnants of Auschwitz, published as the third instalment of the Homo Sacer series, Agamben develops an account of an ethics of testimony as an ethos of bearing witness to that for which one cannot bear witness. Taking up the problem of skepticism in relation to the Nazi concentration camps of World War II—also discussed by Jean-Francois Lyotard and others—Agamben casts Remnants as an attempt to listen to a lacuna in survivor testimony, in which the factual condition of the camps cannot be made to coincide with that which is said about them. However, Agamben is not concerned with the epistemological issues that this non-coincidence of “fact and truth” raises, but rather, with the ethical implications, which, he suggests, our age has as yet failed to reckon with.
The key figure in his account of an ethics of testimony is that of the Muselmann, or those in the camps who had reached such a state of physical decrepitude and existential disregard that “one hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death” (Levi cited in RA 44). But rather than seeing the Muselmann as the limit-figure between life and death, Agamben argues that the Muselmann is more correctly understood as the limit-figure of the human and inhuman. As the threshold between the human and the inhuman, however, the Muselmann does not simply mark the limit beyond which the human is no longer human. Agamben argues that such a stance would merely repeat the experiment of Auschwitz, in which the Muselmann is put outside the limits of human and the moral status that attends that categorization. Instead then, the Muselmann indicates a more fundamental indistinction between the human and the inhuman, in which it is impossible to definitively separate one from the other, and in that calls into question the moral distinctions that rest on this designation. The key question that arises for Agamben then, is whether there is in fact a “humanity to the human” over and above biologically belonging to the species, and it is in reflection upon this question that Agamben develops his own account of ethics. In this, he rejects recourse to standard moral concepts such as dignity and respect, claiming that “Auschwitz marks the end and the ruin of every ethics of dignity and conformity to a norm…. The Muselmann… is the guard on the threshold of a new ethics, an ethics of a form of life that begins where dignity ends” (RA 69).
In order to elaborate on or at least provide “signposts” for this new ethical terrain, Agamben returns to the definition of the human as the being who has language, as well as his earlier analyses of deixis, to bring out a double movement in the human being’s appropriation of language. In an analysis of pronouns such as “I” that allow a speaker to put language to use, he argues that the subjectification effected in this appropriation is conditioned by a simultaneous and inevitable de-subjectification. Because pronouns are nothing other than grammatical shifters or “indicators of enunciation,” such that they refer to nothing other than the taking place of language itself, the appropriation of language in the identification of oneself as a speaking subject requires that the psychosomatic individual simultaneously erase or desubjectify itself. Consequently, it is not strictly the “I” that speaks, and nor is it the living individual: rather, as Agamben writes, “in the absolute present of the event of discourse, subjectification and desubjectification coincide at every point and both the flesh and blood individual and the subject of enunciation are perfectly silent.” (RA 117)
Importantly, Agamben argues that it is precisely this non-coincidence of the speaking being and living being and the impossibility of speech revealed in it that provides the condition of possibility of testimony. Testimony, he claims, is possible only “if there is no articulation between the living being and language, if the “I” stands suspended in this disjunction” (RA, 130). The question that arises here then is what Agamben means by testimony, since it is clear that he does not use the term in the standard sense of giving an account of an event that one has witnessed. Instead, he argues that what is at stake in testimony is bearing witness to what is unsayable, that is, bearing witness to the impossibility of speech and making it appear within speech. In this way, he suggests, the human is able to endure the inhuman. More generally then, testimony is no longer understood as a practice of speaking, but as an ethos, understood as the only proper “dwelling place” of the subject. The additional twist that Agamben adds here to avoid a notion of returning to authenticity in testimony, is to highlight the point that while testimony is the proper dwelling place or “only possible consistency” of the subject, it is not something that the subject can simply assume as its own. As the account of subjectification and desubjectification indicates, there can be no simple appropriation of language that would allow the subject to posit itself as the ground of testimony, and nor can it simply realise itself in speaking. Instead, testimony remains forever unassumable.
This also gives rise, then, to Agamben’s account of ethical responsibility. Against juridical accounts of responsibility that would understand it in terms of sponsorship, debt and culpabililty, Agamben argues that responsibility must be thought as fundamentally unassumable, as something which the subject is consigned to, but which it can never fully appropriate as its own. Responsibility, he suggests, must be thought without reference to the law, as a domain of “irresponsibility” or “non-responsibility” that necessarily precedes the designations of good and evil and entails a “confrontation with a responsibility that is infinitely greater than any we could ever assume…” While it may seem as if Agamben is leaning toward a conception of ethical responsibility akin to Emmanuel Levinas’ conception of infinite responsibility toward the absolute Other, this is not wholly the case, since Agamben sees Levinas as simply radicalising the juridical relation of sponsorship in unexpiatable guilt.
Catherine Mills
No comments:
Post a Comment