Ray

 Agamben makes a crucial reversal of Aristotle’s distinction between bare life (zoē) and good life (bios). For Aristotle, zoē is that life that man as a living animal shares with other living animals, while bios signifies man’s entry into the world of ratiocination, of the question of justice. Bios is therefore the sphere of language, the sphere that differentiates man from other animals. For millennia, this was the difference on which Western political thought was based. Agamben reverses the distinction to argue that the work of politics is precisely to monopolize the sphere of the living – merely living (zoē) – to reduce man to his bare existence, and more: to ceaselessly threaten with the prospect of annihilation: “Human life is politicized only through an unconditional power of death.” (1998: 56) Therefore Agamben’s focus is not on the life adorned with rights, but the life that fails to achieve humanity itself, “the remains as it were of our becoming moral, just and political. I say “as it were” because political life’s condition of possibility is the nonexclusion of bare life”. And a little later: “There is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion.” (1998: 8) This erasural bond Agamben will call “threshold”: political life’s relation with the non-relational. Politics must again and again enact its distinction with bare life and thus again and again bring bare life within its scope as excluded.

Manas Ray