Excellent question — and yes, that is broadly correct, though it needs some careful unpacking.

Agamben’s analysis of subjectivity indeed implies that every form of subjectivation entails a circumscription, a drawing of boundaries that defines what counts as “inside” — as intelligible, recognized, or political life — and what is thereby excluded, relegated to an “outside.” That outside is what, in his terminology, becomes the space of bare life (zoē stripped of bios).

Here’s how this works conceptually across his corpus:

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1. Subjectivation as Inclusion Through Exclusion

In Homo Sacer, Agamben adapts Foucault’s account of subjectivation but radicalizes it.
For Agamben, to constitute a subject is not simply to produce a self-relation through discourse or power, but to enact a fundamental division: inclusion in the political order occurs only through the exclusion of what cannot be represented or mediated within it.
He writes that “the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power,” meaning that sovereignty defines what counts as life by exposing a part of life to abandonment.

Thus, the subject is always founded on an exception — an operation that delineates what can appear as a subject only by establishing what cannot. This structure of inclusion-by-exclusion is the very logic that produces bare life: life reduced to its sheer biological substrate, deprived of political form but still under power’s grasp.

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2. Circumscription as Ontological and Political

Agamben’s argument is not just political but ontological. The “circumscription” you mention is, for him, an operation of caesura or division that structures Western metaphysics itself — the division between language and life, potentiality and act, form and matter, etc.

Every subject, in being delimited, is caught in this metaphysical machine: it must be “qualified” life, distinguished from the unqualified life that sustains it as its negated foundation.

Hence, the subject as such participates in the same logic that produces homo sacer — not because every subject is bare life, but because subjectivity depends on an exclusion of bare life as its constitutive outside.

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3. From Subject to Form-of-Life

Agamben’s later work (e.g., The Use of Bodies) attempts to move beyond this structure. He envisions not a new subject, but a form-of-life in which the distinction between life and its form — between inclusion and exclusion — no longer holds.
This is why he distances himself from the category of “subject” altogether: to speak of “the subject” is already to speak within the metaphysical and juridical grammar of circumscription and exception.

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In short:

• Yes, for Agamben, the subject as such implies circumscription.

• Circumscription always entails an outside — the excluded, abandoned, or “bare” life.

• Therefore, the logic of subjectivity is structurally entangled with the logic that produces bare life.

• His philosophical project seeks a way of life and thought beyond the subject, where life is no longer divided or captured by this mechanism.

Yes — that’s a very perceptive reading, and it’s correct.
Agamben does indeed reject the Left–Right distinction as belonging entirely to the same metaphysical and biopolitical machinery he’s diagnosing. He sees both the “left” and the “right,” as modern political categories, as co-produced by the same logic of sovereignty, inclusion/exclusion, and governmentality that grounds liberalism.

Let’s unpack what that means, because it’s one of the most easily misunderstood aspects of his political position.

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1. The Left and Right share the same metaphysics of power

Agamben thinks both sides of the modern political spectrum remain bound to the metaphysics of representation and will that defines Western politics since Hobbes.

• Whether liberal, socialist, or conservative, each camp assumes that political life must be organized through the capture of life by law, through the mediation of representation, institution, and rule.

• Both Left and Right take for granted the distinction between life and form, between the people and the state, between bios (qualified life) and zoē (bare life).

Thus, for Agamben, even emancipatory or revolutionary projects that claim to oppose domination merely reaffirm the same ontology of capture.

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2. Liberalism and the Left as mirror images

He sees liberal democracy and revolutionary politics as two poles of the same apparatus:

• Liberalism governs by managing life — its safety, health, productivity.

• Revolutionary politics seeks to re-found or seize that same power of management in the name of “the people,” “the proletariat,” or “justice.”

Both, however, presuppose that power is legitimate when it organizes life — that life must be governed.
Agamben’s response is: no, the problem is the very idea that life should be governed at all.

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3. Critique of the “Left” as caught in the paradigm of production

In The Use of Bodies and related essays, Agamben increasingly turns against Marxist or left-liberationist thought for remaining tied to the paradigm of labor and production — which he regards as another expression of the metaphysics of will and act.
Even Marx’s attempt to “liberate labor” still presupposes the human as a productive being, and thus sustains the economy of means and ends, use and value, that structures Western domination.

Hence his interest in destituent power — not the seizure or reconstitution of power (as in constituent power), but its deactivation. The goal is not to establish a new order or a better Left, but to render inoperative the very machinery of ordering.

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4. A “post-political” or “anarchic” stance

Agamben’s rejection of Left, Right, and liberal center is not a nihilistic withdrawal but a call to move beyond politics as such, at least as it has been conceived in modernity.
His political gesture is anarchic in the etymological sense — seeking a life without archē (principle, command, foundation).
He looks for forms of living that are “inoperative”, not ruled or rule-seeking — monastic, communal, aesthetic, or ethical ways of being that no longer reproduce the state form or its oppositions.

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5. Consequences: the end of the political spectrum

So yes — in Agamben’s view:

• Liberalism, the Right, and the Left all belong to the same historical dispensation of power.

• They differ only in emphasis, not in structure.

• What is required is not to choose among them, but to step outside their shared ontology.

In his later period, this is why he speaks of form-of-life, use, and destituent potentiality: categories that don’t fit into Left or Right projects, because they imply an exodus from politics as we know it, rather than a reform or revolution within it.

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If you want, I can show how this position differs from (and critiques) thinkers like Žižek or Negri — who retain a Marxist commitment to “constituent power” that Agamben sees as part of the same trap. Would you like that comparison?

ChatGPT said:

Yes — that’s exactly right.
Agamben is operating at what could be called the ontological or metaphysical level of political thought, rather than the economic or structural level where Marxists and free-marketeers primarily operate.

He isn’t primarily concerned with who controls production or how resources are distributed, but with the very form and logic through which “life,” “power,” and “the political” are conceived in Western thought. Both Marxism and free-market liberalism, for him, are secondary expressions of a deeper and older metaphysical structure — the Western apparatus that divides, captures, and governs life.

Let’s make that distinction explicit.

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1. Agamben’s level: ontological-political critique

Agamben’s analysis aims to uncover the conditions of possibility for politics as such — the operations that make “the political” appear and function.
Where Marxists see alienation in material production and free-marketeers see freedom in exchange, Agamben sees a shared ontology of government and capture:

• Both traditions assume that human life must be organized through some mechanism of inclusion and exclusion (state, law, market, or class structure).

• Both therefore operate within the paradigm of bare life, even if they name it differently (the “worker,” the “individual,” the “entrepreneur”).

• And both are, in his eyes, heirs of the same Western metaphysics — the metaphysics of will, act, and order inherited from Aristotle, Christianity, and Roman law.

Agamben’s project is to destitute this entire metaphysical apparatus, not merely to realign it.

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2. Marxists and free-marketeers share the same grammar

For Agamben, these two traditions — though politically opposed — share a grammar of production and instrumental reason.

• The Marxist speaks of the emancipation of labor, the realization of human potential through production.

• The liberal speaks of market freedom, the realization of individual potential through exchange.
  Both speak of potentiality as something to be actualized, life as something to be optimized, the human as a being defined by use and productivity.

Agamben’s metaphysical suspicion is that this entire grammar — potential/act, use/value, life/form — is what sustains domination in the first place.
He wants not to “free” potentiality but to keep it unconsumed, to dwell in potentiality as such (the inoperativity that he finds in art, poetry, monastic life, and the figure of the whatever being).

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3. Economy as ontology

In The Kingdom and the Glory, Agamben extends this critique by showing how the very notion of economy (oikonomia) — management, ordering, providence — migrated from early Christian theology into modern politics and economics.
The “left” and “right” are therefore just two competing versions of this theological-economic paradigm:

• The Marxist economy of production.

• The liberal economy of markets.
  Both rest on the same theological inheritance — the idea that the world must be governed, that there must be a relation between divine (or human) will and worldly order.

Agamben’s insight is that the problem is not bad management but the idea of management itself — the assumption that being must be administered.

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4. Destituent power as metaphysical rupture

So where Marx wants to seize the means of production and the liberal wants to free them, Agamben wants to render the whole apparatus inoperative — not destroy it, but deactivate its claim to necessity.
He calls this destituent power: a power that does not found a new order but deactivates the machinery of rule altogether, leaving room for a form-of-life where use, potentiality, and living coincide without domination.

This is a completely different register of thinking — not tactical or even historical, but ontological in the strongest sense.

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5. The deeper level: metaphysics of the West

That’s why you’re right to say he’s operating “at a deeper level.”
Agamben’s politics is a metaphysical archaeology of Western thought itself — tracing how theological, legal, and linguistic structures have imprisoned life within forms of representation, order, and capture.

Marxists and free-marketeers both take those structures for granted; they just fight over who should hold the reins. Agamben’s wager is that the only meaningful politics today is one that refuses the reins altogether.