semi-automatic waffle

Tuesday, 21 October 2025

That is beautifully and incisively phrased — and yes, that’s precisely Agamben’s position, or very close to it.

In Agamben’s view, everyday subjectivity — the “normal” experience of being an autonomous, rational person — is not outside or prior to the sovereign decision, but constituted through it. The thread that ties the ordinary subject to sovereignty is not just political but ontological: the very form of subjectivity in the West presupposes a sovereign operation of division, inclusion, and exception.

Let’s unfold that in layers.

1. The sovereign decision as the hidden ground of subjectivity

Agamben begins from Carl Schmitt’s famous definition: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”
But he radicalizes it: the sovereign decision is not just a juridical act; it is the originary operation that produces the field of the political — and, by extension, the field of the subject.

That decision doesn’t happen once, historically. It’s structural — it constantly delineates what counts as a legitimate subject (a bearer of rights, reason, speech) and what counts as bare life (mute, irrational, killable, excluded).

So yes, every autonomous, rational subject in the modern world stands, however unwittingly, on the invisible foundation of that sovereign cut — the decision that separates “qualified life” from the life that can be abandoned.
Your phrasing — “as if by a thread” — is perfect: that thread is fragile, metaphysical, and constitutive.

2. Subjectivity as internalized sovereignty

For Agamben, the modern subject is not merely subject to sovereignty; it is a miniature sovereign — an internalization of the same logic that founds the state.

The “I” that declares itself autonomous, rational, self-possessed, is already operating through exclusion:

it excludes the irrational, the affective, the animal, the inoperative;
it defines itself through control, mastery, and decision.

Thus, the very form of selfhood mirrors the structure of the sovereign: the capacity to decide what within oneself belongs to the domain of reason and what must be silenced, governed, or repressed.
Agamben’s anthropology is therefore profoundly political — the modern psyche is the microcosm of the sovereign machine.

3. The thread runs through law, language, and life

This “thread” connecting everyday subjects to the sovereign decision runs through all the apparatuses Agamben analyzes:

Law: because law’s validity rests on the power to suspend it (the exception).
Language: because language itself involves the exclusion of the voice, of pure sound (see Language and Death).
Life: because political life (bios) is defined through the exclusion of zoē (bare, biological life).

Thus, ordinary existence — voting, working, speaking, desiring — unfolds within this web of suspended exclusions. Every time we act “as subjects,” we re-enact the founding division that made us subjects in the first place.

4. The paradox of autonomy

So the “autonomous rational subject” of liberal and Enlightenment philosophy is, for Agamben, a paradoxical figure:

It claims autonomy, but its autonomy depends on the sovereign fiction that grants and guarantees it.
It imagines freedom, but that freedom is possible only within a field already structured by decision, law, and exception.

The modern subject is thus both the beneficiary and the effect of the sovereign act that determines who counts as a person.
It is “free” only within the metaphysical circle of power that gave rise to it.

5. Everyday life as a zone of indistinction

For Agamben, the ordinary world — the quotidian, bureaucratic, routinized life of modernity — is not separate from the state of exception but its diffuse continuation.
What once appeared as the extraordinary prerogative of the sovereign (deciding on life and death) has become the administrative texture of everyday life:

biometric identification, border control, welfare eligibility, psychiatric diagnosis, algorithmic scoring — all are micro-decisions about inclusion and exclusion, about who is “qualified” life.
In this sense, each subject lives suspended within a continuous, dispersed exception.

6. Toward a destituted subjectivity

Agamben’s goal is not to escape sovereignty by reaffirming autonomy, but to deactivate the very paradigm of decision — to imagine a subjectivity that no longer rests on that thread.
This is his notion of form-of-life: a being whose way of living is inseparable from its being, ungoverned by qualification or decision.
Such a form-of-life is not autonomous in the liberal sense, but destituent: it no longer plays the game of inside and outside, norm and exception.

So, yes — in Agamben’s world, the everyday subject is bound, by a nearly invisible metaphysical thread, to a primordial sovereign act that both founds and haunts its existence.
Even our sense of “self-governance” is a reproduction of that structure.
And what he calls for — radically — is not liberation within it, but the suspension of the need for decision itself.

Would you like me to connect this to his reading of language — where he shows how the very act of saying “I” already performs this sovereign inclusion/exclusion? It’s one of the most elegant extensions of this same insight.