whyte_agamben

8/3/2019 whyte_agamben

1/15

Particular Rights and Absolute Wrongs: Giorgio

Agamben on Life and Politics

Jessica Whyte

Published online: 28 March 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract Over the past decade, as human rights discourses have increasingly

served to legitimize state militarism, a growing number of thinkers have sought to

engage critically with the human rights project and its anthropological foundations.

Amongst these thinkers, Giorgio Agambens account of rights is possibly the most

damning: human rights declarations, he argues, are biopolitical mechanisms that

serve to inscribe life within the order of the nation state, and provide an earthly

foundation for a sovereign power that is taking on a form redolent of the concen-tration camp. In this paper, I will examine Agambens account of human rights

declarations, which he sees as central to the modern collapse of the distinction

between life and politics that had typified classical politics. I will then turn to the

critique of Agamben offered by Jacques Ranciere, who suggests that Agambens

rejection of rights discourses is consequent to his adoption of Hannah Arendts

belief that, in order to establish a realm of freedom, the political realm must be

premised on the expulsion of natural life. In contrast to Ranciere, I will argue that

far from sharing the position of those thinkers, like Arendt, who seek to respond to

the modern erosion of the borders between politics and life by resurrecting earlierforms of separation, Agamben sees the collapse of this border as the condition of

possibility of a new, non-juridical politics.

Keywords Agamben Aristotle Human rights Life Metaphysics

Modernity Politics Ranciere Sovereignty

There is no return from the camps to classical politics (Giorgio Agamben).

J. Whyte (&)

Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University,

Clayton, VIC 3800, Australia

e-mail: [email protected]

123

Law Critique (2009) 20:147161

DOI 10.1007/s10978-009-9045-2


2/15

In the final section of Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben paints brief portraits of a

number of lives, which, on the surface, appear to have little in common: at one

extreme, the series includes the Fuhrer of the Third Reich, a person who had the

power to decide whether millions lived or died; at the other extreme, it includes the

Muselmannthat figure of the concentration camps who had so lost the will to livethat he no longer belongs to the world of men in any way (Agamben 1998, p. 186).

Alongside these starkly counter-posed lives from Second World War Europe, he

discusses those of Wilson, a biochemist who, upon being diagnosed with

leukemia, decided to turn his own body into an experimental laboratory, and of

Karen Quinlan, whose life was sustained for years purely by artificial technologies

and by virtue of a legal decision that ensured the machines would not be switched

off. The choice of this brief series of lives may seem extreme, if not arbitrary,

Agamben (1998, p. 187) writes. And yet each of them, he argues, exemplifies a

collapse of the classical distinction between life and politicsa collapse whoseextreme manifestation was in the Nazi state, where biology was immediately

political and the question of raceor equality of stock, as it was euphemistically

referred tobecame the key political project. In Agambens view, however, the

politicization of life extends far beyond the bounds of National Socialist Germany.

The transformation of biological life into a political task, he argues, is the definitive

event of modernity; the concentration camp is the new biopolitical nomos of the

planet (Agamben 1998, p. 176).

Given this claim, it is unsurprising that Agambens thought is often dismissed as

overly pessimistic, especially as, in his view, the emancipatory resources of modernpolitics are, at best, impotent in challenging the growing indistinction of life and

politics that he analyses. And yet, in a 2004 interview, Agamben responded to the

charge of pessimism by quoting Karl Marx, who wrote in 1843, the desperate

situation of the society in which I live fills me with hope. I share this vision,

Agamben told his interviewers, hope is given to the hopeless. I dont see myself as

pessimistic (Vacarme 2004, p. 123). In this paper, I will examine Agambens

workin light of this phrase he borrows from Marxin order to elucidate the

grounds for, and perhaps the limitations of, his hope. In doing so, I will argue that

Agambens hope is intimately connected to his diagnosis of the desperate situation

of contemporary biopolitics. To show this, I will focus on his understanding of

human rights declarations, which he sees as simultaneously furthering the capture of

life in the realm of sovereign power, andhelping to overcome the separation of life

and politics, thus creating the possibility for a new, non-juridical politics.

Agamben is only one of a number of thinkers to have engaged critically with the

human rights project in the past decade (Balibar 2007; Brown 2004; Douzinas 2000;

Ranciere 2004; Zizek 2004). In an essay entitled Who is the Subject of Human

Rights?, Jacques Ranciere suggests contemporary critiques of human rights occur

in the context of the failure of liberal capitalism to produce the irrepressible

movement towards a post-historical world that had been proclaimed in the wake of

the collapse of the Soviet Bloc (Ranciere 2004, p. 297). The reality, Ranciere

suggests, did not live up to the humanitarian rhetoric; In the following years, he

writes, the new landscape of humanity, freed from utopian totalitarianism, became

the stage of new outbursts of ethnic conflicts and slaughters, religious

148 J. Whyte

123


3/15

fundamentalisms, or racial and xenophobic movements (Ranciere 2004, p. 297). In

this context, human rights increasingly appeared as the rights of those who lived out

their days in the dust of refugee camps, or of those who were forced to flee and

found they had nowhere to go. Human rights, Ranciere suggests, began to appear as

the rights of those who were unable to exercise rights of their own and thus neededsomeone else to exercise them on their behalf. In the subsequent legitimation of the

discourse of humanitarian intervention, he sees the creation of nothing less than a

right of invasion (Ranciere 2004, p. 297). This situation, Ranciere suggests, lead

to a new suspicionthe suspicion that perhaps human rights were a mere

abstraction, and the only meaningful rights were the rights attached to a national

community (Ranciere 2004, p. 297).

In Agambens work, this suspicion about the relation of human rights to the

nation-state takes the form of a critical account of the ambiguous man/citizen link

that underlies modern rights declarations. Rights, he argues, are attributed to man(or originate in him) solely to the extent that man is the immediately vanishing

ground (who must never come to light as such) of the citizen (Agamben 1998,

p. 297). While the nation-state is therefore founded on the fictional subsumption of

man into the citizen, today we are witnessing the culmination of the separation of

the rights of man from the rights of the citizen. The contemporary bearer of human

rights par excellence is the Rwandan child, whose photograph is shown to obtain

money but who is now becoming more difficult to find alive(Agamben 1998,

p. 133). Human rights are the rights of those with no rights; of those Agamben refers

to as bare life (Agamben 1998, p. 133). This initial similarity between Agambenswork and Rancieres is not incidental. Indeed a number of common concerns typify

the work of these thinkers, both of whom are attempting to theorize the condition of

politics today, while critically drawing on the resources of classical political

thought. This initial commonality, however, should not serve to obscure the major

differences between them, which, I believe, can best be approached through a

consideration of their respective accounts of human rights. In what follows, I will

suggest that both Agamben and Ranciere are responding, in different ways to

Hannah Arendts critique of human rights, which relies on her reassertion of the

Aristotelian distinction between zoe, or natural life, and bios, a qualified form of

life. In order to grasp fully Agambens critique of human rights, and to understand

his lack of pessimism, it will therefore be helpful to situate his work in the context

of this Aristotelian legacy. While space constraints prevent a full engagement with

Rancieres theorization of the political here, Agambens work can be brought into

relief through comparing his response to this Aristotelian legacy to Rancieres on

two points: firstly, their respective accounts of the distinction between life and

politics; and secondly, their differing accounts of the political subject.

In attempting to understand the situation of human rights today, both Agamben

and Ranciere turn to Arendts influential essay from the Origins of Totalitarianism,

The Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man (Arendt 1976).

Here, Arendt argues that the mass refugee flows following the First World War

called into question the utility of human rights, by creating a section of humanity

stripped of all political status; the conception of human rights based on the assumed

existence of human being as such, she writes, broke down at the very moment that

Particular Rights and Absolute Wrongs 149

123


4/15

those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people

who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationshipsexcept that they

were still human (Arendt 1976, p. 299). From her examination of the situation of

these refugees, Arendt, as Etienne Balibar points out, developed a radical critique of

the supposed anthropological foundation of human rights (Balibar 2007, p. 728). Ifdestruction of civil rights also destroys human rights, Balibar explains, this is

because the latter are based on the former, and not the reverse (Balibar 2007,

p. 732). Thus, what Arendt refers to as the right to have rights cannot be derived

from any essential quality of the human, any inalienable inherence of rights in the

human person, but is premised upon the existence of a community of political actors

who grant each other such rights. Abstracted from such a political community, the

supposedly inalienable, universal human rights, Arendt concluded, are simply the

rights of those who have no rights.

As both Balibar and Ranciere highlight, Arendts dismissal of the efficacy ofhuman rights lead her to a paradoxical form of institutionalism (Balibar 2007;

Ranciere 2004), which shares elements of Edmund Burkes conservative critique of

natural rightsas expressed in his preference for his rights of an Englishman

(Agamben 1998, p. 127). This preference for the rights of the citizen is premised on

the rigid division of mans private life in the home (oikos) and his public life in the

statea division, Arendt suggests, upon which all ancient political thought rested

as self-evident and axiomatic (Arendt 1958, p. 28). That is, Arendts dismissal of

human rights and her valorization of the rights that are granted through participation

in the political sphere is premised on a narrow conception of the political, fromwhich social questions, including poverty, labour and reproduction are excluded in

the name of freedom. Thus, as Ranciere highlights, Arendts critique of rights

rested on the assumption that modern democracy had been wasted from the very

beginning by the pity of the revolutionaries for the poor people (Ranciere 2004,

p. 298). Indeed, it was this distinction between the political as the realm of freedom

and the social as that of necessity that lead Arendt, in her book on the French and

American revolutions, to suggest that it was the entry of the poor, with their social

demands, into the French revolution that prevented it from establishing a realm

of freedom, and that ultimately precipitated the terror (Arendt 1990). In the

politicization of questions of poverty, labour, and reproductionand in the

valorization of natural life at the foundation of rights declarationsArendt saw a

blurring of the distinction between political and natural life, the impingement of

necessity on freedom, and, ultimately, the eclipse of politics.

In a similar diagnostic vein, Agamben argues that the decisive fact of modernity

is the breakdown of the distinction between mere life (zen) and the good life (eu

zen) that had defined politics for the Greeks. From Aristotle onwards, Agamben

argues, the political realm has been predicated on a caesura that divides the human

into a political and a natural life, and isolates what he refers to as bare life

(Agamben 1998). The caesura Agamben identifies was predicated on a conception

of the life lived in the polis as a particular form of life, from which the maintenance

of natural life was decisively excluded. To understand this separation better, we

should examine a passage from The Politics that takes on a decisive importance in

Agambens work. Aristotle writes:

150 J. Whyte

123


5/15

The good life is indeed the chief end of the state both corporately and

individually, but men form and continue to maintain this kind of association

for the sake of life itself. Perhaps we may say that there is an element of value

even in mere living, provided that life is not excessively beset by troubles.

Certainly most men, in their desire to keep alive, are prepared to face a greatdeal of suffering, finding in life itself a certain comfort, and a feeling that it is

good to be alive (Aristotle 1942, p. 114).

Here, we see the clear distinction Aristotle developed between the pre-political

fact of life itself, and the good life. While Aristotle suggests that men initially

form states for the sake of mere life, this form of association is driven by biological

necessity and, far from being specifically human, is shared by citizens, barbarians,

slaves, women and animals. Once men become self-sufficient, however, enabling

a certain number to free themselves from material concerns and live freely in the

polis, what started as a means to secure life itselfis now in a position to secure

the good life (Aristotle 1942, p. 28). In contrast to that simple fact of life that men

share with all living beings, the good life is the specific end of man as the living

being with logos. In Aristotles Politics, political life is not simply different from

the life lived in the home by degrees, but is different in kind.1 In stark contrast to the

latter, the life lived in the polis was a particular form of life, from which the mere

maintenance of biological life was decisively excluded.

This exclusion of biological life was necessary, Aristotle believed, to create a

realm of freedom. While the free pursuit of the good life in the polis presupposed

material self-sufficiency and the reproduction of the lives of citizens, thisreproduction was not considered political. As Arendt points out, revealing the

Aristotelian foundations of her own account of politics, the good life was good

to the extent that by having mastered the necessities of sheer life, by being freed

from labour and work, and by overcoming the innate urge of all living creatures for

their own survival, it was no longer bound to the biological life process (Arendt

1958, p. 37). One consequence of this was that those whose lives were taken up with

working to provide for material necessities were not considered fit to be citizens. In

his Politics, Aristotle remarks that if a state existed merely to provide a living, it

might be made up of slaves or animals, and that is impossible, because slaves andanimals are not free agents and do not participate in well-being (Aristotle 1942,

p. 119). Slaves and animals (and women), in Aristotles view, were not able to

participate in the good life, but were simply instruments for providing some with the

sufficient quality of life it presupposes.

Where Agamben differs from both Aristotle and Arendt is that, for him, zoe, or

natural life, is not a pre-existing natural substrate but the product of a separation.

Further, zoe, in his account, was not simply excluded from the polis, but was

captured and politicized through this constitutive exclusion, and thus, has the

1 Much of the first book of Aristotles Politics, which deals with the differences between the political

sphere and the household, can be seen as a critique of Plato. This is implied in Aristotles comment, It is

an error to suppose that the relationships between statesman and state, between king and subjects,

between householder and household, between master and slaves, are all the same (Aristotle 1942, p. 25).

It is because Aristotle separated political life from life in the home more emphatically than did Plato that

Agamben often refers to the caesura between life and politics as stemming from Aristotle.


123


6/15

peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusion founds the city of men (Agamben

1998, p. 7). Agamben uses the term ban, borrowed from Jean-Luc Nancy, to

signify the exposure through which life is at once excluded from the political

community and captured in the realm of sovereign power. In his essay Abandoned

Being, Nancy highlights the double meaning of the term banthe one who isbanned is both abandoned, or banished, and held in a ban (Nancy 1993). The one

who is banned is therefore not simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it

but is rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in

which life and law, outside and inside become indistinguishable (Agamben 1998,

p. 29). This ability to hold life in a ban by abandoning it is, for Agamben, the

originary political relation. Agamben uses the term inclusive exclusion to define

this limit relation, in which people are included in the political community purely by

virtue of their exclusionan exclusion which leaves them utterly exposed to

sovereign violence. The sovereign ban is the limit form of relation, but at this limit itremains a relation between the sovereign and that bare life that it includes only by

excluding. Because zoe, in this account, is not merely excluded from the polis, but is

captured within it, Agamben can argue that life is originarily included in the realm

of a politics that is therefore biopolitics from the beginning. The life that is caught in

the sovereign ban is, in Agambens terminology, bare lifea life that is

politicized through the fact of its exclusion. This bare life is neither simply natural

life nor political life but is the threshold of articulation that enables the passage from

one to the other. Bare life, Agamben argues, is the sole referent of sovereign power.

For the Sake of LifeBare Life in Modernity

In stark contrast to this classical model, modern democracy, Agamben argues,

presents itself from the beginning as a vindication and liberation ofzoe (Agamben

1998, p. 9). This means politics ceases to be a specific activitythe pursuit of the

good lifeand comes to be conceived as existing for the sake of life itself, for the

protection of natural life. The decisive fact of modernity, in Agambens account, is

therefore the breakdown of the distinction between life (zen) and the good life

(eu zen), and between bios and zoe. In The Human Condition, Arendt suggests that,

the disappearance of the gulf the ancients had to cross daily to transcend the narrow

realm of the household and rise into the realm of politics is an essentially modern

phenomenon (Arendt 1958, p. 33). In Agambens view, the disappearance of this

gulf fundamentally transforms the status of all of those separations through which

the ancients understood the specificity of political life. In modernity, Agamben

writes, bare lifewhich had originally been situated in a relation of abandonment at

the margins of the polisgradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and

exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe, right and fact, enter into a

zone of irreducible indistinction (Agamben 1998, p. 9).

This transition, through which bare life appears as the modern political subject,

is, in Agambens view, a product of those declarations of rights, which, he argues,

enabled the transition from divine to national sovereignty. The nation-state,

Agamben argues, is founded on a unity of birth-territory-order, and human rights

152 J. Whyte

123


7/15

declarationswhich locate sovereignty in the natural life of a peopleare the

originary figure for the inscription of natural life in the politicaljuridical order of

the nation-state (Agamben 2000, p. 20). This location of sovereignty in the nation,

Agamben argues, is only enabled by a fiction by which birth is automatically nation,

and as such, becomes a political category. It is because rights declarations arepredicated on the creation of bare life, that is, because they politicize the fact of

birth, that Agamben sees them as double edgedboth bearers of liberties and

vehicles for the increasing inscription of life in the realm of a state that now finds its

rationale in precisely that which the ancients had excluded as unpolitical: natural

life, mans biological vulnerability. While Aristotle had seen natural life as outside

the concern of politics, in modernity, the split between life and politics begins

to heal, but only at the cost of tying life to the sovereignty of the state, and

transforming politics into a means for the protection of biological lifea shift

whose extreme manifestation we see in todays legitimation of state militarismthrough human rights discourses.

An Ontological Trap? Ranciere on Agamben

Up to this point, Agambens understanding of modernity sounds very much like

Arendtsand indeed the equation of the two thinkers is central to Rancieres

critique of Agamben. This critique has two key elements: firstly, Ranciere argues

that Agambens account of human rights is predicated on the same separation of lifeand politics that underpinned Arendts suspicions about such rights; secondly, he

argues that Agambens position leads to an ontological trap, in which every

possibility for political contestation is foreclosed in advance (Ranciere 2004,

p. 302). Following Ranciere, Slavoj Zizek frames this critique in the following

terms: Agambens (and Foucaults) understanding of contemporary biopolitics

as the culmination of Western thought ends up getting caught in a kind of

ontological trap in which concentration camp appears as ontological destiny

(Zizek 2004, p. 15). I would like to consider each of these arguments in turn, and

suggest that it is because Ranciere misreads Agambens approach to the separation

of life and politics, that he is unable to grasp fully why Agamben sees the need to

situate contemporary political problems on the terrain of ontology.

According to Ranciere, Agamben, like Arendt, situates those who have only

human rights in a sphere of exceptiona sphere that can no longer be understood as

a space of political dissensus, and which therefore exemplifies Agambens

depoliticizing approach (Ranciere 2004, p. 298). What Ranciere terms dissensus

(or at other points, dis-agreement) consists in an attempt to open rights declarations

to a process of political contestation, to make the gap between their universal claims

and particular application the space in which politics operates (Ranciere 1998).

Ranciere has elsewhere referred to this strategy as verifying equality; Taking

something which is usually dismissed as a groundless claim, he argues, it

transforms it into its oppositeinto a grounds for a claim, into a sphere open for

dispute (Ranciere 1994, p. 47). Rather than simply pointing to this gap in order to

unveil the universal claims of human rights discourses, Ranciere sees formal


123


8/15

equality as carrying a material weight that opens a space for substantive claims: if

all are equal, then why not women too? If freedom from arbitrary imprisonment is

an inalienable human right, why then should immigrants be detained? Following

Ranciere, Zizek suggests that the properly cynical temptation of reducing it to a

mere illusion that conceals a different actuality should be resisted (Zizek 2004,p. 22). Thus, in opposition to both Arendt, and to the Marxian characterization of a

split between formal equality and substantive inequality, Ranciere challenges the

view that human rights are simply the rights of those with no rights. Rather, he

argues, the Rights of Man are the rights of those who have not the rights that they

have and have the rights that they have not (Ranciere 2004, p. 302). By this, he

means that those who are deprived of rightsthe immigrant, the woman, the

workersimultaneously have these rights to the extent that they seize the rights that

are inscribed as supposedly belonging to them, and use them as the basis for a

political contestation (Ranciere 2004, p. 303).The subject of human rights that the title of Rancieres essay asks after is

therefore not a pre-existing anthropological subject but the subject of a particular

political dissensus. Relying on Aristotles description of the demos as those who

had no part in anything (in Ranciere 1998, p. 9), Ranciere argues that the political

subject in any situation is not a pre-existing collectivity or social group but a surplus

name, a part of those who have no part that disrupts every attempt to order

consensually the community (Ranciere 1998, p. 14). Political predicates, Ranciere

argues, are always open predicates, in the sense that their use opens a dispute about

what they entail, and whom they include. This means that political claims consistprecisely in subjecting the border of the political, the border that pertains to separate

politics from life, to dispute (Ranciere 2004, p. 303). Politics, Ranciere argues, is the

configuration of its proper place, a place that is never demarcated in advance

(Ranciere 2004, p. 303). This means that political subjects, on Rancieres account,

do more than contrast the supposed universality of rights to the reality of their

particular application; they put together the world where those rights are valid and

the world where they are not. They put together a relation of inclusion and a relation

of exclusion (Ranciere 2004, p. 304).

It is on the question of the political subject that Ranciere critiques Agamben who,

he argues, collapses the space of politics into a pure power relation between

sovereignty and bare life. Ranciere traces this depoliticizing gesture to Agambens

relation to Arendt, writing:

Agambens view of the camp as the nomos of modernity may seem very far

from Arendts view of political action. Nevertheless, I would assume that the

radical suspension of politics in the exception of bare life is the ultimate

consequence of Arendts archipolitical position, of her attempt to preserve the

political from the contamination of private, social, apolitical life. This attempt

depopulates the political stage by sweeping aside its always-ambiguous actors(Ranciere 2004, p. 301).

In Agambens state of exception, Ranciere argues, there is no space for contesting

the borders of the political, and thus no politics at all. The will to preserve the realm

of pure politics ultimately makes it vanish in the sheer relation of state power and

154 J. Whyte

123


9/15

individual life, he writes. Politics thus is equated with power, a power that is

increasingly taken as an overwhelming historico-ontological destiny from which

only a God is likely to save us (Ranciere 2004, p. 301302). Here, Ranciere is

clearly evoking Martin Heidegger, in order implicitly to challenge Agambens desire

to rethink politics in ontological terms. Before examining Agambens critique ofmetaphysics, however, I would like to spell out what I see as Rancieres misreading

of Agamben on the relation of life and politics, which, Ranciere argues, relies on the

Arendtian opposition of two lives (Ranciere 2004, p. 298).

Throughout his essay, Ranciere consistently equates Agambens understanding

of rights with Arendts institutionalist argumentan argument, Ranciere writes,

that Agamben basically endorses (Ranciere 2004, p. 302). As we have seen, there

are clear similarities between Agambens understanding of human rights, and

modernity, and Arendts view of the relation that binds the Rights of Man to the

modern nation state in such a way that the waning of the latter necessarily impliesthe obsolescence of the former (Agamben 2000, p. 19). And yet, while both

thinkers share a diagnosis of modernity as typified by the blurring of life and politics

and the increasing orientation of the state to the apolitical reproduction of life,

Agambens response to this is directly counterposed to Arendts. In fact, Agambens

belief that politics was originarily biopolitics means he could not be further from the

Arendtian will to preserve the realm of pure politics of which Ranciere accuses

him (Ranciere 2004, p. 302). The realm of pure politics, for Agamben, always

presupposed the abandonment of bare life. Thus, in the modern collapse of the

separation of life and politics that Arendt bemoans, he sees the condition ofpossibility of what he terms a completely new politics (Agamben 1998, p. 10).

Agambens rejection of any project that aims to premise politics on its renewed

separation from natural life could not be more explicit: I would not feel up to

forgoing this indistinction of public and private, of biological body and political

body, of zoe and bios, for any reason, he writes in Means Without Ends. It is here

that I must find my space once againhere or nowhere else. Only a politics that

starts from such an awareness can interest me (Agamben 2000, p. 139).

So what is this politics? According to Ranciere, Agambens polarity of sovereign

power and bare life collapses all dissensus and, as it were, all politics: That polarity

appears as a sort of ontological destiny, Ranciere argues Any difference grows

faint between democracy and totalitarianism and any political practice proves to be

already ensnared in the biopolitical trap (Ranciere 2004, p. 301). Here it is worth

noting that Agamben makes a similar point himself, in even more radical terms; In

Homo Sacerhe writes:

Until a completely new politicsthat is a politics no longer founded on the

exceptio of bare lifeis at hand, every theory and every praxis will remain

imprisoned and immobile, and the beautiful day of life will be given

citizenship only either through blood and death or in the perfect senselessnessto which the society of the spectacle condemns it (Agamben 1998, p. 10).

Thus, Ranciere is partly correct: Agamben does indeed see our time as one in

which (what Ranciere understands as) dissensus would be already captured in the

relation between sovereign power and bare life.


123


10/15

In The Time that Remains, Agamben briefly considers Rancieres position that

the people, or the political subject, is always the part of those with no part, the

supernumerary part that is the bearer of a wrong, and thus disrupts every attempt to

produce an orderly count of the political situation by opening this space to a dispute.

Everything, Agamben suggests, depends on how we understand wrong anddispute. If democratic dispute is understood for what it truly is, that is, the

possibility of stasis or of civil war, he writes, then the point is pertinent.

If, however, following what Ranciere seems to think, the wrong for whom the

people are a cipher is not absolute (as it still was in Marx) but, by definition,

can be processed (Ranciere [1999, p. 39]) then the line between democracy

and its consensual, or postdemocratic, counterfeit (which Ranciere goes so far

as to overtly critique) tends to dissolve (Agamben 2005, p. 8).

Here then, we have two claims, two accusations: on the one hand, Ranciereargues that Agambens dismissal of human rights is predicated on an elitist

conception of pure politics which denies any possibility of political contestation,

and leaves us trapped in an ontological destiny from which only a god can save us;

on the other, Agamben suggests that Rancieres assertion of politics as the sphere of

dispute over who and what is included in the political cannot be distinguished from

the reign of a consensual ethics that both thinkers see as underlying the move

towards a bloody militarism shrouded as humanitarian intervention. In the

following section, I will turn to the terrain of ontology, in order to demonstrate why

Agamben believes it is only here that we can break free of sovereign power, andavoid the complicity with the humanitarian state of which he implicitly accuses

Ranciere.

Being Alive

In De Anima (On the Soul), Aristotle sets out to determine what it means to say that

somethingwhether a plant, an animal or a humanis alive; For living beings, he

writes, Being is life (in Agamben 1999a, p. 147). To this end, he establishes a

series of divisions in the continuum of life, between what he terms nutritive,

sensitive, appetitive, locomotive and intellectual life (Aristotle 1986, p. 210). While

some of these are shared by only some living beings, and some only by the human,

nutritive life, is present in others, and is primary, and is that most general power of

the soul by which life is present in anything (Aristotle 1986, p. 54). In Aristotles

isolation of nutritive life as the basic presupposition of all forms of life, Agamben

sees the decisive moment in which, bare life as such was identified in the history

of Western philosophy, a moment which he therefore identifies as the metaphysical

foundation of modern biopolitics (Agamben 1999b, p. 230). Aristotles isolation of

the general presupposition of nutritive life, Agamben suggests, served to mark

divisions in the humanbetween vegetative and relational life, animal and

humanwhich were then expressed in the political realm in the form of those

distinctions between zoe and bios, and mere life (zen) and that good life (eu zen) that

156 J. Whyte

123


11/15

play a central role in Aristotles determination of the telos of politics and the work

of man.

It is this process of division that underlies Aristotles conception of the human as

a living being with logos. Agambens account of metaphysics therefore consists in

problematizing precisely this notion of human life, or logos, as an additionalcapacity, which he sees as implying a caesura thatbefore being expressed in the

separation of oikos and polisruns through the human. Reflecting on Aristotles

argument that the animal voice expresses only pleasure or pain, while human speech

expresses the just and the unjust, Agamben locates this caesura in the human in the

passage from the animal phone to human language. The living being has logos, he

writes in Homo Sacer, 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, in it

(Agamben 1998, p. 8). No longer the animal phone, which must be excluded to

enable human language, but not yet language, what is captured in the passage tolanguage is a removed voice, or as Agamben terms it, a Voiceby which he refers

to the taking place of language that occurs in a no mans land between sound and

signification (Agamben 1991, p. 33). This metaphysical definition of the human is

therefore achieved through the same ban structure that we have already identified:

like political life, the fully human lifelife according to logosis achieved only

through the separation and abandonment of bare life.

This metaphysical definition of the human is intimately entwined with the

question of politics. In isolating bare life, Agamben suggests, Aristotle is aiming to

discover what is proper to man qua man, and whether man qua man has a work.From the isolation of a specific work of manwhich Aristotle sees as a particular

form of life: life according to logosAristotle derives the end of politics. Politics,

thus enables man to actualize the rational capacity Aristotle had isolated as

definitive of human life, and to live according to what is proper to him; the polis is

the place in which the metaphysical determination of man as a living being with

logos is actualized. The political, as the work of man as man, Agamben argues, is

drawn out of the living being through the exclusionas unpoliticalof a part of its

vital activity (Agamben 2007, p. 6). Both politics and metaphysics, Agamben

argues, are founded on the exclusion of that life that men share with other living

beings. Thus, in contrast to humanismor what he refers to as the anthropological

machine, which sees man as a conjunction of these elementsAgamben suggests

that we should rather concern ourselves with their separation: It is more urgent to

work on these divisions, to ask in what waywithin manhas man been separated

from non-man, he writes, than it is to take positions on the so-called great issues,

on human rights and values (Agamben 2004, p. 16). If, despite this suggestion,

Agamben is indeed interested in the issue of human rights, his own position is

informed by the view that any analysis of rights declarations must concern itself

with precisely this mystery of separationwhich, in his view, is the basic

presupposition of sovereignty and of every division and every articulation between

life and politics (Agamben 2004, p. 16). Political power as we know it, he writes,

always founds itselfin the last instanceon the separation of a sphere of naked

life from the context of the forms of life (Agamben 2000, p. 4). And yet, while the

contemporary indistinction of life and politics does indeed seem a desperate


123


12/15

situation, if Agamben is filled with hope, this is because in the unity of politics and

life expressed in human rights declarationsin a life that has no need to take on

other values in order to become politicalhe sees the possibility of what he calls a

form-of-lifea life that cannot be separated from its form, and for which what is at

stake in the ways of living is living itself (Agamben 2000, p. 3).

Remnant

In explaining his lack of pessimism, Agamben argues that contemporary events are

producing not only a new figure of domination but also a new figure of the subject,

which arises out of the forms of desubjectivation most commonly associated with

the collapse of the border of life and politics. Desubjectivation does not only have a

dark side. It is not simply the destruction of all subjectivity. Agamben writes.There is also this other pole, more fecund and poetic, where the subject is only the

subject of its own desubjectivation (Vacarme 2004, p. 124). This subject would be

without substantive identity, and would therefore be unable to be represented by a

state, claim juridical rights, or form the basis for an exclusive community (Agamben

2005, p. 52). Agambens rejection of identity and his articulation of a non-juridical

politics is premised on the view that any politics that presupposes a substantive

subject leads to bloody forms of exclusion and to that capture of natural life that, he

argues, is the originary act of sovereign power. In contrast, a subject that was only

the subject of its own desubjectivation would be a life that would utterly escape thehold of sovereignty. Rather than having a natural life lived in the home and a

political life lived in the state, this life would be an inseparable unity of life and

politicswhat Agamben terms a form-of-lifein which life was exhausted in its

ways of living. If todays desperate situation fills him with hope, this is because

just as Marx saw the ravages of capitalism as producing the circumstances which

made communism possibleAgamben sees todays indistinction of life and politics

as creating the possibility, for the first time in history, of a new non-juridical

politics, and of the inauguration of a form-of-life, or, as he puts it more simply

elsewhere, a happy life (Agamben 2000, p. 3).

In The Time that Remains, Agamben suggests his conception of the subject as the

subject of its own desubjectivation permits more than one analogy with the

Marxian proletariat (Agamben 2005, p. 31). In contrast to the working class as a

sociological category, Agamben sees the proletariat as a non-substantive subject

that must negate itself (as proletariat) in order to liberate itself and all of humanity.

In a discussion of messianism and revolution, Agamben argues that the

revolutionary vocation of the proletariat is not a new factical vocation but the

nullification, or hollowing out, of every vocation. The proletariat thus lays bare

the contingency of every factical vocationthe split between the private individual

and her social positionwhile enabling the un-working of this separation. Thus, in

Agambens view, the fact that the proletariat ends up over time being identified

with a determinate social classthe working class that claims prerogatives and

rights for itselfis the worst misunderstanding of Marxian thought (Agamben

2005, p. 31). Like Agamben, Ranciere challenges every conception of politics

158 J. Whyte

123


13/15

predicated on the social being of a pre-constituted social group. What Agamben

refers to as the remnant, however, is not simply the part with no part that opens the

community to dispute, but that which can never coincide with itself, and which

reveals the arbitrary nature of every social position (Agamben 2005, p. 57). The

remnant is therefore not the object of liberation but its instrument. The remnant cannever be liberated as such but, through its own auto-suppression, makes liberation

possible. It can never be includedin the political as it attests to the reliance of every

relation of inclusion and exclusion, and every separation between life and politics,

on the workings of the sovereign ban. Thus the remnant testifies to the wrong at the

heart of every order of inclusion and, as the bearer of this absolute wrong, it cannot

claim particular rights for itself. The remnant, as Marx said of the proletariat, has a

universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular rightbecause

no particular wrong but wrong generally is perpetrated against it (in Agamben

2005, p. 31). The remnant, Agamben argues, is the only real political subjectanon-substantial subject that is always the subject of its own desubjectivation

(Agamben 2005, p. 57). Agamben therefore offers an account in which the

separation of life and politics that has characterized Western politics since Aristotle

is predicated on the absolute wrong of the sovereign ban. This means that any

politics that is unable to overcome this separation will be unable to overcome the

bloody mystification of a new planetary order (Agamben 1998, p. 12). If every

relation of inclusion always implies an inclusive exclusion, or abandonment, then

the only politics capable of overcoming this separation would be one that contested

not merely specific exclusions, but the very constitution of the political spherethrough the inclusive-exclusion of bare life. Such a challenge, in Agambens view,

must also overcome the metaphysical determination of the human, which is the

ontological basis of both the separation of life and politics and the abandonment of

bare life.

If Agamben is not pessimistic, this is because in the collapse of the border of

politics and life, which so distressed Arendt, he sees the condition of possibility of

this new politics, in which it would no longer be possible to isolate a bare life.

Where Rancieres critique is pertinent, however, is in his argument that Agambens

critique depopulates the political stage of its actors. While Marxs hope, in the face

of the desperate situation of early capitalism, was, at least in part, generated by his

belief that capitalism creates its own gravediggers, in Agambens work these

gravediggers are missing; in the place of political actors, struggling collectively

against the system of which they are a product, Agambens work is populated by

figures whose lives border on death and whose extreme manifestations are the

Muselmann of the Nazi camps, and the neomort who survives merely by virtue of

artificial respiratory technologies. In the absence of any discussion of other political

possibilities, and in the subsumption of the logic of politics to the logic of the

sovereign ban, Agamben offers little on what would make the difference between a

form-of-life and life in the camp, between a collective form of desubjectivation

reminiscent of the original vocation assigned to the Marxian proletariat and an

individual form of hopeless desubjectivation imposed by sovereign power. To say

this is not to ask Agamben to provide a programme towards an ideal end statea

demand that would be contrary to his entire project, which aims to think a politics of


123


14/15

pure means, in which political action could not be instrumentalized in the name of a

state that would be actualized in the future. My point, rather, is that anyone

interested in immanent social transformation must be interested in political struggles

and concrete acts of resistance if they are not to fall into a teleological and

deterministic understanding of such transformationas indeed was the fate ofMarxism in its social democratic and Stalinist forms, both of which forgot that

Marxs optimism about capitalism was an optimism about its capacity to create the

forms of political agency that could abolish it. While political practice that takes the

form of rights claims ultimately presupposes the state and the relation of

sovereignty and bare life, there are, even in the midst of our desperate situation,

forms of political practice and experiments in the possible that seek to trace paths

out of this relation. If we are to avoid an optimism sustained through teleological

certainty, which pervaded so much of the Marxist traditionif we are not, in

Marxs words, to go on hoping merely out of stupidityit is towards suchexperiments that we should direct our attention (Marx 1843).

References

Agamben, Giorgio. 1991. Language and death: The place of negativity. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press.

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford: Stanford University

Press.Agamben, Giorgio. 1999a. Remnants of Auschwitz. New York: MIT Press.

Agamben, Giorgio. 1999b. Potentialities: Collected essays in philosophy. Stanford: Stanford University

Press.

Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. Means without ends. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press.

Agamben, Giorgio. 2004. The Open. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. The time that remains: A commentary on the letter to the Romans . Stanford:

Stanford University Press.

Agamben, Giorgio. 2007. The work of man. In Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty, life, ed. Calarco Matthew,

and DeCaroli Steven. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Arendt, Hannah. 1976. The decline of the nation-state and the end of the rights of man. The origins of

totalitarianism. London: Allen and Unwin.Arendt, Hannah. 1990. On revolution. London: Penguin Classics.

Aristotle, 1942. The politics. Middlesex: Penguin.

Aristotle, 1986. De Anima. London: Penguin Classics.

Balibar, Etienne. 2007. (De)Constructing the human as human institution. Social Research 74: 3.

Brown, Wendy. 2004. The most we can hope for: Human rights and the politics of fatalism. South

Atlantic Quarterly 103: 451463.

Douzinas, Costas. 2000. The end of human rights. Oxford: Hart.

Marx, Karl. 1843. Letter to Arnold Ruge. Cologne: Marxists Internet Archive. http://www.marxists.org/

archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_05-alt.htm.

Nancy, Jean Luc. 1993. Abandoned being. In The birth to presence. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Ranciere, Jacques. 1994. On the shores of politics. London: Verso.Ranciere, Jacques. 1998. Dis-agreement: Politics and philosophy. Minneapolis and London: University of

Minnesota Press.

Ranciere, Jacques. 1999. Dis-agreement: Politics and philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press.

Ranciere, Jacques. 2004. Who is the subject of human rights? South Atlantic Quarterly 103: 297310.

160 J. Whyte

123
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_05-alt.htmhttp://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_05-alt.htmhttp://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_05-alt.htmhttp://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_05-alt.htm


15/15

whyte_agamben

Documents

Transcript of whyte_agamben