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The exemplary exception - Philosophical and political decisions in
Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer
Andrew Norris
Of all the beings that are, presumably the most difficult to think about
are living creatures, because on the one hand they are in a certain way most
closely akin to us, and on the other are at the same time separated from our
ek-sistent essence by an abyss.
Martin Heidegger, 'Letter on Humanism'
In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life Giorgio Agamben draws upon
metaphysics, philosophical anthropology, set theory and the philosophy of
language to advance a number of radical politico-philosophical claims. In
contrast to arguments that understand political community as essentially a
common 'belonging' in a shared national, ethnic, religious, or moral identity,
Agamben argues that 'the original political relation is the ban' in which a mode
of life is actively and continuously excluded or shut out (ex-claudere) from the
polis. The decision as to what constitutes the life that is thereby taken
outside of the polis is a sovereign decision. Sovereignty is therefore not a
historically specific form of political authority that arises with modern
nation-states and their conceptualization by Hobbes and Bodin, but rather the
essence of the political. Similarly, biopolitics is not, as Foucault sometimes
suggests, incompatible with sovereign as opposed to disciplinary power; nor is
it a distinctively modern phenomenon. Instead it is the original form of
politics: 'the fundamental activity of sovereign power is the production of bare
life as originary political element and as threshold of articulation between
nature and culture, zoe and bios.' Attending to the etymology of the word
'decide' one can understand this sovereign decision as a cut in life, one that
separates real life from merely existent life, political and human life from the
life of the non-human. As this cutting defines the political, the production of
the inhuman - which is correlative with the production of the human - is not an
activity that politics might dispense with, say in favour of the assertion of
human rights. More specifically, the Nazi death camps are not a political
aberration, least of all a unique event, but instead the place where politics as
the sovereign decision on life most clearly reveals itself: 'today it is not the
city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the
West.'1
The Lager is a threshold in which human beings are reduced to bare life; and
the torture this life suffers is nothing else but its exclusion from the polis
as a distinctively human life. The bare life that is produced by this
abandonment by the state is not biological life; 'not simple natural life, but
life exposed to death (bare life or sacred life) is the originary political
element'.2 This is the Muselmann as described by Primo Levi in If This is a Man.
One speaks of the Shoah as industrialized mass death, and of the camps as
'factories of death'. But the product of these factories is not death but, as
Arendt puts it, a mode of life 'outside of life and death'.3 If for Arendt,
however, the production of Muselmnner is anti-political, in that the camps are
spaces in which plurality is foreclosed, for Agamben it is the emergence of the
essence of the political.
Such claims are difficult for political philosophy to address, as they
undermine so many of its guiding assumptions. Instead of asking us to construct
and evaluate different plans of action, Agamben asks us to evaluate the
metaphysical structure and implications of the activity of politics as such.
Instead of asking us to consider the true or proper nature of political
identity, Agamben asks us to consider a threshold state of the non-identical,
the liminal. And far from bringing concepts such as rights, authority, public
interest, liberty or equality more clearly into view, Agamben operates at a
level of abstraction at which such concepts blur into their opposites. He takes
this approach because, like Arendt, he believes that claims to justice can only
be made if one understands the ground of the political upon which both justice
and injustice stand. If Foucault's goal was 'to make the cultural unconscious
apparent',4 Agamben's is that of bringing to expression the metaphysics that our
history has thus far only shown. He argues that, properly understood, what that
history shows us is that politics is the truly fundamental structure of Western
metaphysics insofar as it occupies the threshold on which the relation between
the living being and the logos is realized. In the 'politicization' of bare life
- the metaphysical task par excellence - the humanity of living man is decided
[si decide].É 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.5
What is perhaps both most intriguing and most problematic about Agamben's
work is that - unlike, say, that of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy
- it brings these claims about metaphysics into dialogue with a specific set of
quite concrete examples, including refugee camps, hospital wards, death rows and
military camps. All of these are sites where, on Agamben's account, one can
perceive the metaphysical negation that allows for the affirmation of
distinctively human life: bare life, nuda vita.
One way to evaluate Agamben's claims is to consider how well they help us to
describe and understand such examples.6 Another is to ask whether Agamben's
claims are intelligible on their own account - to see, that is, whether they
open themselves up to an immanent critique. This approach has a number of
advantages, chief among which is that it does not demand that we simply choose
whether to accept or reject Agamben's approach in a global way. Instead such an
approach allows us to be open to a radically different way of thinking about
politics and political philosophy while at the same time maintaining some
critical distance from it. In what follows I want to pursue this option by way
of considering Agamben's appropriation of the early decisionist political theory
of Carl Schmitt. I will argue that Agamben's acceptance of Schmitt's central
claims regarding political judgment make it impossible for him to weave together
his suggestive reading of examples from philosophy and political history into a
mode of political thought that fulfils his own ambition of 'returning thought to
its practical calling'.7
Agamben's project hinges upon the paradigmatic status of the camp. But on his
own account, there is an isomorphism between the exception and the example or
paradigm. Given his acceptance of Schmitt's analysis of the former as the
product of the sovereign decision, this makes Agamben's evaluation of the camp
as 'the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West' into a sovereign decision
beyond the regulation of rule or reason. As this casts his readers as either
subject or enemy, it is hard to imagine how the politics it might produce will
serve as a real alternative to that which it contests.
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