Giorgio Agamben: politics and first philosophy

The surge of interest in Giorgio Agamben's work  has been disappointingly one-sided.  (One sure sign that it's in fact a surge is the appearance of citations to this post-Heideggerian Continentalist in mainstream American law journals, e.g. here (at note 34)).  On one hand, it's the political philosophy --  Homo Sacer, State of Exception, Means Without Ends -- that's gotten the lion's share of the attention, which is a bit of a shame in a thinker of such incredible range.  That's hardly surprising, however, especially given the compelling examples of sovereignty run amok provided by George Bush and his merry band of Executive Branch supremacists, which dovetail so nicely with his analyses in these books.  The problem is rather that the work that's gotten short shrift -- the first-philosophical pieces like the (inexcusably out-of-print) Language and Death and the essays collected in Potentialities -- is ultimately what makes the Foucauldian-biopolitical-Schmittian theses of Homo Sacer intelligible.  Or more precisely, it's the earlier work that provides these theses with their raison d'etre -- the affirmative side of Agamben's onto-political program for which Homo Sacer, et al., provide the necessary-but-not-sufficient critical prolegomenon.

That affirmative side hasn't been hidden, either -- Agamben wrote about it in The Coming Community even before he started down the biopolitical road of Homo Sacer and it's sequels.  Aviva Shemesh makes this point in a review of Agamben's recent The Time That Remains over at the (heavily Agambenian) Form of Life:

The ambivalence of Agamben’s philosophy, which can be read as both a curse and a cure, may be attributed to the double strategy behind his publications in recent years. On the one hand, we have the celebrated Homo Sacer series, which, up to now, is comprised of three books: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, State of Exception, and Remnants of Auschwitz: the Witness and the Archive. These books analyze the darkness of our time, which Agamben calls “biopolitics,” the political power over our naked life. However, in each of these three critiques, the attentive reader can also discern a certain light that shines in the darkness, which flashes up at the closing sections of each one of those “pessimistic” books. Because of the difficulty to recognize this light, Agamben offers a second set of investigations, those other books, which elaborate on his glad tidings: The Coming Community, The Open: Man and Animal, and the book that concerns us here, The Time That Remains. (Profanations, his last publication, forthcoming in English from Zone Books, is another, beautiful, example to this aspect of his thought.)

Up to now, it is mainly the first, critical, or “pessimistic” aspect of Agamben’s philosophy that has created a powerful whirlpool in the stream of our thinking. But when we disregard the other, “redemptive,” aspect, we end up in a complete misunderstanding of his project. One might assume, for example, that what Homo Sacer asks us to do is simply to pay close attention to the minute details of our biopolitical twists and turns. But let us remember the motto of the same book: “And the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death.” Paul’s formulation encapsulates the radical message of Agamben’s project: Modern politics, which was supposed to give us life, is propelling us unto death. As a result, the fulfillment of the situation depicted in Homo Sacer is its transgression. It is far from being enough to continue to dwell on the nature of the state, the law, sovereignty, human rights, and so on. To use a Wittgensteinian metaphor, we could say that if you understand what Agamben says in Homo Sacer, then you need to recognize that the propositions of his book, in their erudite description of our current condition, are senseless – like a ladder, you need to climb through these propositions, on them, over them. You need to throw the biopolitical ladder away. Then you will see the Agambenian world rightly.

I essentially agree with this reading (although Shemesh's prose is a little adulatory for my taste). 

Why then has this affirmative, "redemptive" side received so little attention from the political types?  One answer is that in a sense it has been hidden, in plain sight.  Again as Shemesh puts it, "what, then, do you see [in the "Agambenian world"]? The answer, I believe, is far from being metaphysical. It is, simply put, life itself."   "Life itself" -- nothing could be simpler, nothing could be more obscure, especially when framed as the end of a political philosophy (or rather as its "pure means," as Agamben, following Benjamin, would undoubtely prefer to have it).   The opacity of this notion of pure "life," at once so simple and so difficult to say, is what accounts for the fragmentary form of The Coming Community and his other attempts to articulate directly his affirmative political vision.  But it's also what generates the most difficult stumbling blocks to interpreting the biopolitical work, just because there ultimately cannot be any pure separation between the two sides. 

Thus, in his recent review of State of Exception over at The Weblog, it's precisely at this point that John Emerson finds the book "unintelligible":

[H]is conclusion seems close to Benjamin’s, and is to me unintelligible:

“To a word that does not bind, that neither commands nor prohibits anything, but says only itself, would correspond an action as pure means, which shows only itself, without relation to any end. And, between the two, not a lost original state, but only the use and human praxis that the powers of law and myth had sought to capture in the state of exception.” (p. 88)

"[A]n action as pure means, which shows only itself, without relation to any end" -- it's of such actions that "life itself," a "life for which living itself would be at stake in its own living" (as Agamben also puts it), is composed.  My thesis is that one cannot really understand these notions except by reference to the earlier work: the essay on Max Kommerell and gesture in Potentialities, the discussion of "habit" at the end of Language and Death, and the notions of "being-thus" and the "irreparable" in The Coming Community, to name a few relevant passages.  Similarly, the "word that does not bind, that neither commands nor prohibits, but says only itself" is incomprehensible unless one puts it in relationship with the first two essays in Potentialities on the "idea of language" and its "thing itself" and the discussions of "language as such" (as well as of "as-such-ness" itself, as such, in The Coming Community).  In fact, as I've tried to show elsewhere in much more technical detail, Agamben's affirmative political ideal is ultimately inseparable from his ontologized philosophy of language (or linguistically-turned ontology, if you prefer).  To give the meat-axe summary, for Agamben, the "sayability" of things -- that which allows their exposition in language -- becomes the model for a "coming community" of singular, identity-free (and therefore genuinely free) individuals, insofar as this sayability is at once shared by all things (since each thing only is what it is, as such, in relation to the totality of the predications allowed by its linguistic exposition) without yet constituting any particular shared predicate (since such sayability is the precondition of predication in general).  In fewer words, humanity's dwelling in language as such becomes the model and basis for something like Bataille's "community of those who have no community."

My point is not to endorse the very deep connection between Agamben's first-philosophical writings and his more recent biopolitical ones (in fact I'm critical of this connection both in the previously mentioned paper and in other work).  The point is rather that a very important dimension is being missed in the rush to adopt Agamben's biopolitical framework of sovereignty.  And, while I can't defend this here, it seems to me that attention to that most abstract dimension of his political work ought to give one pause precisely at the point at which one asks the most concrete of questions, that is, what good does this framework do me down here on the ground?  Agamben's political philosophy ultimately leaves one, undecidably, with one of two positions, both of them untenable from the practical-political perspective: either commitment to total revolution, on one hand, or to a quasi-mystical quietism, on the other.  Again, I won't try to defend that here; perhaps in another post. 

 

Comments

[Adam Kotsko]

I second you on the indispensability of the Potentialities collection. There's something very appealling to me in Agamben's "politics" (such as it is), insofar as I am attempting to be a "Christian" or at least "Pauline" thinker on such matters -- yet I recognize the incomprehensibility and worry that the reason it seems "right" to me is that I have been so habituated to think of the "best" as being somehow above human understanding while also being somehow more originary, bereft of the accretions of human history/civilization. (That is, I was so habituated through being brought up in a church environment, where even the most "vulgar" or unreflective picture of something like "the kingdom" cannot fail to participate in the most noble and authentic articulations of such an idea.)

[s0metim3s]

the "sayability" of things -- that which allows their exposition in language -- becomes the model for a "coming community" of singular, identity-free (and therefore genuinely free) individuals, insofar as this sayability is at once shared by all things (since each thing only is what it is, as such, in relation to the totality of the predications allowed by its linguistic exposition) without yet constituting any particular shared predicate (since such sayability is the precondition of predication in general). In fewer words, humanity's dwelling in language as such becomes the model and basis for something like Bataille's "community of those who have no community."

Paolo Virno attempts something similar, in terms of language and, for him at least, another series of connections are made: 'species-being', 'cognitive labour', and so on. I'm not entirely persuaded, though, by the valorisation of language.

[Matt]

Terrific post.

[Gary Sauer-Thompson]

Well now Adam,

I do recall that nearly a year ago I had struggled my way through your large chunks of your Specters of Nietzsche paper, and through the idea of the 'Potential Futures for the Concept of the Political in Agamben and Derrida.'

See here and here at philosophy.com.

My postings are poor--it was all new to me-- and I didn't get that far into your paper re a close read---the juxtaposition of Derrida and Agamben was hard going. I did not know about your Cutting the Branches paper.

Your Spectres paper aroused my interest in Agamben, due to him working in, reworking and building on, the Heideggerian tradition in a way that I found to be very attractive. I also appreciated the Schmittian tone and the references to Bataille.

What you were saying about Agamben made sense to me in terms of the political life I was living in Canberra last year. It kinda gave me a bearings on the profound changes in liberal democracy, which had been taking place since 1996 in Australia, and then had accelerated after 9/11 in Australia, the US and the UK.

I went and ordered Agamben's political books, and I never did get back to your Spectres article. I think that I still have the scrawled over copy somewhere at home in Adelaide. I'll dig it out.

So it is nice to make acquaintance through blogging.

Re-reading your post in the light of that personal experience I can see that I did approach the bio-politics--though not the language ontology texts---in terms of asking the most concrete of questions, that is, what good does this framework do me down here on the ground?

Then again I was partial to the Heideggerian framework, though not to Derrida's re-working of it.