Before the Law

Agamben fails to rise from the dead (or in my estimation)

Sitting in my hotel room in London, on my way home from attending "The Messianic Now: Politics, Religion, Philosophy" in Lancaster, England -- a great conference, with kudos to the organizers, Arthur Bradley and Paul Fletcher -- I feel compelled to testify to what I saw and what I failed to see today.  The conference  title is pretty much self-explanatory; lots of talk about Benjamin, Scholem, Derrida, etc., and, of course, Agamben, who was probably mentioned more than anyone else, and who was billed as the keynote speaker for the concluding session this afternoon.  Based on things I had heard and my own, limited (failure of) communication with him, I had had my doubts all along that he was actually going to show, but was repeatedly told by the conference organizers that he was on board.  Chatting with one of the organizers after I arrived, I learned that he had something of a personal relationship with Agamben -- had spent some time with him at an event in Germany -- and that Agamben had repeatedly assured him that he was going to come, and that he wanted to do a session with graduate students and an open public lecture on Friday in addition to today's conference lecture (all of which, I assume, had been arranged).  In any event, yesterday I was told that Agamben had e-mailed as recently as Tuesday that he was coming (although, interestingly, he failed to respond to the specific request that he tell the organizers what flight he wanted to take from Venice).  Needless to say, come today, the moment of truth, the ho nyn kairos, and, behold, oh ye of too much  faith, he fails to show.

It's sorely tempting to turn this into an allegory of the competing virtues of a Levinasian ethics of responsibility and a Heideggerian ethos of dwelling contentedly in one's ownmost (one's ownmost, mind you, and no one else's!) possibilities, but that might make me sound resentful . . . .  In fact, the much-discussed question of Agamben's heralded parousia -- will he or won't he? -- provided the perfect background music to this conference on messianism, and his ultimate failure to come may have spoken more eloquently to the contemporary relevance of messianism -- or academic messianism, anyway -- than anything he could have actually  said . . . .

Agamben and essentialism

There's an interesting thread on Agamben playing out at I-cite, during the course of which the question of whether he is an essentialist or not came up.  The source of the charge is the transhistorical understanding of sovereignty that he proposes in the Homo Sacer books.  I started to leave a comment but it got too long so I'm doing it here; another late night effort on the eve of my journey to seek the Messiah in Lancaster, England (at the "Messianic Now" conference, where Agamben will allegedly give the closing address), so excuse the informal, not to say snotty, nature of what follows and look at the I-cite thread here for the background . . . .

I'm not sure either of the terms "essentialism" or "anti-essentialism" (or the distinction itself) capture Agamben, any more than they would Heidegger.  He certainly does make these very strong statements about the nature of sovereignty.   In one sense, these obviously are claims about "the essence" of sovereignty.  But since it's clear that when he says "sovereignty" he (also) means "Being" (he says this explicitly in Homo Sacer), the notion of "essentialism" ceases to apply, since what he's actually talking about is what makes (gives, "es gibt," etc.) "essence" in the first place.  He's looking for a political (ontological) state beyond sovereignty (Being), which is why Jodi in her original I-cite post correctly (I think) ties some of his appeal to the longing for a post-identitarian politics .  What Agamben is trying to articulate (in The Coming Community and other places) is a kind of solidarity without identity, that which gathers together without violently forcing  itself upon that which is gathered, etc. etc. etc. (I don't think I'm violently forcing him into a Heideggerian mold, by the way, I think it's there just beneath the surface.)  Part of Agamben's appeal is that he's the great white hope, so to speak, of Philosophy with a capital P, the guy who can pull it all together and make sense of it all by re-Asking the Question of Sovereignty (Being), demonstrating along the way that all the historical and other differences that the feckless doubters insist matter (gender in particular, I would point out) are in fact best understood as excrescences of the History of Sovereignty (Being).  Too strong, perhaps, although I'm not actually sure about that . . . . 

In any event, because his analysis and critique of sovereignty are pitched at the level of fundamental ontology, you can think of him as either an essentialist or an anti-essentialist.  His political stance  is, essentially (sorry), aimed at overcoming essence (Being) -- that's the significance of his analysis of "being thus," "whatever being," etc. in The Coming Community for example -- which means (in some sense) that he both believes and doesn't believe in "essence."  The real question for me is whether the question of sovereignty is best posed solely on this axis (so to speak) of Being, or appears as a question at all only because it is actually stretched along two different (metaphorical-conceptual) axes, the ontological (Being, Heidegger, etc.) and the ethical (the Other, the Good beyond Being, Levinas, etc.).  That at least seems to me the direction that Derrida was going in his own analysis of sovereignty in Rogues, which I think is the most productive counter-point to Agamben, rather than the (somewhat tired at this point) essentialism/anti-essentialism  debate.   

On solidarity (II) -- response to a comment

Nate posted a comment at I cite that I want to respond to here.  Nate says, inter alia:

As much as I like the formulation of solidarity as an event between those who don't (or don't need to? that seems an important difference, somehow, and I'm not clear on which you mean) have anything in common... there's also the matter that there are points and places where solidarity should not be extended, or should be only in the most limited of senses (such that extension or full extension of solidarity would be something of a mockery of the word). At a basic level, I mean solidarity with bosses. Class struggle involves hurting people at least emotionally (and more so if we look at a number of historical examples - I hope I don't sound like I'm romanticizing violence against people, I think that's actually quite ill advised). Picket lines hurt bosses profits, and some frontline managers almost always get fired in a successful union drive, in retaliation for not busting the union and because managers don't have (m)any protect labor rights so they make good sacrifices to appease upper management's anger. Of course, you could say that no schema of solidarity (certainly not one I can indicate) contains a decision procedure for who solidarity happens to/between and who it doesn't happen to/between, and I'd have to agree. But solidarity with some minimal limits of belonging does provide at least a very rudimentary compass for that, which the sort of infinite/limitless solidarity with those whom one has nothing in common with doesn't seem to offer or even really to allow the existence of.

I disagree -- let me see if I can articulate this.  "Solidarity" in the fundamental sense that I'm trying to develop is in fact inherently unstable, that is, lacking in the kind of limits that Nate (and many others) think are necessary for political action.  That's because although solidarity qua event is a response to singularity -- and therefore "limited" in the extreme -- Nate is correct that there are no theoretical (or ethical) limits on  the singularities (the "faces") to whom one turns one's own face.   But that doesn't render politics impossible (something that I think is a concern of Jodi's as well), it simply humanizes it, if I can use that word.  Again, there's a level-of-analysis elision that seems virtually impossible to avoid with Levinas (a sign, I think, of the genuine novelty and brilliance of his thought) that creates this confusion.  Let me put it this way, using a Levinasian example.  Levinas says, "Thou shalt not kill" is an unbreakable injunction; that is, one quite literally cannot "kill" the Other whom one encounters in the face-to-face.  Yeeesh, you say, how  am I supposed to go about my day-to-day political activities without "killing" at least some Others, if not literally then at least figuratively or indirectly (by causing a front-line manager to get fired, lose her health insurance, fail to get needed medical attention, and die, to use Nate's example)?  The answer is that the unbreakable injunction "thou shalt not kill" is for Levinas an injunction at the (ontologically constitutive, albeit) level of the ethical debt to the Other.   That is, the thing that one cannot kill is one's pre-existing debt (or responsibility) to that Other.  What does this mean in terms of Nate's example?  It does not mean that you should refuse to join the strike because the event of your solidarity with the striking Other will have lethal consequences for some Third (the front-line manager).  In fact every act of solidarity with an Other has quite literally lethal consequences for some Third, in fact a multitude of Thirds (Derrida has some really beautiful and passionate lines on this in The Gift of Death).  What it means is that your act of solidarity with the striking Other cannot and does not relieve you from your ethical responsibility for all those other Thirds, including the  front-line manager.  It precludes you from relying on the political calculation -- "the achievement of the greater good for the union members justifies the sacrifice of certain lackeys of the bosses" -- as a mode of dismissal of that responsibility. 

Does this induce political paralysis?  It does not and cannot, it is never a matter of "choice," of "choosing" to act politically or not.  Every day in every way, everything you do (and every single thing you don't do), is a political action in this sense that, again, to put it hyperbolically but not unrealistically, sacrifices a multitude of Thirds to the (fundamentally political, whether one is conscious of this or not) calculation of the moment.  I get out of bed.  Should I immediately go to my check book and contribute to Oxfam to save the life of three malnourished children?  No, I need to eat breakfast and get to work . . . .  There is no escape from this, and so "political paralysis" is no more an option than eliminating one's ethical responsibility for all those Thirds that you've just killed by deciding to eat breakfast.  That's finitude; politics is not a choice, and what Levinas tells us, I think importantly, is that ethical responsibility isn't a choice either.

So what then?  Given that politics is inevitable and responsibility for that politics is inevitable, where does that go?  What difference do those inevitabilities matter at the level of the political decision?  Two not entirely consistent responses to this:  Initially, this (let's call it) politico-ethical condition of existence determines nothing, at least in terms of normative guidance to the content of the political act (this is the point of Derrida's discussion of the unbridgable split between the ethical injunction to act politically and the indeterminate content of the responsive political act in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas).  But secondarily, it seems to me, this ethical origin of the political (to give it another name) has at least two consequences.  The first is at the level of discourse about and justifications for the political act.  It seems to me that the underogable responsibilty for the Third puts significant limits on how one talks about one's political opponents -- de-humanization, it seems to me, is right out, inconsistent with that responsibility.  That, I think, is very important in its own right.  But I also think that that limitation will have implications -- indeterminate ones, but implications nonetheless -- for the content of the political calculation itself.  The underogable fact of this responsibility for the Third can -- in fact, arguably must -- itself become a factor to be weighed in the political calculation, and that will -- usually, maybe not always (I don't think you can rule out in advance the possibility that war will sometimes be necessary even from an ethical perspective) -- eliminate certain political options (to take an easy example, the mass slaughter of one's political opponents).  So even at the level of the content of the political decision, "Levinasian solidarity" affects one's political decision.   (This, by the way, is an example of what I mean by the ethical "suffusing" the political calculation in earlier posts here and here.)

One final point and then I'll stop.  Nate says, "solidarity with some minimal limits of belonging does provide at least a very rudimentary compass for that, which the sort of infinite/limitless solidarity with those whom one has nothing in common with doesn't seem to offer or even really to allow the existence of."  Maybe, but hasn't that "infinite/limitless solidarity with those with whom one has nothing in common" in fact always determined the teleology of the great "solidarity-based" political movements, from salvationist religious discourses to Marxism?  Doesn't the Internationale (I think these are words; I ought to know this . . .) look forward to the day when the "working class becomes the human race"?  It seems to me that one of the great advantages of the Levinasian (especially in this regard I should say "Derridian/Levinasian") notion of solidarity is that it provides a way of articulating that traditional teleology with political action in a way that avoids the rather historically disastrous consequences of standing by that teleology as such.  And since this thread is partly about Agamben, too, I should say that one of the most admirable things about  Agamben's onto-linguistic utopian politics of "life itself" is the way it tries to preserve the utopian element of the traditional political teleologies while ridding them of the elements that have led to their demise in premature declarations of their achievement (and the resultant slaughter of those who don't agree or whose existence provides evidence to the contrary).  While I think that Agamben's effort to save the form of the political embodied in these traditional teleologies ultimately fails as a basis for politics, I think he comes closer to succeeding at this level -- that is, at eliminating those lingering elements that allow for the perversions of Stalinism, the Crusades, and so on -- better than anyone else.

Agamben and Derrida on language and the political

Clark at Mormon Metaphysics has a post on Being in Heidegger and Pierce that triggered a thought on something that's interested me for a while, the different relationships of language to the political posited by Derrida on one hand and Agamben on the other.  Ultimately, I think, this connects up with Jodi Dean's recent post on "solidarity" at I cite (cross-posted at Long Sunday).  If that sounds a like a rather free free association, I guess it is, but . . . . .   

Clark says, interpreting Heidegger:

I'd suggest that perhaps a useful, if not completely accurate, way of thinking Being as beings in totality to consider it as what, in the final outcome, the community of people would understand of beings. That would include not just our feeling of beings as we encounter them, but the discourses about these beings, the relationships the beings enter into and so forth. It would be beings as intelligible in their fulness.

Based on what I know of Heidegger (which is less than I should), I would agree with Clark that this is not a "completely accurate" account of his conception of Being.  (Nor does it sound to me, as Clark seems to be saying, that this is the equivalent of Pierce's identification of Being with the absolute sign -- Being as "the very fact, that is, the ideal sign which should be quite perfect, and so identical, - in such identity as a sign may have, - with the very matter denoted united with the very form signified by it," in Clark's quotation from Pierce.) 

That said, Clark's suggestion that Being amounts to "the discourses about . . . beings, . . . beings as intelligible in their fullness" is reminiscent of (although not identical to) Agamben's understanding of Being, which is another interpretation (I think) of the later Heidegger's turn to language as a, if not the, privileged mode of access to Being.  For Agamben, the Being of beings is their "sayability" in language, the fact that beings only are what they are, as such, insofar as they enter language and thus become subject to the predication of their infinity of uniquely identifying qualities.  (This is not linguistic idealism, by the way -- not the assertion that linguistic concepts or predicates are the real, but that the real is only real-ized in the medium of language, which is something else again.) 

Furthermore, picking up on something I was saying elsewhere, this necessarily shared "sayability" of all beings ("shared" insofar as each "is" what it "is" by virtue of that sayability -- the scare-quotes necessary because it's the Being of Being that's at stake here) is simultaneously the model and condition for the coming community of identity-free "whatever singularities," which is to say, people who exist solely and as such, without categorization -- without being "Italian," "communist," "red," etc.  (These are Agamben's examples in The Coming Community (if I'm remembering correctly), an overarching theme of which is the free political existence of these linguistically liberated beings).  This freedom from identity is simultaneously political freedom for Agamben as well -- in fact, absolute political freedom, insofar as he says (something like; this isn't a real quote but I think captures the sense of the original), "The State can handle anything except someone [i.e., a "whatever singularity"] that exists without relation to any category."  The notion here is something along lines that the State can control anything  through the medium of judgment -- which is to say, law -- as long as the act of judgment is capable of addressing its object (that is, that the object can be categorized, placed on one side of a line or another); but that the act of judgment is necessarily stymied by a singularity that exists beyond (or rather, before) the possibility of linguistic predication, insofar as its only characteristic is to participate in the condition of possibility of linguistic predication in general.   

This then is the main point of contact between Agamben's first-philosophical work and his later, political philosophical work.   On one hand, insofar as it precedes and thereby remains immune from categorization and judgment, such "whatever singularities" exemplify the "form-of-life" -- the life whose form is simply life itself, the pure gesture, habit, the "life for which living itself would be at stake in its own living" as he variously puts it -- that Agamben in Homo Sacer opposes to the pure sovereign function of separating "bare life" from its form.   On the other hand (and  this is what begins to draw the Agambenian paradigm closer to the question of "solidarity" that Jodi Dean raises), by transposing it into the realm of human experience, Agamben also interprets the being's pure being-in-language as the model of the "commonality" that seals the solidarity of the ideal political community.   We are, or can be, members of one big community, Agamben suggests, just insofar as we all share the "pure experience of language" (or as he also calls it, experimentum linguae).  This is an experience which is simultaneously  empty-and-universal -- insofar as it consists of nothing but the originary experience of our existence as individuals in and through the medium of our exposition in language -- yet singular-izing as well -- insofar as it is precisely this bare, empty act of linguistic exposure which is the precondition of singularity as such.  In this sense, I think Agamben provides us with linguistically-turned (and considerably more radical) version of the "subjective destitution" that Jodi Dean suggests is at the basis of political solidarity in her recent post (and at Long Sunday).

Agamben emphasizes that this "pure experience of language" or experimentum linguae is, of necessity, an experience of "language as such," the pure "linguistic-ality" of beings prior to their being spoken in any particular language, or rather, precisely as they are spoken in every particular language, insofar as "sayability" is a condition of beings qua "sayable" at all, in any language.  And thus Agamben writes repeatedly of "language as such" and "the Idea of Language," and argues (in the new preface to Infancy and History, written around the time of The Coming Community) that political salvation can only come after humanity stops its "wandering through traditions" -- which is to say, releases itself from the hold of the particular linguistic traditions which bind our identities and create the political divisions that lead to war, in favor of the pure "being-in-language" that we all share. 

Following on all this, Agamben would also have to say, I believe, that the Schmittian conception of solidarity that Jodi attempts to draw out of Zizek is imperfect precisely to the extent that it retains the "friend/enemy distinction," because this distinction leaves the political subject insufficiently "destitute,"  still burdened by a substantive predicate or quality ("friend" or "enemy") that stands in the way of the experience of oneself in the opening of language as such (to use the Heideggerian idiom).  At the same time, Agamben would have to reject Zizek's belief (in Jodi's summary) "that violence as such liberates, that it draws a line of separation, that it establishes a difference, discards . . .  that this freedom is necessary for the cut of universality proper," because precisely what Agamben is after is a freedom that requires neither universality (in the conventional sense of abstract universality that Zizek apparently intends) nor a "cut" or division of any kind.   And finally, one should consider what this all implies about the political validity of "the party" (which by minimal definition is determined by the "friend/enemy" distinction), and therefore for practical politics in general.  Can politics in the mundane and everyday sense survive this paradigm?   What would it look like?  Something like Hart and Negri's multitude, perhaps, or anarchism in some more traditional form?

In any event, to return to the notion of experimentum linguae, pure experience of language as such, which provides the onto-linguistic support for this notion of politics:  What is most striking to me about this notion is its contrast to a line of Derrida's, who says in passing (in Demeure, I think), something like, "of course there is no such thing as 'language as such,' no one has ever experienced 'language,' only particular languages" (I don't have the text in front of me).  This is really a throw-away line in the context of Demeure (I'm pretty sure that's where it appears), but nevertheless, there is something entirely consistent with Derrida's whole program about it -- the impossibility of the pure Idea, the at-best "quasi-transcendental" (i.e, marked by its historico-empirical context) nature of his governing concepts (and there have to be concepts, and not a concept, for this very reason), and so on.  Moreover, because it articulates so perfectly (albeit negatively) with Agamben's linguistified and then politicized idea of Being, it also seems to me to mark a very important point at which Derrida's own concept of the political intersects with and then diverges from Agamben's.  It corresponds, for example, to why Derrida can say in a footnote in Politics of Friendship, "I have never been able to utter the word 'community,' at least in my own name" (something like that -- again, don't have the book here), whereas for Agamben, "community" is ultimately nothing other than "utterability" itself, as such.  More importantly, I think it casts light on why Agamben's concept of the political, including the more recent onto-biopolitical analysis of Homo Sacer, is set against the background of the "real possibility" (the quotes here are meant to allude to Derrida's analysis of this phrase of Schmitt's in PoF) of a "coming community," a messianic political community that exists at least (this is the "realness" of its possibility) as an eschaton if not a normative ideal of political life, while for Derrida, the political can only begin and concern itself with the messianic call and possibility of the singular here-and-now, which always "exists" within the particularity of a particular tradition or history.  For Agamben, because there is available to us an experience of "language as such" (if we just heed its Call?  this part of his program is hazy to me), there is also available to us -- qua philosophers -- the notion of an ideal political community that language-as-such implies as its end.  For Derrida, by contrast, there is no escape from our "wandering through traditions" and thus no point at which the philosopher can dictate to the politician her true goals.  That's why it seems to me that Derrida's concept of the political is truer to finitude than is Agamben's (and it's also why I think -- although this would take much more to establish -- that Derrida is the true heir to Benjamin's philosophy of the political, and not Agamben). 

Does this mean that there's no notion of political solidarity implicit in Derrida's more chastened version of political messianism?  I think it is possible to draw out such a notion, along the Levinasian lines that dominated his later political thought.  I'm thinking of statements by Levinas like, "[m]y relationship with the other as neighbor gives meaning to my relations with all the others," as well some suggestions in Derrida's writings that, despite the basic structure of his (Levinasian) political thought -- that is, that the ethical relationship to the Other demands political calculation but cannot determine the content of this calculation, which remains singularly tied to the singularity of the here-and-now that it addresses -- the ethical relationship can infuse the (necessarily) calculative political relationships to all the other others (there's a line to this effect in The Gift of Death but it's not coming to me now).  Thus, pace Zizek, and paraphrasing Karl Rufo's excellent comment to Jodi Dean's post (which is also the source of the above Levinas quote), I think that Levinas's "conception of ethics can[] ground an ethical politics" (although, "ground" being a little strong for the relationship between the two, I would prefer the term "infuse" or "suffuse").  Something along those lines would be my candidate for the Derridian/Levinasian stand-in for "solidarity," although it's too late at night for me really to defend that now . . . . .

Thoughts on the imminent death of a blogger

Apparently the first blogger on death row, Vernon Lee Evans, is scheduled for execution in Maryland during the week of February 6.  (Hat tip to Capital Defense Weekly and Abolish the Death Penalty; news stories here and here.)  Evans's blog, Meet Vernon, is posted indirectly (internet access isn't one of the amenities typically provided to death row residents).  A friend receives letters from interested parties and delivers them to him, and then posts his responses on his behalf.  Evans, 56, was convicted of a drug gang-related murder of potential witnesses about 20 years ago (he now says that he is innocent). 

Does it need saying that the fact that Evans happens to have a blog in no way distinghishes him from the 3,382 others on death row in this country?  Or I should say, it does distinguish him, in exactly the same way that each of the unique characteristics of each of the other 3,832 distinguish them as well.  Each is an individual -- a singularity, a paradigm, an example, in precisely Giorgio Agamben's sense -- and as such each is exemplary of all of the rest.  This is why, in groping toward a just resolution of the absolute antinomy of sovereignty and individuality posed by the institution of capital punishment, the United States Supreme Court recognizes the defendant's constitutional right to make his or her individuality the keystone of the sentencing defense.  ("Given that the imposition of death by public authority is so profoundly different from all other penalties, we cannot avoid the conclusion that an individualized decision is essential in capital cases. The need for treating each defendant in a capital case with that degree of respect due the uniqueness of the individual is far more important than in noncapital cases," Lockett v. Ohio (1983).)  That's the best that a court can do, I suppose, under a form of sovereignty that (if Agamben, but also more or less the rest of the Western political-philosophical tradition as well, is correct) is defined by its power of death over its subjects.  By the same token, however, if the singularity of the individual seems like something that instead ought to trump the power of the state absolutely --  beyond simply being one reason for the state, at its whim, to demonstrate mercy by declining to exercise its right to kill -- then one has to begin thinking about, and looking for emergent signs of, forms of sovereignty that don't conform to Agamben's model.  More on this in some other post. 

Update:  More on Evans at Sentencing Law & Policy.

More on Agamben (and Benjamin)

Thanks to Matt Christie at pas au-delà (cross-posted at Long Sunday) for a link to an Agamben lecture from 2002 titled "What is a Paradigm?"   The lecture, which is primarily on the epistemological and ontological status of the example, is interesting in its own right (and exceptionally straightforward for those used to Agamben's often deliberately fragmentary and oblique prose), but also interesting (to me, at least) for collateral reasons as well.  For one, I'm struck, as I always am, by the remarkably consistent, in fact repetitive (a word I intend nonpejoratively no matter what it sounds like), quality of Agamben's underlying obsessions over the course of his writing career.  The notes he hits in this 2002 lecture include elements that not only go back to 1995's Homo Sacer (the discussion of the example as an "exclusive inclusion" complementary to the exception's "inclusive exclusion," e.g.), but to the essays from the early 1980s on Plato, Aristotle, and philosophy as the exposure of the  "unpresupposed principle" as well.  (Yet more evidence for the point I tried to make here.)  The core of Agamben's thought is composed of a relatively small number of conceptual insights supported by a larger (but still surprisingly limited) number of repeated (often virtually verbatim) textual references that recur again and again throughout his writings since the late 1970s.  That is not a criticism; to a certain extent anyone who writes does the same thing, but it does seem significantly more pronounced in Agamben's case.  One of the interesting things about this lecture is that it provides an oblique explanation for this procedure -- the example, for Agamben, is the singular phenomenon which, when placed next to other singular phenomena, exposes their "intelligibility," and thus simultaneously reveals and establishes the set of which the example is an example.  In any event, Agamben's exemplary insights are profound and extremely broad in their implications and his genius has been to assemble these conceptual building blocks in different configurations (I should say, constellations) across an astonishing range of subject matter and textual exegesis. 

The lecture actually begins with (and is clearly at least in part motivated by) his desire to defend himself from criticism on an issue related to this.  Agamben's reliance on historical exemplars -- the Roman law figure of homo sacer and the Musselman of Remnants of Auschwitz are probably the best known -- have led to the very common accusation that he is an inveterate abuser of historical argument.  His explanation in the lecture is that these historical references "were treated as paradigms whose function was to establish and make intelligible a wider set of problems" rather than as an attempt to do history per se.  I think that that defense is legitimate; I've long told friends of mine who've been outraged by his (allegedly -- I'm in no position to judge) one-sided and un-nuanced treatment of equivocal historical sources that they're missing the point.  Agamben's use of historical figures isn't intended as "history" at all; these figures are rather emblems of his (strictly-speaking) pure philosophical arguments, in something like the allegorical sense that Benjamin attributes to Renaissance emblem books. 

As noted above, Agamben himself explains these figures as "paradigms" or "examples" employed for their power of "making intelligible" the other historical phenomena which concerned him.  There are other notions, however, that may have even more explanatory power for his method than do "the example" and "the paradigm."  In particular, at the end of the lecture, there is (I think) an unmistakable allusion to Benjamin's notion of the "origin" (Ursprung)  developed in the "Epistemo-Critical Prologue" of the Trauerspiel book, an allusion that seems to me highly instructive about his use of history, butwhich also may point to a certain fault-line in his thinking:

The fallacy which remains unseen in the common usage of hypothesis is that what appears as a given is in reality only a presupposition of the hypothesis which would explain it. Thus the origin, the unpresupposed principle, remains hidden. On the contrary, to show a phenomenon in its original paradigmatic character means to exhibit it in the medium of its knowability. You have no presupposed principle, it is the phenomenon itself which is original. No more origin, but an original phenomenon.

"An original phenomenon" -- this is the same phrase that Benjamin uses in explaining the meaning of "Ursprung" in the title of his book on the German baroque mourning play, Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels:

There takes place in every original phenomenon a determination of the form in which an idea will constantly confront the historical world, until it is revealed fulfilled, in the totality of its history.   (p. 45-6 (Osborne translation)).

I cannot get into a full discussion of Benjamin's (rather obscure) notion of "origin" that Agamben is trading on here, except to say that -- as I hope this one sentence already suggests -- it does seem to shed even more light on Agamben's use of historical figures than does his own concept of "the example," which (in contrast to Benjamin's "origin") is strictly speaking a purely logical concept that has no intrinsic relationship to history or historical manifestation.   (Nor is it a surprise that Agamben would use Benjamin's notion here in an allusive and unattributed way; his work is stuffed with similar examples of such unattributed allusions to Benjamin, sometimes in the form of virtual paraphrases of Benjamin's original texts.  Again, I don't mean this as a criticism (in fact I enjoy and admire this aspect of his work); I think Benjamin is simply the air he breathes). 

What really (and finally, since it's getting absurdly late here) interests me about this Benjamin allusion is how it how it helps illuminate a subtle but important discontinuity between his fundamental approach to philosophy and Benjamin's, apart from all of the obvious continuities.  As Agamben explains in the above-quoted passage, "to show a phenomenon in its original paradigmatic character means to exhibit it in the medium of its knowability."   Without getting into the (quite fascinating and important) details of the relationship of exemplarity to knowability, what this passage (and the others that precede it in the lecture) clearly indicate is that the fundamental significance that Agamben places on exemplarity stems from its relationship to knowability -- intelligibility -- per se.  More authentically than either deduction or induction, he suggests (and this, by the way, also tracks perfectly Benjamin's discussion in the "Epistemo-Critical Prologue"), the example opens the world, it makes things intelligible in their singularity.  Benjamin's "origin" seemingly serves the same function with respect to historical phenomena, allowing what he calls their "redemption" in the Platonic idea.  Again, Agamben seems to say virtually the same thing in this lecture, noting that "[f]or Plato in dialectics the paradigm shows the very relationship between the sensible and the intelligible."  But I believe that there remains a subtle but crucial difference, a difference that at the Trauerspiel book's early, less political phase of Benjamin's thinking remains in nuce, but which becomes much more signficant -- if still subtle -- in his later work, despite Agamben's apparent adherence to Benjamin's every word. 

For Agamben in this lecture (and elsewhere), the notion of "redemption" remains tied to the notion of intelligibility, knowability, the "opening" of the world of beings (to use the Heideggerian terminology which I think is always appropriate for describing Agamben's thinking -- one way of characterizing my problem with it).  For Benjamin, however, even in this early, pre-Brechtian and pre-Marxian phase of his thinking, "knowability" is not the point, "truth" is, and the purpose of philosophy is not the acquisition of knowledge but an activity directed toward the truth, that is, its representation:  "If philosophy is to remain true to the law of its own form, as the representation of truth and not as a guide to the acquisition of knowledge, then the exercise of this form . . . must be accorded due importance" (28).  Later, of course, this incipiently constructive and active function of philosophy was to blossom into the expressly constructive and political philosophical principles of "On the Concept of History," in which the truth of  history was only accessible through a method -- the creation of dialectical images -- that was already a political act.  Even at this early stage, however, Benjamin insisted that the Ursprung was the product of a constructive principle -- thought's distribution of phenomena in a "constellation" that embodied an the Platonic idea 's historical "origin."   Agamben's example, by contrast, as I have already mentioned remains a strictly logical category of thought that exposes (i.e., opens to "knowability," knowledge) the truth of what is, one which has no intrinsic relationship to history, action, or politics. 

In any event, I find this interesting because one of my current projects is an attempt to pry Benjamin's thought away from the bear hug that Agamben has thrown around it.  As this probably suggests, the larger stakes relate to a political-philosophical critique of Agamben's work, which is extremely, and even legitimately, seductive from the perspective of philosophy as such, but which I find suspect from the perspective of politics (or "the political").  I think that Benjamin on the other hand gets it right, and Agamben's apparently full-throttle embrace of him obscures that difference which seems to me makes a political-philosophical difference. 

 

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.