Agamben’s Exception: Sovereignty, Ontology and the Politics of Crisis Daniel McLoughlin This thesis is submitted to the School of History and Philosophy at the University of New South Wales in fulfilment of the requirements of a PhD in Philosophy August 2010 Acknowledgments I would like to thank all of those who have helped me to reach this point. First and foremost, my everlasting love and gratitude goes to Justine Simpkins. Without her love, friendship, generosity, and unstinting belief in and support of me, this would not have been possible. Every last word of this is dedicated to her. My love and thanks also go to my parents, Lynne and Paul McLoughlin who, from the very first, taught me that there is always something new to learn. Many thanks also go to those whose advice and support has directly shaped this thesis, my supervisors Paul Patton and Catherine Mills. I would like to thank Catherine for believing in the project, for helping me to get it off the ground, and for her insights into and guidance through Agamben’s thought. My thanks go to Paul for the reading groups and teaching opportunities that profoundly shaped my ideas over the course of my studies, the critiques that helped sharpen my argument, and his invaluable help in getting this thesis to the finishing line. The friendship of a whole host of postgraduates who have shared this experience with me has been a constant source of personal and intellectual nourishment. I would like to thank: Richard Bailey, Faye Brinsmead, Michelle Bastian, Florence Chiew, Ben Golder, Michelle Jamieson, Paula Keating, Declan Kuch, Craig Lundy, Demelza Marlin, Winnie Sung, and Peter Woelert. Great thanks go to Jessica Whyte, for her friendship and many long and invaluable conversations about Agamben. Parts of this thesis have been published previously as: ‘The Politics of Caesura: Giorgio Agamben on Law and Language’ Law and Critique 20:2, 2009, p. 163-176 ‘“In Force Without Significance”: Kantian Nihilism and Agamben’s Critique of Law’ Law and Critique 20:3, 2009, p. 245-257. ‘Crisis, Modernity, Authority: Carl Schmitt on Order and the State’ Australian Feminist Law Journal 31, December 2009, p.135-52. ‘The Sacred and the Unspeakable: Giorgio Agamben’s Ontological Politics’ Theory and Event 13:2, 2010. Table of Contents Introduction 1 I. Sovereignty and the Politics of Crisis 1 II. The Critical Reception of Homo Sacer 3 III. The Task of this Thesis 7 Chapter 1. Language and Philosophy 17 I. Language and Ontology 19 II. “Cutting the Branches”: Deconstruction and Separation 25 III. The Subject and Desubjectification 32 IV. The Voice: Metaphysics and Negativity 41 V. Violence, Community, and the Sacred 50 Chapter 2. On Sovereignty: Law and the Void 65 I. Carl Schmitt on the Sovereign Exception 67 II. Sovereignty and Potentiality 71 III. Civil War and the Ties that Bind 79 IV. Abandoned Before the Law 87 Chapter 3. Homo Sacer: Nihilism and the task of Philosophy 103 I. Nihilism and the Destruction of Tradition 107 II. Nihilism and the Society of the Spectacle 114 III. Nihilism and the Task of Political Philosophy 122 IV. The People and the Camp 132 Chapter 4. States of Exception 166 I. The Exception as a Paradigm of Government 169 II. Gigantomachy Concerning a Void 174 III. Potentiality and the Real State of Exception 181 IV. State of Exception and the Politics of Security 193 V. Coda 202 Conclusion 215 Bibliography 225 Introduction The task of this thesis is to analyse Giorgio Agamben’s account of law, sovereignty, and the state in both Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life and State of Exception. To do this, I focus on two critical dimensions of Agamben’s thought: the juridico-political ontology that he develops through the analysis of sovereignty; and his use of sovereignty as a critical tool for the critique of the contemporary state. I propose that these two dimensions of Agamben’s thought need to be analysed within two theoretical contexts: first, an account of the political theoretical strategy guiding his reading of the sovereign exception in Homo Sacer; second, an engagement with Agamben’s work prior to Homo Sacer, in which he focuses on an analysis of human language. I. Sovereignty and the Politics of Crisis The political events that have dominated the early years of the new millennium have seen an explosion of interest in the problem of the sovereign exception, with Western democracies routinely suspending civil liberties and violating human rights in response to the September 11 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre. Andrew Neal argues that the analysis of sovereignty in Homo Sacer pre-emptively captured “in theoretical terms much of the sovereigntist logic that is being played out in post-9/11 world politics. The exception has become an especially sharp political concept that is being used to characterize and critique the contentious political practices undertaken since 9/11 in the name of the so-called war on terror.”1 Indeed, in State of Exception, Agamben himself describes Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay, and President Bush’s tendency to refer to himself as the “commander-in-chief” of the armed forces, as examples of the centrality of sovereignty to contemporary politics. Although the analysis of the exception has had critical purchase on the War on Terror, in the Homo Sacer project Agamben uses the exception to analyse a range of Twentieth Century political phenomena, including the existence of mass populations of refugees, the regular use of emergency powers by Western democracies, the emergence of the concentration camp as a political technology, and totalitarian government. According to Agamben, these phenomena are evidence of the fact that the exception, which was once a limited response to an emergency situation, has now become an entrenched 1 part of the contemporary state. Borrowing from Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” he argues that the exception has, in the course of Twentieth Century politics, “become the rule” and that the “great State structures have entered into a process of dissolution.”2 Thus, Homo Sacer not only takes aim at the proliferation of the exception in contemporary politics, but also identifies this as symptomatic of a profound dysfunction in the political and philosophical architecture of the contemporary state. Homo Sacer’s startling claims about the concentration camps of Nazi Germany have perhaps attracted the most critical attention. Agamben analyses the concentration camps through the framework of the exception, arguing that they are a space in which the exception has become the rule. He then argues that any space in which the exception has been given a semi- permanent location is a camp, and identifies a range of such camps in contemporary politics, from the rape camps that appeared in the former Yugoslavia, to zones d’attentes in French airports in which are detained those who seek refugee status. Even more provocatively, Agamben argues that the concentration camps cast light not only on Twentieth Century politics, but political modernity as such. According to Agamben, the concentration camps are paradigmatic of biopolitics, a concept that he draws from Michel Foucault to describe the modern power to manage life. Further, he attributes to the concentration camp a crucial role in understanding the legal order of the modern state, describing the camp as the “nomos of the modern.”3 The striking claims in Homo Sacer, which are drawn from the concept of the exception, seemed to resonate with the turbulent political situation into which they were published. Agamben’s analysis of the exception has been used by commentators to address a range of pressing political problems: from the occupation of Palestine to the internment camps established by the Australian Government to house asylum seekers.4 Some commentators have enthusiastically embraced the sweeping diagnoses that Agamben seems prone to: Bulent Diken and Carsten Bagge-Laustsen, for example, argue that we now live in a society of exceptions in which the logic of the camp has been generalised across the social field, and is now manifest in phenomena from gated communities to the party destination of Ibiza.5 A range of commentators have, however, taken issue with Agamben for the very same reason: Ernesto Laclau, for example, “fully rejects” Agamben’s account of the camp, describing a key passage as a “series of wild statements” and asserting that the use of the camp as a paradigm is “extreme and absurd.”6 Nevertheless, whether commentators have agreed with Agamben’s theses, or taken exception to them, there is little doubt that the Homo Sacer project has become a crucial reference point for thinkers across disciplines (including philosophy, international relations, jurisprudence, sociology, 2 and critical geography) for addressing contemporary politics, and in particular, the security politics related to refugees and terrorism. II. The Critical Reception of Homo Sacer The security politics of the past decade have made the problem of the sovereign exception a decisive one for critical political and legal theory, and Agamben’s work has played a central role in these debates. As a result, Agamben’s account of sovereignty and his analysis of contemporary politics have been frequently discussed. Why, then, do these elements of Agamben’s work require further attention? What differentiates the approach of this thesis from previous analyses of Homo Sacer? Much of the initial debate around the Homo Sacer project tended to focus on a relatively narrow set of concerns. Given the seeming prescience of Agamben’s analysis of political events, many commentators took up and interrogated his empirical claims about issues such as refugees, Guantanamo Bay, and Auschwitz. The theoretical debates around Agamben tended to focus on the two most obvious conceptual frameworks that shape his analysis of these phenomena.